Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry

Abstract

Early in Hollywood v. Hard Core, Jon Lewis promises a book “structured less like an academic history than a novel.” What this seems to mean is free range over a very wide swath of film history, as far back as the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 and as recent as ratings battles for two films released in 1999. Through all this, it is difficult to discern a coherent argument beyond the repeated claim that Hollywood executives operate, often in collusive fashion, chiefly to make money for their corporations, or, as Lewis puts it, a battle in which “the art of cinema is institutionally subsumed by and/or rendered secondary to commerce,” an insight not likely to surprise even people who restrict their historical reading to Entertainment Weekly. And although Lewis promises a point “as in any good novel, at which the various narratives meet …. [a] payoff [that] is well worth the wait,” the book ends abruptly with a series of ratings case histories and no conclusion.