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BEVERLY HILLS, CA - JANUARY 06: Cody Fern, Judith Light, Edgar Ramirez, Darren Criss, Penelope Cruz, Ricky Martin, Finn Wittrock, Jon Jon Briones, Ryan Murphy, Brad Simpson, Larry Karaszewski, and producers pose in the press room during the 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 6, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage)

The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)

by Milos Forman

Drama - 130 mn - United States of America

1997: Berlin: Golden Bear

SLYTHERIN: “I am not trying to suggest that you should like what Larry Flynt does. I don't like what Larry Flynt does, but what I do like is the fact that I live in a country where you and I can make that decision for ourselves. I like the fact that I live in a country where I can pick up Hustler magazine and read it, or throw it in the garbage can if that's where I think it belongs.” –Scott Alexander + Larry Karaszewski (Alan Isaacman: The People vs. Larry Flynt)

#harry potter #house quotes #slytherin #the people vs larry flynt #alan isaacman #scott alexander #larry karaszewski #hphq

Six Questions With FilmStruck: Larry Karaszewski

FilmStruck: What was the movie that made you fall in love with movies?

Larry Karaszewski: That’s a really complicated question. I fell in love with movies when I was very young, like 9 years old. It wasn’t a specific movie and it wasn’t like most kids who fall in love with movies when they see SNOW WHITE or they see THE WIZARD OF OZ. My parents got divorced and my dad got me one night a week and he sort of didn’t know what to do with a kid and he liked to drink beer, so he would go to the drive-in and drink a case of beer and fall asleep. I would watch these insane early 70s drive-in triple bills. So for me it wasn’t a specific movie, but it was more like a place. It was the Moonlight Drive-In in South Bend, Indiana. A lot of times when you see double features now there’s some kind of thought behind them, there’s a plan for playing the two films back to back. But when I was a kid there would be a new release like DR PHIBES playing with (Gillo) Pontecorvo’s BURN! or THE STERILE CUCKOO or KLUTE. You would see these absolutely insane combinations of movies that really had nothing to do with each other. For me being a little kid, they were completely age inappropriate, which I always thought was a good thing. I think one of the problems with audiences right now is from an early age everything is aimed directly at them. When you’re a kid you can watch The Disney Channel, then Nickelodeon, and everything is aimed directly at you. When I was a kid, I don’t want to sound too much like an old guy saying get off my lawn, but when I was a kid there were only three networks, so you had to watch whatever the hell was on. So if MANNIX was on, I had to watch MANNIX even though I didn’t know what the hell was going on and I was bored out of my mind. It made me learn to sit around and wait for the pay off and know that I would be rewarded. That was definitely the case with me seeing so many R-rated films that pushed the envelope. Crazy stuff that you would never show a kid like THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, which I saw at a drive-in at a very young age.

If I had to specifically answer your question, though, in terms of an early movie I saw that changed me in a big way in terms of love for film I would say HORSE FEATHERS with the Marx Brothers. because I saw it fairly young and it was one of the earliest movies I saw that was not of my era. I remember seeing HORSE FEATHERS and not knowing who the Marx Brothers were and just being blown away at the freshness and the rapid fire comedy of it all. That Groucho could break the 4th wall, that there could be surreal moments in the middle of a movie. That Harpo could bring out a candle burning at both ends. There was sort of a magical quality to that, with this spirit of anarchy. Groucho’s opening song goes “whatever it is, I’m against it.” Definitely that’s something that appealed to me as a young kid. I think that’s why the Marx Brothers came back so strong in the early 70s. It was that sense of giving the finger to everybody. HORSE FEATHERS is a very good entryway for a young person because it’s giving the finger to a school. It made me love black and white movies. It made me realize black and white movies aren’t stuffy. Black and white movies aren’t dull. Black and white movies are crazier than the movies that other kids were seeing. My friends were seeing Disney kind of movies and I knew that HORSE FEATHERS had more going on than that.

FS: What was the movie that made you want to go to film school and make movies?

LK: The movie that pulled the switch in my mind was THE CONVERSATION by Francis Ford Coppola. I was born in 1961, so I must have been 12, 13, 14 when I saw that film. That was the first movie that I saw where I put together that there were people who made the film. That there was an intelligence behind the lens. When you first start watching films you only think about the actors. In the sense that you’re a kid and it’s like “Hey that’s the star! That’s Paul Newman. He’s cool in COOL HAND LUKE. I really want to be Paul Newman!” You don’t really say “I wanna be Stuart Rosenberg,” because you don’t really know what the hell that guy is doing. But when I saw THE CONVERSATION, I knew that there was a person telling me this tale. I could sense that there were filmmakers laying the story out in a certain way. I believe that was 1974. I may have even seen THE CONVERSATION on a double bill with CHINATOWN. They’re both Paramount and they were re-released together at a certain point. 1974 is full of really interesting films. I was coming of age in 1974, 1975 and you’ve got THE CONVERSTAION, CHINATOWN, GODFATHER II, DOG DAY AFTERNOON, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, NASHVILLE. These movies are coming right on top of each other and so when the match was lit by THE CONVERSATION there were lots of things to follow up on. It was like “Holy shit. There are voices in American cinema.” And later when I actually got to work with folks like Milos Forman - it was a dream come true.

FS: How has your love of movies been expressed in your own films and television projects?

LK: That’s kind of an obvious one with me. My writing partner Scott Alexander and I have actually made films about filmmakers. ED WOOD is a complete valentine to joys of being both a filmmaker and a film fan. Just the love that Ed shows Bela [Lugosi] and film in general. Before we made that movie Ed Wood was always seen as a comic figure. A guy who made bad movies. We looked at him a little differently. We said why don’t we concentrate on his passion, why don’t we concentrate on his love of film. He came out to Hollywood and made a handful of movies. Very few people can say that and he pulled it off. He worked with his friends and he worked with his hero. Ed loved movies so much that he just had to make them. So his movies are trying to please himself. He is trying to make the movies he loves. If you look at some of them now, if you look at GLEN OR GLENDA, it’s hard to laugh at all now at GLEN OR GLENDA. It’s a strange, experimental film, a guy putting his life on camera. He wrote, directed, and starred in that movie and it’s about his personal dilemma. For Scott and I, it was the idea of putting our own passion up there. Scott had worked on a bunch of low budget horror films. I had worked on a television show in the Midwest that was made by teenagers. We had both made Super 8 movies. We knew what it was like to be the outsider wanting to make movies and we both had such a passion for film we wanted to transfer that over to Ed.

FS: Are there any films that inspired the structure of American Crime Story?

LK: When we were doing American Crime Story the films we were looking at were some of the films from the same era we were talking about earlier, films like ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, NETWORK, and the work of Robert Altman. DOG DAY AFTERNOON was another one we talked quite a bit about. Like with ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, there’s that idea that you know the end. You know what’s going to happen, yet still it has the qualities of a thriller. By going into the minute details of how everything was found out and delivered, it makes it suspenseful even though you know Nixon is going to resign. We talk a lot about Altman when we were writing initially because usually a television show has a protagonist and you follow them the entire way. We saw the O.J. trial as a big Altman movie where everybody thought they were the lead. Everybody was being miked. Everyone thought that they were starring in their own movie and the other people were supporting characters. Like an Altman movie, like NASHVILLE where there are so many characters and when people are on screen they are living their part of the story - that was our goal for THE PEOPLE VS. O.J..

FS: What was your first introduction to the Criterion Collection?

LK: I was an early adopter. In fact, Criterion should give me a reimbursement check for all those LaserDiscs that I bought. Criterion was the first place on home video that I felt treated the movies with respect. In order to get them initially you had to have a LaserDisc player and nobody had a LaserDisc player. So I got a LaserDics player and my friend Dan Waters, the screenwriter of HEATHERS, got a LaserDisc player and we just became these LaserDisc freaks who would go down and buy all of these things. We would have a big discussion between CLV vs. CAV, which means absolutely nothing to anybody today, but it was an extra 50 bucks if you were buying the disc back in the day.

FS: I’m sorry I’m a youngin’, what does CLV and CAV mean?

LK: It was the amount of information on a disc. You had CAV was the highest quality you could get. CLV was a little lesser quality. With LaserDiscs you had to switch sides, so sometimes only one side would be CAV. Criterion was the first place to do commentary tracks, so it really was like going to film school again. I remember my demonstration disc, when people would come over and I would tell them about LaserDiscs and the Criterion Collection and they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, so I would throw on the last side of TAXI DRIVER with Scorsese’s commentary track. People couldn’t believe it. They were watching the movie with Martin Scorsese and Martin Scorsese is talking about how and why he made all these decisions. Martin Scorsese was talking about Travis sitting outside and talking about ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS playing inside the apartment. I remember that was my go-to because whenever I put it on for somebody, the following week they’d buy a LaserDisc player, or at least they’d say “can I come over again next Sunday and watch something else?”

FS: Do you remember what the first one you bought was?

LK: I still have most of them. The first memorable one was TAXI DRIVER, but I bought so many back in the day. I was pulling them out for talking to you guys and so many are still unopened! I paid $100 for VENGEANCE IS MINE on LaserDisc and it just sits there unopened.

FS: You could sell that on eBay!

LK: Yeah for like $5. The only laserdisc from Criterion that was worth a lot of money on eBay was SALO when you couldn’t get it any other way.

FS: What was the first film you streamed on FilmStruck?

LK: I remember the first day I went on FilmStruck, I actually didn’t watch any movies. I watched a bunch of intros. The film writer Kim Morgan did a bunch, like Bergman and Kubrick and Guy Maddin. I love Kim’s writing so I wanted to see what she had to say about the films. My first great movie experience on FilmStruck was I MARRIED A WITCH, which I had never seen before. For some reason I had always avoided it, even though I love Veronica Lake in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. For some reason I had an “Oh it’s I DREAM OF JEANNIE or BEWITCHED” in my head. When I saw the movie it was so light and so funny and so magically done, no pun intended, I was completely blown away. So that was my gateway into FilmStruck.

FS: If the world were about to end what five movies on FilmStruck would you recommend everyone stream before we all died?

LK: [laughs] The problem is I don’t know what they’ve watched before. Like, BADLANDS is one of the top ten films of all time and you’ve got to watch BADLANDS, but hopefully you’ve already seen BADLANDS. Hopefully if you are dying in my nuclear bunker, you’re one of my friends and I’ve shown you BADLANDS before. I’m gonna spotlight some lesser known films on FilmStruck. There’s a Russian film called COME AND SEE, which I think is a masterpiece and probably one of the best war films ever. There’s a film by Jerzy Skolimowski called MOONLIGHTING with Jeremy Irons playing a Polish worker in London in the 80s. I’m a huge fan of a movie from the 30s called DODSWORTH directed by William Wyler. You can never go wrong watching a William Wyler movie. Here’s a movie from the 70s that doesn’t get talked about very much: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, John Huston’s big adventure movie. It doesn’t get talked about much because it doesn’t really feel like a 1970s movie in the sense that it isn’t R-rated, it isn’t gritty, it isn’t one of those kind of movies; It’s more of an old fashioned adventure movie, and Huston knocks it out of the park. I’d throw in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, which was a huge influence for Scott and I when we were writing BIG EYES, particularly the first part of it which spotlighted the nightclubs in North Beach in San Francisco. The Hungry Eye, The Purple Onion, and sort of that way that Walter Keane just kept working the room wherever he went. So we would watch SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS a lot when we were writing those nightclub scenes. I think that’s a solid list of films to stream as the world ends on our watch.