"Newman, Kim - The Pierce-Arrow Stalled, And..." - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

their pictures just the way they were.
To the rapt masses, who violated the Volstead Act as regularly as they
purchased picture show tickets, Nita Naldi could display as many inches
of above-the-knee skin as she wished; Mr Hyde could be as horrible as it
was possible for John Barrymore to make him; and Cecil B. DeMille would
be remiss were his camera to stay outside the doors of the bedrooms and
bathrooms where the most interesting moments of his films invariably
took place. But even those who paid rapt attention to sheets slipping
from the shoulders of the Talmadge sisters tutted over each fresh
scandal: the suicide (in Paris!) of starlet Olive Thomas, reputedly in
despair over her husband's devotion to cocaine; the marriage of Charlie
Chaplin to a pregnant sixteen-year-old; the quickie divorce of Mary
Pickford and her hasty remarriage to a more important leading man,
Douglas Fairbanks. In 1917, Los Angeles passed an ordinance providing
for the censorship of motion pictures according to the whims of a
council appointed by the city's political machine. Though never
enforced, this precedent raised the spectre, deeply feared by studio
heads who knew outside regulation would hurt their wallets, of a
national body constituted by federal government to pass judgment on the
content of films. Costly scenes would have to be reshot, exciting
storylines would have to be toned down, expensive footage would have to
be jettisoned.
In the summer of 1921, Adolph Zukor, president of Paramount Pictures,
convened a meeting attended by Jesse L. Lasky, Lewis Selznick, Louis B.
Mayer, Marcus Loew, William Fox and Samuel Goldwyn. It was decided the
solution was that the industry itself fund and operate a self-regulatory
body with an unimpeachably moral figurehead. Through attorney Charles
Pettijohn, the moguls approached Will H. Hays, Postmaster General in the
Administration of President Warren Gamaliel Harding, offering him
upwards of $115,000 per annum to head an office which would oversee the
output of all studios, insisting on rigid standards of on-screen
morality. Pettijohn suggested Hays should serve as a 20th Century
Savonarola and preside over a bonfire of the vanities fuelled by the
prints of corrupt films. The studio bosses did not understand his remark
but, experienced with inflammable film stock, conceded such an event
would provide a spectacular blaze. Hays declined the position, allowing
that citizens' groups protesting immoral pictures had a legitimate
concern but that 'all problems are of such a degree as to warrant no
outside interference'. Privately, Hays told Pettijohn he would only take
up the offer if there were one case, with nation-wide publicity, calling
attention to the situation in Hollywood, prompting the public, who at
the moment felt nothing either way, to call for censorship. The lawyer
took Hays' refusal back to the moguls and, wrapped up in their endless
byzantine plotting against each other, they quietly dropped the issue.
Catriona Kaye, Libido in America: A Social History of Hollywood (1953)

'You said there'd be a party,' she complained.
Semnacher was fed up. If Virgie didn't pan out soon, he'd drop her from
his roster. He'd been around show folk from the vaudeville days and knew a
lot of 'saints', but she took the biscuit. Only a day ago, she was on an