"The Scene": People vs Larry Flynt

To be fair, Gloria Steinem excoriated the movie in a New York Times Op-Ed:

Larry Flynt the Movie is even more cynical than Larry Flynt the Man. "The People vs. Larry Flynt" claims that the creator of Hustler magazine is a champion of the First Amendment, deserving our respect. That isn't true.

Let's be clear: a pornographer is not a hero, no more than a publisher of Ku Klux Klan books or a Nazi on the Internet, no matter what constitutional protection he secures. And Mr. Flynt didn't secure much.

The Reverend Jerry Falwell sued him over a Hustler parody that depicted Mr. Falwell in a drunken, incestuous encounter with his mother. Mr. Flynt's victory only confirmed the right to parody public figures (if the result can't be taken as fact) and prevented plaintiffs from doing an end run around the First Amendment by claiming they suffered "emotional distress."

In fact, the Nazis who marched in Skokie, Ill., and the Klansman who advocated violence in Ohio achieved more substantive First Amendment victories than did Mr. Flynt. Yet no Hollywood movie would glamorize a Klansman or a Nazi as a champion of free speech, much less describe him in studio press releases as "the era's last crusader," which is how Columbia Pictures describes Mr. Flynt.