Hollywood and the Production Code Administration

Author(s):  
James Fenwick
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabiano Pecorelli ◽  
Fabio Palomba ◽  
Andrea De Lucia

AbstractTesting represents a crucial activity to ensure software quality. Recent studies have shown that test-related factors (e.g., code coverage) can be reliable predictors of software code quality, as measured by post-release defects. While these studies provided initial compelling evidence on the relation between tests and post-release defects, they considered different test-related factors separately: as a consequence, there is still a lack of knowledge of whether these factors are still good predictors when considering all together. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive case study on how test-related factors relate to production code quality in Apache systems. We first investigated how the presence of tests relates to post-release defects; then, we analyzed the role played by the test-related factors previously shown as significantly related to post-release defects. The key findings of the study show that, when controlling for other metrics (e.g., size of the production class), test-related factors have a limited connection to post-release defects.


2021 ◽  
pp. 186-213
Author(s):  
David Lugowski

This chapter explores a queer all-male dance lesson for partnered sailors in the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet (1936), using archival research (scripts, Production Code Administration records) and comparative textual and contextual analysis. It raises the queerness of Rogers and Astaire before exploring two intersecting axes. The association of sailors with queer behavior and effeminate “pansies” occurs in military scandals, paintings, and Depression-era Hollywood films, including Sailor’s Luck and Son of a Sailor (both 1933). The queerness of male same-sex dancing arises in ballet and in film, including Suicide Fleet (1931). Various institutions criticized or attempted to censor such representations, but they also found acceptance. The US Navy, for example, wanted the comical dance lesson removed from Fleet; instead, it was only rewritten, suggesting the inability to remove queerness from culture and its essential role in mass entertainment.


2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
Wang Xiaofei

AbstractHistorian John Dower titles his book War Without Mercy. Similarly, wartime Hollywood showed no mercy when depicting Japanese. Negative portrayals were often based on actual atrocities, but it was racism to demonize an entire people and culture. The story of how politics in Hollywood and Washington, the conduct of war, and international relations shaped and changed film racism involves a much more complex approach than has been practiced to date. Using archives of film studios, the Production Code Administration (PCA), and governmental agencies such as the Office of War Information (OWI), this article traces the power struggle among them and a new racism which emerged after 1941. Filmmakers now projected favorable images of Chinese to distinguish their new allies from the Japanese enemy. OWI struggled to promote a liberal agenda which saw the enemy as world fascism, not the Japanese people. The article analyzes more than two dozen films to trace the complications in three types of wartime screen racism: (1) "Verbal racism," such as derogating words like "Jap." (2) "Physical racism," which dramatized and ridiculed physical characteristics of Japanese people. (3) "Psychological racism," which saw all Japanese people as cruel and treacherous.


Author(s):  
Simone Romano ◽  
Davide Davide Fucci ◽  
Giuseppe Scanniello ◽  
Burak Turhan ◽  
Natalia Juristo

Background: Test-driven development (TDD) is an iterative software development technique where unit-tests are defined before production code. Previous studies fail to analyze the values, beliefs, and assumptions that inform and shape TDD. Aim: We designed and conducted a qualitative study to understand the values, beliefs, and assumptions of TDD. In particular, we sought to understand how novice and professional software developers, arranged in pairs (a driver and a pointer), perceive and apply TDD. Method: 14 novice software developers, i.e., graduate students in Computer Science at the University of Basilicata, and six professional software developers with work one to 10 years work experience participated in our ethnographically-informed study. We asked the participants to implement a new feature for an existing software written in Java. We immersed ourselves in the context of the study, and collected data by means of contemporaneous field notes, audio recordings, and other artifacts. Results: A number of insights emerge from our analysis of the collected data, the main ones being: (i) refactoring (one of the phases of TDD) is not performed as often as the process requires and it is considered less important than other phases, (ii) the most important phase is implementation, (iii) unit tests for unimplemented functionalities or behaviors are almost never up-to-date, (iv) participants first build a sort of mental model of the source code to be implemented and only then write test cases on the basis of this model; and (v) apart from minor differences, professional developers and students applied TDD in a similar fashion. Conclusions: Developers write quick-and-dirty production code to pass the tests and ignore refactoring.


Author(s):  
Will Glass

The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 banned homosexuality from the screen. This paper uses two films as a case study of the Code's impact on Hollywood's depiction of homosexuality. Both These Three (1936) and The Children's Hour (1961) were adaptations of Lillian Hellman's play in which two single female teachers have their lives ruined by a lie that the women were lesbians. With the first the Code's impact was pervasive. The PCA dictated that the accusations of lesbianism be omitted. By the 1960s, the PCA was relaxing its ban so a film could be made that retained the play's lesbian content. This paper argues that the Production Code was Hollywood's means of enforcing heterosexuality and that, even in the era when the Code's influence was waning, the necessity of maintaining heterosexuality as society's norm still governed how movies (mis)represented the lives of queer people.


Author(s):  
Ana Salzberg

Irving Thalberg was not just a critically important producer during Hollywood’s Golden age, but also an innovative theorist of studio-era filmmaking. Drawing on archival sources, this is the first book to explore Thalberg’s insights into casting, editing, story composition and the importance of the mass audience from a theoretical perspective. The book argues that Thalberg’s views represent a unified conceptual understanding of production – one that is still significant in the modern day. It examines Thalberg’s impact on film-historical turning points, including the transition from silent to sound cinema and the development of the Production Code, and features in-depth analyses of his productions at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1924 to 1936. Indeed, each chapter offers a reading of Thalberg’s films through his own theoretical lens, thus highlighting his insights into production and introducing new ways of considering his classic pictures, including The Big Parade (1925), The Broadway Melody (1929) and Romeo and Juliet (1936). The work concludes by assessing his resonance in popular culture, tracing the mythology of Thalberg as it evolved after his death in 1936.


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