BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Sitting behind a desk slathered in porn, renowned smut peddler Larry Flynt has one eye on New York and the other on every cable box and satellite dish across America.
Flynt is scheduled to open a new strip club on the West Side of Manhattan this week, adding one more nugget to his ever-growing porn empire.
The magazine publisher said he’s in talks with cable and satellite providers about Hustler TV On Demand, which would be styled after his flagship magazine. “Hopefully it’ll be [available] before the year’s out . . . obviously it’ll be adult programming,” Flynt told The Post in an interview in his 10th floor suite in Beverly Hills.
In his first interview about the Hustler Club, which will be on 51st Street next to the West Side Highway, Flynt said gentlemen’s clubs are making a big comeback despite the explosion of porn on the Internet and through DVD and VHS sales.
“There’s no substitute for the real thing,” said Flynt, wearing a Piaget watch encrusted with diamond chips all over the band. “The more you get, the more you want. That basically applies to sex.”
The New York club will be Flynt’s ninth, joining strip joints in Beverly Hills, San Diego, Redlands and San Francisco, Calif.; New Orleans; Baltimore; Paris; and Washington Park, Ill.
By year’s end, Flynt plans to add Detroit and Shreveport, La., to his strip-club roster.
The Flynt empire already includes:
* Adult retail stores in West Hollywood, San Diego, Cincinnati and Monroe, Ohio.
* Approximately 30 magazines, six of them adult in nature, led by flagship Hustler.
* A casino near L.A. International Airport that offers poker, Asian card games and a form of blackjack. The casino also played host to a lingerie contest last month.
* Three production companies that pump out about 40 porn titles a month.
At age 61, the slow-speaking Flynt is barely audible but still quick-witted. The wheelchair-confined porn king, nearly killed by a sniper’s bullet in 1978, admits he was slow to jump on expanding the “Flynt” and “Hustler” names.
“Throughout the ’80s, people were telling me I wasn’t taking advantage of the value of the brand name Hustler,” said Flynt. “And then we saw technology arrive in the form of the Internet,” he noted. “Even though we didn’t full understand of it, we knew we had to take advantage of it.”