Word: hollywoodizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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America is rocked by social violence, and some people think Hollywood is to blame. They point to the sex and smutty talk, drug use and gun love onscreen. The moguls hide behind a rickety rating system that stokes more fury than it slakes. Church groups attack it as a sham; critics on the left complain that it eviscerates mature films. "The censors have spent all their time protecting children against adult movies," says The Nation. "They might better protect adults against childish movies...
...rein in the wild horses of this art-industry, Hollywood in 1930 charged Will Hays, a former Postmaster General, with establishing and enforcing standards for screen stories and behavior. At times the regulators used diplomacy: one official, objecting to gruesome screams in Murders in the Rue Morgue, suggested "reducing the constant loud shrieking to lower moans and an occasional modified shriek." At other times they took the stern approach, telling Howard Hughes he was forbidden to make the gangster film Scarface. The producer's response, in a memo to director Howard Hawks: "Screw the Hays Office. Start the picture...
...Code" era of 1930-34 is getting its due in two excellent books and a film retrospective. Mark A. Vierra's Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood (Abrams; 240 pages; $39.95) mixes gorgeous photos with tart memos and anecdotes from the period. Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 (Columbia University Press; 430 pages; $19.50) cogently examines the pictures and their political impact. Those in New York City can see the fabulous evidence firsthand. Film Forum, the town's invaluable rep house, is mounting a series of 44 key films, unspooling...
Maybe the Depression made Hollywood do it. Most of the studios were losing money by 1932 (RKO declared bankruptcy), and racy films brought in the money. But they also fanned the ire of state and local censorship boards. In 1934 the new Production Code had teeth, and under Joseph I. Breen, a former newspaperman, it bit hard. Dialogue was denatured from snappy to sappy; gowns hid what they once revealed; evil lost a lot of its seductive plausibility. And as studios sought to rerelease their pre-Code films, Breen insisted that cuts be made in the master negative, thus censoring...
...delivers on the credits' promise of "Fame...Passion... Heartbreak...Success...Glory" with an Aristotelian three-act structure--rise, fall and rehab--and florid narration: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers "came out of the South--driven by jangling guitars and led by a rock-'n'-roll rebel!" E!'s True Hollywood Story is tart and eager to dish dirt. Compare an Intimate Portrait on Natalie Wood, filled with warm family reminiscences, with E!'s dark narrative of despair and drugs that pulled the series' second-highest rating. "Some of our stories end happily, some don't," says E! vice president...