MILOS TAKES A CHANCE ON LOVE (Newsday 1/12/97)
*Oscar-winning director Milos Forman talks about his farm, his freedom
and why he wanted Courtney Love to star in his latest film, 'The People
vs. Larry Flynt'*
BY JACK MATHEWS
DIRECTOR MILOS Forman's converted 17th-Century farmhouse is just
15 miles - as the Canada 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 to New Milford and Litchfield
County, you're in picture-postcard New England.
Especially on a recent December day, after a heavy storm 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 one-time dairy barn
that serves as his office. But before he can extend a
hand, two huge dogs - a bloodhound and a black Labrador
retriever - 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 into a studio 30 years ago by its former
owner, the late artist Eric Sloane. 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 like
destiny to him now - it's been a rustic writer's workshop for him
and his collaborators on the films "Ragtime" (1981) "Amadeus" (1984)
"Valmont" (1989) and the one that brings us here, "The People
vs. Larry Flynt."
"Flynt" is Forman's seventh film since immigrating to the United States
after the spring of 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague,
Czechoslovakia, and closed off his country behind the Iron Curtain.
But Forman, since naturalized, sees the American phase of his life
as having begun a year 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 work 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 this country 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 spreads in Hustler. Doesn't condone
his outrageous behavior in courtrooms. Doesn't admit to being amused
by the celebrated Hustler ad parody of Flynt's far right nemesis, Jerry
Falwell.
"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."
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 leading-actress 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 of opinion 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 April, 1994, has had
her own well-publicized struggles with self-image and drugs, 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 'Okay, 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."
Forman's hands sweep out, as if to take in the Connecticut countryside,
whenever he makes 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 the first step usually taken by totalitarian regimes is
censoring people and opinions unpopular with the majority. And the
pornographers are 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 Falwell conservatives to criminalize bad taste.
"I respect their pressures because some responsibility has to be
maintained," he says. "We can't have 100 percent freedom in all things
because they would lead to chaos and anarchy. But we have to fight
for 100 percent freedom. Otherwise, we can lose it altogether. I saw that
in Czechoslovakia, where the people just relented and the Communists
vaulted into power democratically."
That brings us back to Flynt, and the importance of his victories in
testing the limits of the First Amendment.
"This country is the strongest country only because it is the freest,
not because it is the biggest or the richest," Forman 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 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 agreed only 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.
Email: jacqui_missworld@hotmail.com