The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Doesn't Make X-rated Movies

Notes

introduction 1. Nicole Sperling, “Reined-in Puppet Love Gets an R,” Hollywood Reporter, Oct. 6, 2004. 2. Quoted in Rachel Abramowitz,“Puppet Sex Leads to Rating Rift,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 5, 2004. 3. Quoted in Scott Bowles, “Puppets Go Gunning for an Audience,” USA Today, Oct. 12, 2004. Also see Anne Thompson, “Puppet Love: A Comedy with Strings Attached,” Washington Post, Oct. 10, 2004. 4. For a full discussion of The Cooler’s rating woes see Patrick Goldstein, “Arguing Their Case against NC-17,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 2003; Wayne Kramer, “Will ‘Cooler’ Heads Prevail?” Daily Variety, Aug. 18, 2003. 5. Kim Masters, interview, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, Feb. 6, 2004. 6. Quoted in Steven Rosen,“Ratings System Has Macy on a Crusade,”Denver Post, Oct. 17, 2003. 7. Kramer, “Will ‘Cooler’ Heads Prevail?” 8. Together with the MPAA and NATO, the IFIDA (International Film Importers and Distributors of America), a less-powerful and now defunct trade organization, was a founding partner in CARA, agreeing to abide by its rating designations for all of its products. According to the IFIDA Film Directory (1968–1969), its members included companies such as Adelphia Pictures, Allied Artists, American International Pictures, Avco Embassy, Cinemation, Distribix, Grove Press, Janus, Joseph Burstyn, Sherpix, and Silverstein International. The IFIDA went out of service in 1978. 9. This information is available on CARA’s Web site at www.filmratings.com. 10. Although DreamWorks is not an official member of the MPAA, it does abide by the same policies as the other distributors. The mini-major was bought by NBC Universal in 2005. MGM bought United Artists in 1981 after the failure of Heaven’s Gate (1980). Sony bought MGM in 2004. 11. United Artists Classics released Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Arabian Nights and The Canterbury Tales with X ratings in 1979, the only adults-only releases from an MPAA signatory until 1990. In recent years the art-house divisions of the MPAA signatories have 205 Notes offered NC-17 films in limited release; see, e.g., Fox Searchlight’s (20th Century Fox) The Dreamers (2003; U.S. release 2004) and Sony Pictures Classics’ Bad Education (2004). 12. See, e.g., two articles printed twenty-five years apart: Jack Valenti, “To Rate a Film Is Not to Censor It,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 1973; “A Candid Interview with the Steely Head of the MPAA, Jack Valenti,” E Online, Dec. 1998, http://www.eonline.com/Features /Specials/Ratings/Three/valenti.html. 13. Will H. Hays, The Memoirs of Will H. Hays (New York: Doubleday, 1955); Jack Vizzard , See No Evil: Life Inside a Hollywood Censor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971); James M. Wall, “Oral History with Geoffrey Shurlock,” Louis B. Mayer Library, American Film Institute (Los Angeles: AFI, 1975); Raymond Moley, The Hays Office (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1945). 14. Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975); Richard S. Randall, Censorship of the Movies: The Social and Political Control of a Mass Medium (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); Ira Carmen, Movies, Censorship, and the Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966). 15. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, – (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Gregory D. Black, The Catholic Crusade against the Movies, – (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship , and the Production Code from the s to the s (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990); Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, – (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Ruth Vasey, The World according to Hollywood, – (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 16. Stephen Prince, “Movies and Morality,” in A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electric Rainbow, – (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Stephen Prince, “After the Deluge,” in Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, – (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Justin Wyatt,“The Stigma of the X: Adult Cinema and the Institution of the MPAA Ratings System,” in Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era, ed. Matthew Bernstein (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press...