The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) was the film that put his name explicitly into the Oscar conversation. Miloš Forman’s biography of the Hustler publisher placed Harrelson at the center of a film that was simultaneously a defense of First Amendment principles and a portrait of an enormously complicated human being. The performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and a Golden Globe nomination. Critics praised the specificity of his physical and psychological inhabitation of Flynt — the way he made a man who could easily have been played as a cartoon into something recognizably human, even at his most excessive.
By the late 1990s, Woody Harrelson had established himself as one of the most versatile and consistently interesting actors of his generation: someone who could anchor an ensemble comedy on television for eight years, carry independent films with considerable artistic ambition, and hold his own in mainstream Hollywood productions. The range of his work — from Cheers to Natural Born Killers to The People vs. Larry Flynt — was the kind of range that actors spend entire careers trying to demonstrate. He had demonstrated it across approximately a decade.
## The Appeal Effort and What It Cost
While Woody Harrelson’s career was ascending through the mid-to-late 1990s, he was also engaged in what he has described as a sustained effort to win his father a new trial. The appeal effort involved Alan Dershowitz — the celebrity defense attorney who had become famous for his work on high-profile cases including the O.J. Simpson trial and the Claus von Bülow appeal — and appears to have been organized around two central arguments: that Charles Harrelson’s trial had been fundamentally unfair due to prejudicial pretrial publicity, and that the defense had been inadequately resourced.