‘Screwed’ Is a Blunt Portrait of Angry Magazine Publisher

Before there was Larry Flynt, there was Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw Magazine and host of the cable-access show “Midnight Blue,” two legendary mainstays of Manhattan’s X-rated scene. Goldstein apparently became the first man ever to beat a federal obscenity charge--before Flynt even started publishing Hustler. Arrested 19 times by his own count, Goldstein is proud that he’s never cut a deal with a prosecutor.

As with Flynt, Goldstein is important in the cause of 1st Amendment rights. But his story, told in Alexander Crawford’s documentary “Screwed,” makes “The People vs. Larry Flynt” look like “Pollyanna.”

Clearly a shrewd, reflective man of superior intelligence, Goldstein can use four-letter words with the effect of a blowtorch. He’s famously a no-holds-barred kind of guy, and filmmaker Crawford has wisely understood that nothing less than a no-holds-barred documentary will do. Crawford follows Goldstein everywhere, including the sets of the X-rated movies he makes. “Screwed” is as blunt as its subject.

Crawford also puts Goldstein in the context of his audience. He spends time with a heavyset young man searching for a hooker, with an older man interested in sadomasochistic sex and with a one-legged man who collects pornography, who says, “A world without pornography is a world without imagination.”

Brooklyn-born Goldstein, who held down a variety of jobs before launching Screw in 1958 with $150, calls his magazine “a compendium of everything sexual” and he calls “Midnight Blue” more “revenge than entertainment.” By this Goldstein means that the program’s concern with sex gives him a chance to blast anyone who angers him, especially hypocrites. “I don’t defend porn as much as I defend porn’s right to exist,” he says.

Goldstein has been honing his bombastic public persona for so long you sense that he probably means to be in total control of how he comes across on film. It is possible that he may not like that you come away from “Screwed” with a sense of just how much like he is to many of his readers and viewers: middle-aged, seriously overweight and not very successful with women. Indeed, as the film unfolds he’s experiencing the breakup of his fourth marriage. Yet he also seems to want us to take seriously his own longing for love. At one point, he says, “I am the audience Screw targeted.”

He is an angry man, and much of that anger is directed at women as well as hypocrites on the issue of sex. A man who has known him a long time remarks, “He’s a terrible enemy and a wonderful friend.”

Crawford waits until nearly the end of his film to ask Goldstein what the price of being Al Goldstein has been. Goldstein, who tells him that it is his best question, replies, “No one takes you seriously. . . . They’re amazed you ever read a book. . . . You’re regarded as a cartoon character with no depth. . . . You make yourself into a joke so that no one can hurt you.”

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film includes extremely blunt language, considerable nudity and some graphic sex.

‘Screwed’

A Cinema Village Features release of a St. Dympna production. Director-cinematographer-editor Alexander Crawford. Producers Andrew Gurland, Todd Phillips. Barry Michael Cooper and Jeff Pollack. Cinematographer Tom Priestley Jr. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Nuart through Wednesday, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379. (“Screwed” is playing concurrently with “Paris Was a Woman,” but separate admissions are required.)