New ‘Larry Flynt for President’ Doc Spotlights Wild Political Saga
NEW YORK — The much-anticipated new documentary “Larry Flynt for President” was finally unveiled earlier this month at the Tribeca Film Festival, and the first reviews are praising it for its unflinching, verité-style approach at the rollicking saga of the Hustler publisher’s unlikely challenge to Ronald Reagan for the 1984 presidential nomination.
Variety’s top reviewer Owen Gleiberman described Flynt’s 1983 storming of the American political system as a piece of “media guerrilla performance art.”
“It was a rolling publicity stunt, an anything-goes kamikaze assault on the very idea of government,” wrote Gleiberman. “In Flynt’s words, the campaign would be ‘an act of satire and rebellion against Reagan’s America’.”
Gleiberman points out that there are two jokes to the documentary, one being that at the time the unstoppable Flynt “literally thought he could win.”
But the second one is only revealed in hindsight: “the joke no one could possibly know at the time is that as seen today, in Nadia Szold’s lively archival documentary ‘Larry Flynt for President,’ the Flynt campaign now looks like a trashy, penny-ante anticipation of the 2016 Donald Trump campaign — or, at least, certain aspects of it. It was a mud-slinging circus, an all-out assault on decorum in politics, though with a serious issue at its heart: Flynt’s absolutist defense of the First Amendment.”
Yesterday’s review of the documentary in respected international indie film blog Screen Anarchy, by Martin Kudlac, explains that “Szold revisits the real-life story popularized by Milos Forman’s 1996 biopic drama ‘The People vs. Larry Flynt’ in her found-footage montage ‘Larry Flynt For President’” by assembling “never-before-seen footage captured in 1983 as a film crew shadowed Flynt in his attempt for the White House office.”
The reviewer quotes Frank Zappa summarizing Flynt as “unique and colorful.”
“Those intersections make Flynt a fascinating protagonist to observe as Szold’s oeuvre offers equal doses of insight, suspense, hilariousness, and heartbreak,” Screen Anarchy concludes.
“Larry Flynt for President” was produced by Seine Pictures and brought to Tribeca by Film Nation. It will gain wider distribution later this year.
Rocco Siffredi Gathers Starry Cast for ‘The Spanish Stallion: Field of Sluts’
MONTREAL — Rocco Siffredi and Adult Time have partnered on “The Spanish Stallion: Field of Sluts,” a starry new boxing-themed series featuring Maximo “The Stallion” Garcia and a sprawling cast of notable European performers.
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Eight episodes were shot over three months featuring Anastasia Brokelyn, Eveline Dellai, Shalina Devine, Erik Everhard, Jayla, Cherry Kiss, Kitana Lure, Angie Lynx, Lotte Magne, Kaisa Nord, Lia Silver, Silvia, Sybil, Kai Taylor, Zaawaadi and reigning XBIZ Europas “Female Performer of the Year” Jia Lissa.
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“This project is one of the biggest, most ambitious in at least the last 10 years — not only the production, but the whole concept. It started as a regular production, but then, by writing the first two movies, I understood I could go on and make it a series,” Siffredi recalled.
The XBIZ award-winning performer-director shot the series with his son, Lorenzo.
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“Between each shooting period, I was writing the next two or three episodes for a few weeks. I had so much fun; it has been a very interesting and new way of making movies for me,” he said. “I decided to make this movie about sports because, when I met Maximo Garcia, right away I said, ‘This is the perfect guy to do a boxing movie,’ and I was looking to put around him the best cast I could. Unfortunately, COVID messed up my plans.”
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He noted Cherry Kiss was originally set to play the female lead.
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“In the end, it turned out just perfect, because Cherry appeared in the third episode,” Siffredi noted. “I had a huge variety of girls, and I mean the best girls I could have all together in one project. The main actor who really made the difference, together with Maximo, was Kai Taylor, a huge and talented actor. Really, I don’t think I could [film] boxing without him. He was a real boxer for 15 years; he really helped to make the difference in the content.”
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The first episode of “The Spanish Stallion: Field of Sluts,” featuring Sybil and Everhard, is now streaming on RoccoSiffredi.com and on Adult Time.
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Follow Siffredi and Adult Time on Twitter for updates.