Word: manns
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...play the studio "game"--to repudiate Jimmie, to enter into a sham marriage as so many other actors did, to pretend to be what he wasn't. And it is this that precipitated his early exit from the movies, around 1934. Now the biographer and journalist William J. Mann, fascinated by Haines's colorful rise and fall in the film world and his unique refusal to cave in to the studio demands, has shaped around his life an intriguing exploration of fifty years of shifting Tinseltown mores...
...Mann, taking an affectionate but carefully critical view of the hero of his book, traces Haines's life through its multiple metamorphoses. One of the book's central revelations is that Hollywood in the 1920s was a place where it was possible to be openly gay. Homosexuality was simply accepted; gay and straight people mingled socially as well as professionally, and there was a line dividing the on-screen persona of an actor from his private life. But with the advent of sound and the conservative reactionism of the 1930s which accompanied the start of the Great Depression, a crackdown...
...Mann shows us both the long-term effect of these forces upon the movies--the infamous Hays morality code, which constrained the movies to representing a rigidly defined value system whose iron grip did not begin to loosen until the 1960s and '70s--and the very personal impact upon the actors in Hollywood. The studios declared that being gay was no longer okay in Hollywood, thereby avoiding the harsh criticism of the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups, and providing spin control on the gossip newspapers that were rapidly taking on an alarming independence. Actors who were rumored...
...problem isn't with taking nude photos of minors per se, nor is it with acknowledging that they are sexual beings. Sally Mann and Jock Sturges are two photographers whose unobjectionable work plies the same waters with, respectively, provocative and banal results (New York Times critic described the typical subject of one of Sturges' photos as "just a J. Crew model with no clothes to sell"). Their work, however, has also been the subject of recent protests, and one of Sturges' books, Radiant Identities, is cited in the Alabama indictment...
...Jackson-Mann Community Center...