USA TODAY International Edition
Larry Flynt, ‘ King of Smut,’ free speech, dies
Larry Flynt, the poor Kentucky boy who got rich and famous selling pornography, died Wednesday of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles. He was 78.
Flynt’s brother Jimmy Flynt confirmed the death to The Cincinnati Enquirer, part of the USA TODAY Network.
Crude, rude and outspoken, Flynt made his fortune in the early 1970s after he turned a racy newsletter for his Ohio strip clubs into Hustler magazine.
His sexually explicit magazine trampled over boundaries set by competitors, such as Playboy, and set the stage for court battles over obscenity that redefined the meaning of “community standards” and made Flynt an unlikely champion of free speech.
Flynt embraced the mantle of civil libertarian even as his critics complained he was simply exploiting media attention to make money selling hardcore porn. His magazine published racist jokes, sexually explicit photos, an illustration of a woman being run through a meat grinder and, most infamously, pictures of a nude Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
Flynt never shied away from the nature of his business and frequently referred to himself as the “King of Smut.” But he also relished being in the spotlight for his court fights with prosecutors, anti- pornography activists and religious leaders.
“The First Amendment is supposed to protect offensive speech,” Flynt told The Enquirer in 1998. “If you’re not going to offend anybody, you don’t need the First Amendment.”
Over the course of his career, Flynt made offending people a cornerstone of his business model.
Hustler makes fortune, outrages
Born in Lakeville, a small Kentucky town in the heart of Appalachia, Flynt grew up in a poor and broken family.
After serving in the Navy, Flynt moved to Dayton, Ohio, with his mother. Together, they opened a few bars in the Dayton area, most notably Larry’s Hillbilly Haven. Flynt found his calling in the late 1960s when he opened his first strip club in Dayton. He soon expanded the franchise to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, and other cities.
Flynt used his newsletter for those clubs as a model for Hustler magazine, which he launched in 1974 as a publication “for the common man.”
He frequently mocked his rivals at Playboy and Penthouse for slick photo presentations of glamorous- looking women, who Flynt said were unattainable for average guys. Hustler, by contrast, showed far more graphic depictions of sex and included raunchy jokes and crude, anti- establishment articles.
“Playboy taught you how to make a perfect martini or told you what kind of car you should drive,” Flynt told The Enquirer in 2018. “People who buy these magazines want their porn to be porn.”
His most outspoken critics, including feminists and evangelical Christians, said Flynt’s magazine demeaned women and was an affront to basic decency.
“Being a woman, what he did frightened me. It was so distressing,” said Toni Van Pelt, president of the National Organization for Women, in a 2018 interview with The Enquirer. “It’s clear he doesn’t think of women as living, breathing human beings.”
Conservative culture warriors also took issue with Flynt’s work. “He was just another sleaze vendor,” said Phil Burress, a long- time foe and leader of Citizens for Community Values in Cincinnati.
But Flynt was determined to be more than that. He set out to be the world’s biggest sleaze vendor.
Tragedy alters life, not his fight
While leaving a Georgia courthouse in 1978 during an obscenity trial, a gunman shot him and his lawyer.
Though never charged, white supremacist and convicted serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin later admitted shooting Flynt, saying he did it because of a photo spread in Hustler that depicted a white woman with a Black man.
The shooting left Flynt paralyzed. His injuries, coupled with the death a few years later of his wife, who had been diagnosed with AIDS, seemed to exacerbate Flynt’s mood swings and unstable behavior, which included physical and verbal outbursts.
In the years that followed, Flynt claimed to have become a born- again Christian and expressed regret for the way his magazine portrayed women. But neither of those conversions stuck, and Flynt’s pornography business carried on.
Along the way, Flynt continued to pick fights with his opponents. He once showed up in court in a diaper made out of an American flag, and in the mid- 1980s he battled the late Rev. Jerry Falwell all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court over an ad parody in Hustler.
Falwell successfully sued Flynt for emotional distress over the parody, which suggested Falwell had an incestuous relationship with his mother. But the U. S. Supreme Court threw out the verdict in a landmark decision, saying public figures could not collect damages for a parody that reasonable people would not consider factual.
Flynt took pride in the case that bears Hustler’s name. “When you talk about expanding the parameters of free speech, that’s not a bad thing,” Flynt said.
The case, and the rest of Flynt’s life, was depicted in the 1996 movie “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” which starred Woody Harrelson as Flynt. Flynt made a cameo in the movie, playing Judge Morrissey during the scenes about his trial in Cincinnati.
Harrelson was nominated for a best actor Oscar and director Milos Forman was nominated for best director.
The movie, which critics said glossed over the seedier aspects of Flynt’s life, seemed to reinvigorate Flynt and stirred up a desire to return to Ohio to re- fight his old battles. He opened a book store, started selling pornographic videos in Cincinnati and promptly was charged again with violating obscenity laws.
“If I’m going to continue this fight, what better place to do it than in Cincinnati?” Flynt said.
The trial ended with a plea deal in which Flynt agreed to stop selling videos.
Years later, he started selling videos anyway but never faced criminal charges again. By then, the wide availability of pornography on the internet had changed the way Americans and the legal system defined community standards on obscenity.
In 2017, Flynt took on then- newly elected President Donald Trump, announcing a $ 10 million bounty for information that could lead to Trump’s impeachment. He took out a full- page ad in The Washington Post and outlined reasons he thought should lead to Trump’s ouster from the White House.
“Impeachment would be a messy, contentious affair, but the alternative – three more years of destabilizing dysfunction – is worse,” Flynt wrote in the ad.
Remember back when you had to lug around a digital single- lens reflex camera to take decent photos? Now our smartphones have cameras capable of taking gorgeous pro- quality shots.
If you know just a few hidden settings, you can go even further than the defaults built into your iPhone or Android.
The new high- end iPhone models bring a new feature that can take your photos to the next level but think twice before you turn it on.
iPhone photos RAW files
You may have heard photographers talk about shooting in RAW. When you snap a photo with your phone or digital camera, it is saved as an image file, such as a JPEG, TIFF, or RAW.
A JPEG is a processed, compressed image that’s ideal for everyday use. These images don’t take up much storage space and are easy to share via text, email, and social media.
On the other hand, RAW files are huge by comparison and can eat up a ton of storage space. RAW files are just that – the raw photo data. Your camera stores the photo as it was taken, without processing or compression.
The result is a much larger file than a JPEG, but that comes with greater control. You can edit a photo's white balance, color, and exposure much more precisely with a RAW file.
Where RAW really shines is saving your under- or overexposed photos. Say you underexposed your subject’s face and he or she is just a shadow; there’s no saving it.
If you shot in RAW, you’ll most likely have enough data to bring out the details in your subject’s face.
iPhone ProRAW setting is good and bad
It wasn't long ago that the RAW image format was reserved for digital cameras. The feature came to smartphones via third- party apps more recently. In December, Apple introduced its ProRAW format with iOS 14.3.
Here’s the bad news: This is only available if you have an iPhone 12 Pro or 12 Pro Max. ProRAW gives you the benefits of so- called lossless imagery and works on all four of the iPhone 12 Pro’s cameras.
This means that your RAW images make full use of Apple’s Smart HDR and Deep Fusion, as well as night mode.
ProRAW also uses the industry- standard DNG file extension, allowing you to edit photos with third- party software.
To turn it on: Go to Settings > Camera > Formats, then toggle on Apple ProRAW to try it out.
A RAW icon will appear in your camera app, which you can toggle on and off as you shoot.
When you close the camera app and reopen it, ProRaw defaults to off. To keep it on permanently, go to Settings > Camera > Preserve Settings and toggle ProRAW on.
Leave ProRAW turned off
RAW photos take up a ton of storage space, and Apple itself puts a warning in the camera settings, citing that each file is 25MB. Compare this with the standard JPEG photos on your phone that take up about 1MB of space.
You can fit hundreds of JPEG photos for each gigabyte of space on your phone, but fewer than 50 RAW photos. The smallest storage capacity available for the iPhone 12 Pro is 128GB.
If you have 50GB free, that’s enough room for 25,000 JPEG photos at an average of 2MB each. That same space can only fit about 2,000 RAW images. This may seem like a lot, but remember that you can’t do much with these photos until they are edited and saved as a different file type. They are unwieldy and not easily shareable.
My recommendation? Leave ProRAW turned off until you actually need it.
Learn about all the latest technology on the Kim Komando Show, the nation's largest weekend radio talk show. Kim takes calls and dispenses advice on today's digital lifestyle, from smartphones and tablets to online privacy and data hacks. For her daily tips, free newsletters and more, visit her website at Komando. com.