Abstract
In 1968, the American ?lm industry was in its second decade of a box of?ce slump. Many Hollywood executives and ?lmmakers put the blame on the Production Code, a strict regime of censorship authored by a Jesuit priest (Daniel Lord) and a Catholic pro-censorship activist (Martin Quigley).1 The Code had hamstrung production since 1930 and American ?lmmakers and ?lmgoers seemed primed for a change (see Chapter 1).
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Notes
Lord, Quigley and their involvement in the Legion of Decency are discussed in Chapter 14.
The Hicklin standard was established in a British case, Queen (Regina) v. Hicklin, L. R. 3 Q. B. 360 (1868).
United States v Kennerly, 209F 119 D.C.D.S.N.Y. (1913).
In addition to my own work on contemporary content censorship in Hollywood— Lewis, J. (2002) Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York: New York University Press
as well as: Lewis, J. (2009) Real sex: the aesthetics and economics of art-house porn, in JumpCut 51, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/LewisRealsex/1.html
Lewis, J. (2008) Presumed effects of erotica: some notes on the Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, pp. 1–16 in Film International 6 (6)
and Lewis, J. (2003) The Utah version: some notes on the relative integrity of the Hollywood product, pp. 27–29 in Film International 1 (4)
Lyons, Ch. (1997) The New Censors: Movies and the Culture Wars. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 146–182
“Pornography: Love or Death,” Film Comment December 1984; Sandler, K. (2007) The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Doesn’t Make X-Rated Movies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press
Vaughan, S. (2005) Freedom and Entertainment: Rating the Movies in an Age of New Media. New York: Cambridge University Press; and Kirby Dick’s documentary: This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006).
On October 24, 1970, President Richard Nixon made clear his feelings in a written restatement released through the White House Counsel’s Office. These comments are taken from the written statement. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. phpfipid=2759#axzz1PrPUA8TU
Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography. New York: Rutledge Hill, 1986. The publication was dubbed the “Meese Report” conferring due credit to then Attorney General Edwin Meese.
Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957): http://supreme.justia.com/us/354/476/ case.html
A Book Named “John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” v. Attorney General of Massachusetts,383 U.S. 413 (1966): http://supreme.justia.com/us/383/413/case. html
For Justice Douglas’ entire opinion in Roth v United States, see: http://www.law. cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0354_0476_ZS.html
Redrup v. New York, 386 U.S. 767 (1967): http://supreme.justia.com/us/386/767/
In a 1964 obscenity case, Justice Potter Stewart included in his opinion the following: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within the shorthand description [of hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I shall never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.” Though Stewart intended to juxtapose the difficulty he had in defining obscenity with the ease with which he recognized it, the statement became something of a joke inside legal circles and later in the popular culture at large. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964): http://supreme.justia.com/us/378/184/
Woodward, B. and S. Armstrong (1979) The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court. New York: Avon, p. 234.
The Nixon appointees were: Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and (future Chief Justice) William Rehnquist.
For Douglas’s dissent and Burger’s majority opinion in Miller v California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) along with Brennan’s separate dissent, see: http://www.law.cornell.edu/ supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0413_0015_ZO.html
The PCA gave films a Production Seal (of approval) that protected studio pictures from screening bans or print seizures. The 1968 voluntary movie rating system was meant to move away from such a simple and restrictive system, but after 1973 films rated G-for General Audiences, PG and PG-13 (films for which parental guidance should guide attendance), and R (films restricted to adults and children with adult supervision) carried what amounted to an MPAA seal—a promise that the film could not under any circumstances (under the new Miller guidelines) be found to be legally obscene. A relevant case here is Jenkins v. Georgia 418 U.S. 153 (1974), in which the Nixon Court used the Miller decision to unanimously reverse a 1971 ban on screenings of the R-rated Hollywood film Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971). The case proved pivotal for the studios and has since insured that films rated G, PG, and R are by definition not obscene.
Has the supreme court saved us from obscenity? pp. 1, 11 and 16 in The New York Times, August 5, 1973, Section 2.
Though he is far better known as a cartoonist, Jules Feiffer wrote Carnal Knowledge, the studio film that first put the Miller standard to the test in Jenkins v. Georgia, 418 U.S. 153 (1974).
“I vigorously applaud the decision of the Supreme Court,” “Buckley wrote in an essay focusing mostly on the Court’s effort to distinguish between pornography and art.” See: Buckley, W. (August 5, 1973) Obscenity is commerce, p. 11 inThe New York Times, Section 2.
Feiffer, J. (August 5, 1973) Art for court’s sake, p. 1 in The New York Times, Section 2.
Nixon made the connection as well. His efforts to realign the Court had less to do (directly at least) with revisiting the obscenity issue than in supporting states’ rights, which in the South were being used to delay implementation of integration.
van Peebles, M. (August 5, 1973) Rulings? not mine, p. 11 in The New York Times, Section 2.
See: Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core, pp. 187–191 and 267–276.
Blumenthal, R. (January 21, 1973) Porno chic; Hard-core grows fashionable-and very profitable, in The New York Times Magazine.
Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968): http://supreme.justia.com/us/390/629/. Interstate Circuit, Inc. v. City of Dallas, 390 U.S. 676 (1968): http://supreme.justia. com/us/390/676/
The NC-17 was introduced as an attempt to protect studio films with more pervasive erotic content than most R-rated films. The film that was meant to define this new adults-only designation was Philip Kaufman’s 1990 feature Henry and June, a film with a lot of soft-core simulated action that was very much tied to its highbrow plot (it was ostensibly about the romantic entanglements of Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Miller’s charismatic wife June) and its high-end Hollywood production values. Unfortunately for the studios, the NC-17 rating was subsequently applied to the simply awful soft-core film Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995) forever identifying this new rating designation with soft-core trash.
Kirby Dick’s 2006 documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, “outed” several members of the CARA board. For his trouble, Dick’s film got saddled with an NC-17 rating.
Essex, A. (August 13, 1999) NC-17 gets an F, pp. 20–21 in Entertainment Weekly. The orgy Valenti refers to occurs in a scene in Eyes Wide Shut. In order to get an R-rating, Kubrick used digital effects to obscure some of the offensive images.
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© 2013 Daniel Biltereyst and Roel Vande Winkel
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Lewis, J. (2013). “American morality is not to be trifled with”: Content Regulation in Hollywood after 1968. In: Biltereyst, D., Winkel, R.V. (eds) Silencing Cinema. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137061980_3
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