The Books of My Life: Hollywood v. Hardcore

If you are looking to read just one book that will help you understand and comprehend post-1948 and post-anti-trust Hollywood, Jon Lewis's Hollywood v. Hardcore: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2002) is it. Lewis's book, which is broader than its title and subtitle suggests, provides an excellent economic, political, legal, and cultural history of how the new Hollywood cinema of auteurs and the new new Hollywood cinema of megabuck spectacular and anonymous blockbusters came to be.

In a series of related chapters, Lewis explores the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic history of how the old Hollywood became the new and new new Hollywood. In one narrative thread Lewis explores how Hollywood's collusion with the post WWII anti-communist witch hunt, a witch hunt which had a health dose of anti-Semitism in it, helped the studios solve their union and labour problems. In a second narrative thread Lewis shows how the demise of the collusive 1927 and 1930 Codes, which mandated what was not acceptable on the big screen and by extension what was acceptable, codes which, as Lewis argues, were linked to nativist real Americanism, eventually led to the collusive 1968 rating system with its copyrighted G, PG, R, which needed MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and CARA (Code and Rating Administration) approval, and its non-copyrighted X rating category, which didn't. This new ratings system, Lewis argues, immunised Hollywood from the tangle of local and state censorship regulations, after 1973 and particularly 1975, allowed Hollywood to emerge from its post-World War II economic decline, and essentially closed, with the aid of the Nixon conservative Supreme Court, the marketplace to anything with an X rating, especially an increasingly competitive hardcore porn industry that, in the mid-1970s, was professionalising and moving increasingly toward parodic and satiric narrative genre forms. It also, Lewis notes, made it difficult for independent American films and European art films to find exhibitors since exhibitors too--before the studios bought them back--for the most part, accepted the MPAA rating system and came to believe that X, a category that was for those who films that didn't want an MPAA rating and which eventually thanks, in part to Hollywood, came to be a perceived as a synonym for soft and hard core "pornography", weren't good for business.

Lewis's excellent book should be read by anyone interested in the economic, political, and cultural history of Hollywood and everyone who studies American film. I also recommend it to those who get stuck in the trees of censorship and don't, as a result, see how the forest of censorship serves economic interests. Unlike those who think that everything you ever wanted to know about film can be discovered by looking into a textual ball, Lewis's book contextualises Hollywood into its broader empirical economic, political, cultural, and demographic contexts. And while Lewis's may need a bit of updating, it remains the best book on the new Hollywood and new new Hollywood I have come across.

I want to end this review by giving a shout out to Lewis's contention that when porn became a subject of interest in academia, it was no longer a significant economic player in the film theatre exhibition marketplace (the wide availability of porn on the internet has changed this and problematised the profitability of porn in other ways). I would add that as films, selective films since contemporary film academics focus, ahistorically, on a few select films, have become central to academia and contemporary academic film analysis, they have become increasingly detached from what should be of central importance in film analysis, their broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts, and the more culturally arcane Film Studies has become. But then like any knowledge bureaucracy, Film Studies has to become more and more arcane in order to protect its organisational and cultural boundaries.