A Couple of Different Kinds of Film Preservation

These days, Larry Flynt is thanking his lucky porn stars for some of his best customers--feminists.

“I think the greatest thing that came from the women’s liberation movement was the idea that sex is OK,” the hustler behind Hustler told us.

The next greatest thing was the formation of armies of women buying Flynt’s sex stuff. When he launched his hard-core magazine in the hard-line ‘70s, a mere 3% of his, ahem, readers were women. Now it’s 20%. An even bigger chunk of the customers at his sex shop in Cincinnati are gals--a full quarter.

With all those ladies having their way with Flynt’s cash registers, he’s flirting with the scariest, most subversive come-on of his career: good taste.

Hustler Hollywood--Flynt’s nutty new store on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, which opened Thursday, was designed by Yale-educated architects Danna Sigal and Ron Godfredsen to be the Gap of sex paraphernalia and video shops.

And coffee shops.

And out-of-town newsstands.

And a store for stuff that actually can be mentioned in a family newspaper.

Flynt says, “We’ve carefully designed it so the adult sections are in one area, so people who might be offended don’t have to be exposed.”

Flynt worried about being offensive? A delicate new Larry for the millennium? Who knew?

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It was a grand week for film preservationists. On Thursday, Jodie Foster, Winona Ryder and Isabella Rossellini rallied for the cause at a Directors’ Guild benefit for Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. On Friday, supporters braved arctic conditions to celebrate the opening of American Cinematheque’s renovated film palace in Hollywood, the Egyptian Theatre.

Hmmmmm. Could the town that knows no past finally be sniffing its own mortality?

“Preservation is no longer an issue solely in the back alleys of culture,” Robert Rosen, dean of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, told us at the Egyptian. “With the use of film libraries, it’s now a front-office concern at the studios. One of the things that changed was the awareness that what they had in the vaults were not dead stories but corporate assets.”

Not that there weren’t a couple of backstage hitches. The day before the Film Foundation event, 24 cases of wine donated by board member Francis Ford Coppola met a strange fate on the road from Napa Valley. Four cases broke and the other 20 mysteriously disappeared while the mess was being cleaned up.

The next night, Ryder wouldn’t budge from her car for nearly an hour after learning she’d have to speak without a TelePrompTer.

But Rossellini was radiant, introducing UCLA’s restored version of Victor Fleming’s 1948 “Joan of Arc,” starring her mother, Ingrid Bergman. The evening was underwritten by the Italian design house MaxMara in honor of its elegant new boutique on Rodeo Drive.

Indeed, it was a banner week for fans of incredibly long classic films with religious themes. The Cinematheque screened Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 film “The Ten Commandments” on Friday for donors who put their money where the Egyptian’s paving stones were. Preserved forever will be preservation supporters like the William Morris Agency, Sydney Pollack, Peter Morton and Cinematheque board president Sigurjon “Joni” Sighvatsson.

Irene Lacher’s Out & About column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Page 2.