Sexual Outlaws

Sexual Outlaws

Writers heralded New Orleans in the forties and fifties as “The Most Interesting City in America.” Bourbon Street was its epicenter, and became world famous for its concentration of nightclub shows featuring exotic dancers, comics, risqué singers, and contortionists, backed by live house bands. Along a five-block stretch, club goers could see over fifty acts on any given night. The street gleamed with neon lights as barkers enticed tourists and locals into the clubs, the images of the featured attractions prominently displayed in the large outside kiosks. Clubs included the 500 Club, the Sho Bar, and the Casino Royale. It was a glamorous street where men and women dressed in their finest to take in a show.

New Orleans has a history of appealing to the carnal senses. Storyville, the famed red-light district at the turn of the last century, was known for its many houses of prostitution as well as being the birthplace of jazz until it was closed down in 1917. After vaudeville and the success of burlesque, striptease acts became a mainstay on the nightclub stages. In the Forties, strip teasers were in it for the money, as servicemen passed in and out of town looking for a good time. As “Stormy,” one of the most popular Bourbon Street dancers told in Cabaret magazine, “Anything you do, no matter what it is, if you do it well enough, can be lifted to an art.”

Girls competed with each other by creating acts based upon elaborate themes. Imagination was always the key even as props and they incorporated beautiful costumes, mood lighting, and original music into their acts. The production values only enhanced the natural beauty and talents of the girls. There were a bevy of exotic dancers like Lilly Christine, the Cat Girl, Evangeline, the Oyster Girl, Alouette Leblanc, the Tassel Twirler, Kalantan the Heavenly Body, Rita Alexander, the Champagne Girl, Blaze Starr, Linda Brigette, the Cupid Doll, and Tee Tee Red.

The young beauties of Bourbon Street gained star status. They had their own hairstylists, maids, assistants, agents, and managers. They mingled with visiting celebrities and producers gave some exotic dancers small roles in films. Lilly Christine, the Cat Girl, graced the covers of dozens of national magazines, and appeared in a few movies. Considered the top attraction on Bourbon Street, she performed at Leon Prima’s 500 Club. Musician Sam Butera, who worked with “the Cat Girl,” recalls her popularity, “One time they had a hurricane threatening. People were standing outside the 500 Club a block long waiting to get in. That’s how popular she was, even with a hurricane warning!”

 The French Quarter had a seamier side. Pimps, prostitutes, criminals, and mob figures inhabited the Quarter and B-drinking, in which strippers tempted men to buy them drinks for a cut of the profit, was rampant–and illegal. Since everyone dressed up to attend a show, the girls often didn’t know if they were sitting next to a wealthy oilman, or a thug.

Politicians courted their own doom by enjoying themselves in the clubs and ultimately, brought down the final curtain on girlie burlesque. During the 1960s, New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, “cleaned up” Bourbon Street. The New Orleans police raided nightclubs up and down Bourbon Street and arrested numerous young women on charges of B-drinking and obscenity. In order to cut costs, club owners replaced the bands with records. The sexual revolution of the sixties eventually brought in go-go dancers, porn films, and strippers whose acts focused on flesh more than flash. Top musicians like Al Hirt and Pete Fountain survived, but the great burlesque queens of the 1950s did not.

Article courtesy of  Bustout Burlesque

From Silents to Talkies

                           From Silents to Talkies

From the early 1920s to the end of that decade, taking in a movie was a unique and wondrous experience. Going to the picture show became a regular ritual for many Americans who went to the cinema three or four times a week. Radio was still going through growing pains and television, digital gaming and the Internet were years away.

                           
For those who lived in large American cities, twenty-five cents bought the ticket to a magic carpet that transported them from their dreary lives to a world of unparalleled opulence, the movie palace. The furnishings in these temples of excess were as sumptuous as Versailles in the 18^th century. Everywhere one turned were crystal chandeliers, marble fountains, gilt inlay, and richly upholstered seats. The ushers wore smart uniforms and there was often a live musical prelude accompanied by the theater’s orchestra. Movie actors had dropped the histrionics of old for a subtle pantomime and the camera moved with amazing fluidity. This was the film experience at its best.

The term ‘silent film’ is a misnomer; silent films were never silent. The grander palaces used full symphonic orchestras to accompany their movies. Film historians have written extensively about the impact live musical performances had on American cinema in the 1920s. For theaters that couldn’t afford an orchestra, the mighty Wurlitzer organ became a staple, a marvel that could make every sound effect under the sun. Smaller movies houses accompanied their silent dramas with pianos and in areas with large immigrant populations, young girls would act out the title cards in Yiddish, Italian, or Russian as a piano accompanied them. In Japan, an actor called a benshi would narrate the film with a group of musicians playing under him. 

In October 6, 1927, the success of The Jazz Singer, a Warner Brother’s a half-silent, half-talking musical signaled the beginning of the end of silent films and that wonderful experience—but just how rapid was that transition?

Donald Crafton began his book, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926—1931, by addressing the biggest misconception of the transition to sound, namely that it was rapid and completely disrupted the movie making process.  Nothing could be further from the truth. The transition took years to take effect and was a much slower process than many film historians have suggested.

Crafton opened The Talkies with an in-depth critique of the one film that tackled the changeover from silent films to talking pictures, 1952’s musical classic, Singing In the Rain.  Singing In the Rain presented a whimsical vision of the transition. The movie is set in Hollywood in the late 1920s, during the time of flappers, the Charleston and prohibition. The Jazz Singer creates a worldwide sensation and within a couple of weeks, the fictional studio, Monumental Pictures, easily converts their stages to accommodate sound. Miraculously, producers are able to deliver talking pictures to theaters around the country despite the fact most theatre owners had not wired their movie palaces for sound. The new technology was expensive and ever changing and the Great Depression made the cost prohibitive. The director of the Dancing Cavalier, the film within the film, effortlessly shoots a motion picture with the same grace and fluidity as a silent drama. While everything works out beautifully in Singing in the Rain, the reality of the conversion to sound was far more complex and took years rather than weeks. 

One of the early issues with talking dramas was the question of what method filmmakers would use to deliver sound to movies. Like the early battles in video, BETA verses VHS, there were two competing sound technologies, both from upstart studios; Warner Brothers had Vitaphone and the Fox Film Corporation had Movietone. Though Jack, Albert, Sam and Harry Warner didn’t realize it, their process, Vitaphone was doomed from the start. Vitaphone recorded the sound on a separate wax disc and left it to the projectionist to synchronize the sound with the film. It was a formidable enough task, and there were other issues. The discs would break, scratch, were often misplaced and most importantly, were unusable after twenty screenings, effective making the movie a silent drama. Since the sound was already pre-recorded, local censors couldn’t cut out offensive dialogue that was problematic since many early talkies were peppered with saucy dialogue.

The other process, Movietone, recorded the sound directly to the strip of film used to make the motion picture. By 1928, Movietone became the preferred method, but by that time, the changeover to talking pictures created a host of other problems.

While many in the audience were enamored with the thought of finally hearing the voices of their favorite actors, a large portion of the movie going audience loved the silent film experience, the live music, subtle acting and agile camera work and weren’t really interested in talkies.

RKO Radio Pictures made talking pictures from their inception in 1928, the Fox Film Corporation and Warner Brothers were committed to pushing their own sound technologies; however, the bosses at Paramount Picture Corporation, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the “little three”, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists, were certain that this new technology was just another way to deliver motion pictures. They all assumed that talking pictures would co-exist as a separate medium from silent dramas, i.e. talkies for musicals and stage plays, and silent dramas for everything else. In fact, in the final quarter of the 1928-1929, of the 200 films released, the majority, 114 in total, were silent dramas. MGM decided to let everyone else take the plunge and delayed sound conversion until other studios had ironed out the kinks. 

 Another interesting creation, the hybrid film, would eventually bite the dust. Hybrids were odd ducks; some, like The Jazz Singer were half-talkie and half-silent. Others, including classics like Wings and Seventh Heaven, were silent films with synchronized effects and music. In a process known as ‘goat glanding,’ sound technicians gave older silent dramas new life with sound effects and a smattering of dialogue in some key scenes. In 1930, Universal re-released The Phantom of the Opera, re-shot scenes with the same cast as the 1925 original and added bits of dialogue and music. Lon Chaney’s silent footage from the original was used because he was negotiating his contract at MGM and wasn’t available to reshoot. 

After the novelty of talking films began to wear off, audiences tired of the hybrid.  Except for some notable exceptions like Al Jolson’s The Singing Fool that held the box office record until Gone with the Wind, and Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, the hybrid eventually went the way of the dodo.

 The most common way to capture the movie audience was to make dual versions of one film—a talkie for theaters wired for sound, and a silent version of the same film for those theaters that weren’t.  Large numbers of movies houses in rural areas and small towns throughout the country had not yet been prepared for sound. It was a costly process especially during the years of the Great Depression and many independent movie houses went under because they simply couldn’t afford the expense of transforming to sound. In 1929, MGM announced that Greta Garbo’s The Kiss was their last silent but the studio continued making silent versions of talking films possibly as late as 1931.

 Modern film historians tend to exaggerate the number of theaters owned by the biggest of the big five studios, MGM. Paramount owned more movie houses and in some cities, Paramount actually co-owned some of MGM’s movie palaces. While the MGM lot had the greatest square footage, the real power of a studio was ownership of the means of production, distribution and exhibition by the same company, know as vertical integration.

Vertical integration began in the earliest days of cinema. The French film company, Pathé Frères, opened its first theater in Paris in 1906 and by 1909, owned and operated over 200. In the United States, vertical integration continued until late 1940’s, when a federal anti-trust suit forced studios to divest themselves of their theaters.

David Stenn’s biography of Clara Bow, Runnin’ Wild provides the most vivid description of the transition to talkies. Bow was Paramount’s biggest star, and Stenn wrote extensively about her baptism by fire into the world of talking pictures; however, he didn’t note that her early talkies had silent versions, many of which were superior to the talking original.

Even musicals like Showboat, Montana Moon, The Jazz Singer, and The Singing Fool had silent versions. Garbo may have talked in Anna Christie, but there was a silent version of the film. As late as 1930, the vast majority of talking films had silent versions.

 1931 was probably the last year that silent dramas were produced en masse by major American studios but smaller, “Poverty Row” houses continued filming silent dramas for theaters that couldn’t afford to wire for sound. Universal released a silent version of their 1931 hit, Dracula, in the spring of 1931. Though there is no mention of a silent copy of Frankenstein, a film released in the fall of 1931, one probably existed since Universal catered to smaller movie houses that didn’t have the funds to wire for sound. Douglas Fairbanks filmed a part-talking hybrid called Mr. Robinson Crusoe in 1932 and provided a completely silent version of it in the same year.

The creation of silent versions of talkies may have continued for considerably longer since European cinema owners did not wire their theaters for sound until well into the 30s. The silent film tradition continued in Japan as late as 1935. The Warner Brothers musical, Footlight Parade, begins with an electric billboard circling a Manhattan building with the announcement that silent films were finally dead. Footlight Parade was released in October, 1933, a date that suggests silent dramas took a very long time to die.

Film historians have detailed the destruction of the careers of actors who didn’t make the transition to talkies but there were other behind the camera casualties. The coming of the talkies eliminated live performances called preludes, the major plotline of Footlight Parade. There were other casualties. The members of the American Federation of Musicians  took out newspaper advertisements across the country protesting the replacement of live musicians with canned music. Scores of virtuoso musicians lost their livelihood in the transition.

Directors of silent films spoke continually as they guided an actor’s on-screen movements, gently coaxing out a performance. There were many silent directors who, after attempts at talkies, couldn’t or wouldn’t make the adjustment, D.W. Griffith being the most notable but there were others: Rex Ingram, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Victor Sjöström being the most notable cases.  The early sound technicians were tyrants on the set and in the early days of talkies, it was the sound technicians who yelled, “cut” not the director.

When studios stopped making dual versions of films, writers of title cards, the method used for years to tell the story and deliver dialogue, found their art to be obsolete. Cinematographers swapped bulky Mitchell sound cameras for the featherweight Bell & Howell cameras used in silent dramas. Arc lights became obsolete because of their faint hiss and silent tungsten lighting replaced them. Even the make-up used in film changed. After 1927, panchromatic film became the standard and Max Factor had to devise a different type of make-up that worked with sound lighting. 

Talking pictures emerged as the dominant celluloid art form and went through their own painful growing pains with static scenes and stagy acting until 1932 when the movies finally moved again.

Thanks you David B. Pearson for sharing some of your knowledge of the transition to talkies with me. I found the following books helpful in writing this page: Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American cinema’s Transition to sound, 1926 – 1931, Donald Stenn, Clara Bow: Running Wild, Fred E Basten, Max Factor: the Man Who Changed the Faces of the World, Mark E Viera, Hollywood Dreams Made Real, Irving Thalberg and the Rise of M-G-M.

Beautiful, Deadly Nitrate

                               

  Beautiful, Deadly Nitrate

There was a reason filmgoers once referred to cinema as the "silver screen.”  Audiences were enchanted with images that looked as if a master metallurgist had etched each frame from liquid silver. Directors worked with cinematographers to paint the screen in light and shadows and their brush was a movie camera loaded with celluloid film. Filmmakers created stunning images with a look of argent fluidity that no process can duplicate today. Unfortunately, as beautiful as nitrate stock films were, there was a sinister side to the artistry. Like the oleander plant whose flower has a dulcet fragrance and is pleasing to the eye, yet is poisonous in the extreme, the film stock used from the 1880 to 1953 to create stunning images in shades of pewter, black and white, that greatly enhanced the movie going experience, was dangerous. The medium that made up the film stock base was nitrate, a combustible compound used in guncotton and some types of dynamite. Nitrate stock was not only inflammable if exposed to heat or a direct flame, it had the potential to spontaneously combust.

 

Film projectionists and negative cutters quickly became aware of the perils of working with nitrate. Projection booth fires like the one dramatized in the Italian classic, Cinema Paradiso, were commonplace in picture palaces across the globe. In the early days of film, movie theatres were slap-dash affairs and projectionists were often ignorant about the inherent dangers of handling nitrate film. An errant cigarette, improper storage, or even an overheated light bulb as the film passed through a projector’s film-gate could cause a conflagration.  Several incidents of resulted in audience deaths from fire, smoke inhalation or the crush of a stampede of people fleeing the theater.

In his book, Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States, film historian Anthony Slide details a number of horrific episodes involving nitrate stock in places other than theaters – film exchanges, schools and conflations started while screening home movies.  Undoubtedly, the most infamous case of a nitrate fire catastrophe occurred in Quebec in January of 1927. A small fire in the projection booth at the Laurier Palace Cinema in Montreal caused pandemonium. Seventy-seven children died in the ensuing chaos either from suffocation or from the crush of the panicked crowd. The tragedy led Quebec to a prohibition on children under sixteen from cinemas, a law that stayed in effect until 1967. 

 Once nitrate film stock started burning, there was no way to stop it. Water, sand and foam were useless since nitrate supplies its own oxygen and burns with abandon; submerging the reel in water was no help since it burns under water. After numerous accidents, fire departments in larger cities mandated that theater owners construct projection booths of concrete and steel. Wooden furniture was strictly verboten and the law barred anyone other than the projectionist from the booth.  Theaters installed safety doors so that in the event of a nitrate fire, the only one incinerated was the poor projectionist.

 In the early years of film, movie studios had no way of knowing that as the nitrate stock decayed, it transformed from glossy celluloid into a foul-smelling gooey substance that dried into a brown powder and intensified the likelihood of auto igniting. Studio heads were also negligent in preserving the original negatives of their films in film libraries. Prior to television, VHS and DVDs, studios considered movies a disposable commodity that they tossed in the garbage like a week-old casserole. Films would have an initial release then possibly a second, third and sometimes, a fourth run. The print would pick up more battle scares with each successive screening and eventually the only thing of value was the silver content. Studios dumped old film stock in the ocean, forgot it in trash heaps, or even tossed numerous reels in an abandoned Yukon swimming pool.

There were fatal nitrate fires in MGM's storage areas in 1955 and 1960. Those conflagrations finally led the Culver City Fire Department to order MGM to purge their lot of nitrate films. The year 1978 was the annus horribilis for film archivists and made many question if nitrate stock could be stored safely. The United States National Archives and Records Administration and George Eastman House both suffered devastating losses when their film vaults self-immolated. The fire destroyed three hundred twenty nine original negatives stored at the Eastman House, while the National Archives lost millions of feet of newsreel footage.

 

 The clock continues to tick for thousands of films. Negatives and prints of countless movies have already burned in fires, decayed, or disappeared over the years, and not just standard studio programmers: the original negative of the classic, Citizen Kane, perished years and ago and more classic films are in peril. Film archivists are working at a feverish pace to transfer films into non-nitrate copies. Their efforts have not yet caught up to the digital age, forcing preservationists to make copies onto cellulose acetate, another medium that also decays. Those involved in film preservation are in a race to prevent more treasures from the earlier years of filmmaking from vanishing. Film archivists estimate that 85% or more of films made prior to the advent of sound are gone, though not forgotten.

Two authoritative books on the subject of nitrate films are Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States written by film historian and archivist, Anthony Slide, and This Film is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film, a compendium of articles and essays on nitrate film and its dangers edited by Roger Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec.

Dark Angel

Dark Angel

 

 

Dark Angel is PBS’s chilling adaptation of David Wilson’s book, Mary Ann Cotton: Britain's First Female Serial Killer, a twisted, Gothic dramatization of manipulation and murder set in Victorian England. Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt celebrated for her portrayal of the angelic Anna Bates does a 360 turn in her chilling portrayal of Cotton, a woman whose name and identity constantly changed throughout her forty years. Cotton was a grifter who traveled from town to town and left death in her wake.

 

The dramatization presents Cotton as a complicated sociopath, a woman hemmed in by poverty, societal roles, and class repression. Cotton emerged from a number of personal tragedies as a manipulative monster without conscious or mercy. The Victorian period forced poor women into subservience and dependence on the largess of males and Cotton used her sexuality as a lure for unwitting men. She had no compunction of ridding herself of anyone who became an inconvenience including her mother and her own children. Her method of choice was arsenic served to her victims in tea after she had taken out insurance policies on their lives. Cotton knew that the common health issues of the period, cholera and typhoid, matched the symptoms of arsenic poisoning.

 

Cotton managed to create havoc wherever she went, but greed was her comeuppance when she took out a policy on her eight-year-old stepson, Charlie Cotton and murdered the boy. A suspicious apothecary reported her to the police and a post-mortem proved her guilt. Cotton went to the gallows protesting her innocence, but everyone knew the truth. The estimates of the number of her victims range from thirteen to twenty-one, but she took the truth to the grave.

 

Her viciousness of the murders may have caused her execution to be a more gruesome than it needed to be. Cotton became a victim of hangman William Calcraft’s short-drop hanging method, a particularly sadistic manner of death. Cotton died, not from her neck breaking, but from strangulation caused from the ropes’ short rigging.

 

Froggatt leads an amazing supporting cast of veteran British actors and manages to be frightening in her murderous zeal, yet at times vulnerable and sensitive. It’s a bravura performance and definitely one worthy of notice during award season.

Old School Erotica in Modern Times

 Old School Erotica in Modern Times

                       
The mega-success of E.L. James’s erotic trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey not only spawned a plethora of imitators, but also sparked interest in old school erotic works such as Story of O and Anne Rice’s infamous Sleeping Beauty trilogy. Detractors of James’s writing style noted the repetitions, literary clichés, the protagonist’s dated inner voice, and her awkward attempts at American slang. They ignored the appeal that the highly sexed yet monogamous romance held for female readers and the erotic pull of a young, super-endowed billionaire always prepared to please his lover. Some even waxed nostalgic for the golden days of good old sado-masochism – case in point, Story of O.

 Anne Cécile Desclos, a French author, translator, editor, and journalist best know by her penname, Dominique Aury, published Story of O in France in 1954. Despite the French reputation for a permissive attitude toward all things sexual, Histoire d'O with its scenes of torture, group sex and humiliation, forced Aury to write her novel under another pseudonym, Pauline Réage. It would take years before writers of female erotica felt comfortable walking into the international media spotlight. Aury, the mistress of intellect and critic, Jean Paulhan, didn’t reveal herself as the author of the dark tale until 1994.

 Even Paulhan, who wrote the preface, took pains to distance himself from the work and claimed not to know the identity of the writer. Why? Perhaps Paulhan realized how polarizing Story of O’s view of female sexuality was, especially in a period following World War II when feminist authors like Simone de Beauvoir were finding an audience. Story of O is not a feminist work; an aging Aury wrote the novel because she feared her married lover’s interest had waned over the years. “What could I do? I wasn't young, I wasn't pretty, it was necessary to find other weapons.”  

 Paulhan, an aficionado of the works of the Count de Sade, apparently loved dark erotica and had once declared that a woman couldn’t write a work that equaled de Sade’s. How wrong he was.  Aury took his comment as challenge, a way to not only win back her lover, and also prove him wrong. She penned a novel of ultimate female humiliation which included no-nos like whipping, oral and anal sex, forced copulation, branding and labial piercing. Unlike many writers of erotica, Aury didn’t slowly introduce her heroine into the world of BDSM, she immersed her into it almost immediately. The reader meets the beautiful O in a Parisian park on an autumn day. Her lover orders her into a taxi where he makes her strip naked, and then delivers her to a mysterious castle. It is in the castle where the protagonist’s tale of torture and sexual subjugation begins.  

 

Aury wrote the novel in the third person and weaves between the past and present tense. The author didn’t give her protagonist a back-story, didn’t break down O’s psyche, and didn’t even give her a first name. The writing was minimalistic, with little of the sensory detail modern writers include in their novels. Still, the sex scenes were much too hot for the button-down fifties and still shock today. When Grove Press finally published the novel in the United States in 1965, even the male translator used a pseudonym, a female one at that.  

 As a modern reader who likes erotic romances, Story of O was a bit hard to swallow. Aury did not write her novel as a romance or as a treatise on S & M, it is a masochistic sexual fantasy pure and simple replete with whips, chains, and masks. Unlike modern works of erotic romance, O was not supposed to enjoy the encounters and, as one of the characters notes to another, “You have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears.”

 I found myself wincing rather than enjoying O’s many carnal encounters. They never seemed to bring her either joy or pleasure. While I had my own issues the scenes of bondage and emotional and physical punishment in Fifty Shades of Grey, unlike Story of O, I never felt the heroine was in danger. The fact that the Byronic hero, Christian Grey, fell in love with his sub, the virginal Anastasia Steele, changed the emotional dynamic to one of intimacy. Fifty Shades of Grey’s main conflict was Christian’s persistent attempts to dominate Anastasia and unlike Story of O, the protagonist was the victor. By the second Fifty Shades book, the characters  changed places, the sub becomes the dom, and the power passed into her hands, a major reason that Fifty Shades of Grey appealed to so many readers. While Story of O continues to elicit interest from some quarters and artist Guido Crépax's turned it into a graphic novel, the novel is very much a work of another time and place. 

 

 

Pornography, Erotica, and Erotic Romance - A Quandary

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