Publisher Who Fought Puritanism, and Won

In its heyday during the 1960s, Grove Press was famous for publishing books nobody else would touch. The Grove list included writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and the books, with their distinctive black-and-white covers, were reliably ahead of their time and often fascinated by sex.

The same was, and is, true of Grove’s maverick publisher, Barney Rosset, who loved highbrow literature but also brought out a very profitable line of Victorian spanking porn.

On Nov. 19 Mr. Rosset will receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in honor of his many contributions to American publishing, especially his groundbreaking legal battles to print uncensored versions of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” He is also the subject of “Obscene,” a documentary by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, which opens on Friday at Cinema Village.

Mr. Ortenberg and Mr. O’Connor are themselves refugees from book publishing, and this is their first film. “Barney was basically my idol, my mentor and my role model for most of my publishing career,” said Mr. Ortenberg, who used to run Thunder’s Mouth Press, publisher of, among other books, “The Outlaw Bible of American Literature.” “I just thought, here was a great story about a major cultural impresario most people don’t know about. It was just dumb beginner’s luck, I guess. I had had a lot of experience with intellectual content, and I knew something about editing, and the movie was small enough that whatever mistakes we made, they didn’t wind up costing huge amounts. We learned as we went along.”

The documentary has a literary rock score — songs by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Warren Zevon and Patti Smith — and includes, in addition to the usual talking heads, some surprising archival footage. There’s an excerpt from Al Goldstein’s old cable television show, “Midnight Blue,” in which Mr. Goldstein quizzes Mr. Rosset about his four marriages and in general interviews him not as a major cultural figure but as a fellow smut peddler. There are clips of Europe that Mr. Rosset filmed as a teenager (his father, unfortunately, instructed him to keep the camera moving constantly), some footage he took during World War II and some poignant home movies of Mr. Rosset cavorting with his family on his Hamptons estate. Mr. Rosset, who made and squandered several fortunes, eventually had to unload the place to cover his losses.