(no subject)

[olivermoss]

I am researching films before the Hayes Code of 1934, the rules then went into place taking guns and smut, 'miscegenation' and ridicule of clergy out of the US film industry.

According to the Wikipedia article I am reading, the demand for smutty films was from women.

Zanuck once told Wingate that he was ordered by Warner Brothers New York corporate office to reserve 20% of the studio's output for "women's pictures, which inevitably means sex pictures.".

and

Women who make up the bulk of the picture audiences are also the majority reader of the tabloids, scandal sheets, flashy magazines, and erotic books ... the mind of the average man seems wholesome in comparison ... Women love dirt, nothing shocks 'em.

I'm putting together a bunch of references about sexuality in the 1900s to 1930s for my P. G. Wodehouse comm. I've researched this before and know various things from classes I took a long time ago. So, a lot of it is just finding sources for the things I remember and also fact checking myself. Stuff about film and flapper culture is new to me, though.

I'll like it here as well when it's done in case people are interested. There was a lot of interesting stuff going on before the backlashes of the 1930s and later.

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

Ooooh, this sounds interesting! I look forward to further updates.

[olivermoss]

Thanks!

[cuddyclothes]

Wikipedia is not a good source for this kind of thing. Here's the home page for an excellent site:
http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/

Whoops, the blogger recommends Wikipedia. However, there were "women's pictures", but those were usually dramas, some with sex, sort of like the romance novels of today. Put upon heroines against the odds, tearjerkers, etc.

I'm a movie freak, and I know a LOT about this period, the actors, etc.

[olivermoss]

Thanks! Yeah, this was me just taking a first pass at what to cover and I was amused because to this day there is an idea that women only like text-based smut and don't respond to visuals. Only men respond to visuals!

I don't know much about early film. But there are a lot of things people think started in the 60s and 70s that are much older, it's just that the later 30s-50s were a dark time culturally.

[mistressofmuses]

I've always found it really interesting to think how things would be different without certain cultural movements/backlashes. The moralistic ones like what brought about the Hayes Code, especially. If we didn't have, like you said, those dark cultural periods, where would things be now? Obviously we won't ever know for sure, but it would be fascinating to see the difference.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, that would be nice to see.

It's also nice to be aware that things have gone in more than one direction. It's not that 99.99% of human history was solidly against certain things. I am putting together some resources for writing fic based on Wodehouse's works and some relevant countries and decades were super chill and some were super dark.