In the 1994 competitive landscape of American film, Natural Born Killers arrived alongside Pulp Fiction — Tarantino’s own directorial response to the script Stone had taken from him — and the two films together defined a moment in which commercially released American cinema was doing something more formally adventurous and more thematically dark than it had done in most of the preceding decade. Harrelson’s performance in Natural Born Killers, placed against Tarantino’s ensemble in Pulp Fiction, announced that American film of the mid-1990s had shifted into a different register from the mainstream entertainment of the late 1980s. He was at the center of that shift.
## Larry Flynt and the Oscar Turn
The People vs. Larry Flynt arrived in 1996, and it was the film that changed the terms on which critics and the industry understood what Woody Harrelson was capable of. Miloš Forman, the Czech-American director whose previous work included One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus — both Best Picture Oscar winners — brought to the Flynt biography the kind of humanist interest in complicated figures that distinguished the best of his work: the conviction that even people whose choices are deeply objectionable are worthy of being understood on their own terms rather than simply condemned on society’s terms.
Larry Flynt, the founder and publisher of Hustler magazine, is exactly the kind of subject that tests this conviction. He was, in the conventional moral accounting of 1970s America, a pornographer — someone who made money from the explicit sexual display of human bodies, in a period when that was not legally protected expression and when the community standards law that governed obscenity made his business a legally contested enterprise. He was also a figure who, in the specific circumstances of his legal battles, became an unlikely champion of First Amendment protections — a man whose speech was as offensive as possible to most of the people who ultimately benefited from the legal precedents his challenges produced.