Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930 - 1934
Author: Thomas Doherty
Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films -- a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Though more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema -- but the moral terrain is so off-kilter that they seem imported from a parallel universe.
In a sense, Doherty avers, the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded -- in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled.
No other book has yet sought to interpret the films and film-related meanings of the pre-Code era -- what defined the period, why it ended, and what its relationship was to the country as a whole during the darkest years of the Great Depression... and afterward.
Publishers Weekly
In early 1930s America, weighed down by the Depression, a vice-ridden, wise-cracking, anarchic antiauthoritarianism ruled Hollywood. Doherty's exhaustive cultural history of the films produced in the last years before the enactment of the Motion Picture Production Code reveals how the ascendancy of sound and a plummeting economy led to four years of wildly edgy films (1930-1934), radically different from the spic-and-span products of classic Hollywood. Most of the films chronicled here--sporting titles like Eight Girls in a Boat, Call Her Savage and Merrily We Go to Hell--have been both forgotten by film historians and unavailable to generations of late-night TV viewers. Doherty begins with the misery and discontent gripping the U.S. in the 1930s, explaining how these forces shaped a motion picture industry just learning how to use the power of sound. He organizes the later chapters around a colorful, trashy array of genres: anarchic comedies; horror, gangster and vice films; over-the-top newsreels; and expeditionary films set in dangerous territory. Doherty's plot summaries at times grow tiresome, but he rarely fails to enliven them with gossip, quips or anecdotes. Ultimately , he shows how the fun came to a crashing halt when the National Legion of Decency and the Production Code Administration, spearheaded by Joseph Breen, launched a massive and astonishingly successful crusade to clean up "the pest hole that infects the entire country with its obscene and lascivious moving pictures." Given the politics swirling around Hollywood's edgier fare in the wake of the shootings in Littleton, Colo., this lurid and all too short-lived chapter of Hollywood history has never seemed more germane. (Sept.) FYI: A series at New York's Film Forum, The Joy of Pre-Code, running from August 20 to September 14, 1999, will feature more than 40 precode films, including many discussed by Doherty. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
From the time shortly after movies learned to talk until 1934, Hollywood producers were guided by a verbal agreement that controlled the content of their work. The public flocked to racy romantic dramas like Red Dust, violent gangster sagas, socially conscious films, and sexy adventures like King Kong and Tarzan and His Mate. But under pressure from church and political leaders, the Production Code soon replaced Mae West with Shirley Temple. This is a fascinating, in-depth look at an overlooked Hollywood era. Doherty (film studies, Brandeis Univ.) re-creates the horse-trading over censorship and the social tensions and casual racism of a young industry, sketched against the backdrop of the Depression at home and the gathering clouds of Nazism in Europe. He also shows how movie self-censorship served the New Deal by promoting "restraint and decorum." Highly recommended for serious movie buffs as well as those interested in the social history of the early Depression.--Stephen Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Early sound film is revealed as a morally lax medium ready for the boundaries of the Code and the steadying presence of FDR. In the opening chapter, Doherty (American and Film Studies/Brandeis; Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II, 1993) sets the scene for the wild era, showing how the Great Depression and the transition to sound technology created nervous studios and cynical, antiauthoritarian audiences. He then surveys popular genres—adventure, gangster, horror, prison, and sex movies, comedies and newsreels, preachment yarns—and illustrates the antigovernment sentiment, sexual ambiguity, and vice that dominated the screen in films such as Wild Boys of the Road, Scarface, and The Sign of the Cross. Although the Production Code was introduced in 1930, it was not until 1934, with the threat of federal regulation and the "calming equilibrium" of President Franklin Roosevelt, that it was adopted by the film industry. For studios, the code's effects were positive: immediately after the establishment of the Production Code Administration, movie attendance increased and studios rebounded. For pre-code headliners, the effects were mixed, as Doherty's analyses of the Marx Brothers and Mae West attest. Just as the need for national unity during the Great Depression gave reason for the Production Code, so postwar prosperity allowed Americans the personal freedom and "wider selection of moral options" that killed it. Ironically, the death knell came from a Hollywood insider: Alfred Hitchcock, with Psycho (1960), the shocking film that left the Code "walking dead." Scholarly but at ease with a Hollywood aside or period slang, this book sits instyle between Andrew Bergman's We're in the Money and Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness, two other codifications of film eras or genres. As for what was missed, why not have examined the pre-code continental wantonness of Lubitsch films, which make moral and criminal liberties second nature? Providing a nearly complete chronicle and casting unifying light on an unexplored era in film, this may become a standard. Useful appendices include the text of the Production Code. (67 b&w photos, not seen)
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Writing Public Policy: Practical Guide to Communicating in Public Policy Processes
Author: Catherine F Smith
Writing Public Policy is a hands-on, concise guide to writing and communicating in public policy processes. Designed to help students, practitioners, and other "doers" understand and perform common types of communication used in solving public problems, the book introduces the institutional democratic process in the U.S. and explains the standards and functions of communicating in the public sector.
Coverage includes:
* A general method for planning, composing, and assessing communications in a variety of real-life contexts and situations
* Specific instructions for writing and speaking in public policy processes
* Scenarios that illustrate the complexity in policy processes, highlighting their diversity of contexts--including state agencies and local boards, non-profit organizations, federal government committees, special interest groups, and professional associations--the variety of actors involved, and the range of communication types produced
* Commentary relating the scenarios and examples to the general method
* Checklists of expected standards to enable communicators to assess their products
Highly practical and accessible, Writing Public Policy demonstrates the skills and techniques needed to effectively communicate in the democratic process of making public policy. Ideal for courses in public policy studies, civic writing, and technical/business/legal writing, it is also an invaluable resource for practitioners--and students preparing for careers--in public policy, politics, government, public relations, law, journalism, social work, public health, or in any area concerned with public affairs.
Table of Contents:
| Introduction : how to use this book | ||
| Ch. 1 | Public policy making | 1 |
| Ch. 2 | Communication in the process | 8 |
| Ch. 3 | Definition : frame the problem | 19 |
| Ch. 4 | Legislative history : know the record | 42 |
| Ch. 5 | Position paper : know the arguments | 62 |
| Ch. 6 | Petitions and proposals : request action or propose policy | 76 |
| Ch. 7 | Briefing memo or opinion statement : inform policy makers | 93 |
| Ch. 8 | Testimony : witness in a public hearing | 111 |
| Ch. 9 | Written public comment : influence administration | 125 |
| Conclusion : ready for change | 139 |
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