You're Wrong About - The Movie Rating System with Karina Longworth

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

How did Poltergeist get that PG rating? Podcast legend Karina Longworth, host of You Must Remember This, takes us on a wild ride through a century or so of Hollywood history, and shows us what’s been left on the cutting room floor.Here's where to find Karina:WebsiteYou Must Remember ThisSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:http://www.vidiocy.com/http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

Alright, I know what I'm watching tonight. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we end up in another podcast neighborhood and we're really hot from the bike ride over and they invite us in. Today I'm joined by Karina Longworth of You Must Remember This, the first podcast ever made. I'm not fact-checking that. I'm sure it's completely true. It's true for me emotionally. Today we are learning about the movie rating system and the Hollywood history that created it and what kind of world we have ended up in today after many decades of being shown humans behaving in ways that real humans often don't. We are starting all the way back in the

silent era. We're getting in our time machine and going back over a century and we're going to go through the silence, through the haze code, through the birth of the movie rating system we know today, the very troubled birth it turns out. And as you would expect from Karina, go on a wacky wild ride through Hollywood history and I had the most amazing time doing this with her. Thank you so much for your patience waiting an extra day for this episode to finish in the oven. We just recorded a bonus episode about Fleetwood Mac and the making of rumors and I talked for an entire day and threw us all off schedule. So that's how that happened. That episode is going to be out a little bit later this month. I'm really excited to share it with

you and for now, let's go on Karina Longworth's wild ride. Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where we talk about why poltergeist is PG. I'm saying that like I know that it is, but is it? It is. With me today is Karina Longworth. Karina, hello. Hi, thanks for having me. And you're going to talk to us today about the movie rating system and how it came to be, which I am extremely excited for. Good, I'm glad. I hope I can live up to those expectations. I am interested in this topic and I'll start by telling you some of my preconceptions going into this. Okay. I know slightly maybe more than average about the rating system. Like I remember finding it mostly extremely fascinating that PG-13 came about, and I want to say 1984, and that before

that it was just either PG or R, which you really feel in the 70s. I grew up watching the celluloid closet because we had IFC and it was in solid rotation in the early 2000s. I know it's not technically called the Hayes Code, but what almost everyone calls the Hayes Code, which I believe was imposed in the early 1930s and how we had what feels like in a way this kind of subtextual era of film because of that. But why did the things that happened happen? And what do they show us about ourselves? And I feel like we feel like we're in an era of freedom today, but are we? Well, the rating system that was put into place in 1968, that's an embryonic version of what we have now, but that in itself was an act to try to fix something that

had been broken several times already. There was no kind of formal film censorship until the mid-19 teens. What happened in 1913 was that the state of Ohio tried to set up the basically the first effective state-run censorship of movies board, and they got sued by a studio called Mutual Film Corporation, and this led to a Supreme Court decision. And this essentially declared that movies were commerce and not art, and so the First Amendment didn't apply to them. This is already great. So this is in 1915, and this was at a really sort of climactic time for the early film industry because basically up until that point, almost all movies fit on either one or two film reels, so they were not longer than about 40 minutes. That sort of trend of feature

films hadn't caught on, and the film that changed that was The Birth of a Nation, which came out in 1915. That was such a huge blockbuster that it convinced the industry that this was the way forward, that they should start consolidating around longer films that cost more money to make, but could make more money. And also convinced the Klan that it was their time to return to the scene. And The Birth of a Nation, it's long. I'd have to check the actual running time. I think it's two and a half hours long. It feels very long, especially today because it's so ugly. There's so much horrible shit in it. And one thing that I think is interesting is that when this Supreme Court decision came down declaring that movies were commerce and not art,

the decision was written by Justice Joseph McKenna, and he wrote some very flowery language about how he believed that the statement and regulate the content of movies because they, quote, may be used for evil. But not in Birth of a Nation, which we all agree is great and supports a wonderfully racist and evil belief system. We love it. It's so good. Well, that's the thing is that he wasn't talking about Birth of a Nation, the evil that he was talking about, and which a lot of reformers would be talking about over the decades when it came to Hollywood movies, was about things that went against the basic tenets of Christianity, which racism did not. But kissing, oh my God. Yeah. Mostly the evil that these people wanted to regulate had to do with

sex and violence, and particularly any kind of sex beyond sort of married, procreative sex. And so one thing that you see over and over and over again over the years, and I would argue even in 2022, is that films that suggest that people are having sex with more than one partner that are having non-straight sex, that are having interracial relationships, are all sort of rated or censored more harshly. One of the things that became problematic with different states, thanks to the Supreme Court decision being able to do their own censorship, was that there were different standards in different places. And so this was bad news for the movie industry and for filmmakers, because they would send a print of their movie to all these different places, and the different

places could decide what was acceptable and what wasn't. And so in one place, they might just cut out a scene that involved cigarette smoking. Another place they might cut out a scene because a woman's dress was falling off her shoulder. But then they'd keep the cigarette in that other place. And so what ended up happening was that there'd be like 25 different versions of the same movie, and the industry couldn't control that. That's fascinating. So you would be like, remember that great sexy movie and your friend from Ohio would be like, I don't remember any shoulders being in that movie. Yeah, but there was so much smoking. Yeah. A lot of this starts to change by the end of World War I, because obviously,

you have a large segment of the population who went and saw limbs being blown off, who were confronted with horrible violence in real life. And also war always kind of scrambles people's sex lives and marital lives in a way. After World War I, it's the dawn of the 20s, a lot of shit is happening. Like post-war, people want to party. Zelda Fitzgerald is there. It's a whole scene. Completely. And then you also have women's suffrage coming at the same time. We seem to take steps forward in terms of treating women like human beings and then very quickly snap back because that's not acceptable to some people.

So just as things are kind of loosening up in a lot of different ways in the early 20s, a reform movement gains more steam and more fervor. And so you really see this in movies because the movies are like getting a little bit crazier and trying to kind of capture the spirit of youth culture. But then you also have religious groups gaining more steam in terms of trying to shut that down. Like in 1920, there was this hit movie called The Flapper. And it starred this very cute actress named Olive Thomas, who in real life was married to Jack Pickford, who was Mary Pickford's party boy brother. And so while Mary Pickford was considered like America's sweetheart, and she was also kind of a captain of industry, she was one of the

co-founders of United Artists and she produced her own movies. Captain Sweetheart. Yeah. Actually, she probably was in a film called Captain Sweetheart that sounds like a very different title. So while she has this extreme position of respectability, very unusual for a woman in most industries at the time, her brother is just like a naredoel who's on drugs and is kind of spending the Pickford family fortune. He was kind of the hunter Biden of 1920. Oh, and then he took his phonograph to the wrong repairman. Yeah. And then just forgot about it because he took his wax cylinders. He thought he destroyed some wax cylinders. Oh my God. So Jack Pickford and his wife, Olive Thomas, who is The Flapper,

they go to Paris for like a belated hunting moon and she dies. There are a lot of different accounts of what actually happens. But basically, she died of mercury poisoning and it seems like the most likely scenario was that she got up in the middle of the night to take a sleeping pill and didn't turn the light on because Jack had already yelled at her previously in the night for turning the light on. And she accidentally grabbed these tablets that he was using topically to treat his syphilis and swallowed one of those. This is like something that haunts me about this period in American history is that we were like playing very brazenly with a lot of poison. And we were like, take uranium. It's fine. It'll give you a pep. So she dies and this turns into this

huge international scandal. And a lot of people start using it as a way to point fingers at Hollywood for being so amoral. But not like the mercury industry, though. That's fine. Well, you know, people have to treat their syphilis later in the years. Yeah, it's yes, of course. Right. And I mean, it was easy to make an example of her because she was synonymous with The Flapper and because Jack Pickford was such like a bad boy. So yeah, basically it became this way for people to point fingers at Hollywood and say like, even Mary Pickford is associated with all of this depraved shit. So this was the first of a number of scandals that shone a very bright spotlight on Hollywood and allowed this kind of

whispering to turn into shouting about how everybody who makes movies is a depraved, drug-addicted pervert. To zoom out for a second, I find it so interesting that maybe not from the second Hollywood existed, but from pretty soon after to this point, everyone in America has been like, Hollywood, city of dreams. All anyone wants is to make it there and be exalted there. And, you know, movie star is like the dream career. And yet, we've also always been like, but you know, it's evil. There's something very menacing about it. And we've always said both. It feels like we've always said both these things at once. Is that scan for you? Yeah. And I think it's related because I think that the dream is so seductive

and it offers this, you know, kind of chance of passing classes and stepping outside your rank, you know? Totally. And one thing that like we definitely will talk about a lot in this subject is anti-Semitism. You know, the film industry, even as early as this, a lot of the most powerful men were Jewish immigrants. When you have these reform groups that are coming from Catholicism and Christianity, there is kind of an inherent anti-Semitism in a lot of the arguments against the film industry. Like, how did we let these Jewish immigrants have so much money and power? Right. And this idea that Jewish studio heads are making or at least, you know, distributing the movies that people are recognizing to some extent correctly as sort of

how Americans are going to learn how to see themselves and to behave. Yeah. And they're often selling fantasies of sudden wealth and sudden decadence. And so I think that there are basically three scandals that sort of compounded together, led to this situation where the industry itself started to feel like if we don't make it look like we're cleaning up our act, they'll clean up our act for us. And so all of Thomas is first. And then the most famous is the Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle situation. Roscoe Arbuckle was a comedian who was nicknamed Fatty because he was not skinny. He had a blowout party at a hotel in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend. And a woman named Virginia Rape ended up dead. I believe her kidneys burst.

She was also drinking a lot of bootleg alcohol. Perhaps taking a little patent medicine as was the fashion. Correct. But Arbuckle was put on trial three times for her rape and murder. The Hearst newspapers really went after him very hard, creating fabricated stories about what happened in that hotel that night that no reporter could have actually had the facts about because Arbuckle was not telling these stories to anybody and no one else was in the room. So is there any evidence of rape or was that, you know, like what do we know? There was no physical evidence that he raped her. Right. And I mean, the likens I've heard about this is that there was like speculation and outright making stuff up at the time that involved like

that it wasn't just rape, but that it was like very violent in like a truly over the top kind of a way. Yeah. I mean, there were stories published in these newspapers saying that he inserted a bottle into her, but most of the stories suggested that he crushed her with his large body. I don't even know if that's medically possible for, because he was maybe 275, 300 pounds. Yeah, come on. Come on, tabloid writers. You know, I don't think that what was being alleged was medically possible, but it certainly influenced how he was seen in his first two trials and did with hung juries. And then he was put on trial for a third time and he was acquitted. But by then there had been so much negative press that he was not able to work. And

one thing that Will Hayes did, and we'll get to who he was, but one thing he did was he responded to pressure to have all of Arbuckle's movies banned. Oh, wow. And then he lifted the ban when there was pressure from theater owners because they needed comedy content basically. And they wanted to show these old fatty Arbuckle movies. And then the reformers who Will Hayes had, you know, kind of successfully appeased, they came after him when he lifted the ban on fatty Arbuckle movies. And so that in itself is one of the things that leads to the institution of the code. And then there's just one other scandal that I want to talk about, which is the murder of William Desmond Taylor, who was a director. And this is the William Desmond Taylor

murder has never been solved. Really? He was unmarried and he had relationships with several women. And there were also credible rumors that he was bisexual and that he was frequenting gay bars, which, you know, kind of gave that whole situation of his murder this stench of like, he was obviously killed because he was living this depraved sexual life. Of course. Because then, you know, because Barry, your gaze used to be not just a TV trope, but a belief system you couldn't find a way out of very easily. Yeah. When he was killed and these things came out about his personal life, it was kind of knocking down another domino of being able to say that Hollywood, like even its most respectable figures

are actually like living in the gutter. Wow. So in the middle of this wave of scandals, basically, as I was saying, the very powerful men in Hollywood start to understand that they have to at least make it look like they're cleaning up their act because they don't want the government to take over the industry. Huh. And like, what's the fear of the consequences of that, that like, they just have no freedom left at all, basically? They have no freedom left at all, diminished profits, but also, you know, a lot of these guys are Jewish and they're afraid that they will be deposed by anti-Semites. Yeah. Which like, probably would happen, right? Yeah. I think it's a reasonable fear. Yeah. So in 1921, Adolf Zucor and Jesse Lasky, who are the two guys who run Paramount,

they put together a meeting of all the most powerful men in Hollywood at Delmonico's Steakhouse in New York. And Lasky there tells everybody that, you know, we have to make moves to show that we're regulating ourselves because if we don't, the government is going to step in and levy their regulations and we don't want that. It was a very Godfather moment, I have to say. Yeah. I mean, I feel like there could be a whole movie about like one night at Delmonico's. Yes. Oh my God. So, you know, as I was saying in terms of, there's all these state censorship boards and they're making their cuts to the movies themselves. And so there's already this fear that the artistic and narrative integrity and coherence of movies is disappearing. These men believe that

if they put forward their own kind of regulation plan, they'll be able to control this stuff and stop what is happening from happening or getting worse. So Lasky like sits these men down and he presents them with this code of rules that he's come up with, which is 14 points legislating, you know, what they would agree not to show on screen. It included bands on quote, unquote, sensuality, depictions of prostitution, nudity, belly dancing, stories primarily about vice, which might instruct the morally feeble in the methods of committing crime. And most significantly, I think there was a rule against insulting or defaming religion. So, you know, certainly like you would not be able to make any movie that

questioned tenets of Christianity specifically. I'm sure you could make a movie that said, you know, all Jews are crooks, but nobody was doing that. Naturally. So one thing that's really interesting about these two guys from Paramount instigating this meeting and presenting their code of 14 rules that they wanted everybody to adopt is that they didn't actually plan to follow these rules themselves. Because Paramount was the studio of Cecil B. DeMille, who was pretty much known as a guy who made movies about people who had sex. You know, he would eventually become known for these big biblical epics, but almost all the biblical epics have some kind of orgy or harem scene. All right. I know what I'm watching tonight. Yeah. Basically, Paramount was doing something,

you know, almost hilariously devious, because they thought they could convince every other studio to adopt these rules, and then they wouldn't follow them. And then they'd make even more money making these movies that were basically about women having sex for money. What is their plan? They're just like the government just won't notice us over here. It's fine. I mean, I think it was like, let's just cash in while we can. We'll pump out as many last vice movies as we can, and then we'll have our canning already for the long winter. Completely. But so this, I mean, this plan doesn't work completely backfires because somebody leaks the 14 point variety. And so then that it makes, you know, this whole

secret steak meeting public. It's like Appalachian. And so basically, the studios realize that they're not all going to be able to like agree to regulate themselves. And so in order to not have the government censor them, they're going to have to hire their own censor who will kind of do what they want them to do. And they get this idea because two years earlier in 1919, there was the World Series scandal. And so baseball had brought in a commissioner so that they could make it look like they were cleaning up their acts. And so Hollywood was like, basically, we need a baseball commissioner for movies. Wow. Enter Wil Hayes. So Wil Hayes had been the postmaster general under President Harding. The post office, the postal service was kind of a mess

circa 1920, not unlike now. And Hayes had effectively done a very good PR campaigns, you know, showing that he had kind of cleaned up the post offices act and reformed some of their labor practices. This kind of thing made him seem like he would be the right person for the job in Hollywood, because he was able to make it look like he had made a lot of change without actually instituting a lot of expensive change. Oh, perfect. You know, that's really like what the studio moguls were looking for. Like they didn't really want to change. They just wanted the appearance of change so that they could get their critics off their backs. Of course. Another reason why Wil Hayes was the right guy for the job was because he was a practicing Christian. So obviously,

like the Jews could not allow a Jew to regulate them because that would just make the problem worse. The movies would get more Jewish. Even more Jewish. There was a sense that Hayes could commune with the religious groups who were so against Hollywood. The other thing that was really important was that he claimed that he didn't believe in censorship. So he was like, I'm going to step in and I'm going to be the liaison between the people who make and distribute movies and the people who hate Hollywood, like these religious groups and also the government. He was basically like a super lobbyist. You know, he could talk to all these people. Wow. Yeah. And one guy for like the film industry. I feel like that would be a big job.

Well, as we'll see, he eventually starts to have to bring in help. So he goes to work in 1921 and at first everything's great. You know, he's really effective as a publicist for the industry and as a lobbyist. He manages to stall the creation of new state censorship boards and he's able to kind of get the state censorship boards that were the most aggro against the movies to chill out a little bit. And one of his big, you know, sort of strokes of genius is that he invites Hollywood's biggest critics from groups like the Catholic Welfare Council and the DAR. He has them come to sneak previews of movies and meet and greets with stars. And that's kind of like all they need, you know, to stop complaining. Oh, that's, yeah, that makes total sense to me. Yeah.

I think you can detonate a lot of bombs just by letting somebody take a picture with somebody famous. Wow. That's great advice. So this is all pretty effective until this thing I was talking about earlier about Fatty Arbuckle. The movie theater owners really want to be able to do basically repertory screenings of these comedies that Arbuckle had made, which were most of them are not very widely seen even now, but he was a brilliant physical comedian. And so the theater owners want to show them. And this is after Hayes has agreed to put a ban on the movies. He bows to pressure from the theater owners, lifts the ban, and then the religious groups are like, hey, wait a minute, like, what are we doing here? What have we given up just to go to a sneak preview?

And like, why do you think that this scandal, that any of this stuck to Fatty Arbuckle or white or to Roscoe Arbuckle to use his, the name his mother gave him? Because I feel like trying to analyze like why certain beloved stars, male stars have violent or sexual assault related charges that stick to them versus don't is so interesting to me. Like I feel like, you know, in my lifetime, it feels like it's a greater sin to do something embarrassing than to be abusive. He was absolutely othered for his size. There was so much writing during the time of his trials about his monstrous heft or like the massive girth of this child man. And he was really treated like a monster. It's very troubling to think of there being a response to like, well, we always

kind of had it out for this guy. And now we've got a reason to take him down. For a long time, I thought I really understood the Fatty Arbuckle situation. And then I read a book called Room 1219. And Arbuckle was not always a nice guy. He was not exactly a paragon of virtue. It wasn't all great. But as I said, the physical evidence of rape is not there. Wow. Oh, one other thing to know about Will Hayes is that in 1924, his reputation is tarnished because the teapot dome scandal happens. Oh my gosh, I love that we have a tea. I love how much Harding is in this episode. Yeah. So by then Harding is long dead. I think William Harding was in office for about a year. And then he actually died of poisoning on a train. Of course. As was the fashion at the time.

Yeah. So he's gone. But after his death, Congress gets wise to this thing that became known as the teapot dome scandal. Do you know what the teapot dome scandal is? I wish I could tell you. I feel like it connects to I drink your milkshake somehow. I feel like that line might be lifted from testimony there or I could be making that up. It basically has to do with the Harding administration giving these no bid contracts to oil rich lands to specific corporations. And the scandal drags on and on and on. There's a lot of congressional testimony. Will Hayes is brought to testify. And, you know, he kind of reveals himself to be the slimy character that he is by, you know, kind of answering the questions in a way where he, you know, doesn't really say

anything at all. But it's pretty quickly uncovered that he was doing the brokering of these deals. Lovely. I think it's his second or third time on the stand. And they ask him like, why didn't you tell us this stuff like before when you were testifying? Why are you only telling us this stuff now? And he says, well, you guys didn't ask. And that is kind of what he was doing in Hollywood too. You know, it was almost like he was trying to do this kind of misdirect. So that the critics of Hollywood would like look at one thing and stop thinking about another thing. Yeah. The studios start to lose faith and will Hayes. And they realize that like he doesn't really have the standing to punish them if they start like slipping into, you know, this

scandalous content. So Hayes is like scrambling to regain control. And he brings in this guy, Jason Joy, who I love everybody's names, you know, Jason Joy got nobody joy. He was a colonel who had worked in public relations at the War Department. And he and Hayes come up with this new plan where Joy is going to act as a liaison where he's going to go to the studios and ask to see their scripts before they start shooting movies because he claims it's because, you know, there's all these state censorship boards. And we just want to make sure that, you know, you're going to be able to make a movie that's not going to get cut in different ways in different places. But really, this is kind of a way of enacting censorship before the movies get made. And he also puts out a

list called the don'ts and be careful's, which is kind of a new effort to do Paramount's 14 rules again. The don'ts include drug taking, prostitution, miscegenation, which, you know, basically effectively segregates the screen. At that point, you basically can't have white people and black people in the same movie. I feel like this is like an old timey racist word. But I always thought it technically meant procreating, but really also socialization. Yeah, because even though, you know, it's the 1920s, in New York City, white people are going to jazz clubs, for instance, like there's plenty of places where like white people and black people are mingling and socializing, but you wouldn't want to see that in a movie because, you know, what is the end goal of going

to a nightclub? It's to fuck. What if the people in square states start getting ideas? Hollywood has always been saying. Exactly. But, you know, another thing on the don'ts is quote unquote, sex perversion. So that is any kind of gender bending, any kind of suggestion that there could possibly be any kind of romance or sex between people who are not a man and a woman who are married to one another. I think it's really remarkable like how good of a job, you know, the people who imposed the censorship did at turning this into something that felt like real life because I feel like now people look back and media is like one of our most direct roots to history. And we're like, yeah, nobody was gay back then. And it's like, no, everybody was gay. We

just couldn't represent it. Yeah, I mean, I feel like over the past, I would say six to 10 years, you know, there's been more conversation in culture about things like polyamory or, you know, androgyny, being non-binary, being gender fluid in this way where people act like they're inventing the concept. And they are certainly not. All of these things have been part of culture, have been part of people's lives. As long as people have been having relationships and as long as people have been expressing sexual identities, it's just not always depicted in our movies, our novels, our paintings. Right. I'm reminded of the line in the Brady Bunch movie about how weird the Brady's are because they have a bathroom with no toilet. Like, you know, in the Brady Bunch

series, they never showed a toilet. And by the same token, you could like look at depictions of American life, you know, pretty recently and be like, yeah, there were no gay people and there were no toilets. Yeah, completely. Yeah. So obviously, another one of the don'ts is criticism of religion. But only the Jesus ones. You can make fun of everybody else. It's fine. Yeah, certainly there was nobody was upset about making fun of like, quote unquote, snake charmers. Oh, my God. Yeah. So yeah, be careful. Some of the things on that were sedition, surgical operations, and of course, excessive or lustful kissing. Be careful. So the don'ts and be careful. You know, they don't make much of an impact, particularly because after the Wall Street

crash in 1929, the box office plummets and the studios are like, we got to sell sex. Like, it's the one thing that's still selling. Wonderful. I love knowing that. But then a new villain enters our story. Oh, my God. And he is an anti-Semitic Iowa senator named Smith Brekhart. And he proposes that the film industry needs to be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. And as reasoning for this, he talks about how power in Hollywood is consolidated by what he calls quote, bunches of Jews. Naturally. I would expect nothing less from our Iowa senator. Yeah. And so, you know, not everybody was wording their opposition to Hollywood in this way, but there was a sense that the film industry was so immoral because they had so little

Christian influence and positions of power. They basically just had Will Hayes and people had stopped listening to him. You know, it's 1929, 1930. They're adding in sort of more sexy chorus girls and more gangsters and things like this to get people to come back to the movies after the box office crash and protests from the Catholics and the Christians and the anti-Semites are just getting louder and louder as movies are getting more racy again. So Will Hayes is like, well, Jason Joy like didn't do it. So he brings in Martin Quigley, who is the publisher of an Irish Catholic trade magazine. And Martin Quigley calls a priest named Father Daniel Lord and they together write what becomes known as the production code or the Hayes code.

Not one normal name yet have we encountered. I mean, they all kind of sound like Simpsons characters, right? Yes. Oh my gosh. So the production code does include versions of a lot of things that were in the don'ts and be careful, but it's really specifically written to allow Catholics to feel seen. And at the same time, because there are still people who hate Catholics, right? They're like, people are prejudiced against us. So Will, you fix that by being prejudiced against you. It's perfect. Well, it's the code is very calibrated so that like Catholics will feel like they're having, you know, a hat tip to them, but people who hate Catholics won't be pissed off. Wow. Wow. What a country. So the document of the production code is basically

imbued with the philosophy that, you know, the reason for movies to exist is to have a positive moral influence. No, it's to have explosions. It's to have people running and jumping away from explosions, you guys. So now we're in 1930 and the code exists, but they still haven't figured out how to enforce it. And the studios still know that they can make a lot of money by having sexy women in movies, by depicting sort of seamy underbellies of society. And so this is what we call the precode era, where the code exists, but there's no teeth to the enforcement. And so you're getting movies like Babyface, where Barbara Stanwyck like literally has sex to like move from living in a shack to living in a penthouse. Nice. My favorite elements of the precode era are the movies of

Marlena Dietrich and Mae West, who are playing these worldly women who work in nightclubs and are often kind of going on the run. And, you know, not coincidentally, they often have black maids who they treat like human beings. And in some cases, the black maid is her traveling companion, and she treats her like a friend or like an equal. And this is definitely something that the critics of Hollywood do not want to see in movies. And is Morocco in this time period? Yeah, Morocco, I believe, is 1930. And Morocco is interesting. I mean, it's certainly breaking some of the Don'ts and Be Carefuls. Marlena Dietrich performs a nightclub act wearing a tuxedo. As part of the nightclub act, she kind of selects a woman in the audience and kisses her.

The movie suggests in many ways that not only is she sexually active, but so is Gary Cooper, so is everybody else in the movie. And that Marlena Dietrich is, you know, somewhat masculine and that Gary Cooper is somewhat feminine. It is so wonderful that, like, that it's there in the past. And you just have to, I feel like that you cross through a door at a certain point when you're watching much older movies where you stop seeing them as artifacts and you just kind of, for me at least, like at a certain point, it feels like you get closer to experiencing them as people did when they came out. And they're really good. Some of them are really good. Some

of them are really bad, just like movies today. Okay, so the precoder is generally considered to be 1930 to 1934. And, you know, again, I think that some people have this idea that precode movies are just like anything went, you know, like everybody's naked all the time or something. And that's extremely untrue. The movies are very chased by our contemporary standards. But for the time, there were a lot of ways in which they were pushing the boundaries, often implicitly, but sometimes very blatantly and transparently. And the precode era basically starts to end at the end of 1933 when Hayes is like, look, nobody listens to me. I keep trying to do these things. Like just nobody's listening to me. So he hires a guy named Joseph Breen,

who's another Catholic. Again, another Simpson's name. Yeah. And so Breen is finally able to do what nobody had done before him, which is really inspire fear in the hearts of Studio Moguls, that if they didn't clean up their films, the government would step in and do it for them. And so the Hayes office kind of becomes known as the Breen office. You know, they managed to effectively censor Hollywood movies with a few exceptions, you know, with a little bit of kind of slipperiness about what the rules are from 1934 until the end of the 50s. Wow. That's quite a run. It is. And what starts to happen in the 50s is that European film kind of forces American film

to change its standards of what's acceptable. And what happens in 1952 is that there's another Supreme Court decision. It's over the distribution in the U.S. of a short film by Roberto Versilini called The Miracle, which stars Anna Magnani as a devout Catholic who is liquored up by a drifter. She falls asleep next to the guy and then later she realizes she's pregnant and she believes it's immaculate conception. And so Catholics boycotted this movie as sacrilegious and the distributor of the movie sort of fought to not have his movie censored. And it led to a Supreme Court decision, which overturned the decision from 1915, which had declared that movies were commerce and not art. So now movies were considered art and not commerce and thus their content

could not be censored by the state. So David Lynch, in a sense, has his father-in-law to thank for his entire career. Yeah, I guess you could say that. The middle part. Yeah. So I mean, even after this decision, though, the movie industry could apply self-censorship. Basically, all this decision was saying was that movies were protected by the First Amendment. But the movie industry still wanted to play nice with conservatives and religious zealots. And so they continued to try to apply the code to movies. And what the code office, what the green office actually gave movies was a seal of approval. There was a time when almost all movie theaters in America were owned by the studios. And they had all agreed that we will only show movies that have the seal of

approval. And this started to break down because of Howard Hughes. He actually did get a seal of approval for the outlaw, but the office took it away after this fight over the advertising. And so he couldn't release that movie in the movie theaters that were owned by the studios. And he had to self-release it in independent theaters. And when he did that, the movie made a lot of money and made the studios kind of begrudgingly understand that people would go see a movie that didn't have a seal of approval. And basically, the movies kind of enter the modern age slowly. It takes a long time. The major thing that happens during that time is that Joseph Breen retires. And the association, which kind of enforces all this stuff is now known as the MPAA, or the

Motion Picture Association of America. And they hire a new lobbyist to run them called Jack Valenti. He comes to understand in the 60s that movies need to reflect the culture more than they have been. A lot of this is pushed by foreign films, films from Europe that are showing nudity, that are being very frank about sex. You know, these movies, they get shown in America and they become box office hits because people want to see this sexy stuff. So 1968, Jack Valenti develops and promotes the first MPAA rating system. So the original ratings are G, general audience, so anybody can go see those movies. Then M, suggested for mature audiences, parental discretion advised. M, suggested for mature audiences is in between G and R.

It doesn't make a ton of sense. R is restricted at that time in 1968. It meant persons under 16 not admitted unless accompanied by parent or adult guardian. So naturally the most exciting rating as it continues to be. And then, but more restrictive than that was the X, which meant no one under 16 admitted. Oh, it's funny that we, I'm interested in why we got rid of that. Well, we will talk about that. The ride will continue. These are the ratings in 1968. In 1970, they make their first set of changes, which is that all of these regulations that had been for people under 16 were changed to being for people under 17. So now you can't go see an R rated movie if you're 16. It's for people 17 and over. What kind of difference was that supposed to make?

It really seems like hair splitting. Well, I mean, that would be Jack Valenti's argument for sure. But you know, all of these changes that they keep having to make to the rating system are because of parents groups and religious groups again, you know, like they just, he kept saying like, we're sticking firm, we're not going to change a thing, but then he would change everything all the time. And so, you know, people kind of understood that their rating system was subject to criticism and like would change if the criticism was vocal enough. The other big change that happens in 1970 is that M suggested for mature audiences parental discretion advised is change to PG. PG stands for parental guidance, you know, and it is just supposed to be this middle

ground between G, everybody can see it, including your baby to R, which is like, you're not supposed to go if you're a teenager, but if you can get an adult to buy a ticket for you, that's fine. Like, yeah, like from the beginning, this is so muddled. And I always kind of assumed that PG had something to do with G. It was like post general or something, but no, it's just a totally different G doesn't matter. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The G in general, and the G and PG are completely different. The G and the G rating is general audience. The G and the PG rating is guidance, parental guidance. So we have the X rating, which as of 1970 basically says like, if you're under 17, you're not going to see this movie. Whereas there was a real wink, wink, don't enforce the R

policy that was basically like, yeah, we're going to call it R. But like, if somebody comes in and they're 15, don't check their ID, like let them go see the R movie. X was really strictly enforced from the beginning. And it was not supposed to mean hardcore pornography. And so the X rating was designed to allow a higher level of sex, violence and language in Hollywood movies. And to suggest that those things that had previously been censored would not be censored anymore. And so Midnight Cowboy is kind of the big success story of the X rating because it suggests that this rating can apply to an art film that makes a lot of money at the box office, that is fortifying for adults is given awards. It is designated as an adult picture. So nobody

can say that Hollywood is like exporting bad morals to everyone. Right. So it's like, here's the special place where only adults can go when we don't have to worry about contaminating the children. So you have to stop complaining. Yeah, the X rating has like a good run for a couple years. But what ends up happening is the mainstreaming of pornography. And again, like the rating is not designed to designate like porn versus not porn. But that wasn't really a problem until around 1969, when a movie that called itself a documentary called Pornography in Denmark was released in New York City movie theaters. And it could get away with being in movie theaters because it was called a documentary, but it basically was a film of real

unsimulated sex. Well, in the sexiest country. Yeah. And it was a blockbuster. And it suggested that, you know, you could basically show feature length sex films in movie theaters. This leads to the 70s porn boom of which the biggest blockbuster is Deep Throat. And Deep Throat is an X rated movie that plays in regular movie theaters and becomes one of the highest grossing movies of 1972 on a list where the Godfather is number one. Wow. At this time, are there theaters in America where you could be like, well, we could see the Godfather at seven, 15, or if we want to stay for dessert, we can see Deep Throat at eight. Yes. Wow. There's a very famous article in the New York Times that coins the term porno chic. And it's basically about like how it's become

not only socially acceptable, but almost like a social mandate to go see Deep Throat in a movie theater. I mean, you know, Deep Throat, I don't know if you've seen Deep Throat, I it's like, I have. It's more funny than I anticipated. Yeah. It's kind of a comedy. It's silly. It's not very well made. It's definitely not an art film. It's kind of like the Evil Dead. You're like, look at these people who did this for some reason. Right. And the Evil Dead actually got an X rating as well. Oh. Deep Throat is followed by some feature length porn films that have higher artistic aspirations like Behind the Green Door, The Devil and Miss Jones. There is kind of a glory period of artistic feature length pornography that is shown in movie theaters,

but as the porn industry expands, you know, there's also a lot of other types of porn that are being put out there. And, you know, in order to play in commercial movie theaters, you're supposed to submit your movie to the MPAA for a rating. And some of these movies did, Deep Throat did, Devil and Miss Jones did, but a lot of these movies would basically try to get into these movie theaters without submitting to the MPAA, but they'd advertise themselves as being not just X rated, but triple X. Wow. Triple X is not a rating. It is absolutely like a self-applied marketing term. It's a vibe. Yeah. But it confused in the public's mind. It created the impression that X meant porn. Totally. And also like insufficiently sexy porn for that matter.

So once this starts happening, and this is something where Jack Valenti is very pissed off, is very upset that the porn industry is doing this, but you can't copyright a rating. So the MPAA was not able to copyright the X and they couldn't sue for people advertising their movies as triple X. And X starts to become the property of the porn industry and movie studios realize that like if they release movies that are X rated, they will be perceived as porn, they will be boycotted, and then all of this stuff will start happening again. You know, Christians and the religious right coming after them, and that could lead to government censorship. So what ends up happening from about the mid-70s

to the late 80s is that Hollywood studios still want to push the envelope in terms of content, but they want to do it in a way that where their movies can be released as are. And so studios start mandating that like in contracts with directors that they be able to deliver in our rating. The X rated movies that are not pornography that are released are basically called films. So it's early John Waters movies like Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos. It's Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. It's some international films like In the Realm of the Senses, which is like an erotic art movie. And it's a lot of early Pedro Alamedovar films, you know, which are rated X for sexual content. Again, often gay or, you know, polysexual. They're basically being censored

for not being about monogamous sex between a man and a woman. Wow. Arguably, an X rating for a movie like Evil Dead or a John Waters movie, it's almost good publicity, you know, because those movies we're never going to play in a thousand screens nationwide. It becomes this thing that where the audience that those movies are for gets more excited because they think it's going to be more extreme. But Hollywood studios are absolutely afraid to release a movie with an X rating. And again, like they mandate that directors change their movies. And every now and then a studio will kind of stand behind a director when Brian De Palma made Scarface and it was rated X for violence. The studio stood behind him and they filed an appeal with the MPAA and the MPAA changed the

rating R without any cuts. I see because of the chainsaw scene. Yeah. The chainsaw scene, but also just the sort of climactic shootout. Yeah. I don't think it was intended to say like crime is cool, but certainly that's how it's been received. And so there is still this moral element to what the ratings board is doing, you know, in terms of trying to stop Hollywood from putting out messages that it feels are anti-Christian. It's so funny to me how like just how we reveal what we believe is a country or at least what the people running the country believe and, you know, what deserves a restricted rating or not. It is difficult to explain why movies are rated the way they are. Like quotes from Jack Valenti are just endlessly entertaining,

but it was during the time when they were trying to figure out like whether or not they're going to keep the X rating or replace it. And he was like, well, you know, I can't tell you why I'm giving movies an X rating because if I did, then like it would open us up to lawsuits. They keep these things extremely opaque. I mean, there are stories of, I think it's a basic instinct. Paul Verhoeven was, he said that he submitted the movie to the MPA eight or nine times and all they'll tell you when you submit your movie is that there is a pervasive vibe of sexuality or a pervasive theme of sexuality and they won't say specifically what to cut. So Verhoeven was like, you know, they don't tell you what to cut, but like

eventually like you kind of get a sense of what it is. And so with basic instinct, he realized that like they really didn't like how long Michael Douglas's head was in between Sharon Stone's legs. They really didn't like the sense that he was spending a lot of time going down on her. God forbid that. And I mean, you know, this is a movie where you watch like a full screen rape. It doesn't cut away. It's fully lit. But no, you should never go down on a woman. We shouldn't set an example. So basic instinct is from the NC 17 era. So I want to back up because obviously we have to talk about how X got changed to NC 17. But before that, we should talk about the creation of the PG 13, which we alluded to at the beginning,

which happens in 1984. And the problem was that, you know, there was nothing in between the PG and the R. So some movies that got rated PG were like Jaws and The Elephant Man and Poltergeist and Ghostbusters, because these are movies where, you know, everybody kind of understands that like kids want to go see these movies. And it's kind of important, like commercially for them to but then at the same time, some parents take their kids to see these movies and they're like, you know, why is my child watching Dan Ackroyd get a blowjob from a ghost? It's always a great question to ask. Also, like imagine taking your seven year old to see Jaws. Like you don't know, you don't live in a universe with Jaws. You're like, it's about a shark.

That's Steven Spielberg. He does some whimsical stuff. My God. Yeah. And it is two Spielberg movies that inspire the change. So in the summer of 1984, he releases Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, which he directed and Gremlins, which he produced, both of which were PG rated and were criticized for being too violent. And the violence in Temple of Doom is actually probably George Lucas' fault because he was coming up with the story while he was getting divorced. And like his neglected wife had cheated on him. So he came up with the image of like a man's beating heart being ripped out of his chest. The fact that that awful movie came directly out of George Lucas' messy divorce just somehow makes so much sense to me. Yeah. So that was absolutely one

of the most criticized images of that movie. I mean, and again, they were like, yeah, it's racist, but who cares? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So there's all this criticism of these two Spielberg movies. And so Spielberg, you know, doesn't like anybody to think he's not a nice guy. And so he actually goes to Jack Valentin as like, you know, maybe we should do something, maybe we should have an in-between rating. And of course, Jack Valentin is like, no, the system's working fine. You know, it's a little murky as to how he changes his mind, but of course, he always changes his mind. Spielberg has taken credit for talking Valentin into creating what became the PG-13 rating. You know, his two movies were released in June

and July of 1984. The first PG-13 movie becomes John Milius' Red Dawn, which was released in August 1984. Which really needed it. The actual full description of what PG-13 means is, quote, parents strongly cautioned some material maybe inappropriate for children under 13. So there's no G word in that. Right. It should be a P.S.C. 13, parents strongly cautioned. I mean, the fact that it's so hard to nail down really speaks to just, to some degree, the futility of ever having the right categories, truly. Yeah. And also making it age-based. And, you know, this idea that like, I mean, I do remember a couple times in the 90s getting my ID checked, going into an R-rated movie. But there is such

like a wink-wink thing of, you know, everybody knew that you could buy a ticket for a PG movie and go into the movie theater and not get stopped. So we're entering the home stretch. Like the last big thing to talk about is the creation of the NC-17. So basically, we talked about the influence of European films in the 60s on Hollywood. The same thing starts to happen at the end of the 80s, where the MPAA is starting to look out of touch, because in Europe and in England, there is an embrace of art films that are a little bit more risque, that are not given the most restrictive ratings in those places, but they are given X ratings in the U.S. So a big example of this is the Peter Greenaway film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, which did not have

England's version of an X rating and was like a huge box office hit in England. But then it came out in the U.S. X rating, you know, and there's a huge limit to how much business and X-rated film could do, because a lot of theater change simply would not book them. You couldn't advertise them in most newspapers. You couldn't get TV advertising for them. And so it was the financial kiss of death. And so this movie specifically starts a conversation about like, do we need to change things? One of the reasons why it does is because it was distributed in the U.S. by Harvey Weinstein, who was looking to, you know, make more money and to get more publicity in general. But the big thing that happens is that Wild at Heart, the David Lynch film, wins the palm door

it can. This is the most prestigious prize at the most prestigious film festival in the world, and it's basically saying this is the most important movie of the year. But it won the prize it can before the MPAA had given it a rating. And Lynch and the studio had been led to believe that it was absolutely going to get an X. And so they were talking, you know, at their press conference and can being like, you know, we don't know what it says that this movie is given the top prize of any film in the world, but it's going to have to be shown in an adulterated version in America. You know, the X was always supposed to be for art movies. It obviously got co-opted by the porn industry. It's not effective anymore. How do we allow filmmakers to make art movies?

So Harvey Weinstein is like, you know, let me get in on this. And so he sues the MPAA on behalf of Pedro Almadovar because they've given an X rating to time me up, time me down. Once the judge hears the case, he throws the suit out almost immediately because he's like, he says, you know, it is obvious that the studios only bringing this lawsuit for publicity. But this becomes a wake up call for Jack Valenti because, you know, if he's afraid of anything, it's lawsuits. And, you know, the big fear because it's happened before is that there could be a lawsuit that could go to the Supreme Court and that could seriously change the picture of censorship in America and could really cripple the film industry. So he agrees to replace the X rating

with the NC 17, which stands for no children under 17. Naturally. And of course, because when you see NC, you think no children. You do. Yeah. You're like my favorite mountain goat song. So the first kind of test for this rating is the Philip Kaufman film, Henry and June, which is about Henry Miller and Anais Nen in Paris in the 1920s. So Philip Kaufman's previous movie was The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was an R rated film but was very sexy, you know, and was really celebrated as like, this is the kind of movie we want to see of a movie for adults about adults having sex that is tasteful and beautiful and meaningful. Kaufman didn't think that Henry and June was going to get an X rating or an NC 17 rating. He kind of put it

together based on the guidelines that had gotten an R rating for his last movie. The MPAA said that they were going to give the most restrictive rating to this movie due to a number of scenes of women, you know, having sort of sexual situations with one another and one shot of a woman being raped by an octopus on a postcard. Oh. So Henry and June is like, you know, a lot of people don't find it nearly as sexy as Unbearable Lightness of Being and it's not as good of a movie, but it's given this most restrictive rating and it becomes the first movie released in the U.S. with an NC 17. And it just kind of dies at the box office mostly because the reviews are like, we were expecting something sexier and this movie is kind of boring. There are actual film reviews that say

you know, this is a tease. Why isn't Uma Thurman naked in this movie? So people are just kind of disappointed and then Hollywood gets the message that because this one movie, which was not very good, doesn't do well at the box office, Hollywood gets the message that the NC 17 is the commercial kiss of death. Henry and June is 1990. No studio gives a wide release to an NC 17 movie until Showgirls in 1995. And Showgirls becomes the NC 17 movie given the widest release of all time. It was released on 1000 screens. At that time, studio films were opening on 2000 screens or more. It only makes $20 million at the U.S. box office on a $45 million budget. And that would be the last wide release for an NC 17 movie to this day.

So it just like it never really took off, it seems like. Well, again, it's like Valenti, I think really fumbled the rollout. And then, you know, they get criticized for hypocrisy because movies like basic instinct, which is much more explicit than Henry and June, you know, a few frames here, a few frames there, it gets released as an R and it's a massive hit. And so what incentive do studios have to actually push the envelope, you know, make a stand for freedom of expression by releasing an NC 17 movie when they can make a lot more money releasing an R rated movie. Right. And it feels like very consistently this whole story, there's been this thing of like, we can't let the government come control our movies. So we

have to control our movies and just agree to the system of extremely arbitrary and hard to understand rules. Yeah. And, you know, it's some of the same things that were being controlled or suppressed in 1915 and 1924 and 1930 are the same things. Now, the vast majority of American movies that have been rated NC 17 have earned that rating for gay sex, sex work, non procreative or like quote unquote, aberrant sex. I mean, an example is Requiem for a Dream, right, where there is grotesque drug use imagery, but it got its rating for the ass to ass scene. So like, two women having sex work sex, basically. So where are we today? Like, what do you see? Where are we? What's possible and what remains impossible? I long for movies about sex that depict sex in a realistic or

beautiful way. I also just long for movies about relationships, you know, I think that Hollywood has kind of ceded that territory to television. One of the movies that I'm covering in erotic 90s, then upcoming season on my podcast is Pretty Woman. And one of the things that becomes really evident watching that movie today is that, you know, it's about two adults trying to have a relationship. When you watch that movie in 2022, you're sort of forced to think like, what was the most recent movie that was released that I saw that was really at the end of the day, just about two adults trying to have a relationship. Right. It feels like we've ended up in an era where Hollywood believes that the only way to make a profit worth writing home about is by making a movie about people who

are too busy to have a relationship because the universe is going to explode again. Yeah. And even there's a different class of movies being made specifically for Oscar attention, but like romance is not part of those movies at least in recent years. I think a lot of people now are missing the romantic comedy, but the romantic comedy maybe went away because there was nowhere else it could go unless we started breaking down some of these barriers about things like interracial relationships, gay relationships. You know, we've just had the release of a movie called Bros, which didn't do very well. And you know, there's a lot of argument as to why. I mean, I don't know that the issue is that audiences weren't ready for it. I mean, maybe some of the

issue was just the way that it was marketed as like an anomaly. Right. And I feel like audiences were like so beyond ready for it that by the time it actually came out, like I remember seeing a trailer for that. And I was like, A, why aren't you calling this somebody to love if that phrase gets repeated 75 times in the trailer? And B, to me looking on at the whole situation, it feels a little bit patronizing in a way that's pretty obvious where it's like, here, you finally got a romantic comedy. Aren't you happy? You know, I think that something that makes me really interested in these movies of the 80s and 90s that I've been studying recently is that sometimes it feels like these movies are kind of getting to something in the culture before the culture does. And I think

the opposite is happening now. Like as you said, that we were so ready for a gay rom-com that it's almost superfluous when it happens. I felt the same way about the movie Promising Young Woman, which was like, I felt like the cultural conversation about date rape and rape culture had moved so far beyond what that movie was saying. That by the time the movie comes out, it's like it's already outdated. Yeah. And then it feels like the movies that now people feel kind of excited about and feel like they said something before the culture had totally figured it out, it feels like sometimes or maybe often those are movies that don't do well when they first come out. Like Jennifer's body really comes to mind as a movie that's gradually become beloved, but just like didn't

find the audience it needed at the time. Yeah. You could say Showgirls is the same, I think. Yeah. So gosh, I mean, I'm tempted to ask what the future is, but I feel like it might just be more of the same. Like what do you want? What should be happening in Karina Longworth's Hollywood? That's what I want to know. One of the problems in Hollywood right now is that there's like Zendaya and then there's, you know, Jennifer Aniston and there's kind of nobody in between. Like there are stars who are 25 and there are stars who are 50 and then like it's almost there's a lost generation, like there aren't like sort of big exciting stars who are 35 or 40. And so I think that's one of the reasons why we're losing something in terms of movies about adults just like trying to love each

other or trying to have sex with each other or the actual problems that you face like when you've been in a marriage for a long time and somebody else like walks into your life. And I would love for that to come back. I mean, for me, that's even more important than movies that are sexually explicit is movies that try to have some kind of emotional depth and whether people want to talk about it or not. And I, because I think now there's sort of a new generation that really believes that sex should not be visually depicted and that there's just too much of a, it's too thorny, there's too many issues with the gays and consent and all of that. The G-A-Z-E to be clear. So I want to be respectful of people who feel that way because I mean, I'm like a,

you know, I'm an autonomy absolutist. I don't think anybody should be forced to watch anything that they don't want to watch. But I think that it's a truism that the way that we understand our lives and the world we live in is by seeing it reflected back to us through our, you know, whether it's a novel or a painting or a movie or, you know, whatever, whatever the medium of the moment is, I think that we need that. And I don't think that the answer for how do you live in a world in which like there is sexual harassment and sexual inequality and, you know, horrible abuse, I don't think the answer is, well, let's never depict it. I think you have to tell these stories in order to, first of all, to document that these things are happening in the world,

but also to try to understand them. And where else can people find you? What are you working on that you're excited about? And what have you been, what have you been up to with your wonderful brain? So my big thing is my podcast, you must remember this, which I've been doing since 2014, and is about 20th century Hollywood. The most recent season was called Erotic 80s. And it's basically each episode is about one year of the 80s and one or two films or stars or directors from that time that feel emblematic of that year and where the culture was. I'm working on a season called Erotic 90s, which is going to have a slightly different format. But we're looking to launch that in March 2023. You can follow the podcast at remember this pod on Twitter or Instagram,

and I'm on those places at Karina Longworth. Thank you again so much to Karina Longworth for joining us. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing help. I was visiting Miranda while she was editing this episode and I sat next to her while she edited my raucous laugh. And yeah, it does feel weird, but it's great. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing the show and making all things possible, as always. Thank you so much to you. We'll see you in two weeks. you