At last, lolita is here. well, not exactly. Italy, to be precise, then Spain, Germany, France, Britain. And a screening room in New York, where I was the first critic in the United States to see Adrian Lyne's $60 million movie—which still hasn't found an American distributor. Thirty-five years after Stanley Kubrick's original film version of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial masterpiece about a middle-aged man's sexual relationship with his 12-year-old stepdaughter, "Lolita" is more controversial than ever. One studio executive told Variety, "Pedophilia's a hard sell." Even for Lyne, who's had big box-office success with movies like "Flashdance" and "Fatal Attraction." Lyne's most fatal attraction may have been to the Nabokov book, originally banned in France and avoided by U.S. publishers until Putnam took it in 1958. Since then it's sold 14 million copies. But the current cultural climate, symbolized by the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, has the studios running scared.
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