The Freedom to Film

Director Milos Forman’s converted 17th century farmhouse is just 15 miles--as the Canadian geese fly--north of busy Danbury, Conn. But from the moment you peel off Interstate 84 and head up the twisting two-lane roads leading toward New Milford and Litchfield County, you’re in postcard New England.

Especially on this December day, after a heavy storm has dumped nearly two feet of snow in parts of the Northeast and left more than 100,000 people in Connecticut--Forman among them--without power for nearly three days.

“Your timing is perfect, we just got our power back an hour ago,” says Forman, opening the door to the onetime dairy barn that serves as his office. But before he can extend a hand, two huge dogs--a bloodhound and a black labrador--muscle him out of the way, charge through the door and run off in the snow.

The 65-year-old Forman, wearing a rumpled sweatsuit and a three-day beard, takes off after them, leaving his guest behind to soak up the atmosphere of his surroundings and listen to the snoring of the 12-year-old grandmother of the runaway lab.

The large barn was converted by its former owner, the late artist Eric Sloane, into a studio 30 years ago. It still has the original hand-hewn beams, but a massive stone fireplace has been added, and there is now a panoramic view of the rolling countryside through three banks of windows.

Since 1979, when Forman bought the property, in what seems destiny to him now, it’s been a rustic writer’s workshop for him and his collaborators on the films “Ragtime,” “Amadeus,” “Valmont” and the one that brings us here, “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” “Flynt” is Forman’s seventh film since emigrating to the U.S. after the Prague Spring of 1968, when tanks rolled into the city and closed his country off behind the Iron Curtain.

But Forman, since naturalized, sees the American phase of his life having begun two years earlier, when his last Czech film, “The Fireman’s Ball,” was selected for the New York Film Festival.

“The New York festival has become so important for me,” Forman says, speaking through a thick and constant haze of cigar smoke. “The fact that ‘Fireman’s Ball’ was placed in this prestige position, that was the only ticket for me to go and visit New York. Otherwise, I might not be here.”

Forman, largely because of the reaction to “Fireman’s Ball,” got a contract to make a film in the United States, and he was away from Czechoslovakia with a working visa when the Soviets invaded.

“When I finished the film, I asked [Czech officials] to extend my exit visa. They said, ‘Yeah, we will do that, but you must come to Prague.’ ‘To Prague, for a stamp? You have the same stamp at your embassy in Washington.’ So, I knew exactly what it meant. I would go back, and I would not leave.”

As Forman talks about his background under the tyranny of the Nazis, in whose concentration camps his parents died, and the Communists who came to power in Czechoslovakia, it’s apparent through his unself-conscious gestures that his Connecticut farm has come to symbolize for him the personal freedom that drew him to the United States in the first place. And which now draws him to tell the story of flamboyant porn magnate Larry Flynt.

“It’s funny, I’m criticized for ‘Amadeus’ and ‘Larry Flynt’ exactly the same, only in reverse order,” Forman says. “After ‘Amadeus,’ I was attacked for degrading Mozart, who was on a marble pedestal, this angel who produced heavenly music. Suddenly, you show the other side of Mozart, this vivacious young man, full of contradictions, and I was attacked for damaging his reputation.

“With Larry Flynt, it’s the other way around. I’m being attacked for glorifying this sleazy character. I put Mozart down from the pedestal and put Larry Flynt up there. It’s ridiculous.”

Forman gives the usual disclaimer of all reasonably tasteful people defending Flynt. Never looked at the gynecological spreads in Hustler. Doesn’t condone his outrageous behavior in courtrooms. Doesn’t admit to being amused by the celebrated Hustler ad parody that had Flynt’s nemesis Jerry Falwell describing his sexual indoctrination by his mother in an outhouse.

“I’m only putting on the screen what surprises me about this man,” Forman says. “That he has other qualities, another side to his sleazy personality which is rather admirable. He had the tenacity to fight for his dream, however dirty that dream is, and he was willing to risk his personal freedom, to go to jail for it. To fight is something I admire.”

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Fighting for a principle is also something Forman seems to enjoy, even if the principle is something as relatively minor as urging Columbia to promote Courtney Love, who plays Flynt’s ill-fated wife Althea Leasure, for a lead instead of supporting actress Oscar nomination.

“Playing safe is not in the style of this movie,” Forman tells a caller from the studio during this interview. “At this moment, I am all for taking risks. Why don’t we talk to her and let her decide, it’s her performance.”

Afterward, Forman explains that the consensus at the studio is for pushing Love in the supporting actress category because the competition there doesn’t appear to be as strong. He finds that thinking ridiculous. “She is the leading actress of the film,” Forman says. “The emotional attachment for audiences is the relationship between Flynt and Althea, and she is absolutely instrumental at that. She’s fabulous.”

To call the casting of Love a risk is to understate the case. The widow of Kurt Cobain, the rock star who committed suicide in 1994, has had her own struggles with self-image and drugs well publicized, and how she got on the movie’s payroll is a story in itself.

“The studio was adamantly against Love because she wasn’t a name,” Forman says. “I don’t want confrontation. Especially before you’re shooting, you need the studio to be your friend. So, they sent me all the names and I did tests with them. Love was always the best, the most exciting, and she was the only one I wanted. Finally, they said, ‘OK, we would love to accommodate you, but we can’t, because we didn’t find anywhere in the world an insurance company who would insure her.’ That was serious. If that was true, we would have to give up.”

Forman made a few calls on his own and found a willing insurer, but the studio was unwilling to cover the policy. So, Forman, Love, her co-star Woody Harrelson and producers Oliver Stone and Michael Hausman put up the money. Even then, it was a condition of the policy that an insurance company monitor be on the set every day and that Love submit to weekly urine tests. “She took the biggest risk,” Forman says. “She said she could be clean and she was. I know how easy it is for me to say, ‘When I stop this cigar, that was my last,’ and I give you my word. But three or four hours from now, I don’t know, because I’m addicted to nicotine. I admire her.”

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Forman’s hands sweep out, as if to take in the Connecticut countryside, whenever he’s making a point about freedom, and the good fight between individuals and the institutions we create to govern our behavior.

“We create institutions to serve us, we need them to serve us, and we always end up being owned and dictated to by them, and we always have to fight them for our freedom,” he says. “Communists called themselves the freest society because they would get rid of all the dangers around us. How? By putting us in a zoo, where you are protected behind bars. . . . A lot of people find this life in a zoo very comforting.”

Forman says that the first step usually taken by totalitarian regimes is to censor people and opinions unpopular with the majority. And pornographers are among the first in line.

“That’s what the Communists did, they attacked pornography and prostitution and all that. Everybody applauded. ‘Yes, we have to have a law.’ Then the moment it becomes a law, you find it’s much wider than it was intended to be. The first thing the Nazis did was go after homosexuals. They called them decadent perverts. After a while, it’s blacks, then it’s Jews, then Freemasons, and finally the whole Western culture.”

Forman thinks that because Americans have never lived under a totalitarian system, they take their freedoms for granted, and that explains the eagerness of some to criminalize bad taste.

“I respect their pressures because some responsibility has to be maintained,” he says. “We can’t have 100% freedom in all things because they would lead to chaos and anarchy. But we have to fight for 100% freedom. Otherwise, we can lose it altogether. I saw that in Czechoslovakia, where the people just relented and the Communists vaulted into power democratically.”

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That brings us back to Flynt and the importance of his victories in testing the limits of the 1st Amendment. “This country is the strongest country only because it is the freest, not because it is the biggest, or the richest,” he says. “Freedom is essential for creativity in all fields. If you clip the freedom for one, you clip it for all of them. Not just pornography. Larry Flynt hasn’t robbed anybody or killed anybody. It’s just a question of taste. If you clip the freedom of tastes, you are basically clipping the strength of the country.”

Tell Forman his country home is a writer’s dream, and he smiles as if you’d just complimented him for winning another Oscar.

“Yes, it’s beautiful here,” he says. “I think I was meant to be here. You know, the road going by is Carter Road, which is named after the first farmer in the area, who owned this farm. After I buy the house, I find out that the only exact translation of Carter in Czechoslovakian is ‘Forman.’ ”

If that’s not eerie enough, Forman says, he learned while working with Michael Weller on the adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” that the nearest country store had been owned until 1976 by the son of wealthy Harry K. Thaw and and his ex-chorine wife Evelyn Nesbit, two principal characters in the story.

For Forman, the final omen confirming his judgment in buying the farm was his meeting with James Cagney, who lived a few miles away, across the state line in New York. Forman says he met Cagney at a lunch attended by Richard Widmark, Treat Williams and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and was invited by Cagney to come by his house for a visit. Forman says he went to see Cagney two weeks later and the actor, then 81, had already forgotten him.

“When I arrived, he said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘Well, I make films.’ He said, ‘Any I might have seen?’ I said, ‘The latest film I did was “Hair.” ’ He said, ‘ “Hair?” ’ He got up and shuffled to a cupboard. I must tell you first there wasn’t a single piece of movie memorabilia in the house. He didn’t like them. But he pulled out something from behind the cupboard and says, ‘I never saw it, I never had a desire to see it, I don’t know how it got here, or why I kept it. Now, I know. It’s yours.’ He handed me the poster for the first off-Broadway production of ‘Hair.’ He’d had it since 1967.”

Forman says he told Cagney about the strange coincidences with Carter Farm, and that when he asked the legendary actor to end his 20-year retirement to play New York Police Commissioner Waldo in “Ragtime,” he only agreed after his wife said there were too many omens for him to turn it down. The “Hair” poster, by the way, hangs to the right of the door of Forman’s office. It’s autographed by Cagney.

“One of the privileges of being a neighbor,” Forman says, beaming.