Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris

Author:Mark Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

TWENTY

The two girls were naked. That fact alone represented three problems. Naked was, of course, the first problem; even if there had been no other issues, naked was a deal breaker all by itself. Girls was the second problem; not women, but girls. Wasn’t one of them, one of the two that were giggling and wrestling and rolling around the floor naked, supposed to be a teenager, perhaps not even of the age of consent? And two was a problem; two girls together, with everything that might suggest to a moviegoer. Not to mention the presence of the male photographer whose clothes they were tugging off, who was happily diving into the action, threatening to become naked himself. Three naked young people, tumbling and laughing and thrashing and clearly about to have sex in several different combinations.

And then there was the scene in which the photographer stood over Sarah Miles, locking eyes with her, while another man thrust into her.

This was not possible.

The first letter that Geoffrey Shurlock sent to MGM had been polite but firm. Nobody at the studio could say they hadn’t been warned; they had been warned as far back as March, before the movie had even been shot. “As you know, nudity is prohibited under the Code,” Shurlock had reminded the studio, as if any reminder were necessary. “We notice that the story calls for Thomas to have a sex relationship between two teenagers. This…would not be approvable.” And the scene in which he just…watches? “This suggestion seems to us to verge on the pornographic.”1 Shurlock had warned MGM again in April, after the movie’s title had changed from The Shot to just The Antonioni Picture; this time he had used stronger language, phrases like “heightening the degree of offensiveness” and “unacceptably irreverent.”2 And he had tried one more time in July,3 but by then it was too late, because Blow-Up, as it was now called, was shooting all over London in the summer of 1966, and the old Code, thanks to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Alfie, was already on its way out. By the fall, when the movie was completed and edited, Shurlock was overseeing the new, more relaxed Code, which everyone knew was a halfhearted attempt to maintain the integrity of a system that still demanded a certain toeing of the line by studios while giving filmmakers a little more room. A little more room. Not room for bare teenage breasts and three-ways and a man trying, as Shurlock put it, “to incite the girl into a state of orgasm.”4

This time, Shurlock knew that he had Jack Valenti in his camp. Valenti was liberal, he was open-minded, he had sided with Warner Brothers and against the Code on Virginia Woolf, and he admired Antonioni, but, he said, “I don’t believe that everything that’s put into a film by a man of quality is sacrosanct…. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”5 And the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, even with a more permissive advisory board now in place, would certainly condemn the film.

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