You're Wrong About
You're Wrong About
The Movie Rating System with Karina Longworth
How did Poltergeist get that PG rating? Podcast legend Karina Longworth, host of You Must Remember This, takes us on a wild ride through a century or so of Hollywood history, and shows us what’s been left on the cutting room floor.
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Sarah: All right. I know what I'm watching tonight.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we end up in another podcast neighborhood and we're really hot from the bike right over and they invite us in. Today I'm joined by Karina Longworth of You Must Remember This, the first podcast ever made. I'm not fact checking that. I'm sure it's completely true. It's true for me emotionally. Today we are learning about the movie rating system and the Hollywood history that created it, and what kind of world we have ended up in today after many decades of being shown humans behaving in ways that real humans often don't. We are starting all the way back in the silent era. We're getting in our time machine and going back over a century. And we're going to go through the silence, through the haze code, through the birth of the movie rating system we know today, the very troubled birth, it turns out, and as you would expect from Karina, go on a wacky wild ride through Hollywood history, and I had the most amazing time doing this with her.
Thank you so much for your patience waiting an extra day for this episode to finish in the oven. We just recorded a bonus episode about Fleetwood Mac and the making of Rumors. And I talked for an entire day and threw us all off schedule. So that's how that happened. That episode is going to be out a little bit later this month. I'm really excited to share it with you. And for now, let's go on Karina Longworth’s wild ride.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where we talk about why Poltergeist is PG. I'm saying that like I know that it is, but is it?
Karina: It is.
Sarah: With me today is Karina Longworth. Karina, hello.
Karina: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Sarah: And you're going to talk to us today about the movie rating system and how it came to be, which I am extremely excited for.
Karina: Good. I'm glad. Hope I can live up to those expectations.
Sarah: I am interested in this topic. And I'll start by telling you some of my preconceptions going into this. I know slightly, maybe more than average about the rating system. I remember finding it mostly extremely fascinating that PG-13 came about in I want to say 198, and that before that it was just either PG or R, which you really feel in the seventies.
I grew up watching the Celluloid Closet because we had IFC and it was in solid rotation in the early 2000s. I know it's not technically called the Hays Code, but what almost everyone calls the Hays Code, which I believe was imposed in the early 1930s, and how we had what feels like in a way this kind of subtextual era of film because of that. But why did the things that happened happen? And what do they show us about ourselves? And I feel like we feel like we're in an era of freedom today, but are we?
Karina: The rating system that was put into place in 1968, that's an embryonic version of what we have now, but that in itself was an act to try to fix something that had been broken several times already. There was no kind of formal film censorship until the mid 19 teens. What happened in 1913 was that the state of Ohio tried to set up the, basically the first effective state-run censorship of movies board. And they got sued by a studio called Mutual Film Corporation. And this led to a Supreme Court decision. And this essentially declared that movies were commerce and not art, and so the First Amendment didn't apply to them.
Sarah: This is already great.
Karina: So this is in 1915, and this was at a really climactic time for the early film industry. Because basically up until that point, almost all movies fit on either one or two film reels. So they were not longer than about 40 minutes. That sort of trend of feature films hadn't caught on. And the film that changed that was the Birth of a Nation, which came out in 1915.
Sarah: Oh, wow.
Karina: That was such a huge blockbuster that it convinced the industry that this was the way forward. That they should start consolidating around longer films that caused more money to make but could make more money.
Sarah: And also convince the Klan that it was their time to return to the scene. And Birth of a Nation, it's like long.
Karina: I'd have to check the actual running time. I think it's two and a half hours long. It feels very long, especially today because it's so ugly. There's so much horrible shit in it.
And one thing that I think is interesting is that when this Supreme Court decision came down declaring that movies were commerce and not art, the decision was written by Justice Joseph McKenna. And he wrote some very flowery language about how he believed that the state bin and regulate the content of movies because they quote, “may be used for evil.”
Sarah: But not in Birth of a Nation, which we all agree is great and supports a wonderfully racist and evil belief system. We love it. It's so good.
Karina: That's the thing is that he wasn't talking about Birth of a Nation. The evil that he was talking about and which a lot of quote unquote reformers would be talking about over the decades when it came to Hollywood movies, was about things that went against the basic tenets of Christianity, which racism did not-
Sarah: But kissing, oh my God.
Karina: Yeah. Mostly the evil that these people wanted to regulate had to do with sex and violence. And particularly any kind of sex beyond married procreative sex. And so one thing that you see over and over again over the years, and I would argue even in 2022, is that films that suggest that people are having sex with more than one partner that are having non-straight sex, that are having interracial relationships are all rated or censored more harshly.
One of the things that became problematic with different states, thanks to the Supreme Court decision being able to do their own censorship, was that there were different standards in different places. And so this was bad news for the movie industry and for filmmakers because they would send a print of their movie to all these different places, and the different places could decide what was acceptable and what wasn't. And in one place, they might just cut out a scene that involved cigarette smoking. Another place they might cut out a scene because a woman's dress was falling off her shoulder. But then they'd keep the cigarette in that other place. And so what ended up happening was that there'd be like 25 different versions of the same movie, and the industry couldn't control that.
Sarah: That's fascinating. So you would be like, remember that great sexy movie? And your friend from Ohio would be like, I don't remember any shoulders being in that movie.
Karina: Yeah. But there was so much smoking! A lot of this started to change by the end of World War I because obviously, yeah, you have a large segment of the population who went and saw limbs being blown off, who were confronted with horrible violence in real life. And also war always scrambles people's sex lives and marital lives in a way. After World War I, it's the dawn of the twenties. A lot of shit is happening. Post-war people want to party.
Sarah: F. Scott Fitzgerald is there. It’s a whole scene.
Karina: Completely. And then you also have women's suffrage coming at the same time. We seem to take steps forward in terms of treating women like human beings and then very quickly snap back, because that's not acceptable to some people. So just as things are loosening up in a lot of different ways in the early twenties, a reform movement gains more steam and more fervor.
And so you really see this in movies because the movies are getting a little bit crazier and trying to capture the spirit of youth culture. But then you also have religious groups gaining more steam in terms of trying to shut that down. In 1920 there was this hit movie called The Flapper, and it starred this very cute actress named Olive Thomas. Who in real life was married to Jack Pickford, who was Mary Pickford’s party boy brother. And while Mary Pickford was considered America's sweetheart and she was also a captain of industry, she was one of the co-founders of United Artists and she produced her own movies.
Sarah: Captain Sweetheart.
Karina: Yeah. Actually she probably was in a film called, Captain Sweetheart. That sounds like a very good movie title. So while she has this extreme position of respectability, very unusual for a woman in most industries at the time. Her brother is just like a ne'er do well who's on drugs and is spending the Pickford family fortune. He's the Hunter Biden of 1920.
Sarah: And then he took his phonograph to the wrong repairman.
Karina: Yeah. And then just forgot about it.
Sarah: He took his wax cylinders. He thought he'd destroyed some wax cylinders. Oh, my God.
Karina: So Jack Pickford and his wife, Olive Thomas, who is the flapper, they go to Paris for a belated honeymoon, and she dies. There are a lot of different accounts of what actually happened, but basically, she died of mercury poisoning. And it seems like the most likely scenario was that she got up in the middle of the night to take a sleeping pill and didn't turn the light on, because Jack had already yelled at her previously in the night for turning the light on. And she accidentally grabbed these tablets that he was using topically to treat his syphilis, and swallowed one of those.
Sarah: Ah, this is like something that haunts me about this period in American history, is that we were playing very brazenly with a lot of poison. And we were like, take uranium, it's fine. It'll give you pep!
Karina: So she dies, and this turns into this huge international scandal.
Sarah: Oh, wow.
Karina: And a lot of people start using it as a way to point fingers at Hollywood for being so amoral.
Sarah: But not like the mercury industry, though. That's fine.
Karina: People have to treat their syphilis lesions. And it was easy to make an example of her because she was synonymous with the flapper and because Jack Pickford was such a bad boy. Yeah, it basically became this way for people to point fingers at Hollywood and say even Mary Pickford is associated with all of this depraved shit.
So this was the first of a number of scandals that shined a very bright spotlight on Hollywood and allowed this kind of whispering to turn into shouting about how everybody who makes movies is a depraved drug addicted pervert.
Sarah: What? Why? To zoom out for a second, I find it so interesting that maybe not from the second Hollywood existed, but from pretty soon after to this point, everyone in America has been like, “Hollywood, City of Dreams”. All anyone wants is to make it there and be exalted there and movie star is the dream career. And yet we've also always been like, “It's evil. There's something very menacing about it.” And we've always said both, it feels like we've always said both these things at once. Does that scan for you?
Karina: Yeah, and I think it's related because I think that the dream is so seductive, and it offers this chance of passing classes and stepping outside your rank. And one thing that we definitely will talk about a lot in this subject is anti-semitism. The film industry, even as early as this, a lot of the most powerful men were Jewish immigrants. When you have these reform groups that are coming from Catholicism and Christianity, there is an inherent anti-Semitism in a lot of the arguments against the film industry, right? How did we let these Jewish immigrants have so much money in power?
Sarah: And this idea that Jewish studio heads are making, or at least, distributing the movies that people are recognizing to some extent correctly, as how Americans are going to learn how to see themselves and to behave.
Karina: And they're often selling fantasies of sudden wealth and sudden decadence. And so I think that there are basically three scandals, which sort of compounded together, led to this situation where the industry itself started to feel like if we don't make it look like we're cleaning up our act, they'll clean up our act for us. And so all of Thomas' first, and then the most famous is the Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle situation.
Roscoe Arbuckle was a comedian who was nicknamed “Fatty” because he was not skinny. He had a blowout party at a hotel in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend, and a woman named Virginia Rappe ended up dead. I believe her kidneys burst. She was also drinking a lot of bootleg alcohol.
Sarah: Perhaps taking a little patent medicine, as was the fashion.
Karina: Correct. But Arbuckle was put on trial three times for her rape and murder. The Hearst newspapers really went after him very hard, creating fabricated stories about what happened in that hotel night that no reporter could have actually had the facts about, because Arbuckle was not telling these stories to anybody and no one else was in the room.
Sarah: So is there any evidence of rape, what do we know?
Karina: There was no physical evidence that he raped her.
Sarah: And the legends I've heard about this is that there was speculation and outright making stuff up at the time that involved, it wasn't just rape, but that it was like very violent in a truly over the top kind of way.
Karina: Yeah. There were stories published in these newspapers saying that he inserted a bottle into her. But most of the stories suggested that he crushed her with his large body. I don't even know if that's medically possible. Because he was maybe 275, 300 pounds.
Sarah: Yeah. Come on, tabloid writers.
Karina: I don't think that what was being alleged was medically possible, but it certainly influenced how he was seen. And his first two trials ended with hung juries, and then he was put on trial for a third time, and he was acquitted. But by then there had been so much negative press that he was not able to work.
And one thing that Will Hayes did, and we'll get to who he was, but one thing he did was he responded to pressure to have all of Arbuckle's movies banned. And then he lifted the band when there was pressure from theater owners because they needed comedy content basically. And they wanted to show these old Fatty Arbuckle movies. And then the reformers, who Will Hayes had successfully appeased, came after him when he lifted the ban on Fatty Arbuckle movies. And so that in itself is one of the things that leads to the institution of the code.
And then there's just one other scandal that I wanted to talk about, which is the murder of William Desmond Taylor, who is a director. The William Desmond Taylor murder has never been solved. He was unmarried and he had relationships with several women. And there were also credible rumors that he was bisexual and that he was frequenting gay bars, which gave that whole situation of his murder this stench of he was obviously killed because he was living this depraved sexual life.
Sarah: Of course, because ‘bury your gays’ used to be not just a TV trope, but a belief system you couldn't find a way out of very easily.
Karina: Yeah. When he was killed and these things came out about his personal life, it was knocking down another domino of being able to say that Hollywood, even its most respectable figures, are actually like living in the gutter. So in the middle of this wave of scandals basically, as I was saying, the very powerful men in Hollywood start to understand that they have to at least make it look like they're cleaning up their act, because they don't want the government to take over the industry.
Sarah: Huh. And what's the fear of the consequences of that, that they just have no freedom left at all basically.
Karina: They have no freedom left at all. Diminished prophets. But also, a lot of these guys are Jewish, and they're afraid that they will be deposed by anti-Semites.
Sarah: Which probably would happen, right?
Karina: Yeah. I think it's a reasonable fear. Yeah. So in 1921, Adolf Zukor and Jesse Lasky, who are the two guys who run Paramount. They put together a meeting of all the most powerful men in Hollywood at Delmonico’s Steakhouse in New York. And Lasky there tells everybody that we have to make movies to show that we're regulating ourselves, because if we don't, the government is gonna step in and levy their regulations and we don't want that.
Sarah: This is a very Godfather moment, I have to say.
Karina: Yeah. I feel like there could be a whole movie about one night at Delmonico's.
Sarah: Yes. Oh my God.
Karina: As I was saying in terms of there's all these state censorship boards, and they're making their cuts to the movies themselves. And so there's already this fear that the artistic and narrative integrity and coherence of movies is disappearing. These men believe that if they put forward their own kind of regulation plan, they'll be able to control this stuff and stop what is happening from happening or getting worse.
So Laskey sits these men down and he presents them with this code of rules that he's come up with. Which is 14 points legislating what they would agree not to show on screen. It included bans on quote unquote “sensuality, depictions of prostitution, nudity, belly dancing, stories primarily about vice which might instruct the morally feeble in the methods of committing crime.” And most significantly, I think there was a rule against insulting or defaming religion. So certainly you would not be able to make any movie that questioned tenets of Christianity, specifically. I'm sure you could make a movie that said all Jews are crooks, but nobody was doing that.
Sarah: Oh, naturally.
Karina: So one thing that's really interesting about these two guys from Paramount instigating this meeting and presenting their code of 14 rules that they wanted everybody to adopt, is that they didn't actually plan to follow these rules themselves. Because Paramount was the studio of Cecil B. De Mille, who was pretty much known as a guy who made movies about people who had sex, he would eventually become known for these big, biblical epics. But almost all the biblical epics have some kind of orgy or haram scene.
Sarah: Oh, I know what I'm watching tonight.
Karina: Yeah. Basically Paramount was doing something almost hilariously devious because they thought they could convince every other studio to adopt these rules, and then they wouldn't follow them. And then they'd make even more money making these movies that were basically about women having sex for money.
Sarah: What is their plan? They're just like the government just won't notice us over here. It's fine.
Karina: I think it was like, let's just cash in while we can.
Sarah: We'll pump out as many last vice movies as we can, and then we'll have our canning already for the long winter.
Karina: Completely. This plan doesn't work. It completely backfires because somebody leaks the 14 points to Variety. And so then that makes this whole secret steak meeting public.
Sarah: It's like Appalachian.
Karina: And so basically the studios realize that they're not all gonna be able to agree to regulate themselves. And so in order to not have the government censor them, they're gonna have to hire their own censor who will do what they want them to do. And they get this idea because two years earlier, in 1919, there was the World Series scandal. And so baseball had brought in a commissioner so that they could make it look like they were cleaning up their acts. And so Hollywood was like, basically we need a baseball commissioner for movies.
Enter Will Hayes. So Will Hayes had been the Postmaster General under President Harding. The post office, the postal service was a mess circa 1920. Not unlike now. And Hayes had effectively done a very good PR campaign, showing that he had cleaned up the post office's act and reformed some of their labor practices. This kind of thing made him seem like he would be the right person for the job in Hollywood because he was able to make it look like he had made a lot of change without actually instituting a lot of expensive change.
Sarah: Oh, perfect.
Karina: You know that's really like what the studio moguls were looking for, they didn't really want to change. They just wanted the appearance of change so that they could get their critics off their backs. Another reason why Will Hayes was the right guy for the job was because he was a practicing Christian. So obviously the Jews could not allow a Jew to regulate them because that would just make the problem worse.
Sarah: The movies would get more Jewish.
Karina: Even more Jewy. Yeah. There was a sense that Hayes could commune with the religious groups who were so against Hollywood. The other thing that was really important was that he claimed that he didn't believe in censorship. So he was like, I'm gonna step in and I'm gonna be the liaison between the people who make and distribute movies and the people who hate Hollywood, these religious groups and also the government. He was basically a super lobbyist. He could talk to all these people.
Sarah: Wow. Yeah. And one guy for the film industry. I feel like that would be a big job.
Karina: As we'll see, he eventually starts to have to bring in help. So he goes to work in 1921, and at first everything's great. He's really effective as a publicist for the industry and as a lobbyist. He manages to stall the creation of new state censorship boards, and he's able to get the state censorship boards that were the most agro against the movies to chill out a little bit.
And one of his big strokes of genius is that he invites Hollywood's biggest critics from groups like the Catholic Welfare Council and the DAR, he has them come to sneak previews of movies and meet and greet with stars. And that's all they need, to stop complaining.
Sarah: Oh, that's, yeah. That makes total sense to me. Yeah.
Karina: I think you can detonate a lot of bombs just by letting somebody take a picture with somebody famous.
Sarah: Wow. That's great advice.
Karina: So this is all pretty effective until this thing I was talking about earlier about Fatty Arbuckle. The movie theater owners really want to be able to do basically repertory screenings of these comedies that Arbuckle had made, which most of them were not very widely seen even now, but he was a brilliant physical comedian. And so the theater owners wanted to show them, and this is after Hayes has agreed to put a ban on the movies. He bows to pressure from the theater owners, lifts the ban, and then the religious groups are like, hey, wait a minute, what are we doing here? What have we given up just to go to a sneak preview?
Sarah: And why do you think that this scandal, that any of this stuck to Fatty Arbuckle or to Roscoe Arbuckle to use the name his mother gave him? Because I feel like trying to analyze why certain beloved stars, male stars have violent or sexual assault related charges that stick to them versus don’t is so interesting to me. I feel in my lifetime it feels like it's a greater sin to do something embarrassing than to be abusive.
Karina: He was absolutely othered for his size. There was so much writing during the time of his trials about his monstrous heft or the massive girth of this child man, and he was really treated like a monster.
Sarah: It's very troubling to think of there being a response to we always had it out for the guy and now we've got a reason to take him down.
Karina: For a long time I thought I really understood the Fatty Arbuckle situation, and then I read a book called Room 1219 and Arbuckle was not always a nice guy. He was not exactly a paragon of virtue. It wasn't all great, but as I said, the physical evidence of rape is not there. Oh, one other thing to know about Will Hayes. is that in 1924, his reputation was tarnished because the Teapot Dome scandal happened.
Sarah: Oh my gosh. I love that. I love how much Harding is in this episode.
Karina: Yeah. So by then, Harding is long dead. I think William Harding was in office for about a year, and then he actually died of poisoning on a train.
Sarah: Of course, as was the fashion at the time.
Karina: Yeah. So he's gone. But after his death, Congress gets wise to this thing that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. Do you know what the Teapot Dome scandal is?
Sarah: I wish I could tell you. I feel like it connects to, I drink your milkshake, somehow. I feel like that line might be lifted from testimony there, or I could be making that up.
Karina: It basically has to do with the Harding administration giving these no bid contracts to oil rich lands to specific corporations. And the scandal drags on and on. There's a lot of congressional testimony. Will Hayes is brought to testify, and he reveals himself to be the slimy character that he is by answering the questions in a way where he doesn't really say anything at all, but it's pretty quickly uncovered that he was doing the brokering of these deals. I think it's his second or third time on the stand and they ask him, why didn't you tell us this stuff before when you were testifying or why are you only telling us this stuff now? And he says, you guys didn't ask. And that is what he was doing in Hollywood, too. It was almost like he was trying to do this kind of misdirect so that the critics of Hollywood would look at one thing and stop thinking about another thing.
The studios start to lose faith in Will Hayes, and they realize that he doesn't really have the standing to punish them if they start slipping into this scandalous content. So Hayes is scrambling to regain control and he brings in this guy Jason Joy, who- I love everybody's names. Jason Joy brought nobody, joy. He was a colonel who had worked in public relations at the war department and he and Hayes come up with this new plan where, Joy is gonna act as a liaison where he's gonna go to the studios and ask to see their scripts before they start shooting movies because he claims it's because, there's all these state censorship boards and we just want to make sure that, you're gonna be able to make a movie that's not gonna get cut in different ways in different places. But really this is a way of enacting censorship before the movies get made.
And he also puts out a list called, The Don'ts and Be Carefuls, which is a new effort to do Paramount's 14 rules again. The don'ts include, ”drug taking, prostitution, miscegenation,” which basically effectively segregates the screen. At that point you basically can't have white people and Black people in the same movie.
Sarah: I feel like this is like an old timey racist word, but I always thought it technically meant procreating, but really also socialization.
Karina: Yeah, because even though it's the 1920s in New York City. White people are going to jazz clubs, for instance. There's plenty of places where white people and black people are mingling and socializing. But you wouldn't want to see that in a movie because, what is the end goal of going to a nightclub? It's to fuck.
Sarah: What if the people in square states start getting ideas, Hollywood has always been saying.
Karina: Exactly. But another thing on the don'ts is quote unquote sex perversion. So that is any kind of gender bending, any kind of suggestion that there could possibly be any kind of romance or sex between people who are not a man and a woman who are married to one another.
Sarah: I think it's really remarkable how good of a job the people who imposed the censorship did at turning this into something that felt like real life. Because I feel like now people look back and media is one of our most direct roots to history and we're like, yeah, nobody was gay back then. And it's no, everybody was gay. We just couldn't represent it.
Karina: Yeah. I mean I feel like over the past, I would say 6 to 10 years, there's been more conversation in culture about things like polyamory or androgyny, being non-binary, being gender fluid in this way where people act like they're inventing the concept. And they are certainly not. All of these things have been part of culture, have been part of people's lives as long as people have been having relationships and as long as people have been expressing sexual identities, it's just not always depicted in our movies, our novels, our paintings.
Sarah: I'm reminded of the line in the Brady Bunch movie about how weird the Brady's are because they have a bathroom with no toilet. In the Brady Bunch series, they never showed a toilet. And by the same token, you could look at depictions of American life pretty recently and be like, yeah, there were no gay people and there were no toilets.
Karina: Yeah, completely. Yeah. Obviously another one of the don'ts is criticism of religion.
Sarah: But only the Jesus ones. You can make fun of everybody else. It’s fine.
Karina: Certainly there was, nobody was upset about making fun of quote unquote snake charmers. Yeah. The, ‘be carefuls’, some of the things on that were sedition, surgical operations and of course, excessive or lustful kissing. Be careful. So the ‘don'ts and be carefuls’ don't make much of an impact, particularly because after the Wall Street crash in 1929, the box office plummets and the studios are like, we got to sell sex. It's the one thing that's still selling.
Sarah: Wonderful. I love knowing that.
Karina: But then a new villain enters our story. And he is an anti-Semitic, Iowa senator named Smith Brookhart. And he proposes that the film industry needs to be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. And as reasoning for this, he talks about how power in Hollywood is consolidated by what he calls “bunches of Jews”.
Sarah: Naturally, I would expect nothing less from our Iowa senator.
Karina: Yeah. And not everybody was wording their opposition to Hollywood in this way, but there was a sense that the film industry was so immoral because they had so little Christian influence and positions of power. They basically just had Will Hayes and people had stopped listening to him. It's 1929, 1930, they're adding in more sexy chorus girls and more gangsters and things like this to get people to come back to the movies after the box office crash and protests from the Catholics and the Christians and the anti-Semites are just getting louder and louder as movies are getting more racy again.
So Will Hayes is like, Jason Joy didn't do it. So he brings in Martin Quigley, who is the publisher of an Irish Catholic trade magazine, and Martin Quigley calls a priest named Father Daniel Lord, and they together write what becomes known as the production code or the Hays Code.
Sarah: Not one normal name yet have we encountered.
Karina: I mean they all sound like Simpsons characters, right?
Sarah: Yes. Oh my God.
Karina: So the production code does include versions of a lot of things that were in the don'ts and be careful, but it's really specifically written yes to allow Catholics to feel seen. And at the same time, because there are still people who hate Catholics.
Sarah: They're like, people are prejudiced against us. So we'll fix that by being prejudice against you. It's perfect.
Karina: The code is very calibrated so that Catholics will feel like they're having a hat tip to them, but people who hate Catholics won't be pissed off.
Sarah: Wow, what a country.
Karina: So the document of the production code is basically imbued with the philosophy that the reason for movies to exist is to have a positive moral influence.
Sarah: No, it's to have explosions. It's to have people running and jumping away from explosions, you guys.
Karina: So now we're in 1930 and the code exists, but they still haven't figured out how to enforce it. And the studios still know that they can make a lot of money by having sexy women in movies by depicting the sort of seamy underbellies of society. And so this is what we call the pre-code era where the code exists, but there's no teeth to the enforcement.
And so you're getting movies like Babyface where Barbara Stanwyck literally has sex to move from living in a shack to living in a penthouse. My favorite elements of the pre-code era are the movies of Marlena Dietrich and Mae West who are playing these worldly women who work in nightclubs and are often going on the run. And not coincidentally, they often have black maids who they treat like human beings and in some cases the Black maid is her traveling companion and she treats her like a friend or like an equal and this is definitely something that the critics of Hollywood do not want to see in movies.
Sarah: And is Morocco in this time period?
Karina: Yeah. Morocco, I believe, is 1930. And Morocco is interesting. It's certainly breaking some of the don'ts and be carefuls. Marlene Dietrich performs a nightclub act wearing a tuxedo as part of the nightclub act, she selects a woman in the audience and kisses her. The movie suggests in many ways that not only is she sexually active, but so is Gary Cooper, so is everybody else in the movie. And that Marlena Dietrich is somewhat masculine, and that Gary Cooper is somewhat feminine.
Sarah: It is so wonderful that that it's there in the past and you just have to, I feel like that you cross through a door at a certain point when you're watching much older movies where you stop seeing them as artifacts and you just, for me at least, at a certain point it feels like you get closer to experiencing them as people did when they came out. And they're really good. Some of them are really good, some of them are really bad, just like movies today.
Karina: Okay. So the pre-code era is generally considered to be 1930 to 1934. And again I think that some people have this idea that pre-code movies, it's just like anything went, everybody's naked all the time or something. And that's extremely untrue. The movies are very chaste by our contemporary standards. For the time there were a lot of ways in which they were pushing the boundaries, often implicitly, but sometimes very blatantly and transparently. And the pre-code era basically starts to end at the end of 1933 when Hayes is like, look, nobody listens to me. I keep trying to do these things, just nobody's listening to me. So he hires a guy named Joseph Breen, who's another Catholic.
Sarah: Again, another Simpsons name.
Karina: Yeah. And so Breen is finally able to do what nobody had done beforehand, which was to really inspire fear in the hearts of studio moguls, that if they didn't clean up their films, the government would step in and do it for them. And so the Hayes’ office becomes known as the Breen office. They managed to effectively censor Hollywood movies with a few exceptions, with a little bit of slipperiness about what the rules are from 1934 until the end of the fifties.
Sarah: That's quite a run.
Karina: It is. And what starts to happen in the fifties is that European film kind of forces American film to change its standards of what's acceptable. And what happened in 1952 is that there's another Supreme Court decision. It's over the distribution in the US of a short film by Roberto Rossellini called, The Miracle, which stars Anna Magnani as a devout Catholic, who is liquored up by a drifter. She falls asleep next to the guy and then later she realizes she's pregnant and she believes it's immaculate conception.
And so Catholics’ boycott this movie as sacrilegious. And the distributor of the movie fought to not have his movie censored, and it led to a Supreme Court decision. Which overturned the decision from 1915, which had declared that movies were commerce and not art. So now movies were considered art and not commerce, and thus their content could not be censored by the state.
Sarah: So David Lynch, in a sense, has his father-in-law to thank for his entire career.
Karina: Yeah, I guess you could say that.
Sarah: Part of it, the middle part. Yeah.
Karina: So even after this decision though, the movie industry could apply self-censorship. Basically all this decision was saying was that movies were protected by the First Amendment, but the movie industry still wanted to play nice with conservatives and religious zealots and so they continued to try to apply the code to movies. And you know what, the code office, what the Breen Office actually gave movies was a seal of approval.
There was a time when almost all movie theaters in America were owned by the studios, and they had all agreed that we will only show movies that have the seal of approval. And this started to break down because of Howard Hughes. He actually did get a seal of approval for the Outlaw, but the office took it away after this fight over the advertising. And so he couldn't release that movie in the movie theaters that were owned by the studios, and he had to self-release it in independent theaters. And when he did that, the movie made a lot of money and made the studios begrudgingly understand that people would go see a movie that didn't have a seal of approval. And basically the movies enter the modern age slowly. It takes a long time.
The major thing that happens during that time is that Joseph Breen retires and the association, which kind of enforces all this stuff, is now known as the MPAA or the Motion Picture Association of America. And they hire a new lobbyist to run them called Jack Valenti. He comes to understand in the sixties that movies need to reflect the culture more than they have been. A lot of this is pushed by foreign films from Europe that are showing nudity, that are being very frank about sex. These movies get shown in America and they become box office hits because people want to see this sexy stuff.
So 1968, Jack Valenti developed and promoted the first MPAA rating system. So the original ratings are G, general audience, so anybody can go see those movies. Then M, suggested for mature audiences, parental discretion advised. M suggested for mature audiences is in between G and R. It doesn't make a ton of sense. R is restricted, at that time in 1968, it meant “persons under 16 not admitted unless accompanied by parent or adult guardian”.
Sarah: So naturally the most exciting rating as it continues to be.
Karina: And then, but more restrictive than that was the X, which meant no one under 16 admitted.
Sarah: Oh, it's funny, I'm interested in why we got rid of that.
Karina: We will talk about that.
Sarah: The ride will continue.
Karina: These are the ratings in 1968. In 1970, they made their first set of changes, which is that all of these regulations that had been for people under 16 were changed to being for people under 17. So now you can't go see an R-rated movie if you're 16. It's for people 17 and over.
Sarah: What kind of difference was that supposed to make? It really seems like hair splitting.
Karina: That would be Jack Valenti's argument for sure. All of these changes that they keep having to make to the rating system are because of parents’ groups and religious groups again. He kept saying we're sticking firm, we're not gonna change a thing. But then he would change everything all the time. And people understood that their rating system was subject to criticism and would change if the criticism was vocal enough.
The other big change that happened in 1970 is that M suggested for mature audiences, parental discretion advised is changed to PG. PG stands for parental guidance, and it is just supposed to be this middle ground between G, everybody can see it, including your baby to R, which is you're not supposed to go if you're a teenager, but if you can get an adult to buy a ticket for you, that's fine.
Sarah: Yeah, from the beginning this is so muddled, and I always assumed that PG had something to do with G. It was like post general or something. But no, it's just a totally different G doesn't matter.
Karina: Oh yeah. The G in general, and the G and PG are completely different. The G and the G rating is general audience. The G and the PG rating is guidance, parental guidance. So we have the X rating, which as of 1970 basically says if you're under 17, you're not gonna see this movie. Whereas there was a real wink, wink, don't enforce the R policy that was basically like, yeah, we're gonna call it R, but if somebody comes in and they're 15, don't check their id let them go see the R movie. X was really strictly enforced from the beginning. And it was not supposed to mean hardcore pornography. And so the X rating was designed to allow a higher level of sex, violence and language in Hollywood movies. And to suggest that those things that had previously been censored would not be censored anymore.
And so Midnight Cowboy is the big success story of the X rating because it suggests that this rating can apply to an art film that makes a lot of money at the box office, that is fortifying for adults, is given awards, it is designated as an adult picture so nobody can say that Hollywood is like exporting bad morals to everyone.
Sarah: So it's here's the special place where only adults can go when we don't have to worry about contaminating the children. So you have to stop complaining.
Karina: Yeah. The X rating has a good run for a couple years, but what ends up happening is the mainstreaming of pornography. And again, the rating is not designed to designate like porn versus not porn, but that wasn't really a problem until around 1969. When a movie that called itself a documentary called, Pornography, in Denmark, was released in New York City movie theaters and it could get away with being in movie theaters because it was called a documentary, but it basically was a film of real unsimulated sex.
Sarah: Wow. In the sexiest country.
Karina: Yeah. And it was a blockbuster, and it suggested that you could basically show feature length sex films in movie theaters. This leads to the seventy’s porn boom, of which the biggest blockbuster is Deep Throat. And Deep Throat is an X-rated movie that plays in regular movie theaters and becomes one of the highest grossing movies of 1972 on a list where the Godfather is number one.
Sarah: At this time are there theaters in America where you could be like we could see the Godfather at 7:15, or if we want to stay for dessert, we can see Deep Throat at 8:00?
Karina: Yes.
Sarah: Wow.
Karina: There's a very famous article in the New York Times that coined the term porno chic, and it's basically about how it's become not only socially acceptable, but almost like a social mandate to go see Deep Throat in a movie theater. Deep Throat, I don't know if you've seen Deep Throat.
Sarah: I have, it's more funny than I anticipated.
Karina: Yeah, it's comedy. It's silly. It's not very well made. It's definitely not an art film.
Sarah: It's kind of like the Evil Dead. You're like, look at these people who did this for some reason.
Karina: And the Evil Dead actually got an X rating as well. Deep Throat is followed by some feature-length porn films that have higher artistic aspirations, Behind the Green Door. The Devil and Ms. Jones, there is a glory period of artistic feature-length pornography that is shown in movie theaters. But as the porn industry expands, there's also a lot of other types of porn that are being put out there. And in order to play in commercial movie theaters, you're supposed to submit your movie to the MPAA for a rating. And some of these movies did, Deep Throat did, Devil and Ms. Jones did. But a lot of these movies would basically try to get into these movie theaters without submitting to the MPAA, but they'd advertised themselves as being not just X-rated, but XXX. XXX is not a rating. It is absolutely a self-applied marketing term.
Sarah: It's a vibe.
Karina: Yeah. But it confused in the public's mind. It created the impression that X meant porn.
Sarah: Totally. And also insufficiently sexy porn for that matter.
Karina: So once this starts happening, and this is something where Jack Valenti is very pissed off, he's very upset that the porn industry is doing this, but you can't copyright a rating. So the MPAA was not able to copyright the X and they couldn't sue for people advertising their movies as XXX. And X starts to become the property of the porn industry. And movie studios realize that if they release movies that are X-rated, they will be perceived as porn, they will be boycotted, and then all of this stuff will start happening again. Christians and the religious right coming after them. And that could lead to government censorship.
So what ends up happening from about the mid-seventies to the late eighties is that Hollywood Studios still want to push the envelope in terms of content, but they want to do it in a way where their movies can be released as R. And so studios start mandating that, like in contracts with directors that they be able to deliver an R rating. The X-rated movies that are not pornography, that are released are basically cult films. So it's Early John Waters movies like Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos. It's Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. It's some international films like In The Realm of The Senses, which is an erotic art movie. And it's a lot of early Pedro Moldova films, which are rated X for sexual content, again, often gay or polysexual. They're basically being censored for not being about monogamous sex between a man and a woman. Arguably an X rating for a movie like Evil Dead or a John Waters movie, it's almost good publicity. Because those movies we're never gonna play in a thousand screens nationwide.
It becomes this thing that where the audience at those movies are for, gets more excited because they think it's gonna be more extreme. But Hollywood studios are absolutely afraid to release a movie with an X rating. And again, they mandate that directors change their movies, and every now and then a studio will stand behind a director. When Brian De Palma made Scarface and it was rated X for violence, the studio stood behind him and they filed an appeal with the MPAA and the PAA changed the rating to R without any cuts.
Sarah: I assume, because of the chainsaw scene.
Karina: Yeah, the chainsaw scene, but also just the sort of climactic shootout. Yeah. I don't think it was intended to say crime is cool, but certainly that's how it's been received. And there is still this moral element to what the rating board is doing in terms of trying to stop Hollywood from putting out messages that it fails are anti-Christian.
Sarah: It’s so funny to me how we reveal what we believe as a country, or at least what the people running the country believe and what deserves a restricted rating or not.
Karina: It is difficult to explain why movies are rated the way they are. Quotes from Jack Vali are just endlessly entertaining. But it was during the time when they were trying to figure out whether or not they're gonna keep the X rating or replace it. And he was like, well I can't tell you why I'm giving movies an X rating because if I did then it would open us up to lawsuits. They keep these things extremely opaque.
There are stories of I think it's a Basic Instinct. Paul Verhoeven said that, submitted the movie to the MPAA 8 or nine times, and all they'll tell you when you submit your movie, is that there's a pervasive vibe of sexuality or a pervasive theme of sexuality. And they won't say specifically what to cut. So Verhoeven was like, they don't tell you what to cut, but eventually you get a sense of what it is. And so with Basic Instinct, he realized that they really didn't like how long Michael Douglass's head was in between Sharon Stone's legs. They really didn't like the sense that he was spending a lot of time going down on her.
Sarah: God forbid that, yeah. And this is a movie where you watch like a full screen rape. It doesn't cut away. It's fully lit. But no, you should never go down on a woman. We shouldn't set an example.
Karina: So Basic Instinct is from the NC-17 era. So I want to back up because obviously we have to talk about how X got changed to NC 17, but before that we should talk about the creation of the PG 13, which we alluded to at the beginning which happens in 1984. And the problem was that, there was nothing in between the PG and the R.
So some movies that got raided PG were like Jaws and the Elephant Man and Poltergeist and Ghostbusters because these are movies where everybody understands that kids want to go see these movies and it's important commercially for them too. But then at the same time, some parents take their kids to see these movies and they're like, why is my child watching Dan Ackroyd get a blowjob from a ghost?
Sarah: It's always a great question to ask. Also imagine taking your seven-year-old to see Jaws. You don't know, you don't live in a universe with Jaws. You're like, it's about a shark. That's Steven Spielberg, he does some whimsical stuff. My God.
Karina: Yeah. And it is two Spielberg movies that inspire the change. So in the summer of 1984, he released Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which he directed and Gremlins, which he produced, both of which were PG rated and were criticized for being too violent. And the violence in Temple of Doom is actually probably George Lucas's fault because he was coming up with the story while he was getting divorced. And his neglected wife had cheated on him. And so he came up with the image of a man's beating heart being ripped out of his chest.
Sarah: The fact that awful movie came directly out of George Lucas' messy divorce just somehow makes so much sense to me.
Karina: So that was absolutely one of the most criticized images of that movie.
Sarah: And again, they were like, yeah, it's racist, but who cares?
Karina: Yeah, exactly. So there's all this criticism of these two Spielberg movies, and so Spielberg doesn't want anybody to think he's not a nice guy. And so he actually goes to Jack Valenti and is like, maybe we should do something. Maybe we should have an in-between rating. And of course, Jack Valenti is no, the system's working fine. It's a little murky as to how he changes his mind, but of course he always changes his mind. Spielberg has taken credit for talking Valentin into creating what became the PG 13 rating. You know his two movies were released in June and July of 1984. The first PG-13 movie was John Milius Red Dawn, which was released in August, 1984.
Sarah: Which really needed it.
Karina: The actual full description of what PG-13 means is, quote, “parents strongly cautioned, some material may be inappropriate for children under 13,” so there's no G word in that, right?
Sarah: It should be a PSC 13 Parents strongly cautioned. The fact that it's so hard to nail down really speaks to just to some degree the futility of ever having the right categories, truly.
Karina: Yeah. And also making it age based. And this idea that I do remember a couple times in the nineties getting my ID checked going into an R rated movie, but there is such a wink, wink thing of, everybody knew that you could buy a ticket for a PG movie and go into the movie theater and not get stopped. So we're entering the home stretch. The last big thing to talk about is the creation of the NC-17. So basically, we had talked about the influence of European films in the sixties on Hollywood.
The same thing starts to happen at the end of the eighties, where the MPAA is starting to look out of touch, because in Europe and in England, there is an embrace of art films that are a little bit more risqué, that are not given the most restrictive ratings in those places, but they are given X ratings in the US. So a big example of this is the Peter Greenaway film, the Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, which did not have England's version of an X rating and was a huge box office hit in England. But then it came out in the US, X rating, and there's a huge limit to how much business an X-rated film could do, because a lot of theater chains simply would not book them. You couldn't advertise them in most newspapers. You couldn't get TV advertising for them. And so it was the financial kiss of death.
And so this movie specifically starts a conversation about do we need to change things? One of the reasons why it does is because it was distributed in the US by Harvey Weinstein, who was looking to make more money and get more publicity in general. But the big thing that happens is that Wild at Heart, the David Lynch film wins the Palm Door at Cannes, this is the most prestigious prize at the most prestigious film festival in the world, and it's basically saying this is the most important movie of the year. But it won the prize at Cannes before the MPAA had given it a rating and Lynch in the studio had been led to believe that it was absolutely gonna get an X. And so they were talking at their press conference in Cannes being like, we don't know what it says that this movie is given the top prize of any film in the world, but it's gonna have to be shown in an adulterated version in America. The X was always supposed to be for art movies. It obviously got co-opted by the porn industry. It's not effective anymore. How do we allow filmmakers to make art movies?
So Harvey Weinstein is like, let me get in on this. And so he sues the MPAA on behalf of Pedro Almodóvar because they've given an X rating to Tie Me Down. Once the judge hears a case, he throws the suit out almost immediately because he says it is obvious that the studio is only bringing this lawsuit for publicity, but this becomes a wakeup call for Jack Valenti because, if he's afraid of anything, it's lawsuits. And the big fear because it's happened before, is that there could be a lawsuit that could go to the Supreme Court and that could seriously change the picture of censorship in America and could really cripple the film industry. So he agrees to replace the X rating with the NC-17, which stands for no Children under 17.
Sarah: Naturally:
Karina: Of course, because when you see NC you think ‘no children’.
Sarah: You do. Yeah. You're like my favorite Mountain Goat song.
Karina: The first test for this rating is the Philip Kaufman film, Henry and June, which is about Henry Miller and Anais Nin in Paris in the 1920s. So Philip Kaufman's previous movie was The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was an R-rated film, but was very sexy, and was really celebrated as this is the kind of movie we want to see, a movie for adults, about adults having sex that is tasteful and beautiful and meaningful. Kaufman didn't think that Henry and June was going to get an X rating or an NC 17 rating. He put it together based on the guidelines that had gotten an R rating for his last movie. The MPAA said that they were gonna give the most restrictive rating to this movie due to a number of scenes of women having sort of sexual situations with one another and one shot of a woman being raped by an octopus on a postcard.
So Henry and June, a lot of people don't find it nearly as sexy as Unbearable Lightness of Being, and it's not as good of a movie, but it's given this most restrictive rating and it becomes the first movie released in the U..S with an NC-17, and it just dies at the box office mostly because the reviews are like, we were expecting something sexier, and this movie's kind of boring. There are actual film reviews that say this is a tease. Why isn't Uma Thurman naked in this movie? So people are just disappointed.
And then Hollywood gets the message that because this one movie, which was not very good, doesn't do well at the box office, Hollywood gets the message that the NC 17 is the commercial kiss of death. Henry And June is 1990. No studio gave a wide release to an NC 17 movie until Showgirls in 1995. And Showgirls became the NC-17 movie given the widest release of all time, it was released on a thousand screens. At that time studio films were opening on 2000 screens or more. It only made 20 million at the US Box office on a 45 million budget, and that would be the last wide release for an NC-17 movie to this day.
Sarah: So it just never really took off, it seems like.
Karina: Again, it's Valenti I think really fumbled the rollout. And then, they get criticized for hypocrisy because movies like Basic Instinct, which is much more explicit than Henry and June, a few frames here, a few frames there. It gets released as an R and it's a massive hit. And so what incentive do studios have to actually push the envelope, make a stand for freedom of expression by releasing an NC-17 movie when they can make a lot more money releasing an R-rated movie.
Sarah: And it feels like very consistently this whole story, there's been this thing of we can't let the government come control our movies, so we have to control our movies and just agree to the system of extremely arbitrary and hard to understand rules.
Karina: Yeah, and it's some of the same things that were being controlled or suppressed in 1915, in 1924, in 1930 are the same things now, the vast majority of American movies that have been rated NC-17 have earned that rating for gay sex, sex work, non-procreative or quote unquote “aberrant sex”.
An example is Requiem for a Dream, where there is grotesque drug use imagery, but it got its rating for the ass to ass scene. So two women having sex work sex, basically.
Sarah: So where are we today? Where are we? What's possible and what remains impossible?
Karina: I long for movies about sex that depict sex in a realistic or beautiful way. I also just long for movies about relationships. I think that Hollywood has seeded that territory to television. One of the movies that I'm covering in erotic nineties, the upcoming season of my podcast is Pretty Woman. And one of the things that becomes really evident watching that movie today is that it's about two adults trying to have a relationship. When you watch that movie in 2022, you're forced to think what was the most recent movie that was released that I saw that was really, at the end of the day, just about two adults trying to have a relationship.
Sarah: It feels like we've ended up in an era where Hollywood believes that the only way to make a prophet worth writing home about is by making a movie about people who are too busy to have a relationship because the universe is gonna explode again.
Karina: Yeah. And even there's a different class of movies being made specifically for Oscar attention, but romance is not part of those movies, at least in recent years. I think a lot of people now are missing the romantic comedy, but the romantic comedy maybe went away because there was nowhere else it could go unless we started breaking down some of these barriers about things like interracial relationships, gay relationships.
We've just had the release of a movie called Bros, which didn't do very well and there's a lot of argument as to why. I don't know that the issue is that audiences weren't ready for it. Maybe some of the issue was just the way that it was marketed as an anomaly.
Sarah: And I feel like audiences were so beyond ready for it, that by the time it actually came out, I remember seeing a trailer for that and I was like, a), why aren't you calling this Somebody to Love if that phrase gets repeated 75 times in the trailer? And b), to me, looking at the whole situation, it feels a little bit patronizing in a way that's pretty obvious, where it's here you finally got a romantic comedy, aren't you happy?
Karina: I think that something that makes me really interested in these movies of the eighties and nineties that I've been studying recently, is that sometimes it feels like these movies are getting to something in the culture before the culture does. And I think the opposite is happening now.
As you said, we were so ready for a gay rom com, that it's almost superfluous when it happens. I felt the same way about the movie Promising Young Woman, which was I felt like the cultural conversation about date rape and rape culture had moved so far beyond what that movie was saying, that, by the time the movie comes out, it's like it's already outdated.
Sarah: Yeah. And then it feels like the movies that now people feel excited about and feel like they said something before the culture had totally figured it out, it feels like sometimes, or maybe often those are movies that don't do well when they first come out. Jennifer's Body really comes to mind as a movie that's gradually become beloved, but just didn't find the audience that it needed at the time.
Karina: Yeah. And you could say Show Girls the same, I think.
Sarah: Gosh, I'm tempted to ask what the future is, but I feel like it might just be more of the same. What do you want? What should be happening in Karina Longworth Hollywood? That's what I want to know.
Karina: One of the problems in Hollywood right now is that there's like Zendaya and then there's Jennifer Aniston and there's nobody in between. There are stars who are 25 and there are stars who are 50, and then it's almost there's a lost generation. There aren't big exciting stars who are 35 or 40. And so I think that's one of the reasons why we're losing something in terms of movies about adults just trying to love each other or trying to have sex with each other, or the actual problems that you face when you've been in a marriage for a long time and somebody else like walks into your life and I would love for that to come back.
For me that's even more important than movies that are sexually explicit, movies that try to have some kind of emotional depth and whether people want to talk about it or not, because I think now there's a new generation. that really believes that sex should not be visually depicted and that it's too thorny. There are too many issues with the gays and consent and all of that.
Sarah: The G A Z E, to be clear. Yeah.
Karina: So I want to be respectful of people who feel that way, because I'm an autonomy absolutist. I don't think anybody should be forced to watch anything that they don't want to watch. But I think that it's a truism that the way that we understand our lives and the world we live in is by seeing it reflected back to us through our lives whether it's a novel or a painting or a movie or whatever. Whatever the medium of the moment is.
I think that we need that, and I don't think that the answer for how do you live in a world in which like there is sexual harassment and sexual inequality and horrible abuse. I don't think the answer is let's never depict it. I think you have to tell these stories in order to, first of all, to document that these things are happening in the world, but also to try to understand them.
Sarah: And where else can people find you? What are you working on that you're excited about and what have you been up to with your wonderful brain?
Karina: So my big thing is my podcast, You Must Remember this, which I've been doing since 2014, and is about 20th century Hollywood. The most recent season was called Erotic Eighties, and basically each episode is about one year of the eighties and one or two films or stars or directors from that time that feel emblematic of that year and where the culture was. I'm working on a season called Erotic Nineties, which is gonna have a slightly different format, but we're looking to launch that in March, 2023. You can follow the podcast @rememberthispod on Twitter or Instagram, and I'm on those places at Karina Longworth.
Sarah: Thank you again, so much to Karina Longworth for joining us. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing help. I was listening to Miranda while she was editing this episode, and I sat next to her while he edited my raucous laugh. And yeah, it does feel weird, but it's great.
Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing this show and making all things possible. As always, thank you so much to you. We'll see you in two weeks.