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My third book, co-authored with the sharp legal scholar Laura Wittern-Keller.  This book was a convergence of tastes and interests and I think the product is one of the most solid contributions to the discussion of film censorship now available.  The book reads like a lively conversation--wide ranging and even witty at times.

The Supreme Court case at the center of the book began the official decline of state censorship boards.  The film at the center of the case is, like many of the most controversial works, largely forgotten but a very decent movie. Laura and I argue that the case was a watershed moment in the legal and intellectual debate over film censorship.

My second book and perhaps like second books I completed a thought that I had in the first.  I wanted these books to operate as a coherent argument about the effects movies have had on the idea of art and culture.  In Freedom to Offend, I looked at the collapse of film censorship and the movie culture that developed in the post-censor world.  I argued (to the chagrin of Richard Schickel) that movies established a dangerous trend of exploiting freedom in the absence of censorship.  I wondered, quite simply, whether the defense of art protected such exploitation.

My first book, and perhaps like many first books, I had one solid idea and the time to work on how to express it.  It stands as an effort to explain what role movies played in changing the meaning of art and mass culture in American life.  The book was also my shameless expression of admiration for film critics--a class of intellectuals who I think are still vastly under-rated.  

Critical Intellectuals

The Wrong Side of Schickel's 1960s

The LA Times no longer runs letters to the Book Review Editor because of a lack of space. I post my comments below to a review written by Richard Schickel in the spirit of scholarly exchange.

In Richard Schickel's curious though revealing review of "Freedom to Offend," he strongly suggests that I defend the notorious Legion of Decency, Hollywood’s disastrous Production Code, and the twiddle-dee and twiddle-dumb of censorship Joseph Breen and Martin Quigley. I don't.



Schickel thinks the hero of the book is Bosley Crowther, the critic that other critics of Schickel's generation are required to hate. He's not.



The greatest fault of my book, though, is the fact that I am not sufficiently awed by Schickel and his colleagues. I failed to do justice to his memory of a glorious time.



I am not a memoirist; I am an historian. As such, I try to avoid falling for that all too common delusion that memory trumps critical thought. It doesn't.



Originally, I had intended to entitle this project "The Heroic Age of Moviegoing," assuming that Schickel and his generation had overcome arcane cultural codes with passion and verve. What I found was a much more complicated and interesting story in which characters like Crowther and others who worked prior to the "heroic" 1960s helped open up movie culture by constantly attacking the purveyors of cultural containment. Thus my book is not a eulogy to a past remembered by Schickel.



I too respect my elders--pace Mr. Schickel--I just don't trust their memories of their heroic selves.