The Face On The Cutting Room Floor

The history of cinema censorship is as much a panorama of American morality in the twentieth century as it is a tale of quick-buck chicanery, hypocrisy, bigotry, ignorance, and the admirable struggle to make movies a great art form. Starting with the films of Mabel Normand, Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle, and Jean Harlow, the battles both secret and public over what the American public should or should not see have grown in intensity and in significance. Why was the ending of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' altered? Why was the line "Cattle don't graze after sheep" deleted from Howard Hughes's 'The Outlaw, ' which starred Jane Russell? What is Alfred Hitchock's formula for violence which allows his films to pass the censors? Murray Schumach tells the stories of these films and others on which the censors went to work: Double Indemnity, From Here to Eternity, The Moon is Blue, The Man with the Golden Arm, West Side Story, and more. Here is also an inside look at the movie industry 'black list' and how 'unemployable' writers get work via the Hollywood underground. The book discusses the role played by pressure groups, including the Catholic Legion of Decency and the NAACP. Here, too, is the full report of Khrushchev's visit to Hollywood in 1960, an account that would be hilarious if it didn't expose the movie industry at its worse. Includes 40 pages of photographs, many depicting scenes not allowed to be shown on the screen.

"The book makes use of the false document technique: It pretends to be the true story of a 38 year-old Scotsman called Cameron McCabe who writes about a crucial period of his own life during which several people close to him are murdered"--Amazon.com.

History of cinema censorship including the Blacklist and the role played by pressure groups such as Catholic Legion of Decency and the NAACP. The appendix includes the complete Motion Picture Production Code.

With an introduction by Jonathan Coe 1930s King's Cross, London. When aspiring film actress Estella Lamare is found dead on the cutting-room floor of a London film studio, Cameron McCabe finds himself at the centre of a police investigation. There are multiple suspects, multiple confessors and, as more people around him die, McCabe begins to perform his own amateur sleuth-work, followed doggedly by the mysterious Inspector Smith. But then, abruptly, McCabe's account ends . . . Who is Cameron McCabe? Is he victim? Murderer? Novelist? Joker? And if not McCabe, who is the author of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor?

Rayford Goodman and Mark Bradley team up once again when the subject of Bradley's latest interview turns up dead and Goodman is arrested for the crime

An examination of the American motion picture industry's efforts to meet pressure group and government demands is illustrated with stills from popular films