Free Download The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code (Revised Edition) by Leonard J. Leff, Jerold L. Simmons
English | July 6, 2001 | ISBN: 0813190118 | True EPUB | 412 pages | 5.8 MB
The new edition of this seminal work takes the story of the Production Code and motion picture censorship into the present, including the creation of the PG-13 and NC-17 ratings in the 1990s.
Starting in the early 1930s, the Production Code Director, Joe Breen, and his successor, Geoff Shurlock, understood that American motion pictures needed enough rope-enough sex, and violence, and tang-to lasso an audience, and not enough to strangle the industry. To explore the history and implementation of the Motion Picture Production Code, this book uses 11 movies: Dead End, GoneWith the Wind, The Outlaw, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Bicycle Thief, Detective Story, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Moon Is Blue, The French Line, Lolita, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The authors combine a lively style with provocative insights and a wealth of anecdotes to show how the code helped shape American screen content for nearly 50 years.
"A readable, intimate account of the rise to near-tyrannical power, and the fall to well-deserved ignominy, of the old Production Code Administration." -Atlantic Monthly
"A valuable insight into our own innocence and naiveté." -The New York Times Book Review
"The triumph of Leff and Simmons’s fine work is that they have reminded us of how fatuous and inimical a code of conduct can be: how tempting it is as a theoretical answer, and how intrinsically flawed it is as a working solution." -The Times of London