With a much more appealing hero than, say, “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” a new documentary paints a portrait of a feisty First Amendment warrior.
“Obscene” tells the story of Barney Rosset, the longtime publisher of Grove Press. Starting in 1951, Grove published many of the Beat writers, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and the autobiography of Malcolm X.
Along with those progressive credentials, Grove also took to the barricades on behalf of censorship laws. Its test case was D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” a 1928 novel that could not be freely distributed in the U.S. because of its allegedly obscene content.
Winning that case and a case involving Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” Rosset and others helped usher in the cultural openness of the 1960s. Grove took full advantage of that permissiveness, with its freewheeling magazine, the Evergreen Review, and a line of vintage erotica.
Rosset also was involved in the distribution of “I Am Curious (Yellow),” a notorious landmark of highbrow adult cinema, which made more money for the company in its scandalous engagements than the books did.
Money is a recurring theme in the documentary. Rosset grew up in privilege, attended an experimental school and served as a cinematographer in World War II. After that, he had enough family money to do whatever he wanted, so (after a little-recognized stab at producing a civil-rights documentary) he went into publishing and lefty causes.
At one time he owned miles of waterfront property in the Hamptons, which a friend guesses would be worth $100 million today. But Rosset sold it all off, gradually, to support Grove. Apparently he lives on very little now.
The movie has some dandy footage of the era, full access to Rosset (who’s still around and haphazardly blogging), and lots of anecdotes. It doesn’t have much focus, however, and although the free-speech cases are central to the picture, they pass by in the same measured way as everything else.
“Obscene” has a roster of colleagues and friends testifying about Rosset’s influence, including filmmakers John Waters and John Sayles, and writers Erica Jong and Jim Carroll.
Rosset remains a bit of a mystery, but he was undeniably around for some fascinating changes in modern culture. “Obscene” can’t define all those changes, but it knows them when it sees them.
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