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215 Notes Introduction: The Mainstreaming of Hollywood Screen Violence 1. The eight major studios during the 1980s were Columbia, Disney, MGM/ UA, Orion, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. 2. For example, following the success of Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer were signed to a long-term deal with Paramount Pictures. Brian Grazer signed a deal with Tri-Star Pictures following the success of Splash (1984), and Aaron Russo, who produced Trading Places (1983), made a 72 million multifilm deal with Producers Sales Organization , an independent production/distribution company that was vying for mainstream success (Ansen, “Producer”). 3. An American Werewolf in London earned just over 30 million at the domestic box office and became the twenty-third highest grossing film of 1981. It was the only horror movie to place in the top 25 box-office earners that year, likely due to Landis’s previous success with the youth-oriented comedies National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980). 1. A Bloody Renaissance: Screen Violence and the Rise of the New Hollywood Auteurs 1. Most other notable examples of graphic violence in silent-era films come from other countries, such as Danish director Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (The Witch, 1922), which includes memorably gruesome reenactments of witch-scare stories. One of the scenes shows a witch pulling a rotting, dismembered hand from a bundle of sticks and snapping off a finger to make a potion, while another scene shows a demon holding aloft a dead baby that he then proceeds to bleed into a cauldron (the impact of which is somewhat diminished by the patent fakery of a doll substituting for the baby). Another example is Sergei Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1926), whose famous Odessa Steps sequence features a brief but graphic image of a woman who has been shot in the eye. 2. The original 1968 set of classifications—G for general audiences, M for mature audiences, R for restricted to those under sixteen without an accompanying adult, and X restricted to anyone under sixteen—was revised several times. In 1970, the M rating was changed to GP, then changed again in 1972 to PG (parental guidance suggested). Around the same time, the R and X ratings had their age limits raised to seventeen. In 1984, the PG-13 rating (may by unsuitable for children under thirteen) was added as an inbetween rating for those movies that were beyond PG material but not quite R (for a more in-depth discussion of this rating, see chapter 6). Finally, in 1990, the un-copyrighted X rating, which had become synonymous with pornography and was therefore deemed no longer commercially viable for Hollywood productions, was replaced with the copyrighted NC-17 rating, although this move was strictly symbolic and ultimately had little effect on the industry’s output. 3. To put this astoundingly low number in better perspective, Hollywood’s all-time high weekly attendance was 78.2 million in 1946. 4. This is the primary reason why Stanley Kubrick’s proposed biopic of Napoleon, which was supposed to follow his critical and commercial hit 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), fizzled at several studios and never saw the light of day. Instead, he went on to make A Clockwork Orange (1971), one of the seminal violent films of the early 1970s. 5. While there was no nudity in the early Hammer films, Boot describes the sexual suggestiveness of the films in terms of “milky white bosoms and throats exposed for biting, and lots of orgasmic gasping at the moment of penetration” (89–90). 6. The Curse of Frankenstein, which was distributed worldwide by Warner Bros., made 5 million. The film’s budget was a mere 160,000 (McCarty 22). 7. When the reviews first came out, they were almost uniformly negative, and even those critics who wrote positively about the movie as a whole still had negative things to say about Marion’s murder. Philip T. Hartung of Commonweal called the shower scene “one of the bloodiest scenes ever shown in a movie” (469); Moira Walsh of America said it was “the bloodiest bathtub murder in screen history,” suggesting that Hitchcock’s “chief sources” of subject matter were “Krafft-Ebing and the Marquis de Sade”; an unnamed critic at Time described it as “one of the messiest, most nauseating murders ever filmed” (“Cinema”); and Stanley Kauffman, writing for the New Republic , called the two...

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