Milos Forman

The 44th International Film Festival opened Friday in the Czech Republic with a week of events planned, including an award for French actress Isabelle Huppert and a world premiere by Milos Forman. The festival in the spa resort of Karlovy Vary features 220 movies this year, including Czech-born Forman's "A Walk Worthwhile," which the Oscar-winning director adapted from a 2007 staging of a 1960s Czech musical. The film will show today. On Sunday, Huppert is to receive the Crystal Globe award for her outstanding contribution to world cinema.

Czech-born filmmaker Milos Forman, who won Oscars for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Amadeus," is back in Prague to stage an opera at the Czech National Theater. The jazz opera "A Walk Worthwhile" by Czech authors Jiri Suchy and Jiri Slitr dates from the 1960s, when it had a run of 64 performances at their small theater. In 1966, Forman transformed the opera into a TV movie. Now, more than 40 years later, Forman, 75, is back to transform it again for a big stage. It opens Sunday.

WHEN Milos Forman was a student in Prague in the 1950s, he read a book on the Spanish Inquisition about people confessing under torture to crimes they'd never committed. "What struck me at the time was that the same thing was happening in Czechoslovakia under the Communists," the 75-year-old director recalls. "I met one prisoner who had escaped the death penalty but had been tortured through sleep deprivation. After a few months of that, you are ready to confess to anything."

"I don't care if people are Democrats or Republicans, communists or anti-communists," says director Milos Forman. "I divide people between those I am afraid of and those I am not. Once you have lived under the Nazis and the Communists, you learn these kinds of things." The official portraitist of "Amadeus" and "The People vs.

Milos Forman has worked with larger-than-life performers such as Jack Nicholson in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and Jim Carrey in "Man on the Moon." But as he assesses a career that includes a pair of directing Oscars -- for 1975's "Cuckoo's Nest" and 1984's "Amadeus," both best picture winners -- he's struck by his work with an actor of a different vintage.

By the late '70s, the Flower Power movement had long wilted. Jimmy Carter was now president and OPEC--not the Viet Cong--was the enemy. But that was the least of the challenges director Milos Forman and writer Michael Weller faced as they began the task of adapting the stage musical "Hair" for the wide screen.

Director Milos Forman's converted 17th century farmhouse is just 15 miles--as the Canadian geese fly--north of busy Danbury, Conn. But from the moment you peel off Interstate 84 and head up the twisting two-lane roads leading toward New Milford and Litchfield County, you're in postcard New England.

The popular debate over "The People vs. Larry Flynt" has been tremendously revealing of cultural attitudes toward women and pornography, but you would never know that from John Balzar's story ("Making Nice Over the 1st Amendment," Calendar, Jan. 24). In presenting the discussion between director Milos Forman, Flynt lawyer Alan Isaacman and faculty and students at Annenberg School for Communication at USC as an evening of mere accolades, Balzar managed to erase from the event not only my pointed criticism of the film's whitewashing of Larry Flynt but also my colleague Jonathan Kotler's discussion of its simplification of legal issues.

"Larry Flynt the Movie is even more cynical than Larry Flynt the Man." With that remarkable declaration, feminist Gloria Steinem began her assault on Milos Forman's "The People vs. Larry Flynt" in an op-ed article published Jan. 7 in the New York Times. The article went on to accuse director Forman of glorifying the founder of Hustler while ignoring the depths of his depravity.

There was idealism, controversy, applause, a few hisses, a little bit of music, an uninvited protest, no flowers and very ordinary food. "A typical ACLU event," board member Marilyn Bergman said, as the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California's Torch of Liberty Dinner ended with the abrupt removal from the stage of a man objecting to Courtney Love's presence as a guest presenter.