The lives of some sex peddlers are just made for Hollywood. Larry Flynt: check. Hugh Hefner: coming soon. Al Goldstein? Not quite yet.
While some goyishe porn pushers tried to pass off orgies as art—we’re thinking of you, Bob Guccione—Goldstein’s Screw magazine, a tabloid-style porn rag popular in the 1970s, was more in-your-face. It was raunchy, obnoxious, usually disgusting and sometimes political.
Not that Screw couldn’t be artful. Goldstein once asked Salvador Dali to design an entire issue, and almost succeeded. And like Flynt, Goldstein also had his headline legal moments, culminating in a Wichita obscenity trial after he pissed off the FBI with a story titled “Is J. Edgar Hoover a Fag?”
While you may never see Goldstein on the silver screen, Screw does have a cameo in Woody Allen’s Bananas. And yes, that’s the perv himself on The Daily Show in 1999. The porn king, however, has since fallen from glory.
