Download Forbidden Hollywood The PreCode Era 19301934 Turner Classic Movies When Sin Ruled the Movies Mark A Vieira 9780762466771 Books

Product details Hardcover 256 pages Publisher Running Press Adult (April 2, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0762466774

Forbidden Hollywood The PreCode Era 19301934 Turner Classic Movies When Sin Ruled the Movies Mark A Vieira 9780762466771 Books Reviews

• I am proud to say I'm the first on my block to receive the latest work of Mark Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood. What an excellent record of the Pre-Code Era! I pictured the actual book binding under the beautiful dust jacket. Vieira leaves no stone unturned. Engaging text and 100's of many unseen photographs beautifully printed by the master in this truly wonderful Hollywood essay. I'll be spending hours pouring over the newest addition to my Vieira library. My hat is off again to you, Mr Vieira. Kudos to you!!
• My bookcase devoted to Golden Age Hollywood is teeming with big picture books by Mark Vieira famous Hollywood photographer and chronicler of the Golden Age of film from the 1920's silent era through the 30s and 40s. This new book has recently been published by Turner Classic Movies and looks at the films produced between 1930 and 1934. This time period has been labelled as the precode era referring to the strict Hollywood morality code enforced on the studios by the Joseph Breen Motion Picture Code censors. The author includes many pages going into depth about how the Hollywood producers, censors, writers, directors and actors reacted to the code. Precode movies were often mediocre but there were gems such as The Divorcee with Norma Shearer, several Mae West flicks, Dracula, Frankenstein, the Tarzan pictures and many more. These films have become popular in the modern age through showings on TCM and other venues.
  The book contains beautiful photography and is written in good taste. Another winner for TCM and Mark Vieira!
• As always, Mark Vieira produces yet another stunning work which I’m proud to add to my book collection! Reviewer ‘martyoooo’ has written a glowing review that says it all, and I agree!
  Thank you, Mark Vieira, for doing so much to honor the Classic Hollywood that we love and enjoy!
• Great book. If you are looking for sin, this is not for you. This is a book about sin in Hollywood releases prior to enacting the "code" in late 1934.
• Forbidden Hollywood is a history of the American movie industry from 1930 to 1934, beautifully enhanced by photographs of stars and stills from the movies of the time.
  
  The dominant question of the industry at the time was what was allowed and what was not allowed in the movies. The industry’s executives knew that there were boundaries. But the boundaries were inevitably moving targets — shaped by politics, the public conscience, and any number of less identifiable factors.
  
  Some studios and producers would push the edge, and they could also suffer. If they didn’t police themselves, someone — government or otherwise — was going to step in and do it for them. The Hays Code (formally the Motion Picture Production Code) was adopted in 1930 as the way the movie industry would self-regulate.
  
  The Hays Code includes a pretty long list of prohibited content, including sexual content (“licentious or suggestive nudity”, sex perversion, etc.), “ridicule of the clergy”, “illegal traffic in drugs”, and so on.
  
  What we now call “pre-Code” movies were made in this time of the Hays Code.
  
  It didn’t work. Vieira brings up some of the factors at work, both for and against the movie industry’s interests in the 30s and for and against the effectiveness of the code.
  
  The 30s were the first years in which talkies became common, and talkies opened up new opportunities and new freedoms for moviemakers — dialog could be longer and more expressive, action scenes and dramatic scenes could be more continuous, without interruptions from intertitles.
  
  Of course, the 30s were the heart of the depression, and movie houses and studios were fighting for their lives. Not to mention competition from radio — with radios and radio networks now common, people didn’t have to leave their homes and go to movie houses for regular entertainment.
  
  Vieira doesn’t talk too much about prohibition, but he does spend a fair amount of time talking about the moral climate of the time — activist religious organizations taking on industries who, in their eyes, encouraged sinful behavior.
  
  Certainly a big part of why self-regulation under the Hays Code didn’t work was the need for profit. Movie studios needed to make money in a hard market, and movies that included sexual content, gangsters, and questionable characters in general proved to be good draws.
  
  It’s also true that the Hays Code lacked teeth. The committee that tried to enforce the code couldn’t prohibit movies from being made or distributed if they violated the code. At best, they could only try to influence moviemakers to tone down their content, maybe remove some violating scenes.
  
  The best part of Vieira’s book, to me, is his commentary on the movies themselves. He takes particularly controversial movies, or just ones representative of the time, tells us what the movies were about, who their stars were, the circumstances under which they were made, and what their reception was like.
  
  The movies include ones that you would recognize, if you’re familiar with them, as difficult to square with the Hays Code — Red Dust, Baby Face, The Sign of the Cross, Little Caesar, . . . And some others that are just movie classics we take for granted — Frankenstein, Dracula, King Kong, A Farewell to Arms, Grand Hotel, . . .
  
  And, of course, there were great actors, producers, directors, and personalities like Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer, Mae West, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Barbara Stanwyck, the Barrymores, Greta Garbo, . . .
  
  The pictures and stills in the book are almost worth the price of the book by themselves.
  
  Eventually, opposition to the movies’ content won out. By 1934, opposition groups began to organize to boycott movies and put real economic pressure on the industry. The Catholic Legion of Decency is especially called out by Vieira as having a great influence and effect.
  
  The industry had to do something, and it did. Moviemakers knew they had to up their self-regulatory game or lose their chance to control their own industry.
  
  In 1934, the Production Code was drawn up and implemented, this time with teeth. Administrators of the Code, Joseph Breen in particular, could prohibit member theaters from showing unapproved movies, and they could halt production of unapproved movies. They examined scripts to catch violations early in the production process so that movies wouldn’t reach the point where sunk costs would argue against halting production or rewriting and re-filming problem scenes.
  
  The Production Code stayed in effect until 1968.
  
  Vieira’s book really filled a gap for me. I’ve seen many of the movies he talks about, and I’d always had a feel for the freedom the people who made them had in making them, compared to the movies that came shortly afterwards. They were free to explore subjects that became too sensitive for the industry until the modern era.
  
  Mostly though I think that, now, when I go back to watch some of these movies again, inspired by Vieira’s book, I’m seeing them differently. I know so much more now of the conditions under which they were made. Sometimes it’s a shame now to see compromises made even to the Hays Code, much less cuts and edits that came later as the Production Code was applied to movies still in circulation. But now I can appreciate much more of what I’m looking at.