Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The early motion picture industry didn't just entertain audiences, it enticed them into movie palaces with spectacle, sex, and (increasingly) lurid tales of sin and seduction. This combination proved so successful that, by the early 1930s, a conservative religious movement emerged with an aim to "clean up" Hollywood's excesses, led by the Catholic Church but supported by preachers, ministers, and spiritual spokesmen nationwide. The Catholic Church's League of Decency became the first cultural crusade against what was perceived as a threat to the national character. Wielding an authority of equal parts religion and politics, the League saw to it that movies were banned outright, content was snipped and clipped, and production scripts were combed over for hints of immorality. Classic novels were re-written for the screen to pass the scrutiny of the hastily-created, reactionary Hays Office. Is this a good thing? There was a backlash among Hollywood writers; Black's recounting of William Faulkner creating the story of "Sanctuary" in three weeks ("the most horrific tale" Faukner could imagine, Black writes, "a morbid tale of rape, murder, sexual impotence and perversion") certainly seems like an outright challenge to the Paramount studio writers and censors, and the rewritten, completed film ("The Story of Temple Drake") turns the story inside out for a relatively less-scandalous ending.
Over the course of years, the Legion of Decency and the Hays Office's Production Code (which functioned as a presumptive industry watchdog) ensured that onscreen crime would not pay and immorality would be punished. Realism in Hollywood films got bleached out, but as the book makes clear the industry preferered to deal with religious moralists, and to police themselves with a nebulous code, rather than face government interference. In that regard America hasn't come very far, as the religious right's contemporary battles over entertainment and the morality of content in movies, TV, and the internet make clear. Recommended.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communication)
In response to a series of sex scandals that rocked the movie industry in the early 1920s, the Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency implemented a code stipulating that movies stress proper behavior, respect for government, and "Christian values."Based on an extensive survey of original studio records, censorship files, and the Catholic Legion of Decency archives (whose contents are published here for the first time), Hollywood Censored examines how hundreds of films were expurgated to promote a conservative political agenda during the 1930s.By taking an innovative view of how movies were made, and the conditions that made them, Hollywood Censored brings together such chapters as "Movies and Modern Literature," "Beer, Blood and Politics," and "Film Politics and Industry Policy" to form a rare look at America's most famous industry.
0 comments:
Post a Comment