Hollywood and the Code

You grow up watching Hollywood movies on television, it's easy to get the impression that sex and color must have been invented at around the same time - a notion the film Pleasantville (1998) takes off and runs with. It's now easy to snicker at married couples forced to pretend they're happy sleeping in separate single beds, but there was a reason, of course, and the reason was the Hays Code. Its roots go back to 1922 when the Hollywood studios tried to make a show of policing themselves by creating the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and appointed a former Republican Party Chairman and Postmaster General to head it up: William Hays. Soon enough, the MPPDA was known simply as the Hays Office.

It didn't have much effect for a while. In 1930, it drew up a list of "good taste" rules and standards that went pretty much ignored until one Joseph Breen, a ferocious Catholic missionary, threatened to throw the weight of 11 million Catholics who'd signed a pledge behind an all-out boycott of "all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality." The studios snapped to attention and began relentlessly enforcing the Code in July 1934. And it defined "decency and Christian morality" in strictest detail. Just as one absurd example, not only would married couples sleep separately, if they happened to even sit down on the same bed in any film scene, both would have to keep at least one foot firmly planted on the floor.

That's why many films made before 1934 can come as such a surprise. "In language and image, implicit meanings and explicit depictions, elliptical allusions and unmistakable references, pre-Code Hollywood cinema points to a road not taken," writes Thomas Doherty in Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934. "For four years, the Code commandments were violated with impunity and inventiveness in a series of wildly eccentric films. More unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, they look like Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel universe."

Still, many have argued that the restrictions made for some of the hottest scenes ever put on film. Filmmakers could obey the letter of the law but still show the smoke, leaving the fire to the imagination. And seriously, has a more erotically charged, more rawly sexual creature ever threatened silver screen with spontaneous combustion than Rita Hayworth's Gilda? Everyone remembers Lauren Bacall reminding Humphrey Bogart how to whistle in To Have and Have Not (1944), but they forget the near-baritone build-up to the tease: "You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle." And you know the rest.

Gradually, a sort of alternative code was taking shape, a systematic language of signs standing in for what couldn't be shown. A kiss, and then a pan to the waves crashing up on the beach. Fireworks overhead? Orgasm. And an alternative alternative code evolved in the gay and lesbian subcultures of Hollywood, marvelously documented in Rob Epstien and Jeffrey Friedman's The Celluloid Closet. Lines like John Ireland's to Montgomery Clift in Red River flew right past the censors: "There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun - a Swiss watch, or a woman from anywhere. You ever had a Swiss watch?"

But of course, it's in our nature to want more than just a tease. Anyone who didn't want to creep over to the seedy side of town and slip into a porn theater before the advent of home video, held out hope that they might catch a flash of flesh from Europe at an art house cinema or a film festival. Few admitted it (though famed auteur theorist Andrew Sarris would years later in the New York Times), but many were looking for more than art in the European films that crossed the Atlantic between the end of WWII and the late 60s. Of course, Europe's reputation as a more sexually liberated continent had long been established, and on the screen, works like Ecstacy (1932) featuring Hedy Lamarr as a young woman exploring her sexuality, often without the benefit of clothes, only served to firm up that rep.

While cinephiles haunted screenings of early Ingmar Bergman or Michelangelo Antonioni (his Blow Up (1966) in particular promised to show what made London swing), European filmmakers kept pressing into new, previously forbidden territory, only occasionally setting off alarms at the US Customs Office, as I Am Curious - Yellow did in 1967. From Japan, there was Woman in the Dunes (1964), and "foreign films" in general could rouse a good controversy in many a community with a university film society in its midst, right on through the 70s. Among the notorious would be Night Porter (1973), Salo (1975), In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Caligula (1980), and list goes on...

The "Golden Age"

Why "Golden Age"? Consider that between 1972 and 1983, porn - not sexy Hollywood fare, not racy sexploitation, not European art films, but pure, unabashed porn - chalked up 16 percent of total box office returns in the US. And yet, 16 percent of all American moviegoers in the 70s were most definitely not dirty old men in raincoats. What was going on? The answer could be as brief as two words: Sexual. Revolution.

You already know all the cliches about what all the 60s brought and wrought. Just a few buzzwords to set the scene: The pill. Satisfaction. Woodstock. Make love not war. The miniskirt, and later, hip-huggers, then hot pants. And so on. In the movies, a few tell-tale signs of the times: In 1970, Midnight Cowboy became the first - and last - X-rated movie to win an Oscar for Best Picture (not to mention Best Director for John Schlesinger). Two years later, Marlon Brando would follow his comeback performance in The Godfather with what some argue to be the last performance he took seriously: Paul, the grieving expatriate in Last Tango in Paris (1972) who plunges into an affair with a younger woman with ravenous abandon. Butter jokes were everywhere, and if you wanted to be in on them, you had to go see this movie.

It was in this atmosphere that many Americans decided that maybe it was okay after all to check out something even racier. Perhaps the first above-ground box office success, a film people weren't ashamed to line up for, was Pornography in Denmark (1970), for which San Francisco-based hardcore pioneer Alex de Renzy conducted interviews with Danes immediately after their country had done away with censorship altogether and - this was the draw - spliced in a few choice examples of what was going on over there. Denmark was distributed by Sherpix, credited with the first hardcore fictional feature, Mona: The Virgin Nymph (1970) and the first hardcore 3D feature, The Stewardesses (1970).

By 1971, the New York Times had dubbed San Francisco "The Porn Capital of America." On July 4, 1969, Jim and Artie Mitchell had opened the O'Farrell Theater, where they would show groundbreaking films such as Autobiography of a Flea (1976). Why groundbreaking? Because not only was it a period piece, it was directed by a woman, Sharon McKnight, and featured the debut of Paul Thomas. The Mitchell Brothers would also make a star out of one of the original "Ivory Soap girls," Marilyn Chambers (real name: Marilyn Briggs). Behind the Green Door (1972) is a psychedelic, arty, very San Francisco sort of porn film which nevertheless "became a lightning rod in the debate over pornography," writes Ford. "Defenders saw Chambers as a nice girl who discovers herself through sex. Opponents saw her character as enslaved and humiliated... Jim and Artie Mitchell loved the fight because it sold tickets to their film."

San Francisco of the 70s was also, of course, the Mecca to which gays and lesbians, bi- and transsexuals, just about anyone whose sexuality was not welcome in flyover country, flocked. Wakefield Poole is credited with making the first modern gay hardcore adult film, Boys in the Sand, filmed on Fire Island and released in New York in December 1971. But for Poole, San Francisco was home and, besides other features, he shot a documentary on the Gay Pride Parade in 1974 before abandoning film in the late 80s. It's not an unhappy ending, though. He's an admired chef and wrote his autobiography in 2000, Dirty Poole: The Autobiography of a Gay Porn Pioneer. In 2002, New York's Anthology Film Archives presented a retrospective of his early films.

But back to the 70s, specifically, to 1972, the year the dam broke. Director Gerard Damiano unleashed the Deep Throat juggernaut in June of that year at the New World Theater on 49th Street in New York City. Turan and Zito report that among those who took in its first run were Frank Sinatra, Spiro Agnew, Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, and of course, Bob Woodward. For the New York Times film critic at the time, Vincent Canby, it was simply a matter of sheer luck, a confluence of social forces: "I'm sure if Deep Throat hadn't caught the public's fancy at this point in history, some other porno film, no better and maybe no worse, would have."

But Damiano was the lucky one, ushering in an age of what that same paper called "porno chic." Deep Throat was the talk of late night TV, "the one XXX film to attend to see what all the fuss was about," writes Merritt, "grossing tens of millions of dollars (totals vary greatly)." It also made a celebrity out of Linda Lovelace, a controversial figure who later claimed that she performed in all her porn films - and there were many, shorts and features alike - at gunpoint. In the 80s and early 90s, Lovelace became a mascot for feminist critics of the porn industry such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon who claimed that porn incites men to act violently towards women. Dworkin and MacKinnon sparked a debate that split feminism down the middle. Katie Roiphe, for example, countered, "Precisely the danger in this kind of feminism is that it creates a dwindling space for men. It makes men into objectifiers - sleazy, brutish creatures only interested in sex."

And Deep Throat itself, as a film? Well, the story is based on a rather unusual premise. A woman, Lovelace, pays her doctor a visit, complaining that she's never experienced an orgasm. Dr. Young (Harry Reems) discovers the cause: Her clitoris is in her throat. Despite the humor, a welcome innovation in the genre, most argue that Damiano's other porn blockbuster of the same year, The Devil in Miss Jones, is the better film. [For more on Deep Throat see the documentary film Inside Deep Throat.]

One other landmark of the "Golden Age" should be mentioned, Radley Metzger's The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1975), widely regarded as one of the best of the era and winner of the first annual Erotic Film Festival Award. Of course, it also marked a move for Metzger's out of the realm of softcore; he filmed it under the name Henry Paris.

That was then, this is now

Anyone who's seen Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights can tell you what put an end to the "Golden Age": Video. The advent of home video, on the one hand, which had a radical effect on the entire industry, not just porn, and on the other, the use of video in production. Suddenly, porn could be made quite cheaply, which was bad news for directors used to generous budgets and a non-assembly line approach, and it could be viewed in the privacy of one's own home, which was certainly bad news for theaters like the O'Farrell and countless others coast to coast.

But in many ways, the video revolution of the 1980s was a positive development. "The Porn Capital of America" has long since shifted south to Los Angeles, but video did open doors to anyone just about anywhere who wanted to make their own sort of erotica that would be an alternative to the male-gaze-centric hetero fare that had dominated porn for far too long. Gay porn boomed and sex-positive female stars such as Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley and Candida Royale launched careers not only in front of the camera but behind it as well.

Video was just the first step in the widening proliferation of porn outside the movie theater; with the Internet, that proliferation exploded. It's become such an obvious and, in the case of spam, all but unavoidable fact of life that not only has it been generally accepted as such but there's also been something of a revival of "porn chic," 21st century-style. Doonesbury characters are surfing porn, porn stars are endorsing products and production companies like Vivid are written up in high profile national papers and magazines. The ultimate measure, though, is probably economic. "Estimates of annual revenue for adult entertainment - porn film sales and rentals, Web site subscriptions and fees, and so on - range from $8 billion to $10 billion," USA Today recently reported. Just over $4 billion of that loot comes from film sales and rentals, according to the trade industry bible, Adult Video News.

Those aren't the sorts of figures Hollywood cares to ignore. Boogie Nights itself represents a shift in attitudes as to what's appropriate for mainstream audiences to see; it's not all that less explicit than the films its characters are shooting. But it's the French once again who seem hell-bent on pushing those boundaries even further. The wave of non-porn yet vividly explicit films coming out of France in the last several years - Catherine Breillat's Romance, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-Moi, and Patrice Chereau's Intimacy - has hardly gone without comment in film journals. In the French journal Trafic, critic Jean-Marie Samocki argues that explicitness has become a matter of national identity: "France," as Philippa Hawker sums up the argument in an Australian paper, "faced by what it perceives as the globalising and homogenising power of American culture, sees a way to define itself otherwise. There are some places it can go, cinematically, that Hollywood cannot."

Perhaps not the studios, and perhaps not directly. But if Hollywood icons like Meg Ryan, and for that matter, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut are stripping down on screen to get it on, it may be only a matter of time. How did Kidman's character end that film? "I do love you, and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible."

"What's that?" asks Tom.

"F**k."

The days of whistling lessons are long over.

Go back to Part 1.