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.