Camera And Action, page 4
Theater innovation in the suburbs had an obvious impact on movie houses in cities. Urban structures modernized with the glass and marble sleekness of sixties architecture and the twin-theater concept with a side-by-side configuration, a single turnstile entrance, one projection booth, and one manager. The twin-theater trend offered the owner a chance to show the art film alongside the entertainment feature. Don Rugoff, head of an art house chain, explained that "a picture, after running for some weeks in both theatres, might slow down in business, but not enough to justify replacing it. It could then continue on in one of the theatres, while a new program goes into the other." By staggering show times or varying the length of the movie run, an owner could meet the needs of film society viewers, art-house advocates, and general audiences. Moreover, the "concept" theater suggested that exhibitors recognized the diversity in viewer taste and moved beyond the assumption that there was just one audience. Others, such as Walter Reade, emulated the twin concept, adding a 600-seat theater next to his newly renovated 450-seater. Theater buffs never again saw anything like the thousand-seat palaces of the early decades since architectural restructuring went hand in hand with downsizing. With the exception of Radio City Music Hall, built in 1932 with a 6,200-seat capacity, most of the others had vanished or been refashioned. Loews' Capitol in New York removed 2,000 of its 3,600 seats to make room for the new Cinerama screen and keyed down the decor. In these monotone interiors, screens took up entire walls .21
Editor Ernest Callenbach of Film Quarterly lamented the passing of grand theaters or at least the appreciation of theaters as places:
Speaking quite personally, I think it is a bad thing that most of us who are deeply concerned with films have come to regard film theatres largely as necessary evils: ugly, uncomfortable, and noisome on the whole, often managed incompletely, even as to elementary projection quality.29
To Callenbach, the streamlined theater suffered from a "fundamental misunderstanding of what such a theater" should provide. Sleek, "stripped-down," and "plastered-over" architecture created a cool ambiance for what Callenbach argued was "a `hot' medium." The plaster and gilt of old invited the viewer into glamour and mystery and suggested the movie-going experience was not just about the film. In contrast, a streamlined interior, as Callenbach observed, was authoritarian: "It insists that you watch the picture and nothing else." The decor, once integral to the cinematic experience, gave way to the "empty chill" of standard theater design. The object of movie-going now was the picture not the facade; that was just fine with proponents. The streamline contemporary theater forced audiences to focus on film. It was cinema itself that mattered, not gilding, scrolls, or gargoyles.3o
Theaters, advertising, diversification, and mergers suggest that Hollywood is first and foremost in the business of making money. Yet, economics tell only part of the story of the Hollywood establishment at mid-decade. Expansion programs and intensified marketing reveal industry resourcefulness and restructuring, but they do not describe film's cultural role during this time. Shifts in the Hollywood structure coincided with changes in attitudes, beliefs, and values. These alterations challenged the dominance of the family blockbuster film and opened other avenues of exploration for filmmakers. New content and visuals in smaller budget films revealed changes in film taste and film's function as a cultural barometer and guide. While Hollywood can restructure, cut costs, and seek revenue production outside movie-making, it cannot buy audiences. Perhaps the most important change for the course of the American feature film was the death of controls and review boards that determined appropriate material for mainstream screens. Censorship had been a contentious issue since Hollywood's early days. Filmmakers, the public, and the courts wrestled over proper definitions of film content and acceptable boundaries for visual representation on the screen. Changes in censorship codes at mid-decade put the final touches on the Hollywood blueprints about to reshape American movie-making.
Hollywood producers had traditionally determined their industry's moral responsibility through voluntary self-regulation during the film industry's golden era. To prevent further government intrusion and federal censorship, producers and other trade leaders in 1922 formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (shortened to Motion Picture Association of America in 1945).31 Eight years later, on March 30, 1930, under the directorship of Will H. Hays, the MPAA created the Motion Picture Production Code, a censorship agreement of sorts, to police the industry. The membership entered into "a voluntary agreement," acknowledging its responsibility to the public and making a pledge to raise "the motion picture to a still higher level of wholesome entertainment for all concerned." The challenge for the review board, known as the Production Code Administration (PCA), was to balance successfully the code standards "with the integrity and rigor of the screen as a medium of entertainment." Through that administration, the board enforced restrictions with a $25,000 fine for violations of the 1930 code regulations, which required prudence in references to crime, profanity, violence, obscenity, and the "sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home .1112
The PCA operated in conjunction with the Catholic Legion of Decency, a social watchdog for the specific guidance of Catholic families.33 The Catholic Legion, formed in 1934, became an unprecedented pressure group that assumed the authority to prevent the release of questionable films. Catholic priests and bishops pursued motion picture control by negotiating with producers to eliminate offending scenes or words from a script before it could receive PCA approval. Their intent was to make a picture more acceptable to Catholic audiences or even to prevent release at major theaters.34 Suitable films then received the Code Seal of Approval, indicating that they had the PCA and Legion's consent and were therefore safe for exhibitors to show. The problem for both filmmakers and the industry was not battling the Catholic Church per se but the possibility of 20,000,000 Catholics boycotting a film lacking a Code Seal of Approval.35 Yet, it was not just the number of Catholics that threatened the success of a film. It was their concentration in major cities like Chicago, Boston, New York, and Detroit, where studio-owned, first-run theaters determined the life of a film. Both exhibitors and filmmakers feared that "negative publicity and Catholic boycott would make it impossible for any Legion-condemned film to make a profit." Films at issue were not pornographic or clearly obscene, but those pictures that had potential for success with an adult audience interested in sophisticated subject matter.36
Considering that filmmakers were involved in a number of court cases throughout Hollywood history and even though independent producers tried to skirt the Legion censors by seeking alternative distribution channels, the dominance of censors was not successfully challenged until mid-1960. Two forces coalesced by then to give non-PCA films wider distribution opportunity. First, films without PCA approval began to register their commercial value at local art theaters such as New York's Cinema I and II. Second, by the early 1960s, European films had successfully made their way into the general American movie market. With their mature subject matter and relatively strong commercial draw, both European and non-Code pictures helped demonstrate that social agencies of censorship were losing ground in policing freedom of the screen and engineering audience choice. Non-PCA Seal films had profitable showings at theaters in New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit by the mid-1960s and films with Legion condemnation generated revenues totaling in the millions.37 Both non-Code and European material indicated changing audience and filmmaker tastes in film. Interestingly, the box office was Hollywood's most potent censor and the lack of a Seal of Approval might be a theater's best bait.38
Changing tastes cropped up internally as well when the review board could not agree on what constituted obscenity. By 1966, new members with more liberal views of morality and of film's responsibility sat on the industry's review board. The MPAA had also hired Jack Valenti, President Lyndon B. Johnson's aide, who promised to bring some of the "Great Society" vision to Hollywood. Valenti's idea was "to inspire and enlarge the future of the motion picture industry" by making it "part of this new era." He "refused to look back." He would be no dreamer. This Harvard graduate and Texas public relations man intended to shake the status quo both inside and outside Hollywood. Valenti's presidency promised "new ideas, new objectives, new programs."39
The watershed came in 1965 and 1966 for both the PCA and the Legion with Mike Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Warner Brothers took a risk and invested in the world's most famous married couple, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, as Edward Albee's George and Martha, history professor and daughter of the college president. Their love-hate relationship involved a sadistic repartee in front of their guests, a young campus couple played by George Segal and Sandy Dennis, whom Martha invited home for a few nightcaps. Amidst the booze and self-disgust, the Burton and Taylor characters revealed the darker side of American marriage. Completed in the fall of 1965, the same year The Sound of Music debuted, Virginia Woolfremained in Warner's vault until May 1966 because the script was "unapprovable under Code requirements." The Production Code Administration asked Warner to cut the five "sons of bitches," the twenty "goddamns," the thirteen "christs," the one "hump the hostess," and of course, "screw you. "40 However, Warner was $7.5 million into the film largely because of the principals' salaries and had no intention of changing a script that had received the Tony Award for its Broadway production. When a studio such as Warner defied the PCA's rejection of the project and stuck the script in the vault, the barriers holding back years of contest over the rights to aesthetic freedom, deliberated in court cases and first-amendment demands from filmmakers, buckled.41
Jack Valenti gets experience in President Johnson's office just prior to bringing the "Great Society" vision to Hollywood (Photofest).
The Code Review Board ultimately agreed to award Virginia Woolf an exemption if Warner would remove the "screw you" and "frigging," which the studio did. After much deliberation, the Catholic Review Board (now known as the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures - NCOMP) reached a compromise and allowed Virginia Woolf an A-1V rating ("morally objectionable for adults, with reservations") and the PCA ceded.42 The film finally opened in New York on June 11, 1966, with a stipulation on theater contracts "prohibiting anyone under the age of eighteen from seeing the picture unless accompanied by an adult."43 Review members stressed that "this exemption does not mean that the floodgates are open for language or other material."44 Yet, exceptions usually lead to new rules. Industry executives, directors, actors, actresses, and Newsweek quickly pointed out the hypocrisy in the exemption policy on the one hand and the questionable value of the Code on the other. Life magazine highlighted the film's merit, and even the Legion of Decency noted its artistry. The struggle over Virginia Woolf made the ineffectiveness of the PCA ever more apparent to the Motion Picture Association of America and, by July 6, Martin Quigley, Jr., son of the coauthor of the original Code, declared the old censorship system dead.45 By late 1967 New York Times critic Vincent Canby confidently wrote, "the major American film companies apparently no longer fear having their films condemned by the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures" (Legion of Decency). Similarly, exhibitors who previously refused to show a "condemned" film, now received controversial subject matter with enthusiasm.46
It was not coincidental that Code restrictions crumbled by 1966. The film industry, the public, and the courts had argued for nearly thirty years over PCA and Legion control of film content. The censorship decision on Virginia Woolfin 1965 and the Code's death in mid-1966 were not a coup but a watershed in the history of American culture and film. Confusion within censorship circles, theaters' profits from condemned films, and audiences' demand made it easier for the industry to balance censorship, enterprise, and social expectations. Not only could a braying Martha say "goddamn you" on screen, but she could also bring in profitable returns. The filmmakers whose aesthetic taste competed with typical genre pictures could now find wider public support. Valenti made it clear that "no one had conspired to kill the code, no one was capable of saving it." Warner's pledge to keep the film as written, along with social pressure on the Code administrators, "cohered at one moment in history to change the face of American film censorship. "47 Add to that Valenti's entrance into the industry just as changes in distribution procedures allowed for exhibition opportunity and, beginning in the mid-1960s, filmmaking and watching took on a new appearance. To be sure, as Vincent Canby reported in The New York Times, "most of the men who hired [Valenti] are of a younger, more liberal breed than were the first generation potentates who hired Eric Johnson [Valenti's "48 predecessor] in 1945.
The film market now opened wider to independents who wished to use the medium for confronting difficult issues and asking audiences to ponder seriously the complexities of contemporary life. Until November 5, 1968, when the Motion Picture Association of America developed a new ratings system of General, Mature, Restricted, and X, Hollywood could deal with any subject if done "in good taste." The exhibitor and the public, not Hollywood, would "police" the theater. The screen that previously had not been available to explicit scenes of sex and violence changed permanently. Words, images, and bodies "clutched in the sex act became as ordinary as someone passing the toast at breakfast," according to one trade expert.49 The film industry garnered a measure of poetic license that raised questions about the fine lines between artistic expression and indecent exposure. If images and bodies clutched in the sex act or graphic visualizations of violence - in Technicolor - demonstrated a filmmaker's faith in his intent to reflect reality, to mirror society, then how would one define the role of the artistic component, the filmmaker's vision? Narratives that showed life realistically also advanced frameworks of interpretation and ultimately circulated claims to authority. When mainstream entertainment burst with candidness and passed responsibility for effect on to the viewer, it essentially allowed Hollywood to have its cake and eat it too.
The Code break-up facilitated the move toward independents' film production.50 Along with the loss of studio mogul dominance, simply put, it was the creative sector's gain. Filmmakers who had been pushing to widen content borders for the mainstream audience welcomed the prospect of legitimizing new subject matter and assigning answerability to parents. When William Tusher claimed in 1967 that American films reached a new level of "respect they had not enjoyed for many years," he meant that industry changes brought filmmakers to the foreground as artists who could turn mainstream films into artistic products, making them "better, more inventive, more searching and frequently more entertaining than ever.""
The move toward independents boosted the prospects for the young and ambitious to contribute to Hollywood restructuring. This period saw the transition of the director from subordinate to auteur. In the studio-era integrated system, "the director was usually a hireling along with the writer, the cameraman, the actor, and the wardrobe lady." Directors "apprenticed at the studio, where [they] got ... tutoring in the company way, and ... tunneled as best [they] could through someone else's choice of cast, script, and editor." For the most part, directors were salaried and involved in camera action only, leaving the picture once the action was shot. Arthur Penn recalled of Left-Handed Gun, a film he directed in 1958, "I finished shooting, they said `Goodbye!"' True to form, he saw the film for the first time months later in New York after the editor completed it.5'There were exceptions -Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Billy Wilder, and some others. However, as Joseph Gelmis, president of Film Critics Circle and reviewer for Newsday, pointed out, "most of them were hyphenates - producerdirector. The rule was that the producer ran the show and the studio put its stamp on each film. Directors were interchangeable. The formulas were sacred."53
The most wounded in this change of authority was indeed the producer, the former chief. David 0. Selznick, just a year before his death, complained that the producer's artistic control all but vanished. "The movie producer seems to have become an anachronism," he lamented. In the golden era, the producer was the creative force, having "mastered every detail of filmmaking." The producer lost the supreme role as master of supervision, acquisition, and "creative control." Amid the climate of Hollywood restructuring, the producer often functioned as the wheeler-dealer, but his responsibility for the creative project typically ended there. In the words of one observer, "Most young directors and writers prefer to operate on their own without a producer looking over their shoulder."54 By mid-decade directors had gained enough autonomy and creative agency to be more daring.55 Individuals such as Sidney Pollack (This Property is Condemned) and Elliot Silverstein (Cat Ballou) experimented with American film, blending artistic style with narrative invention. Such a synthesis, they hoped, would lead to a "new American cinema" that would deliver directors into a golden age of their own.56The challenge filmmakers faced was balancing the artsy element with the financial promise of attracting a large audience.57 Filmmaker Richard Lester described the concentrated focus on the filmmaker. As he commented, "A director's job ... is to ... produce a personal vision on a subject that he has chosen ... and what the people who pay him are buying is that personal vision." Ultimately, the film "must finally succeed or fail on the success or failure of [that] personal vision."58
