Good thing Marks got that Texas Chainsaw Massacre post up; it was starting to get mighty Jesus-y up in here. Let me help bring the tone down a notch with this excerpt from Jeffrey Sconce's Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics:
"On August 1, 1969, James S. Copley, the publisher of the San Diego Union and the Evening Tribune, announced that his two newspapers would no longer promote X-rated or unrated movies and would not accept advertisements from theaters showing such films. If Copley's action wasn't the first of its kind on the part of a big-city newspaper, it was the first to attract serious notice in the trades, and some not-so-serious commentary as well. The San Diego Door, an alternative weekly, editorialized against Copley's 'moral judgements' made on behalf of San Diegans by poking fun at his policy: 'Incidentally, the Door has a movie ad censorship policy too, which most people in San Diego are unaware of. We will not accept ads from any movie theater that shows the cervix of the uterus or the male prostate glands. We feel this is going too far.' But irony was an insufficient weapon against publishers worried about their images and their readers' sensibilities...by the close of 1969, the Independent Film Journal calculated that twenty-seven newspapers across the country had banned ads for X- and R-rated films."
In related news, here's a bit from the OB Rag about the neighborhood's successful battle to make the Strand theater stop showing pornos.
Good thing Marks got that Texas Chainsaw Massacre post up; it was starting to get mighty Jesus-y up in here. Let me help bring the tone down a notch with this excerpt from Jeffrey Sconce's Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics:
"On August 1, 1969, James S. Copley, the publisher of the San Diego Union and the Evening Tribune, announced that his two newspapers would no longer promote X-rated or unrated movies and would not accept advertisements from theaters showing such films. If Copley's action wasn't the first of its kind on the part of a big-city newspaper, it was the first to attract serious notice in the trades, and some not-so-serious commentary as well. The San Diego Door, an alternative weekly, editorialized against Copley's 'moral judgements' made on behalf of San Diegans by poking fun at his policy: 'Incidentally, the Door has a movie ad censorship policy too, which most people in San Diego are unaware of. We will not accept ads from any movie theater that shows the cervix of the uterus or the male prostate glands. We feel this is going too far.' But irony was an insufficient weapon against publishers worried about their images and their readers' sensibilities...by the close of 1969, the Independent Film Journal calculated that twenty-seven newspapers across the country had banned ads for X- and R-rated films."
In related news, here's a bit from the OB Rag about the neighborhood's successful battle to make the Strand theater stop showing pornos.