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CENSORED: Artificial Intelligence as Judge, Jury, and Executioner…

 

The email from KDP/Amazon opened cordially.

Hello,  We hope this email finds you well.

We are terminating your account effective immediately because you have multiple accounts, which is a violation of our Terms and Conditions. 

WTF! Cancelled! An author’s worst nightmare.

Apparently, some authors try to game the system by opening multiple accounts to exaggerate sales, create hundreds of fake reviews, sell old content as new with a new cover, and other transgressions. But not me. I  wrote back to protest that I have always had only one account as per terms of service. Please explain how, why, when? Please provide evidence.

As per our policy,  we reserve the right to disclose any type of information we
consider sensitive data and we’re unable to elaborate further on specific
details regarding our terms and conditions…

Surely “the right not to disclose information” was what was intended by the boilerplate deflection of a reasonable request?  I kept pressing for details. Each time a different content review staff member would either stonewall or come back with a new definition of the offense: Guilt by association.

We are confident that your account is related to an account that has already been terminated due to violations of our Content Guidelines. As a result, we will not be reinstating your account.

This provided a clue. Amazon also cancelled the account of my layout & cover designer, himself an author, and several of his clients for whom he had uploaded large book files when their internet connection kept failing. He did this for my 580 page ADVENTURES. It seems an Amazon Bot, tracking IP address and accounts, in a crackdown on TOC violators, had identified one of his clients, not me, as having more than one account.

Therefore all  his clients, for whom – with permission – he provided this upload service, they must be violators too. Their accounts must be cancelled and their books removed from Amazon’s site. Providing proof of actual multiple accounts is unnecessary.  The Algorithm has spoken. And Algorithms are never wrong. Right?

So I provided my explanation as to how data might have been been misinterpreted. My “violation” had occurred at a time when KDP allowed an employee of the author to help manage files. Eight months after ADVENTURES was published, KDP changed this in new terms of service.  Six months later the newly activated Bot applied the updated TOC  retro-actively regardless of original publication date. A human response from a publisher to an author’s problems was deserved; instead, the cold implacable logic of A I.

Upon further review, we are upholding our previous decision to terminate your
account and remove all your books from sale on Amazon.

This includes my time-twisting paranormal thriller ALICE THROUGH THE MULTIVERSE, uploaded solely by myself from my computer in 2018.  Gone, Baby, Gone.

 

I kept appealing. But computer programs are blind to nuance, indifferent to explanation. Techno-solutionism rules. And call centre employees who want to keep their jobs must not override an Algorithm. It is Math, impervious to error.

Beware of the increasing power and authority of Artificial Intelligence.

Please be advised that this is our final decision and we won’t be offering further insight or action on this matter. You are not permitted to open new accounts and will not receive future royalty payments from additional accounts created.  – Amazon Content Review Team

Case  closed. Catch 22 meets Kafka. Will an Algorithm have the power one day to ban books from schools? How easy will that be to reverse?

 

Needless to say, there were a host of authors victimized in this data misinterpretation. And a host of lawyers on-line ready to right their wrongs.

For a fee.

https://www.ecommercechris.com/amazon/account-closed
We’re All Ex-Amazonians. We’ll Reinstate Your Seller Accounts Suspension The Right Way!  Amazon Sellers Attorney 10:19

It can only be solved by appeal. We write the appeal for you, with any amendments required by the lower levels and Amazon and include an escalation to higher management if your appeal is denied. You copy and paste our work into an email to Amazon. In most cases Amazon insists that any and all related accounts are reactivated. We offer our services for a fixed, non-refundable fee of $1750.

I chose not to go this route. It would be a Pyrrhic victory at best. I have republished ADVENTURES through Ingram Spark, the second largest distributor of books after Amazon. It is available to be ordered at Barnes & Noble, and other book sellers. Ingram Spark has outlets in the UK, ( inc: Foyles, Gardners) and in  Australia (inc: Booktopia, Fishpond) ALICE THROUGH THE MULTIVERSE will follow.

ADVENTURES had over 70 x 5 STAR reviews on Amazon, now all wiped. Reviews are vital to an author. There are  still reviews on Goodreads. Here’s one:

Jon Hewitt’s review Nov 20, 2020

“Fabulous read, particularly the early years! BTS is a very rare breed (outside of a studio system) – a feature film director with a very long career and heaps of credits, including all the sploitations from oz to god! Revealing and funny. Highly recommended.”

Christopher rated – it it was amazing
“Let’s get my biases out of the way first.

First, Brian wrote a funny, terrific foreword to my book, Mine’s Bigger Than Yours! The 100 Wackiest Action Movies. And he’s a really good Mensch.

Second, as a genre film-obsessed Canadian, I feel a kind of kinship with our pals Down Under. Much like our Tax Shelter era horror films of the 70s, a bunch of plucky action films helped get Aussie films noticed abroad. And two geographic neologisms were coined: Canuxploitation and Ozploitation.

The latter is thanks in large part to Trenchard-Smith, with his unabashedly fun (and action-packed) efforts like Turkey Shoot, Stunt Rock, and my personal favorite, Strike of the Panther.
The Man from Hong Kong is accurately described by Film Ink as “about as good as an Australian riff on James Bond that you were ever likely to see at that time.”

As a bonus: BTS helped launch Nicole Kidman’s career too, putting the at the time curly-haired young actress into his charming action/kids movie, BMX Bandits.

Anyway, I’m the perfect audience for Adventures in the B Movie Trade.

There are lots of terrific behind the scenes insights about the shoots and Trenchard-Smith’s somewhat unlikely rise to prominence and a fellow whom Tarantino would eventually cite as an inspiration.

Luckily for the reader, he’s as good a craftsman on the page as he is a film director.

If you order a paperback copy of ADVENTURES IN THE B MOVIE TRADE from Barnes & Noble, please give it a review. In a few weeks, I will publish a hardcover edition with 200 pictures in color.

Coming soon:  CENSORED; ALFRED HITCHCOCK – CENSORSHIP SABOTEUR.

CENSORED! Why did they cut that bit? – Part 1 (NSFW)

Movie Censorship during my formative years by Brian Trenchard-Smith

(Disclaimer, this post contains images of cinematic nudity and violence within historical context.)

Once Upon A Time in Movies… they were shot on 35MM celluloid. Forgive me if I get into the Cinema weeds here.  It’s a love that never dies. The exposed film was processed, work-printed, edited, and the negative matched to the final cut. In the change of images in the left-hand film strip, you can see a slight overlap of cement along the frame line, incurred when the splicer pressed down to glue the outgoing and incoming frames of negative together. What cinema audiences saw was a continuous positive print made from the spliced negative, that absorbed the splices and so ran smoothly through the projector.

Unless, of course, a CUT was made in the print, where a section had been extracted, then the two ends cemented together. The splice would cause the frame to jump in the projector for a fraction of a second, accompanied by a discordant bump in the soundtrack you see printed beside the sprocket holes, and worse, a disconnect in the flow of the scene. What just happened? Discerning UK audiences of action, Sci-Fi and horror knew that something had been CENSORED!

Why did they cut that bit?

I was 15 when I first encountered this phenomenon during a 1961 splice-ridden re-issue of Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a groundbreaking fantasy adventure that received a hard time from the British Board of Film Censors. The obvious cuts prompted in me a lifelong fascination with the whys and wherefores of movie censorship as an instrument of social control from 1899 to 1968 when proscriptive cuts and bans were replaced in the UK & USA with classification by age.  Let’s start with the origin of my interest The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as an example of the BBFC’s attitude to violence and horror in the 1950’s.

Reel 1:
Remove the four close-ups of snake-tailed woman being strangled by her own tail.

Reel 3:
Remove close shots of Cyclops gloating over man on spit.

According to Ray Harryhausen, the Cyclops is licking his lips at the prospect of the meal ahead. RHH complained in his book that the British Censor had eliminated a wry moment that humanized the Cyclops.

Remove close shot of Cyclops’ face as it peers into cave before being blinded.

I wondered “why was this shot deleted?” Was the monster’s deformity too horrific at such proximity? It is the closest shot yet of the Cyclops’ single eye, placed to highlight the target of the blazing firebrand that Kerwin Matthews launches in the next shot. It invites the audience to imagine the imminent damage to the eyeball. In fact, the eye poke takes place off screen, and the wound is never seen. The British Board of Film Censors’ philosophy was that children under sixteen years of age were impressionable and emotionally fragile. They should be protected from nightmarish images, which could warp their development.. Further cuts were required, otherwise The 7th Voyage of Sinbad would be given an ‘X’ Certificate, under sixteens not admitted, with significant box office consequences. Many provincial “family cinemas” in the UK of 1958 would not play ‘X’ Certificate films. No Hammer Horrors in our parish, thank you very much. Columbia could not afford to restrict the British release of a movie that had been a sleeper hit in the US the previous year. The cuts were made to obtain the less punitive ‘A ‘Certificate, which allowed admission to under sixteens, if accompanied by parent or guardian.

Then in 1961, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the first version I saw, was cut even further to obtain a ‘U’ Certificate to be double billed with The Three Worlds of Gulliver in a holiday re-issue. The most egregious of the cuts: the groundbreaking fight with the skeleton. Too scary for little kids who can come to ‘U’ Certificate films unaccompanied, ruled the BBFC which saw the film as more horror than fantasy. It took till 1975 when the film was reclassified uncut, and British audiences could finally see Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion fantasy as he originally intended. You can check out the classic duel here.
Really? Too disturbing for kids? In a typical censorship anomaly, two years after Sinbad’s truncated re-issue, RHH’s Jason and the Argonauts, with its army of sword swinging skeletons, was passed uncut for a “U” Certificate.

There is much to mock about movie censorship, and I will, but it should be granted that the censors in their own minds were working to protect society from harm. Whether that harm was imaginary continues to be part of the free speech debate, as new technology delivers instant access to toxic material. The debate over free speech is now more contentious than it has ever been. The purpose of this and following essays on the subject is not to fan the flames of the culture wars. It is to put censorship into the context of social history, because censorship reflects its times. What follows is a quick sketch of the origins, intentions, and practice of film censorship, viewed through my personal perspective. I’ll focus mainly on British and American censorship, with comparative examples from Europe and Asia.

ORIGINS

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the new entertainment medium of motion pictures exploded in the tastebuds of an eager public, a visual gelato for a nickel an hour to take them away from the pressures of their lives. The first cinemas were little more than converted storefronts; a screen or a sheet tacked to the wall at one end and a projector at the other, with scattered seats in between and no toilets. There were reports that some patrons became so transfixed by the projected images that they remained in their seats and relieved themselves on the floor, rather than go out to a public toilet. Often there was only one exit, which exacerbated another potential health hazard. 35 MM film was made of cellulose nitrate, which was highly inflammable. If the film jammed in the projector gate, the heat from the projector’s beam could cause it to catch fire within seconds and burn for hours. In 1897 a nitrate fire at a Paris venue killed 140 patrons.

Crowds inspect the aftermath of the deadly 1926 Dromcollier cinema fire in County Limerick, Ireland. A similar tragedy in Scotland.

To prevent cinema fires, the London County Council (LCC), exercised its licensing authority over “halls of public entertainment” requiring that projectors be housed in a fireproof box. Local authorities across England and America followed suit. Initially, the motivation for regulating these penny gaffs (UK) or nickelodeons (USA) by local councils was motivated by public safety. A worthy cause, followed inevitably by mission creep. Concerns rose about the content that flickered on their screens. There had always been government censorship or modification of literature and theater. To the middle-class forces of social control, the new medium was working class, consisting mostly of sensationalist entertainment. It was, in their view, commercialized voyeurism and needed supervision.

In 1910 the LCC banned a newsreel of the boxing match between heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, a black man, and former champion James Jefferies, dubbed “the great white hope’ who came out of retirement to reclaim the title. His defeat caused race riots across America.

The LA Times rather cavalier cartoon reflected the explosive outcome of Johnson’s victory. Fear of similar violence breaking out in the UK was behind the LCC’s ban. Custodians of public welfare and morality on both sides of the Atlantic regarded the flickers with anxiety and suspicion. Still images of the female form previously confined to solo viewing in arcade peepshows were now in motion on screens in front of scores of people arousing lustful thoughts.

Melies’ After the Ball (1897) is the earliest known film to show nudity, although the model wore a body stocking, and the poured water was faked with black sand.

The 1900 Biograph film The Temptation of St. Anthony. depicts female sexuality as a trick of Satan. Such scenes inevitably proved popular, and multiplied. The genie, it seemed, was out of the bottle. Fears arose that cinema would substitute its questionable values for existing mechanisms of socialization. Municipal councils in the UK saw the opportunity to use their licensing power, initially intended for public safety, to become guardians of moral safety by deciding what should or should not be shown in their district; a handy, virtue-signaling platform for the politically ambitious, a way to be seen as on the side of God. Council regulations were added to cinema licenses requiring no films could be shown that were “offensive…improper or indecent”; terms open to wide interpretation.

In which category does this shot of Annette Kellermann from A Daughter of the Gods (1916) fall? Personally, it does an excellent job of emphasizing what it purports to conceal.

Inspiration (1915) was the second non-pornographic American film containing nude scenes.

This YouTube video, created for the 72 Hour Film Festival in Frederick, Maryland, provides some insight into the self-appointed censors’ preoccupations, foot fetish issues among them. Municipal censorship created confusion for distributors and exhibitors everywhere. Some cuts were required in one county, no cuts in another, different cuts in multiple other counties. rendering distributors unable to standardize their release prints. In America, that often meant that the cuts would never be restored to prints that went on to play in more liberal states, where the cuts were not required. The innovative design of Theda Bara’s bra in the 1917 Cleopatra was denied to many audiences in conservative states.

Bureaucratic anarchy was not good for business. As in the USA, companies in the UK had invested heavily in the nascent motion picture industry. To attract middle class patrons who shunned the penny gaffes, they built picture palaces, with fitted carpets and marble counters for refreshments, serviced by uniformed and courteous staff. Well-appointed cinema chains like Empire, Majestic, and Jewel rapidly attracted the bourgeoisie, doubling their venues each year till in 1911 there were almost 4000 cinemas in England.

That year the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith “for the first time in his life entered the portals of a cinematograph theater…laughed heartily and continually made witty comments about the pictures.” Cinema going was now respectable, and potentially a gigantic cash cow. Cinema companies invited the government to take over the confused arena of censorship and create common standards that would be accepted by both industry and civic authorities. But the British Home Office was savvy enough to understand that official government censorship would be a political minefield, and preferred to set up a quasi-independent body, working in conjunction with the film industry to take care of the problem at arms-length, providing a level of control without official responsibility. In November 1912, the British House of Commons announced the formation of the British Board of Film Censors. Its President was paid 1000 pounds a year, its four examiners received 300 pounds each. Two films were shown in the viewing room simultaneously in front of all four examiners seated next to each other. Two would be focused on the left screen, two on the right. This practice continued even into the early sound era. Examiners had the power to require cuts, and grant Certificates of Exhibition:

“U” for Universal Exhibition, all ages admitted;

“A”, under sixteens admitted with parent or guardian.

After Frankenstein was released in 1931, a new Certificate was introduced – the “H” (for horror)

This was replaced by the “X” Certificate in 1950. Classifications remained unchanged till 1970.

The official paper certificate granting exhibition was stamped in wax with the BBFC seal.

A display of the censor’s classification became the first image the audience saw before the film began.

The early British censors certainly were productive. In 1913, their first year, they saw 7510 films. Cuts were made in 168.  Several were banned outright, citing “indelicate or suggestive situations…indecent dancing…impropriety in conduct and dress.” No sex please, we’re British…

America would not adopt an equivalent classification system for more than 50 years. The American government rejected direct involvement in censorship of movies. They counted on religious pressure groups to force the film industry take care of the problem. It took time but ensured a theocratic underpinning to the eventual American production code. What was most concerning to America’s moral guardians was the motion pictures’ obsession with crime.

By 1907, the issue of whether films could influence behavior had surfaced in the media. The trade paper Motion Picture World reported a case of two teenage girls charged with shoplifting after they had just seen a movie about a thief. The editor warned of the danger crime films posed to children. A legal decision in 1908 gave the issue national publicity. Two boisterous westerns – The James Boys & Night Riders (now lost) were rejected for licensing in the state of Illinois due to “violence”. Highly unlikely any visual would shock an audience today. Screen violence in the silent era had a distinctly theatrical quality, generally shot at a full figure distance without intercutting any detail of wounds.

Six Nickelodeon operators, stalled in their release of The James Boys & Night Riders, sued, claiming that the story of the notorious outlaw brothers had already been depicted on stage and on arcade stereopticons. The Supreme Court of Illinois ruled against the plaintiffs citing that “the motion picture medium was more likely than other forms of entertainment to appeal to weak and immature minds…those classes whose age, education and situation in life specially entitle them to protection against the evil influences of obscene and immoral representation.” Chief Justice Cartwright described these films as “nothing but malicious mischief, arson, and murder.” The depiction of crimes that represents only the actions of the perpetrators are “immoral and their exhibition would necessarily be attended by evil effects on youthful spectators and therefore a threat to society.” The ban on the two outlaw westerns was upheld. The criminal must pay for his crimes became an early dictum. And show remorse.

As in the UK, states and municipalities across the US appointed their own censorship boards. Fees charged to each film’s distributor, up to $3 per reel reviewed, ensured that all such boards delivered handsome revenue to state coffers. In 1939 the State of New York earned $200,000 profit from purging Cinema of unwholesome content.

In 1916, to counter the confusion and contradictions of multiple censorship bodies, America’s National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (subsequently MPAA) announced it would police itself and issued a catalogue of prohibited material, referred to as the Thirteen Points: among them nudity, white slavery, violence, illicit love, gambling, alcoholism, and disrespect for the law. However, state and municipal censors were political appointees, a payoff to important party members or their wives. Nobody gives up those perks readily, so such bodies persisted for decades, even after the industry set up a detailed Production Code to prevent objectionable content. The studios paid lip service to the rules, but still sought to push the envelope, like Clara Bow skinny dipping in 1927’s HULA.

Criticism intensified from religious pressure groups, disturbed by the risqué dialogue of the new sound movies. The Catholic Legion of Decency, a mass membership association, threatened Hollywood with a nationwide boycott if it did not clean up its act. So, in 1934, the MPAA created its own enforcement arm, the Production Code Administration (PCA), with a devout Catholic, Joseph Ignatius Breen as its head enforcer. Fueled by religious and moral zeal, Breen’s iron grip on standards of Hollywood content remained in force till the mid 1950’s when independent producers began challenging his power and successfully released films with controversial themes without a Production Code seal. By the mid 1960’s the Code had lost all its enforcement power. Theaters were going to play pictures the public clearly wanted to see, with or without a PCA seal of approval. In 1968 President Johnson gave advertising executive and former campaign advisor Jack Valenti the task of making the Production Code more in tune with the times. Under Valenti’s leadership, a classification system for movies evolved that, with regular modifications, has worked quite well ever since.

I find the British classification system more comprehensive in its advice to parents as to age suitability.

Censors reflects the society of their times. As a social history observer, I’m fascinated by the anomalies, contradictions, creative battles and covert agendas in the first 80 years of movie censorship. As background on the US Production Code, this site gives you all the salient information.

While Chief Censor Joseph I. Breen saw his work at the PCA as a positive mission with a socially uplifting outcome, cultural historian Thomas Douherty, in his biography of Breen, “Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration” was not so kind to the Code.

“Hollywood under the Code was variously, cumulatively, and intractably, racist, patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic, capitalistic, and colonialistic.” He accused the Code of promoting “bourgeois, heteronormative, American-centric values upheld and celebrated from genre to genre, studio to studio.”

Between 1930 – 1934, studios sought to enhance depression afflicted box office by pushing the boundaries as much as they could until Breen took control of the Code. Here are a couple of examples that remained controversial.

British and American censors from the 1930’s onwards had a common approach to what was permitted. Island of Lost Souls, in 1932, was a rare exception. The film was passed by the US Production Code (hereafter PCA) but banned repeatedly by the British Board of Film Censors till 1958, then only released with cuts.

The official reasons for the ban in 1933 were lost when the BBFC records were destroyed in the London Blitz of World War Two. However, their 1933 general report to parliament on the rejection of 23 films that year contains comments that might apply to Island of Lost Souls: “…psychological arguments treated too frankly for public exhibition” and “intense brutality and sordidness coupled with promiscuous immorality.” Island of Lost Souls was the first sound adaptation, after several silent versions, of the HG Wells’ cautionary tale of science run amok – The Island of Doctor Moreau. Acclaimed British stage actor Charles Laughton in his Hollywood debut plays a renowned scientist banished to a remote tropical island after the exposure of his vivisection experiments. Laughton avoided mad scientist cliches and played Moreau with a perverse sardonic charm.

In a new laboratory, dubbed the House of Pain in Wells’ novel, Moreau continues his work to genetically engineer fully functioning human beings from the island’s animal population. But the results are only “Beast Folk” – human animal hybrids – much to the horror of a shipwrecked Englishman played by Richard Arlen, whom the Doctor encourages to mate with his latest creation – the Panther woman.

Such a provocative idea had squeaked by the PCA due to lax enforcement prior to 1934, but to the church going middle aged British censors, the mere suggestion of “bestiality” coming from a scientist who asks “Do you know what it means to feel like God?” was enough to give them a heart murmur. Then there was the vivisection scene, only a 5 second wide-shot, in which no actual vivisection is seen, but preceded by several off screen howls of pain. Anti-vivisection legislation had been on the statute books for 50 years. Worse, this was vivisection of a human-animal hybrid! The portrayal of cruelty to animals in feature films released in Britain was explicitly forbidden. It was a case of controversy overload.

The depiction of biological evolution under human control was “repulsive” and “unnatural”, as was the implication that God created Man out of lower animals, in direct conflict to Biblical teaching in the Book of Genesis. Affront to religion, In suspect, was a significant factor in the banning. In response to the claim that the film was against nature, Elsa Lanchester, (Mrs. Charles Laughton) reportedly said “Of course it’s against nature. So’s Mickey Mouse!”

What was it that went over the heads of the PCA, but resonated strongly with the BBFC, the supervising censor board of the British Empire and its colonial possessions in Asia and Africa?

In Charles Laughton’s white suited Master cracking a whip to control and civilize the natives, the BBFC saw the film as a colonial allegory, implicitly critical of the British Empire’s control over its African and Asian possessions. All the colonials in the film wear traditional white suits, whereas in Wells’ novella they were dressed in ‘dirty blue flannels.’ Wells described the Beast-Men as ‘islanders’, whereas the movie’s European characters refer to them as ‘natives.’ The film’s politics, albeit embedded in a horror film, was clear to the examiners. When Doctor Moreau ends his examination of Lota, the Panther Woman, whose “stubborn beast flesh” is returning, with a sadistic promise: “this time I’ll burn out all the animal in her!”, the implied racism of the character was an affront to the dignity of colonial administrators.

At a time when independence movements were growing in Britain’s colonies, it was hard for the BBFC not to view, as subversive allegory, the climactic revolt of the Beast-Folk, who murder their white suited Master with the same surgical instruments he used on them. Although it was banned in the UK, Australia passed the film for white audience, but with the restriction (NEN) Not to be Exhibited to Natives.

A brief digression into institutionalized racism in censorship.

From 1926 onwards, rules relating to matters of race were strict in the British colonies of Hong Kong, Singapore and India, as pro- independence demonstrations gradually spread across the Empire.
Consider these interesting quotes from the guidelines issued to colonial administrators by the BBFC:

  • “Any film denoting Bolshevist or mob violence. The Chinese are easily worked up and there is quite enough mob violence going on at the moment.”
  • “Any film showing the white man in a degrading or villainous light.”
  • “Any film showing white women in indecorous garb or positions, which would tend to discredit our womenfolk with the Chinese.”
  • “Stories showing any antagonistic or strained relations with the coloured population of the British Empire, especially with regard to the question of sexual intercourse, moral or immoral, between individuals of different races.”
  • “Any film that deals with racial questions, specifically the intermarriage of white persons with those of other races.”

There were also location-specific restrictions. Pictures reflecting badly on the natives of India were banned in Hong Kong, because a significant portion of the Hong Kong Police were of Indian ethnicity.

The make-up effects used to create the multi ethnic Beast-Men contributed to the film being banned in several countries.

An unrecognizable Bela Lugosi, fresh from his box office smash as Dracula, plays the Beast-Man who is the Sayer of the Law over his fellow creatures.

In America, when Island of Lost Souls was submitted to the PCA in 1941 for re-release approval, they corrected their earlier lapse of doctrinal judgement; all dialogue suggesting in any way that Dr. Moreau had created the Beast-Men had to be removed. Only God can create, not man. By making the Beast-Men just God’s creatures who happened to live on the island, the PCA eliminated the essence of HG Wells book which debated scientific ethics. Wells hated the film, because it introduced a totally new character not in the novel, the Panther Woman, to provide sexual tension. He publicly applauded the BBFC’s ban.

When the BBFC introduced the “X” Certificate in 1951, Paramount resubmitted Island of Lost Souls believing, two decades later, it would be passed for the new adults only classification. Wrong. The BBFC expressed its disdain: “The film is old and bad; whatever might be the case for permitting the theme of this film in a modern production, there is no ground whatsoever for permitting this dated monstrosity to be revived under cover of our ‘X’ Certificate.” It “would do our ‘X’ a lot of harm.” The French had no problem with its release.

Paramount tried again in 1957, receiving the response from the BBFC that “the film was no less repulsive than when it was viewed before…totally unacceptable for public exhibition in this country.” Paramount then submitted an extensively edited version, which the BBFC was initially reluctant to view in the light of the backlash from religious leaders to the flood of “X” Certificate horror films that followed the success of Hammer’s Dracula and Frankenstein remakes. BBFC Secretary John Nichols stated: “There has been a considerable hardening of responsible public opinion against horror films, and we certainly cannot relax our standards – indeed, a little tightening up is desirable.” After further wrangling, further cuts were made and an “X” Certificate was issued.

Hardly shrieking horror in that version.

So it remained till 1996 when an uncut version was classified “12” for video release, because “it was surprising to see how well the horror holds up”. In 2011, the uncut DVD release was reclassified PG, on the grounds that children were seeing more frightening monsters on Doctor Who and Harry Potter.

The film benefitted from expressionistic cinematography by Karl Struss, who had shot Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the year before. The director was Erle C. Kenton, a former teacher who acted in Mack Sennett silent comedies, and graduated to director, developing a reputation for bringing a film in on time and on budget. He was paid $750 per week to direct Island of Lost Souls. By 1960, he had accumulated 144 directing credits, finishing his career like many prolific B Movie directors in television.

Like many perceived journeymen, his work was underrated. In 1942 he directed two of Abbott and Costello’s best comedies Pardon My Sarong, and Who Done it? His Universal horror movies House of Dracula (1945), House of Frankenstein (1944) were solid examples of low budget ingenuity keeping a tired horror franchise alive. While Island of Lost Souls is considered his one true classic, he has another claim to fame – Search for Beauty.

Erle Kenton saw the days of flexible interpretation of the Hays Code would soon be over. Under the incoming management of the PCA. any film to be released after July 1st 1934, would be subject to much stricter controls. Erle set out again to make a picture that would push the envelope, and get it into release before the before the door of permissiveness closed. The genre he chose was sex comedy.

The premise was based on a play: Three comedically characterized con artists dupe two Gold Medal Olympians into serving as editors of a new health and beauty magazine which is only a front for scandal stories and salacious pictures. With the Olympians’ names on the Health & Exercise front cover, their smutty magazines will pass through the mail with innocent wrapping without being seized by the federal authorities and thus earn a fortune. A scheme that has much in common with Paramount’s agenda for the movie too.

But the Olympians heroically turn the tables and put the tricksters out of business. Decency triumphs! A moral tale, that conveniently offers constant opportunities to display male beefcake and female pulchritude in revealing athletic costumes and lingerie.

Is that a wardrobe malfunction I see before me? (Or is it by design?) The sheer number of scenes of undress convinces me that director Erle Kenton set out to make – while he still could – the 1934 equivalent of a skin flick, perhaps a proto-Porky’s without the nudity, where the lure for the audience, both male and female, is to ogle beautiful bodies.

You will not see such figure-contouring female costuming in a Hollywood film after this. Erle Kenton knew how to skirt the rules, putting sex into the audiences’ mind in non-sexual situations. Scenes of physical exercise can always justify a subsequent shower scene, right? Maybe two.

The locker room scene with four bare butts was a rarity even in Pre-Code. Perhaps Kenton was trying to set a precedent. Good luck with that under the Breen regime. Several scenes were cut out when the film was submitted for re-release years later.

Gay cinephiles have told me Search for Beauty had strong appeal to the closeted gay and lesbian community of America, a significant segment of the movie-going audience of which Paramount was privately well aware: an audience that dared not speak its name, you might say, but yearned for movies that in some way spoke to them.

Equally attractive to gay and straight audiences alike was Buster Crabbe in his first leading role. Before entering acting, Crabbe was an actual Olympic bronze medalist in 1928 and a gold medal winner in 1932. A one-time Tarzan, he would go to star in the popular Sci- Fi serials Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Kenton partnered him with a British actress in her first Hollywood role – Ida Lupino. Over a 50 year career she notched up 105 movie and TV roles, before becoming one of the few women in Hollywood to maintain a career as a director, traditionally a male preserve. Two of her films Outrage (1950) and The Hitchhiker (1953) are registered by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant.

Search for Beauty is in its own way culturally significant because of deliberate objectification of the male as much as the female body.

Consider which part of Buster Crabbe is the focus of the lady’s attention:

The film’s climax of massed athletes performing calisthenics in a Busby Berkeley-esque musical parade has a curiously fascist tone.

Did Leni Reifenstal screen a print of Search for Beauty while planning the fascist imagery her Olympia movie? There are oddly prescient camera angles in the triumphant Parade of Beauty sequence.

Beautiful specimens of humanity, all with shaved armpits, marching together for health through calisthenics! Not a black face amongst them, of course. But that was Hollywood back then.

Is the Sieg Heil accidental? I assume that Paramount had high hopes for Search for Beauty in Germany one year after the Nazi party, a strong advocate of physical fitness, had taken control of the country. Germany was an important foreign market. For six more years most major studios would remain uncritical of Nazi atrocities to protect that revenue stream. Double standards rule in Hollywood. Paramount pitched Search for Beauty as a moral fable. This poster for a Chicago theater, highlighting a live burlesque act as the supporting program film, is a telling indication of Paramount’s grasp of the picture’s core audience.

Director Erle Kenton, for his part, made Search for Beauty as an irreverent lampoon of American prudery, indicated by his choice of final shot.

In the silent era, keeping sex off the screen was the focus of censors. With the arrival of sound and color, violence increased its ability to shock. In March 1930, the Tiffany Production MAMBA gave audiences the first opportunity to see blood in 2-Strip Technicolor.

They also got to see miscegenation, misogyny, whip-wielding threats of threats of marital rape, and natives killing white men! Lurid subject matter that got the guardians of morality clutching their pearls.

MAMBA, and the code breaking films described earlier, resulted in a hardening of the production code under Joseph Breen. Adding weight to restrictions on explicit violence was the popularity of gangster movies like Scarface and Public Enemy, in which multiple characters die in a hail of bullets, the sound of which was a novelty, that echoed through the theater, inducing a visceral impact not experienced in silent cinema.

Sound triggered a legitimate question for the censors of the world: Does screen violence have a priming effect on cognitive and emotional response? Can a violent movie incite a cinema goer to commit a violent act? That debate continues today. The earliest censorship codes decided to prohibit explicit depiction of wounds and mortal agony. For five decades, censors believed that detailed violations to the integrity of the human body were too confronting to the psyche of adult audiences. Characters could have a cut lip, or bleed politely from a flesh wound. Violence done to the head or face, the epicenter of our intelligence and personality, was regarded as more confronting than violence directed at a clothed part of the body and had to be handled with discretion. After the Production Code became rigorously enforced in 1934, previously approved violence was cut from re-releases of King Kong.

Cecil B. DeMille’s 1931 The Sign of the Cross was stripped of shots of bloody gladiatorial combat, and seminude girls menaced by crocodiles, and a gorilla.

The academy Award winner All Quiet on the Western Front suffered from the revisionism of the Breen Office. Too much emphasis on the horrors of war in popular culture might be detrimental to recruiting in time of war. In the 1934 re-release of All Quiet on the Western Front, this powerful moment amongst others was deleted: A soldier has grabbed the barbed wire to pull himself through, when an explosion fills the frame. When the dust clears only his hands remain still clinging to the wire.

Such sanitization of screen violence held until World War Two, when blood lust needed to be aroused for patriotic reasons. This justified the fudging of previous standards. Face wounds, previously forbidden, offered the wartime audience enhanced satisfaction at the death of the enemy. In Flying Tigers (1942) when Japanese pilots are struck by bullets, they clutch their faces with bloody fingers, or vomit blood. US pilots die cleanly.

Conversely, in Back to Bataan (1945), shots of brutality to US soldiers were intended to produce rage and reinforce in the audience the determination to achieve victory.

By 1945 the horrors of war experienced by a generation inevitably led to a gradual loosening of the PCA rules in the depiction of violence. The prison break movie Brute Force (1947), inspired by an actual two day riot at Alcatraz prison the year before, broke new ground in that genre. The film has a number of brutal scenes including the beating of a prisoner bound to a chair by straps, and the crushing of a stool pigeon prisoner under a stamping machine.

Critics at the time considered the climax of Brute Force displayed the most harrowing violence ever seen in movie theaters. The PCA was criticized for passing it, but justified the decision on the grounds that the prison conditions depicted would act as a deterrent to crime. By contrast, British censors considered the movie was detrimental to public perception of penal systems in general and by association British prisons. It was banned in the UK for several years. The eventual DVD release was rated suitable for age 12.

Technicolor blood, always more confronting than B&W blood, began to be seen again in historical subjects like Scaramouche (1952) Mel Ferrer bleeds politely from Stewart Granger’s blade.

By 1958, Kirk Douglas could bleed less politely in his production of The Vikings.

To compete with television, movies had to deliver more grit than the US networks allowed. Bloodshed in westerns and big budget historical drama began to be given more leeway by the PCA. The same shots would not be permitted in a contemporary thriller; the censors’ rationale being that period costumes make violence less disturbing.

The BBFC were always more concerned with violence than their American counterparts. I began to notice multiple splice jumps during Italian Sword and Sandal epics that I enjoyed as a kid. One in particular was the Steve Reeves peplum epic,  Giant of the Marathon (1960) to which to cinematographer / 2nd Unit director Mario Bava, soon to make a career in horror and giallo, contributed a stunning underwater battle as an homage to Douglas Fairbanks Snr.’s The Black Pirate. (1922) The BBFC was sensitive to penetration of the human body, and deleted several of Bava’s most impactful moments.

Arrow in the eyeball was a guaranteed Yikes! moment for the fans. Bava used it again in Goliath Against The Vampires (1961).

This time the BBFC let it through, but gave the film an “X” Certificate, a real rarity for peplum. When fire was combined with penetration by arrow or spear, it amplified the sense of pain.

The BBFC saw it as gratuitous sadistic detail and such shots were cut to obtain a ‘U’ Certificate for unrestricted exhibition.

British audiences were denied Mario Bava’s stunning 1960 directorial debut Black Sunday.

This gothic masterpiece remained banned by the BBFC for 8 years, then released pruned of its best disturbing images. Nonetheless it made a star out of little known British actress Barbara Steele. The full uncut version was not released till 1992.

UK’s Hammer Films advanced the boundaries of horror at a time  when the British film industry was ailing, as the BBFC, a quasi- autonomous government instrumentality, was quite aware. They knew that for Hammer’s color remakes of black and white horror classics Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy to prosper in the American market, they had to  loosen previous restrictions on blood and dismemberment in the new “X” Certificate.  Not as much as Hammer wanted of course, but it worked.

Naturally, there was a backlash from religious groups, but Hammer’s strong box office performance proved the public were ready. The Dracula/Frankenstein/ Mummy franchises were a huge success world wide, which in turn attracted production back to the UK. The BBFCs policy liberalization of Adults Only movies had an impact that benefitted trade.

I credit American director Cy Raker Endfield’s ZULU with finally pushing the boundaries of the British “U” Certificate  (all audiences admitted)  in 1964. I saw it on its first weekend. There was a distinct intake of breath from across a packed house when, early in the movie, hundreds of bare breasted Zulu girls began a ritual dance.

Topless girls were normally verboten in a “U”Certificate film, ZULU’s requested classification.  However there was one category of footage permitted for all audiences by the BBFC since the silent era – actual footage of traditional native ceremonies even if the participants are unclothed. Newsreels and short subjects containing such material were considered a valuable natural history record and permitted for public exhibition. Endfield claimed that that the sequence he filmed was an authentic Zulu mass wedding ceremony, that would provide cultural context to the Zulu side of the story.  In 1961, the spurious feature documentary on nudism clubs – Naked as Nature Intended – had received an “A” Certificate after cuts. There was no precedent for anything less than an “A” for bare breasts, when ZULU came before the BBFC. Also there was an “A” Certificate level of blood and violence by prevailing standards. The BBFC  were aware of the financial implications, if the expensive 70mm. British production did not receive a “U” Certificate for its  release in the UK’s prime summer holiday playing time, potentially the patriotic ZULU‘s most lucrative market.  Box office statistics suggested generally “A” films earned 20% less than comparable “U” films.  Some minor cuts in spear and bayonet wounds were  made, and the needed “U”Certificate was obtained.  Occasionally market forces influence a censors’ decision. In a good way. The British Film Institute Monthly Bulletin review questioned the wisdom of the BBFC’s “U” Certificate, suggesting ZULU was ” too tough and bloody” for younger audiences.

As the sixties progressed, and the control exerted by the PCA came to an end, explicit violence in American movies gradually increased across all genres.  Film makers were anxious to try out advances in prosthetic make up technology. Multiple blood squibs in slow-motion would finally reach the screen in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde.

A year later Sam Peckinpah took the bullet ballet to a new level. For a while, blood squibs became the action director’s new toy. More about how censorship  evolved through the 1970’s & 80’s in a future post.

Throughout the decades of censorship under the dominant bodies of the PCA & BBFC, many film makers have tussled with the censors over violence, nudity, and taboo subject matter. None battled them so consistently over a 50 year period than Alfred Hitchcock. His chess games with the censors on both sides of the Atlantic will feature in the next chapter. HITCHCOCK: CENSORSHIP SABOTEUR!

Brian Trenchard-Smith Presents: PULP FICTION B MOVIE NOVELLAS!

Remember those pulp fiction paperbacks of yesteryear and the movies they inspired? Hard boiled crime thrillers, full of murder, mayhem, betrayal, generally with a dame at the center of intrigue.  Many a B Movie came from a crime novella.

Blonde Hell-Cat On The Prowl

I want to introduce you to a trilogy of novellas that combines hard boiled noir with B Movie thrills. They are the latest work of actor, author, playwright, and screenwriter Dennis Pratt. He is also the great nephew of Boris Karloff.

Writer and Actor Dennis Pratt

This is one of Dennis Pratt’s acting headshots around the time we met. It projects a man you wouldn’t want to mess with. True. He generally played bad guys. But he’s also the most kindhearted decent fellow you’d want to meet, with an engaging sense of humor. He had been encouraged to write as well as act by a producer on the Magnum P.I series who admired Dennis’ ability to spontaneously come up with new dialogue on the set if a problem arose. Dennis entered the writer-for-hire market and soon scored two low budget movies. Kick Boxer – The Art of War and American Justice.

Kickboxer 3 Poster

American Justice Poster

A writer’s agent Michele Wallerstein introduced us. It was a good professional match. and we immediately collaborated on Leprechaun in Vegas and Leprechaun in Space, both of which reflect a shared sense of anarchic humor.

The Leprechaun and Elvis Impersonator In Vegas

The Leprechaun and Dr. Mittenhand in Space

When we co-wrote Britannic (a Titanic homage) and Operation Wolverine – Seconds to Spare (Die Hard on a train) together, I was blessed by Dennis’s understanding of the genres we were operating in, and a shared ambition to gives the fans of each genre as much of what they came for as budget would allow. 

Britannic Poster

Operation Wolverine - Seconds To Spare Poster

Dennis gained a reputation for fixing scripts that either missed the mark or needed remodeling for budget or cast. I brought him in to rewrite Deep Freeze, a blend of Them and Deep Blue Sea, to be shot in wintery Winnipeg, Canada, but the producers elected to shoot it in LA on the lowest possible direct-to-video budget, and I bowed out. Pity. It could have been an imaginative creature feature twenty years ago, but it needed name cast and quality visual effects.

Deep Freeze Poster

Between writing assignments, Dennis Pratt created a number of his own spec scripts. He had acquired a good ear for the language of officialdom from his time in the US Air Force. His gift for the banter of dubious characters probably came from moonlighting as a Los Angeles taxi driver between acting gigs. 

Dennis Pratt Taxi - Six Short Stories Book Cover

A couple of his screenplays got close, but we were never able to get them funded. I felt it would be a shame if nobody got to experience the oddball characters and hard-edged entertainment he created. I encouraged Dennis to remodel three of his screenplays into fast paced novellas. Just published on Amazon and Kindle, these are dark tales with vivid characters. Each explores a different crime milieu; mob crime, small town crime, future crime. 

Three books by Dennis Pratt

The front cover of THE SHOOTER AND THE KID is an homage to pulp fiction artwork of the 1950’s. Dennis Pratt grounds the story in a contemporary mid-level LA mob operation, with tentacles reaching across the Southwest. The criminal ambiance has pleasant echoes of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.

The Shooter and the Kid Book Cover

Donna is the cynical, sexy enforcer of the Sean McGuire crime family. She’s reliable and discreet, generally achieving objectives without violence. This is an important stipulation when McGuire sends Donna to find out who has been skimming from his business enterprises. She is obliged to take with her a shy, stuttering 23 year old nerd, Max, who is McGuire’s nephew. Max is, however, a brilliant forensic accountant, and embezzlement bloodhound.  On the road to Vegas, a fractious chemistry develops, and Donna, shall we say, cures Max’s speech impediment. Max falls heavily in love. Their sex scenes are both funny and touching.  Against her better judgement Donna responds to Max’s inherent decency. She begins to re-evaluate her life. A confrontation with an embezzling casino manager results in an ambush, with Donna dispatching the thugs before a horrified Max. This triggers a series of gun battles and hairs breadth escapes as they go on the run from Donna’s vengeful boss. Max gets to grow up fast, and the story builds to a multi twist finale.  There’s plenty of muscular action and crackling dialogue in a tight 241 pages for fans of the genre.  It could make a fun Netflix movie if handled as an off-beat shoot-em-up, and the lead cast had palpable chemistry. 

The Only Place In Town Book Cover

The use of the widescreen movie format on the cover art of THE ONLY PLACE IN TOWN reflects its screenplay origin, a character driven suspense thriller, spiked with a dark vein of sardonic humor. With ownership of the gas station, the local store, and the diner, four brothers have a lock on a small town, until greed and ambition turn three of them against one. Their machinations become complicated by their long-suffering wives who contrive to escape the stifling misery of their marriages. Tensions notch up with the arrival in town of a mysterious man from their past.  I’ve always felt this twisted tale of deceit, treachery and murder would make a gripping movie in the vein of Blood Simple. I had Billy Bob Thornton in mind for the role of Zeb. But I was unable to get backing for it, and it passed to another well thought of director, but he too was unsuccessful. Perhaps producers ten years ago felt it was an ensemble piece with insufficient youth market appeal for theatrical release. But today The Only Place In Town, with seven juicy parts for name actors, is ideal for a streaming platform pick up. Think about who you would cast, as you rip through this fast paced novella.

Dreamland Book Cover

It is 2035 and many of our current fears have come to fruition. Air and water pollution, corroded infrastructure, civic corruption have become the reluctantly acceptable norm. Money remains the root of all evil. Sex has become a commodity rather than a bond. Think of it as an ‘R’ Rated Sam Spade story, set in a dystopian future, with an intriguing AI MacGuffin at its core.  

Each of these Pulp Fiction B Movie novellas is a fast read, full of excitement, suspense and surprises. Here’s where to find them:

Dennis Pratt Three Books

MAMBA… The World’s First Gory Talkie

A Cinema History snack by Brian Trenchard-Smith

“See the cruelest white man in Africa! See his brutal marriage, her adultery, his revenge!
A jungle uprising of furious natives all collide in a wild brawl of fists, whips and flying fur on the eve of World War One! See it now in blood-stained 2-Tone TECHNICOLOR!”

Trailer copy from those purple prose days sprang to mind. When a unique long lost Hollywood classic is found, it’s like the discovery of King Tut’s Tomb. There’s a treasure trove to unpack.
But let’s go back to the beginning.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood – the Roaring Twenties to be precise – the production, distribution and exhibition components of the nascent “motion picture business” were settling into place, with many companies jockeying for dominance. It was a time of galloping technological change, fueled by strong public demand for drama and comedy displayed on a screen rather than a stage. Color and sound were on the way. One company – Tiffany Productions – made a big bet. In 1929, they put $500,000, five times their normal budget, into a single film – MAMBA.

It was the world’s first “all color” talkie, a ripping yarn shot out of doors, while other color movies were musicals, shot with controlled lighting on studio sound stages. The film contained scenes that would be forbidden by the Production Code a year later, which was rigorously enforced by chief censor Breen from 1934 for the next 25 years. MAMBA was a huge success.

Then a decade after its production, the negative was destroyed and the film deemed lost forever; and would have been, were it not for the sustained efforts of a number of people dedicated to movie preservation, in particular Australian cinema historian Paul Brennan and Swedish author and history professor Jonas Nordin, whose personal memories of the discovery and complex restoration process are linked at the end.

They provided most of the photographic materials in this article. And to whet your appetite, Jonas Nordin has created his own trailer.

The story of MAMBA’s creation, destruction, and resurrection offers the opportunity to turn back the clock a hundred years and look at the thriving world of Early Hollywood, and perhaps conclude that it was not much different to Hollywood today.MAMBA was made by Tiffany Productions. To give broader context to Tiffany’s most notable movie, I’ll chart the 14 year history of the company’s rise and fall. There will be occasional digressions into evolving technology and industry practice to provide a sense of the era. Think of it as the short subject that precedes the main attraction.

Tiffany was founded in 1918 by director Robert Z Leonard and his wife silent movie star Mae Murray. They followed other prestige partnerships like United Artists, formed two years earlier by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and DW Griffith, director of Birth of a Nation. Fifty years later major stars Barbara Streisand, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Dustin Hoffman, and Steve McQueen would form First Artists to gain greater creative control and profit share in their movies.

Similarly, Tiffany’s purpose was to produce vehicles for its star Mae Murray, directed by her husband Robert Leonard, releasing them through rising distributor Metro to the nickelodeons of America. Leonard & Mae, the founders of Tiffany Productions, had sadly different career paths that are a window into the twists and turns of Silent Hollywood success stories.

Chicago born Leonard gave up law studies in favor of acting in 1907. For a period he drove a van to make a living. Over six feet tall with camera friendly looks, he quickly broke into the fledgling movie industry, becoming an established star by 1913, then directing short comedy features, His career took off when he was assigned a popular serial, The Master Key.
A contract at Universal followed, where he became chiefly associated with the films of his future wife, the ex-Ziegfeld Follies star Mae Murray.
Mae Murray, a striking beauty at 5’ 2”, with frizzy blonde hair, was born Marie Adrienne Koenig in 1885. In 1908, she joined the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway and with determination and political skill beat out the competition to achieve headliner status by 1915. Her motion picture debut in To Have And To Hold a year later made her a major star for Universal. Roles opposite Rudolph Valentino in The Delicious Little Devil and Big Little Person followed.

Salary, in addition to profit share, for her 1922 hit Peacock Alley was $10,000 a week. She became known as “The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips” and “The Gardenia of the Screen”. For a brief period she even wrote a weekly column for newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Critics sniped at her over-the-top costumes and exaggerated emoting, but the eight movies Tiffany Productions delivered to Metro were popular and financially successful.
Perhaps Mae Murray’s volatile personality became too much for Leonard and the couple divorced in 1925. Their lives diverged down sadly different paths. At that time three rival distributors, Metro, Goldwyn, and Mayer merged into a new powerhouse – MGM. Robert Z Leonard left Tiffany, joined MGM. An enduring marriage to another actress soon followed. Leonard was perfect for the new studio system, turning out musicals and light comedies, with occasional big hits like The Great Zeigfeld, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1936, and a lavish 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, starring Laurence Olivier, written (curiously) by Aldous Huxley. Leonard became one of the studio’s most reliable contract directors till his retirement in 1955. Fate was not so kind to his ex-wife Mae Murray, seen her with 4th husband European Prince David Mdvani.
Murray clashed with MGM chief Louis B Mayer, then, at the advice of Mdvani, whom she had appointed her new manager, she broke her contract. Later she would plead to return but Mayer refused. His enmity discouraged many directors from considering her. The dawn of the sound era was another blow.
Her first talkie Peacock Alley in 1930, a remake of her 1921 silent hit, revealed she had little flair for dialogue. It flopped, as did her two subsequent releases. She sued Tiffany for destroying her career and lost. Her husband/ manager Mdvani – how predictable – drained most of her wealth before their divorce.

In the 1940s, her nightclub appearances celebrating her past received reviews critical of her youthful costumes, the heavy makeup to hide her age, and her silent movie style. Perhaps she was an inspiration for Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Murray’s finances continued to collapse, and for most of her later life she lived in poverty, giving ballroom dancing lessons to teenagers. Yet nobody came to her aid. At her career peak in the early 1920s, along with such other Hollywood luminaries as Cecil B. DeMille, Harold Lloyd, and Irving Thalberg, Mae Murray was a founding member of the board of trustees at the Motion Picture & Television Fund – a charitable organization that offered assistance and care to industry members without resources. Four decades later, Murray was found homeless and disoriented, and spent her final years in the care of that excellent charity; a poignant irony. At the peak of their careers, both Mae Murray and Robert Z Leonard, the founders of Tiffany Pictures, received stars on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame. They were once a Hollywood power couple. How sadly different were their lives thereafter. They fade from the story of MAMBA now, but the company they founded would continue to be a Hollywood player, striving for a hit that would elevate Tiffany to the Major Studio level.

The man to do the job was producer director John Stahl, who was recruited, after the Leonard/Murray divorce, to be the new CEO. Along with executives Phil Goldstone and Maurice H Hoffman, he retooled the company for low budget production to generate cash flow. Tiffany has been called a Poverty Row studio, in the vernacular of the time, one whose films had lower budgets, lesser stars, if stars at all, and much lower production values than major studios. In fact Tiffany was more an independent production/distribution company with its own studio, having acquired the old Reliance / Majestic backlot on Sunset Boulevard.

Stahl renamed the company Tiffany-Stahl Productions and released 70 features, both silent and sound, 20 of which were Westerns. The new Tiffany invested in developing technologies to get ahead of the competition. They commissioned shorts subjects, photographed in a breakthrough color process known as Technicolor. The iconic Technicolor brand has a fascinating history and you can get into the weeds of it at this amazingly detailed website.

Your eyes may glaze as the differences between 2-Strip and 3-Strip Technicolor are explained, but it’s worth the study, because it demonstrates the ingenuity of the early camera pioneers; how fraught with mechanical and chemical complexities the process of creating a color image was. Today, just hit record on your phone.

Stahl, Goldstone and Hoffman were early examples of innovative hard driving studio executives that have their parallels in every decade of Hollywood history. The company would occasionally overreach in self-promotion. Their advertising slogan “Another Gem from Tiffany” caused iconic jewelry firm Tiffany & Co. to sue for trademark infringement. Tiffany Productions recognized the potential of synergy.
The huge demand for sound movies in 1927 enabled Stahl and his team to make a lucrative deal with RCA: If a cinema owner agreed to book a block of 26 Tiffany films, RCA would install the sound gear at a bargain rate. In the early days of this technology, sound came from a Gramophone disc played like a Gramophone record in synch with the picture. As many as 2,460 theaters signed up for the deal, providing Tiffany with a guaranteed distribution network.
For an understanding of the difficulties of early sound technology, the Vitaphone Wikipedia website is illuminating. Vitaphone was vulnerable to severe synchronization problems, famously spoofed in MGM’s 1952 musical about the Silent Era’s transition into Sound – Singin’ in the Rain. If a record was improperly cued up or bumped, the sound would stray out of sync with the picture, and the projectionist would have to try to manually acquire sync. The problem disappeared within a few years when soundtracks were printed in synch with the image on the 35mm film itself.
As sound movies swept the silent off the screen, Stahl felt ready to take on the next technological milestone: a full-length sound feature in Technicolor. The major studios had all rushed spectacular Technicolor musicals into production on their new sound stages, tying up almost all Technicolor’s twelve cameras. To jump ahead of the competition, Tiffany decided to make the world’s first outdoor spectacular in color and 3D.
However there is no record of Mamba being shown in 3D. They had to get the movie into theaters fast, and there was no time to perfect the process.

Mamba was shot in approximately 10 weeks between September and December 1929 on what is now the Universal backlot, probably using left over sets from The Golden Dawn to recreate Neu Posen, a fortified border town separating British and German East Africa, the two competing colonial powers, on the eve of The Great War.
This wide establishing shot of Neu Posen is an example of a time honored in-camera effect known as the glass shot, where peripheral aspects of the setting are painted on glass which is then positioned in front of camera to blend in with the action visible beyond. Thus, painted jungle obscures the studio buildings adjacent to the set. The foreground lake is still used by Universal for movies and its theme park stunt show.

The deadly snake of the title is Auguste Bolte, the richest man in Neu Posen, Casting, as always, was important. The role needed a star character actor.

Acclaimed Danish stage actor Jan (Jean) Hersholt was chosen. With screen roles ranging from The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed, his name while not a headliner, was meaningful. Hersholt is perfect in the part, avoiding the scenery chewing approach of many early sound era villains in favor of a grumpy smoldering malevolence.

Jean Hersholt plays Bolte as a corpulent, unkempt, boorish plantation owner, constantly boasting of his wealth, who whips his servants, and sexually abuses local women. He is despised by the European community, whose respect he craves. So, he purchases a beautiful bride, Helen Von Linden, daughter of an impoverished nobleman, by paying her father’s debts, in the hope this trophy wife will earn him the prestige he feels entitled to.


Eleanor Boardman added some marquee value as the luckless German heiress Bolte manipulates into marriage. A successful photographic model from age 16, she entered silent movies in 1922, playing leading roles in 25 pictures before MAMBA. The year before she had starred in her husband King Vidor’s Oscar nominated The Crowd. They were a power couple of their day.

Boardman’s performance in The Crowd was widely recognized as one of the outstanding performances in American silent film. In this, her first sound role, her acting is sincere intelligent and restrained.

As the luckless bride at the nuptials, Boardman’s face speaks volumes. Matters get worse from the wedding night onwards due to her reluctance to consummate the marriage, in a scene that was cut by the Australian censor.

The scene in which Bolte demands his conjugal rights, pressing his hand on her breast before she repels him, is mild by today’s standards, but it had the Australian censors of 1930 clutching their pearls. In fact, it is an eloquent MeToo scene, written way ahead of its time and undoubtedly the work of the only woman in the writing team.

Winifred Dunn wrote her first produced screenplay at age 18 and was soon, according to trade papers, one of the “busiest scenario editors in Hollywood”, credited with writing on over 40 productions. In 1925, major star Mary Pickford recruited her to work collaboratively on several projects. Dunn was in tune with women’s issues. She knew that all the scenes of humiliation and spousal abuse inflicted on the heroine would resonate with the women in the audience married to difficult men. The prospect of marital rape, too lurid and confronting for Australian guardians of public decency, serves to further heighten suspense at the heroine’s plight for the rest of the movie. “ When I want you, all the locks in the world won’t keep me out.” is the kind of dialogue the Production Code would soon forbid. Similarly, scenes where a husband raises a whip to his disobedient wife, declaring “Everything I own carries my mark” would be stricken from scripts for the next 20 years.

A noble German officer Lt. Karl Von Reiner prevents the lash from landing. He and all the German characters in the story bear the influence of a German born member of the writing team.

Ferdinand Schumann-Heink, born in Hamburg, the son of a famous opera singer, emigrated to America, and served in the US Army during World War 1, while his brother joined the German navy, and died when his U Boat was sunk. Schumann-Heink understood the ironies of war. Perhaps he based the character of Auguste Bolte on arrogant nouveau riche profiteers that flourished in Germany’s colonial heyday. A grasp of German manners and sensibility is also evident in the depiction of the Karl Von Reidel, the romantic lead, played by Ralph Forbes.

Ralph Forbes came from a British acting family. After playing supporting roles to Lilian Gish and Norma Shearer, he achieved leading man status when he played Ronald Colman’s brother in Paramount’s 1926 big-budget Beau Geste. A scar on his cheek caused by a college football accident, was airbrushed from his headshot by a vigilant publicist. But in MAMBA the blemish is amplified by make-up, to be a typical dueling scar a young Prussian officer might have received at Heidelberg University. It lends credibility to Forbes’ portrayal.

Boardman and Forbes have genuine chemistry. They project a delicate sexual tension in their scenes together. There’s a sense of repressed yearning in their exchange of close ups as the film progresses

While not an A list cast individually, Hersholt, Boardman and Forbes, seen here with director Albert S. Rogell in a break from shooting, were cumulatively strong enough to attract movie fans. Al Rogell broke into the film business at age 15; by 22 he was directing serials and shorts subjects. His specialty was tight action dramas and westerns, making him well suited for the task. Rogell would go on to amass 122 directing credits in film and television till his retirement in the late 1950’s. His confident affable demeanor is reflected in this picture posing with cowboy star Tom Mix, who he directed in The Rider of Death Valley two years later.

Rogell’s unbroken three minute moving camera shot establishing the town is masterful. A column of native workers, carrying ivory tusks, walk, heads bowed, past a whip-carrying British soldier. This starts the film with a disapproving comment by American creatives on colonialism. More on political undercurrents later.


The camera cruises by ponies painted with black and white zebra stripes followed by an ostrich trotting through the street. Then a river comes into view, with canoes berthing, goods being unloaded. A wide variety of African detail follows before the camera arrives at the first dialogue scene which sets the background to the story. A masterful Scorsese shot before Scorsese, though the Variety reviewer, while praising the photography, complained “ early panoramic shots are hard on the eyes.” In the following scene, we learn that the rival colonial powers that share the town have each raised detachments of native troops. Indeed, peacefully interacting tribes allied with rival powers would be forced to fight each other in the war to come This tragic aspect of WW1 would be depicted forty-five years later in Jean Jacques Arnaud’s French colonial drama Black and White in Color.

MAMBA’s next scene is where the writers’ sense of irony is most obvious.


A German and a British soldier come across a group of African children play fighting in the street. One group wear spiked German helmets, the other British insignia. The two soldiers lecture the kids that Germany and Britain are “fine friends.”
“Throw away your swords and popguns, and be like white men. Why, there are millions of us all over the world and we never fight.”
This advice is given, while engaging in badinage slyly scornful of each other’s nation. The German mutters “Sheinkopf” as an aside, while the British soldier taps the German playfully in the chest, but just a little too hard. When the children leave, the British soldier concludes: “Too many blacks here in Africa, too few of us whites to hold ‘em in line, once they get the fightin’ idea into their heads.” You could read that as a racist character’s lament for the end of colonialism, or, as I prefer, you could consider it to be the American writers’ statement of the inevitable outcome of history.

You could see the subplot of Bolte rejecting the child he has fathered by a local African, as symbolic of the treatment of Africa by colonial powers. Liberal writers had to be clever with their messages. I see the movie’s final shot of the British Union Jack flying over the colony as an ironic question mark, rather than a celebratory confirmation of status quo restored. The picture could have ended traditionally on the lovers’ kiss. There is so much to enjoy in both the politics and the political incorrectness of the film. Despite the writers’ good intentions, the handling of racial issues reflects 1930 Hollywood, paternalistic, racially insensitive, at best, but it makes the film all the more interesting to deconstruct. Audiences will be abuzz with opinion as they leave the theater.

A lot of attention went into tuning make-up, design and lighting to the best aspects of 2-Strip Technicolor, while trying to minimize its limitations. The Cinematographer was Charles P. Boyle, who would amass 84 credits, like Oscar nominated Anchors Aweigh, which integrated cartoon characters with Technicolor live action, before concluding his career at Disney with the iconic Old Yeller. These images taken from screen grabs do reflect the richness of the 2-strip color palette.



Director Rogell had to work around delays due to Technicolor camera availability but managed to get four cameras for the big scenes. The budget ballooned, causing Tiffany cash flow problems. The company was funding the movie largely out of revenue coming in from completed films in release which was sometimes irregular. In order to fool the creditors, the production reportedly kept two sets of identical costumes available so that the cast and crew could keep working in case one set was confiscated. Production cost landed at about $500,000, a colossal amount for Tiffany, which was accustomed to make movies for $100,000. Rogell managed the problems well and delivered a 78 minute movie with camerawork, like the opening tracking shot, and the editing of action scenes that is surprisingly modern for the period.

His staging of the climactic battle scene is spectacular and well covered, with angles regularly integrating attackers with defenders, making the flow of the conflict clear.

There are a few false notes, like the speeded up shots of the charging natives, presumably to make them more frenzied looking. But overall it plays well. And for an audience in 1930 it must have done. High drama, crowd scenes, blazing buildings, and blood – all in color and sound at last!

What an impact this movie must have had on the previously monochromatic cinema-going public. I wonder if a 16-year-old lad from Pennsylvania, named Cy Raker Endfield might have seen MAMBA in 1930 or in subsequent reissues. He would go on to co-write and direct ZULU, in 1964, the iconic African colonial war movie.

These were the days when people wore jackets and ties to the set. Here are the key men who made MAMBA. Well, some of them. Grips and electrics not included. Women are noticeably absent. Crew photos have evolved since.

The 5 Technicolor studio-bound musicals released to substantial box office ahead of Mamba served to build the public appetite for big color drama. The recent Wall Street Crash had not yet affected cinema attendance, now at a peak.

As contrast to the wholesome color musicals on offer, Tiffany mounted a substantial campaign emphasizing the lurid: violence, adultery, and the tropical African setting – in color. It was an exploitation marketing approach Roger Corman and American International Pictures would decades later perfect.


MAMBA premiered in March 1930 at New York’s Gaiety Theater at the top price of $2 per ticket. It ran two weeks, a record at the time. Reviews were good. Photoplay Magazine concluded: “ ends with melodrama … and revolting natives “


Playdates across America followed. There are some reports that MAMBA’s eventual box office gross was $1.3M. No records remain of its international receipts. It was banned in Germany for being “ denigrating to Germans”; a tribute to Jean Hersholt’s performance.

Tiffany was surely on the verge of being admitted to the studio “A League”. Perhaps Stahl and his team had made a few enemies along the way. Somehow Tiffany’s access to exhibition outlets shrank. Apparently the “A League” made deals with exhibitors to supply multiple star laden pictures provided their theaters never played a Tiffany-Stahl release. This was to cripple a rising competitor. Illegal restraint of trade, but it was the Wild West of entertainment law at the time. John Stahl sold his shares in the company after MAMBA, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall. Denial of market access is an issue still with us in the digital world.

With revenue on Tiffany’s new product line substantially reduced, debts piled up. The recession started to bite. Box office dropped 30%. Tiffany Studios final production had a prescient title.

Eventually Tiffany filed for bankruptcy in 1932. The studio complex was later bought by Columbia Pictures. Another transition was in play. The highly inflammable nitrate stock used to shoot all silent and many early sound movies was soon to be replaced by the safer emulsion stock. Their negatives were considered obsolete, as indeed were silent films; they were of no value. Exhibitors wanted pictures that talked.

In 1938 producer David O. Selznick needed a generous supply of fuel for the burning of Atlanta sequence in his forthcoming Gone With The Wind. He recognized that the now obsolete nitrate stock was a potent and enduring source of flame, as fires in movie theaters had shown, so Metro Goldwyn Mayer purchased Tiffany’s nitrate original film negative library and scattered it across the civil war Atlanta set in Culver City, then ignited by the studio’s pyrotechnicians . The cameras rolled, and tons of nitrate negatives burned for hours providing consistent fiery backgrounds. As Rhett Butler drove his wagon between blazing buildings, the original negative of MAMBA was going up in smoke, along with vast numbers of silent movies, some classic, lost forever.

Within decades only two reels of a used print in America remained in existence. MAMBA was considered lost, until early 2009 when Paul Brennan, film assessor for events at Heritage Cinemas in Sydney, Australia, stumbled upon an entry at the IMDb message board.

“I have just had the opportunity of viewing the complete 1930’s Tiffany Production of Mamba… …Unfortunately, this was seen without the accompanying Vitaphone [RCA Photophone] disc soundtrack… The early two-colour Technicolor was amazingly bright and made this screening a surprisingly pleasant experience. …according to the authors of Forgotten Horrors, ‘only about 12 minutes of silent footage remain.’ I can refute this information as there exists in Australia a complete 35mm version of this film, in good condition.”


Paul contacted the author of this post, a retired cinema projectionist and collector of abandoned 35 mm movies, Murray Matthews, pictured here with his wife Pat, alongside Paul Brennan. The Matthews had located a complete nitrate print of Mamba in an old warehouse in a remote area of South Australia. All nine reels were in great shape. They were even stored in original Tiffany cans. Only four of the nine Vitaphone soundtrack records were to be found All nine Vitaphone sound discs had been preserved luckily.


Australia and New Zealand was the end of the distribution line. Sometimes it took years for a movie to reach this far from Hollywood. The prints were often in bad shape or incomplete when they finally arrived. MAMBA probably survived intact because the Australian distributor demanded the quick dispatch of a brand new print in exchange for an advance against future revenue. Australian projectionists must have handled it carefully over its five year run in light of its final condition. When the rights expired and the picture was to be shipped back to Hollywood, Tiffany Productions had simply ceased to exist. So the sole print of MAMBA remained forgotten in Australia gathering dust in a warehouse till Pat and Murray Matthews rescued it.

Paul Brennan persuaded the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia to make a digital copy of the print and the 4 surviving sound discs to his friend Swedish Cinema history buff Jonas Nordin, who accomplished the laborious task of re-synchronizing the sound – now at a different frame rate – to the digital picture. The demonstration of the 4 reels with synchronized sound was enough to get other parties involved to fund a full 35 mm restoration from the surviving print, with a soundtrack taken from original Vitaphone discs that had luckily been preserved in America. Much thanks is due to UCLA, and Kino Lorber also for stepping up to the plate.

The 35mm restored print of MAMBA will soon be available to Festivals and specialty cinemas. Without the dedication to the preservation cause by everyone involved, this unique snapshot of Cinema history would never have been seen again in its original form. Thanks.
Pat & Murray Matthews, “the guardians of the nitrate” tell their story here.

Jonas Nordin wrote about the restoration process here.

Paul Brennan is interviewed for Film Buffs Forecast here. He’s hilarious.

ROYAL SCANDALS – We Can’t Get Enough of Them.

The Meghan Markle/Oprah Winfrey bombshell interview, with allegations of racist attitudes in Buckingham Palace, was a perfect storm of feminist and Black Lives Matter issues guaranteed to produce a media feeding frenzy, largely along tribal lines.. The situation was not unpredictable. British comedian John Oliver could see it coming when he appeared on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” in 2018 just months before the royal wedding.

“I don’t think you need to have just seen the pilot episode of ‘The Crown’ to get a basic sense of, she might be marrying into a family that could cause her some emotional complications. They’re an emotionally stunted group of fundamentally flawed people doing a very silly, pseudo job. That’s what she’s marrying into. So I hope she likes it. It’s going to be weird for her.”

So spoke an anti-Royalist, whose irreverent lampooning of the privileged and powerful is always fun to watch. Personally, I’m not an anti-Royalist. The Monarchy represents a thousand years of British History, and as such is a useful institution in governance, providing a titular head of state without any power to interfere in politics. Occasional behind the scenes influence maybe, but no effective power.

Constitutional monarchy provides a symbol of the country’s traditions, image, and values around which the citizens of different political persuasions can unify for the good of the nation. In my view, the Royal Family has great benefit for the UK, substantially in excess of its cost. They are an essential component in British tourism.

In this clip @ 3 minutes 30, you can see both sides of the debate on the economic value of the monarchy.

The Royals make easy targets for cancel culture enthusiasts angered by centuries of colonialism and inequality promoted by the British class system. But I see the Queen’s extended family more as deer caught in the headlights of rapid social change. They are human and therefore fallible, like the rest of us. Their essential humanity is well depicted in the Netflix series The Crown, albeit in the style of historical drama rather than documentary.

The Crown Poster

Critics complain of its inaccuracies, political point scoring, and oversimplification, but on balance, having grown up in England and observed British life ever since, I find each season of The Crown is a compellingly believable portrait of a long standing yet vanishing institution; a Monarchy, struggling to adapt to the post World War Two world. The motivations of all the players are delivered in shorthand. But it’s great shorthand, full of wit and insight, broadly truthful and lavishly staged, with stellar performances from all the cast. This recap of the first seasons will give you a sense of the institution into which the Royal Family were born, one which they were indoctrinated from birth to support as a God-given duty.

This recap summarizes subsequent episodes to date. We’ll have to wait till 2022 to see how the events leading up to Princess Diana’s death and the subsequent fallout are depicted.

When Rupert Murdoch arrived on the British media scene, he saw how anti-Royalist sentiments could be harnessed to provide a cash cow for a public hungry for grievance issues. Born to wealth, profit was his motivation not social change. Racism, sexism, hyper nationalism were all useful buttons to press in Murdoch’s global quest for political power and influence. When Diana Spencer was chosen by Prince Charles, to be a compliant Royal wife, the opportunity for the Murdock press to build her up then tear her down was irresistible.

The moment she bucked the rigid control of the Buckingham Palace bureaucracy, the Murdoch media were there to pounce on every perceived infraction of protocol leaked by the Palace. Princess Diana died in a high-speed car chase caused by tabloid jackals hungry for the big bucks that a revealing snapshot would earn. Without conscience they swarmed around her dying body for that purpose. Will a future episode of The Crown re-enact that scene? It should. Of course Murdoch is not solely to blame for the toxification of news media. We, its customers, share the guilt, with our appetite for celebrity culture and envy-driven schadenfreude.

So, to return to the Oprah interview, it is no wonder that Diana’s son Prince Harry, robbed of his mother at age 12, would want to protect the woman he loved from the same fate. Certainly Harry and Meghan broke ranks when they went public, they bit the hand that fed them, they caused a sacred British institution embarrassment, with suggestion of endemic racism in British society. But clearly the Palace hierarchy, unwilling to modernize, and in thrall to the UK tabloid media, failed to see teachable moments in either the Wallis Simpson saga or Princess Diana’s mental health issues. They badly mishandled the smooth entry of another independently minded American divorcee into the complications of royal duties. I applaud the Sussexes for their painful candor.
Lord Louis Mountbatten

My personal connection to Royal circles has been only tangential. First I was asleep in a cot when my mother poured a couple of gin and tonics for Lord Louis Mountbatten when he visited my father’s RAF base. He was apparently a charismatic personality and enjoyed a drink. Pity I missed such an historic figure.

Lord Brabourne

My wife and I met Mountbatten’s son-in-law John Knatchbull, 7th Baron Brabourne, CBE, professionally known as John Brabourne, a twice Oscar-nominated producer, at an Australia film industry function in Sydney. We chatted about a movie he produced HMS DEFIANT/DAMN THE DEFIANT(US) a ripping yarn of Napoleonic warfare, which broke new ground in its day for a vivid flogging and gutsy boarding party combat. A couple of months later, John Brabourne survived the IRA bombing of a motorboat that killed his father in law, Lord Mountbatten, his mother, one of his sons and a crew member.

On the 9th of April 1951 my father Wing Commander Eric Trenchard-Smith attended a Royal Air Force Ball in Malta given in honor of the visiting Princess Elizabeth, who would become Queen the following February upon the death of her father, King George VI. All twelve attending officers were given one dance each with the Princess. In my father’s case, it was a foxtrot. He told me in his final years that the Princess was amply endowed and that he was glad to have the length of arm sufficient to avoid the risk of contact with the royal bosoms. My father had a wry sense of humor. He also recounted that the future Queen was charming and seemed genuinely interested in him, his Australian background, what RAF life was like, what his wartime experience had been. Princess Elizabeth herself had served in the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial service as a mechanic and truck driver during the war, and her new husband Prince Philip was a Navy man.

RAF Pilot Eric Trenchard-Smith dancing with Princess Elizabeth

After the dance, Princess Elizabeth sat down with my father, and ordered a glass of Orangeade. When the waiter put the glass down, he spilled a little. My father had been taught always to carry a spare clean handkerchief to a social gathering. He was able immediately to pull it out and mop up the little puddle, softening the embarrassment of the waiter and getting a smile from the Princess. (You may be certain that if you have any social encounter with me, I will come equipped for spillage.) The future Queen continued to ask questions till it was time to dance and converse with the next officer. His good impression of the future Queen has no doubt transferred to me.

In Australia in the mid 1990’s I once chatted with a group in a cafe for five minutes without realizing one of them was Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York. She was then separated from Prince Andrew and on a promotional tour in Australia. I had stopped by to say hi to actor Shane Briant who introduced his three friends by name, the last being a redheaded lady in the corner he called Sarah. Lighting in the Avalon Cafe that winter was not up to scratch – that’s my excuse. I focused on Shane, not his guests, and thanked him, a Hammer Film veteran for taking a small role in my low budget supernatural horror thriller Out of the Body back in 1987. He had never seen it. I hoped I would be able to give him a decent role one day in the future.

The redhead spoke.
“If you don’t give him a decent role I certainly won’t help promote your movie’s opening.”
“Oh dear. ” I said, still unaccountably unaware of the context.
“I’m Sarah Ferguson” she said, extending her hand.
“Oh, forgive me for not recognizing you, silly me” I said. The focus of the table then returned to her. We chatted briefly, before extricating myself without further embarrassment.

Princess Alexandra and husband Angus Ogilvy

Flash back to March, 1967. The News Department of Channel Ten Sydney occasionally sent me out as a cameraman/field reporter when they were shorthanded. Once I was sent to Canberra, the nation’s capital, to cover Princess Alexandra of Kent, cousin to Queen Elizabeth, planting a tree at Government House. The shrub was already loosely positioned in the ground. All the Princess had to do was heap a last shovelful of dirt onto it for the photo op. I joined the gathered camera crews and photographers, equipped with a clockwork wind Bell & Howell. While we waited for Princess Alexandra to arrive, I took some scene-setting shots, and forgot Rule One of cameras powered by clockwork: rewind after every shot.

So, just as the Princess scooped earth onto her shovel, the camera cut out. I rewound frantically, but by the time I was ready to roll again, the Princess had deposited the requisite shovelful of earth at the foot of the shrub and was smiling at the gathered media. Applause all round. Oh God, I’ve missed the money shot! So without hesitation I asked: “Excuse me, Ma’am, my camera jammed, would you mind doing that again?” Sharp intake of breath issued from British embassy officials who were aghast at this lapse of protocol. But the Princess graciously obliged. Later at the press reception, I was able to thank her. She and her husband Angus Ogilvy, relaxed and friendly, asked me questions about Australia from a young ex-pat’s perspective, before a royal equerry steered them away to more important guests.

As mentioned, I’ve always had sympathy for the Royal Family. They symbolize British heritage and make an important contribution to tourism. Lifelong representation of an historic institution is a difficult job, made all the harder by a coprophagic tabloid media. Being on duty, under the microscope, all day, every day, for life, is a taxing job, which the Netflix series The Crown makes clear. The royal diadem is really an iron vise.

The success of The Crown has sparked a number of high quality depictions of major British political scandals. I enjoyed the latest account of the Profumo Affair.in the BBC/Netflix production The Trial Of Christine Keeler:
https://youtu.be/XlsnFsgrO1s

You’ll get another perspective on the Keeler / Profumo Affair in this documentary.
https://youtu.be/mhV7wiR75nQ

Politicians behaving badly – both jaw-dropping sagas.

For more of my views on popular entertainment and British history check out my book Adventures in the B Movie Trade.

Dennis Pratt’s Vintage Radio

Meet my friend, actor, screenwriter, and author Dennis Pratt. We have been writing partners on multiple projects since 1993, including Leprechaun 3, Leprechaun 4 in Space, Britannic, In Her Line Of Fire, Omega Code 2, The Cabin, and Drive Hard. He brings an actor’s insight to the characters he writes. He will make occasional contributions to this website.

Actor, screenwriter and author Dennis Pratt

Greetings, Earthlings! Before there was Netflix, before there was HBO, before there was cable, and before there was television – there was the wonder of… Radio!
Radio cast rehearsingVoices from distant places piped into the homes of people who used their imaginations to create their own version of the characters who spoke to them from afar. The radio stations used RCA 44BX microphones, which had two live faces and two dead ones. Thus actors could face each other and react. An actor could give the effect of leaving the room by simply moving his head toward the dead face of the microphone. The scripts were paper-clipped together, to minimize unwanted sounds. Actors would drop finished pages to the carpeted floor after use.

There were mysteries like “The Shadow,” wherein Lamont Cranston, man about town, solved mysteries using his ability to “cloud men’s minds” and make himself invisible.

The Shadow poster

The Shadow poster

The premise was, by today’s standards, impossible to believe, but in the 1930s and 40s, an age of comparative innocence, people accepted the improbable. Orson Welles starred in several of these half hour episodes in order to finance his Mercury Theatre company.

Orson Welles acting for radio with hand raised in front of microphone

Welles never rehearsed. He would be rushed by ambulance, siren wailing, from a Broadway theatre where he was rehearsing his next production, to a radio studio where he would arrive just before air time.
His distinctive, cultured voice would bring the character of Lamont Cranston to life for thousands of people who would hang on his every word as the story unfolded.

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men …the Shadow knows.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UTEiKuQC5U

Old time radio to me is a connection to my childhood when we used to sit around the kitchen table, listening to shows like “Gangbusters” and “Gunsmoke,” while we ate popcorn and talked about what was happening in Dodge City, or the backstreets of New York, or Chicago.

We were small town people taking a journey through radio to places we might otherwise never see or experience. It was like having the actors we saw on a movie screen coming to our home and speaking directly to us.

And there was always a mail-in offer from sponsors. If you mailed them a certain number of cereal box tops, you might receive a decoder ring, or a membership in a secret crime fighting society. I remember as a four year old, putting a shredded wheat box top into our mail box, without an envelope, or a stamp, hoping I would receive an autographed photo of Hopalong Cassidy, and through some miracle it arrived two weeks later! No idea if it was the postman or my parents who made it happen, but it was such a thrill to get something like that in the mail! “Hoppy” was my friend forever!

Hoppalong Cassidy advertisement for a radio priced $16.95
Hopalong Cassidy advertement for a bicycle

Radio was a major advertising medium.

Stars of the silver screen were lured to radio with exorbitant salaries that helped pay for the mansions and the Duesenbergs that personified Hollywood royalty. Ed Wynn who never really wanted to go into radio was asked what it would take to get him on the air. He replied “$5000 a week” and was handed a pen and contract.
Actor Ed Wynn
In 1946 Bing Crosby was paid $8,000 a week for his show on the ABC Radio network, the equivalent of over $100,000 a week in today’s money.

Bing Crosby radio show poster
Bing Crosby in a tobacco advertisement
Quite a few stars endorsed tobacco in those days.

Unfortunately, a high salary like Crosby’s resulted in the supporting players receiving much less. Most of the actors surrounding the star would get something like $40 a week, which, in those days, was still a livable wage. Tax rates for those earning more than $70,000 a year as individuals were high, rising to 91%. But, by producing and selling their own shows, some stars were able to get a 25% tax rate.1

The extraordinarily popular George Burns and Gracie Allen were getting $9,000 a week.
George Burns and Gracie Allen
Audiences fell in love with the scatterbrained Gracie and sympathized with the ever patient George Burns as he tried to unravel the confusion that surrounded Gracie wherever she went.

I hope these extracts encourage you to explore the world of old radio online or CD. They are a great window into a bygone era.


I’m going to be involved in the publication of a series of Film Noir novels based on some Dennis Pratt’s screenplays. His stories are unpredictable, full of poetic imagery, leavened with irony. To give you a sense of that, here’s the blurb from his last novel ANGEL UNKNOWN:

“The dead and the living come together in this hard-edged story of faith and redemption. A mentally challenged boy experiences the supernatural when he braves countless dangers to take his critically ill sister on a 2,000 mile odyssey to reach Hollywood where they hope to find Dr. Ned, a television character whom the boy believes is the only man alive able to save his sister. These two children will need all of their spiritual strength because waiting for them at the end of their journey is a pink-cheeked, baby-faced serial killer looking for his next victim.”

Book cover of Dennis Pratt's Angel Unknown


1. Source: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nocera-tax-avoidance-20190129-story.html

Pimpin’ Pee Wee and the Case of the Missing Member – NSFW

Here’s a story about one of my very non-PC guilty pleasure movies. (Not safe for work!)

PROPS CREW don’t get enough respect, I’ve always thought. The right prop enhances the credibility of an actor’s performance. In emergencies property masters have to improvise. On the reboot of the PORKY’S franchise, subsequently titled “Pimpin’ Pee Wee”, I experienced what a director dreads on a tight schedule: the theft of a vital prop just before the scene is to be shot.

You see, the character known as Meat was having trouble getting laid because the sheer size of his member frightened prospective candidates. A porn star comes to the rescue in his pay-off scene, which I thought would be a bit blah without a sight gag. I had set up an Austin Powers-style hide-the-penis gag in a dimly lit room. Meat’s enormous erection would be seen rising from his reclining body as a backlit silhouette, accompanied by Zarathustra-like chords evoking Kubrick’s 2001. Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom etc.

Film crew places artificial penis on pedestal for shadow effect.

The aroused member was a beautifully sculpted stone phallus, acquired from a Hollywood sex toy shop, mounted on a rod secured to a C-stand. From the camera’s point of view, the shadow of Biggus Dickus was positioned to align perfectly with the silhouetted outline of Meat’s loins. On cue, the rod would be slowly elevated from horizontal to vertical. We had it all set up, ready to go after lunch. That’s when Murphy’s Law kicked in.

During the lunch break, someone, perhaps an extra, walked off with our distinguished phallus. It being mid-December, perhaps he saw it as an ideal Christmas gift for that special someone, but for us, it was the centerpiece of a key scene. The nearest sex shop was an hour away in traffic. We were cock-blocked in Canyon Country.

Luckily, we had Mike, a resourceful props man in the hot seat. With the clock ticking, Mike rapidly sculpted a replacement for the missing member, matching the necessary dimensions with gaffer tape! He got us shooting within twenty minutes and the shadow of Meat’s mighty member rose in perfect alignment.

The set of Pimpin' Pee Wee with penis shadow effect

Props departments rarely get enough recognition for what they contribute to the texture of a film. Hail Prop Master Mike! Appropriately, I added the following reassurance to the end titles:

No dildos were harmed in the making of this motion picture…

There’s more about all the fun you can have behind the camera in ADVENTURES IN THE B MOVIE TRADE.

Writing is Re-writing… Persistence Wins!

I have writing credits on 14 movies, and have written many screenplays that never made it to production. One of them was a paranormal action/adventure entitled “The Executioner’s Daughter.” Between 2004 and 2009 it was optioned twice for good money, but we could never get a female star with the required level of wattage to trigger a studio distribution deal. But the story still gnawed at my liver, so I rewrote it as a novel and published my revised version in 2018 as ALICE THROUGH THE MULTIVERSE. It was critically well received. Best selling author Richard Christian Matheson wrote: “A brilliant and thrilling novel. Order it today and let it take you away…”

Here’s the trailer that my friends at BFX Imageworks made:

Here are some extracts from Amazon and Good Reads reviews:

"I flew through this book in two days because I couldn’t stop reading it. It was fast paced, clever and constantly engaging. A rollicking good read."

"Alice Through The Multiverse is a thrilling, high octane page turner that never lets up. It weaves elements of time travel, romance, history, espionage, action, and international intrigue into a unique story with vibrant characters."

"The writing style was fresh, cinematic, and the book reads as if you’re watching a movie unfold on the pages in front of you. Highly recommended."

"WHAT A FABULOUS ENDING!"

(Yes, actual caps!)

"This is a slam bang, non-stop thriller that never lets up."

"ALICE THROUGH THE MULTIVERSE is a time-shifting delight that is rich in historical detail, populated by compelling and engaging characters, and filled with rousing action and provocative ideas. The book is both smart and accessible, a narrative with the strong structure of a classic that nevertheless contains the wild twists and turns only a maverick artist can provide."

"ALICE THROUGH THE MULTIVERSE has the same kooky energy of a ‘Destroyer’ novel. Would make for a poppin’ mini-series."

"The story is gripping and mesmerizing, rich in sensory detail and emotions."

"The characters are engaging and relatable. The prose is expert, with highly developed description and detail and a distinct sense of setting and emotion investment as you engage with the action of the novel. This is one of the most engrossing, fast paced and entertaining novels I have read in a long time. You’ll love it. It’s a great read."

Promotional illustrations for Alice book with woman's face, axe and gun.

Here is the full text of a review from someone experienced in the genre:

"I’m a big fan of time travel on the page and on screen, though in many cases the complexities and paradoxes of the notion can overwhelm a story to such an extent that any entertainment value is ultimately undermined (I’m looking at you, Terminator: Genisys.) In the case of Alice Through The Multiverse, however, the story and characters are – and remain – the focus throughout, whilst big questions are raised for the characters (and readers) to ponder.

Happily, the characters – both historical and contemporary – are well-rounded, and their decisions and actions never feel incompatible with what we have come to know about them. In the case of modern characters, this isn’t such a tough task. With historical characters, however, there are a plethora of potential issues that might arise to drag a reader out of the story – language, psychology, behaviour, belief, etc. The choice of the author to at least partly build his story around a medieval English peasant girl (the Alice of the title) is therefore a brave one. So, has he succeeded? In a word, yes. I cannot think of a single false beat when it comes to Alice, meaning that I whizzed through the thriller elements of the novel without losing my emotional involvement. As for the central mystery, I did think I’d solved it within the first 10 pages… but I ended up being wrong. (Not to stick the boot in, but the big Terminator: Genisys twist was ruined in the trailer… so Alice beats Arnold once again.)

If you’re looking for a thriller with heart – with mystery elements (and even theological considerations) thrown in – this will be a hugely worthwhile read. I’m looking forward to a sequel…"

The reviews are gratifying. More important than revenue, to this author at least, is that his words are read, that his ideas are shared, his imagination explored. It’s why we write. My advice to screenplay writers, if your script does not gain traction, turn it into fast paced prose. Persistence wins!

You can find Alice Through the Multiverse on barnesandnoble.com.

Cinema Miniatures: A Matter of Perspective

The visual effects shot – an optical illusion sufficiently persuasive for the audience to suspend disbelief – has always fascinated me. Nowadays VFX are the domain of the computer. But it was not always so. Effects used to be done in camera. Here’s a simple illusion, snapped while walking past my neighbor’s field.

Photograph of fence and field illustrating forced perspective where tree appears to be sprouting from fence..

Momentarily it looks like the tree is sprouting from the fence. But then you realize it’s the effect of forced perspective. As a kid I was drawn to films with lots of magical eye candy so George Pal and Ray Harryhausen movies became early favorites.

The War of the Worlds (1953) Poster
Jason and the Argonauts and Mysterious Island posters

“How did they do that giant castle/volcano/tornado/earthquake/parting of the Red Sea shot?” I wondered, as the credits rolled on each new VFX-enhanced movie. Miniatures played a big part. My first introduction to a miniature was in 1963, when the school Film Circle visited the set of Becket starring Richard Burton, as the 12th Century King Henry the Second, and Peter O’Toole as Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury whose murder the king unintentionally ordered with the words ” Will nobody rid me of this meddlesome Priest!”

Poster for Becket film

Elizabeth Taylor, recently married to Burton, arrived on the set during the lunch break with a small entourage. We spotty-faced teenagers gazed at the icon with awe. She smiled acknowledgment, but her face really lit up at the sight of her husband returning from lunch with his co-star Peter O’Toole. Burton clearly saw her but walked right past her without acknowledgment. The Cut Direct. What was that about? I saw her smile change to a jab of hurt. Hmm, stars have human foibles too.

Interior of Canterbury cathedral in Becket

We were given a tour of the enormous sets. Shepperton Studios Stage H barely contained an actual size replica of the inside of Canterbury Cathedral, the largest set that had yet been built in Europe. This was the work of our host, the film’s production designer John Bryan, whom I had met the previous year at the location shoot of Tamahine at Wellington College, my school. He took pleasure in showing us an early Hollywood device still in use for making a large set even bigger at minimal expense: the perspective miniature. He had commissioned a miniature of the half of the cathedral dome over the altar that was visible from inside the front entrance. This miniature was semicircular, three feet in diameter, and painted in fine detail. The dome was then suspended from wires above the camera and lowered into a wide angle shot of the cathedral, so that it sat in perfect alignment with the top edge of the set.

Exterior of Canterbury Cathedral in Becket

A split diopter lens on the camera then balanced the focus between the foreground miniature and the deep background beyond. Bryan explained that same effect could also be achieved by a matte painting of the dome on a sheet of glass positioned in front of the camera in the same alignment with the walls beyond.
Here is a screen capture from another scene in Becket using the same technique.

Giant bell in foreground of Becket crowd scene

A reduced size replica of the swinging bell is mounted in a reduced size version of the belfry, set up in front of the camera on a high platform, viewing down at the King’s arrival. A full sized bell tower would have been cost prohibitive.

The silent era pioneered the use of hanging miniatures.

A three image diagram of how a foreground miniature works.

Here a quite substantial miniature has just been positioned to add floors and a tower to the buildings beyond.

Silent film hanging miniatures being set up

Silent film miniatures in intermediate stage of setup.

Fully set up silent film miniatures with crowd in front.

The set for the 1925 Ben Hur’s chariot race was only one side of the arena, where all the action was shot. The race around the other identical side of the arena was achieved by simply flopping the negative. Left to right speeding chariots then hurtled right to left, matching the correct screen direction once chariots had rounded the corner.

Hanging miniatures for the chariot race in Ben Hur (1925)

Careful examination will reveal that above the wall surrounding the stadium and the first rows of bleachers, there hangs a miniature with moving ‘puppet’ people that can rise and fall with the human extras. The main reason for using a miniature in this way is that, unlike a painting, the light on the built set will always be the same as that on the miniature making it possible to shoot in a variety of different ‘lights’ during the day. I have such respect for the early pioneers of the art of Visual Effects.

If I’ve whetted your appetite for more factoids about old style cinema magic, here is an extensive website to peruse: MAGICIANS OF THE MINIATURE – Matte Shot.

There are more stories of the magic of movies in my book Adventures in the B Movie Trade.