{"id":867,"date":"2011-03-30T14:28:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-30T21:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/03\/elizabeth-taylors-vs-the-hayes-code.html"},"modified":"2011-03-30T14:28:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-30T21:28:00","slug":"elizabeth-taylors-vs-the-hayes-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/03\/elizabeth-taylors-vs-the-hayes-code.html","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Taylor’s vs. The Hayes Code"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE writer M.G. Lord, a longtime friend of The Misread City, has a wonderful, counter-intuitive <\/span>piece<\/span><\/a> on Elizabeth Taylor, especially the films Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Butterfield 8, in the brand-new issue of The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>. For your humble blogger — who belongs to a generation for whom Taylor was best-known for big hair and serial divorces — the piece was an eye opener.<\/span>

<\/span>
<\/a><\/span>The story begin this way:<\/span>

<\/span><\/p>\n

On June 10, 1966,\u00a0<\/i><\/span>Life<\/span><\/em>\u00a0magazine did one of its many cover stories on\u00a0<\/i><\/span>Elizabeth Taylor<\/i><\/span><\/strong>. Far from her usual smoldering beauty, she looked puffy, haggard, decades older than her 34 years. \u201cLiz in a Shocker,\u201d the headline proclaimed. \u201cHer movie shatters the rules of censorship.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
The movie, of course, was\u00a0<\/i><\/span>Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?<\/span><\/em>\u00a0\u2014 a scorching drama adapted from Edward Albee\u2019s acclaimed Broadway play. Its frank, gritty language brazenly violated the Production Code, rigid guidelines that had dictated the content of American movies since 1934.\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/em><\/span>
<\/span>Lord, of couse, is the author of the cultural study Forever Barbie<\/i>, the Cold War memoir Astro Turf<\/i>, and the upcoming\u00a0How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice. <\/em>(She’s also a die-hard, if not uncritical, fan of sf writer Robert Heinlein.)<\/span><\/div>\n

This week I’m working as a guest editor at the Reporter and I’m proud to have had a (very) small role in the latest issue. Despite my involvement, there’s a lot of good stuff — smart review of The Kennedys, which sounds like a disaster, sharp profile of new boss of Lifetime \u00a0— in there this week.<\/span>

<\/span>
And just up on the site today, Friday, a smart story<\/a> on the rise of the Telenovela that I helped edit.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE writer M.G. Lord, a longtime friend of The Misread City, has a wonderful, counter-intuitive piece on Elizabeth Taylor, especially the films Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Butterfield 8, in the brand-new issue of The Hollywood Reporter. For your humble blogger — who belongs to a generation for whom Taylor was best-known for big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[149,76,148,29],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-867","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-feminism","7":"category-film","8":"category-hollywood-reporter","9":"category-west-coast","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}