Special Screening: “Larry Flynt for President”

Do you consider today’s political theater absurd? A look at a campaign sham from the past offers some perspective. The Ojai Film Festival presents Nadia Szold’s “Larry Flynt for President” on Thursday, November 11 at 7 pm in the Ojai Art Center. This documentary tells a story so wild it plays like a succulent time machine of sordid 1980s craziness. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival to critical acclaim and love from the audience.

Larry Flint, ‘smut peddler extraordinaire,’ and owner/publisher of Hustler magazine, was shot March 6, 1978, during a legal battle in Georgia over obscenity charges. Assembled from never-before-seen footage recorded in 1983, this film documents Larry Flint’s bid for the White House after the bullet left him partially paralyzed.

Larry Flynt’s “presidential campaign” became a tawdry piece of low-life media performance art that made the 1968 mock candidate Pat Paulsen look like Bernie Sanders. Not a campaign, not really, but a rolling publicity stunt, an anything-goes kamikaze assault on the idea of government. Flynt himself called the campaign “an act of satire and rebellion against Reagan’s America.” The joke of it is that Flynt, a shrewd megalomaniac, thought he might win.

Director, writer, and Ojai resident Nadia Szold’s other films include “Mariah” (2016) and “Thievery” (2007).