![“The watershed that demonstrated the Legion [of Decency]’s new commitment to mature works and forced the industry to abandon the [Production] Code was the most expensive non-spectacle film of its time, Warner Brothers’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With the appropriately brash ‘screw you,’ Martha and George not only ushered in Nick and Honey but dispatched a whole era of film censorship.”
“The necessary changes included, among other things, the elimination of over twenty ‘goddamns,’ seven ‘bastards,’ five ‘sons-of-a-bitch,’ and assorted anatomical phrases such as ‘right ball,’ ‘monkey nipples,’ and ‘ass.’ The [Warner Bros.] studio was confident that [Edward] ‘Albee is sufficiently inventive and creative to substitute potent and pungent dialogue that could prove highly effective, even though possibly reducing somewhat the ‘shock’ impact of this highly regarded play.’ “
Leonard J. Leff (1980). A test of American censorship: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Cinema Journal, 19(2), 41–45.
Leff cites Warner executive Steve Trillig in a letter to Albee’s agent regarding the necessary changes needed to the screenplay for it to pass the Production Code. The 1963 letter was found among 26 boxes of uncatalogued materials pertinent to Virginia Woolf in the Ernest Lehman Collection, Hoblitzelle Theatre Arts Library, Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
Goddamn, I love great scholarly research! —Visual Turn](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lijwwsmEY91qzowgeo1_500.jpg)
“The watershed that demonstrated the Legion [of Decency]’s new commitment to mature works and forced the industry to abandon the [Production] Code was the most expensive non-spectacle film of its time, Warner Brothers’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With the appropriately brash ‘screw you,’ Martha and George not only ushered in Nick and Honey but dispatched a whole era of film censorship.”
“The necessary changes included, among other things, the elimination of over twenty ‘goddamns,’ seven ‘bastards,’ five ‘sons-of-a-bitch,’ and assorted anatomical phrases such as ‘right ball,’ ‘monkey nipples,’ and ‘ass.’ The [Warner Bros.] studio was confident that [Edward] ‘Albee is sufficiently inventive and creative to substitute potent and pungent dialogue that could prove highly effective, even though possibly reducing somewhat the ‘shock’ impact of this highly regarded play.’ “
Leonard J. Leff (1980). A test of American censorship: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Cinema Journal, 19(2), 41–45.
Leff cites Warner executive Steve Trillig in a letter to Albee’s agent regarding the necessary changes needed to the screenplay for it to pass the Production Code. The 1963 letter was found among 26 boxes of uncatalogued materials pertinent to Virginia Woolf in the Ernest Lehman Collection, Hoblitzelle Theatre Arts Library, Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
Goddamn, I love great scholarly research!
—Visual Turn
Source: jstor.org
OBO: The Anti-Wikipedia?
Oxford Bibliographies Online is a noble effort to create a collection of resources in a range of academic fields. At first glance my heart raced with the anticipated thrill of access to extensive bibliographies vetted by scholars (you have to be a real academic geek to get excited about bibliographies). The new project has begun with resources for Classics, Criminology, Islamic Studies, and Social Work, with plans to add 50 more.
OBO (rhymes with “oboe”?) is positioning itself as curated index of scholarly resources organized by discipline. It will be a subscription service sold to academic and public libraries. Undoubtedly it will be a worthwhile resource to scholarly information. As Inside Higher Ed said,
“Think of it as Oprah’s book club for scholars.”
Within the scholarly community, peer-reviewed journals serve an important quality control function on the publication of research. There are solid reasons for knowledge to be produced and distributed this way. Yet the gatekeeping function also has its limitations, with knowledge determined by a narrow group of disciplinary experts, who then circulate it among the narrow group of their peers. It is an expert system, but a closed one.
The movement toward open access to knowledge — from Wikipedia, to open access scholarly journals, to the web itself in the broadest sense — proposes a world where information is freely accessible and publishable by anyone. This assumes that a gatekeeping function only impedes the flow of knowledge, and that the “marketplace of ideas” will sort out the “truth.” Just as we have seen the risks of an unregulated economic marketplace, the unfettered marketplace of ideas comes with its own risks. Misinformation about evolution or climate change are frequently cited as examples of popular acceptance of such inaccurate ideas.
OBO will be viewed by some as assuring access to high-quality scholarship, and by others as continuing to maintain academia’s monopoly on what ideas are considered authoritative. I guess I would be surprised to find Oxford leading the charge for open access to scholarship, but I find myself disappointed at what appears to be business as usual in the academy.
