Category: reason

Court Thwarts Trump’s Attempt To Exclude Undocumented Immigrants From Census

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A federal court has thwarted an executive order that said undocumented immigrants should not be counted in the 2020 Census. In a Thursday ruling, the court noted that President Donald Trump’s July 21 order runs contrary to America’s historical method of tallying an area’s population—a count that matters for purposes of determining how many seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that area gets. The judges ordered the secretary of commerce not to enact the order.

“Throughout the Nation’s history, the figures used to determine the apportionment of Congress—in the language of the current statutes, the ‘total population’ and the ‘whole number of persons’ in each State—have included every person residing in the United States at the time of the census, whether citizen or non-citizen and whether living here with legal status or without,” states the decision, penned by a three-judge panel from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“We declare the Presidential Memorandum to be an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to the President by statute,” the judges concluded.

The case—New York Immigration Coalition v. Trump—was brought by the national American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas, and Arnold & Porter on behalf of the New York Immigration Coalition, Make the Road New York, CASA, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the ADC Research Institute, and FIEL Houston.

“The constitutional mandate is clear—every person counts in the census,” said Dale Ho, who directs the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, in a statement. “Undocumented immigrants are people—and nothing President Trump does or says changes that fact.”

“The court order bars work by the Census Bureau that would allow it to produce a separate count excluding people in the U.S. illegally,” notes The Wall Street Journal:

There isn’t a citizenship question on the census, after the Supreme Court last year blocked the president’s plan to add one. To carry out the president’s latest order, the bureau had planned to match census responses with citizenship-verified records from state and federal agencies to estimate how many people in each state weren’t legal residents.

This, the judges ruled, would violate the law that requires Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who supervises the bureau, to send a single set of numbers—a “tabulation of total population by States”—to the president. The memo also violated the law because “so long as they reside in the United States, illegal aliens qualify as ‘persons in’ a ‘State’ as Congress used those words,” the panel ruled.

The Trump administration can still appeal the decision. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that “around a half dozen lawsuits around the U.S. were filed by states, cities, immigrant advocates and civil rights groups challenging its legality and constitutionality” of Trump’s July 21 order. “The New York case is the first to get a ruling, but there are other issues the New York judges didn’t address that could be addressed in the other court cases.”

QUICK HITS

• “A veteran Raleigh police detective is off the job while the department and the Wake County District Attorney investigate more than a dozen fraudulent drug cases,” reports a local ABC affiliate. “Some people sat in jail for weeks and months based on evidence that turned out to be fake.”

• Unprecedented wildfires are pummeling Oregon, prompting hundreds of thousands of residents to flee.

• A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study suggests restaurant diners are more likely than those not dining out right now to catch COVID-19. The study has spread a lot of fear about restaurants being coronavirus hotspots, but it’s important to remember that the study merely showed a correlation, not that folks are necessarily picking up the virus while dining out:

• “The American response to COVID is best characterized as…eccentric,” writes Daniel M. Rothschild, executive director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

• Yesterday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court told state election officials “that they can’t mail out absentee ballots until the court decides whether to add the Green Party’s presidential ticket to the ballot,” reports CNN. The ruling comes just a week before “the September 17 deadline for when the 1,850 municipal clerks need to mail out absentee ballots to Wisconsin voters who asked for one is set in state law.”

• Protecting and serving:

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9/11/2001 in Staten Island, New York

I post this essay every year in honor of September 11th, 2001 (see 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019).

Every generation has a defining moment. For my generation, it was 9/11/2001.

Here are my memories of 9/11/2001. It was a Tuesday.

I was a Senior at Staten Island Technical High School, which is about 20 miles from ground zero. We were about 1 week into the school year. I was sitting in Ms. Endriss’s 2nd Period A.P. Political Science class. We were going over some NYC Public School discipline policy, and discussing what kinds of weapons were forbidden in schools (brass knuckles were a no-no). A student walked into the classroom late. He had heard a rumor that a Cessna airplane had hit the World Trade Center. A girl in my class exclaimed that her father worked in the World Trade Center. I could see the look of fear in her eyes, even though none of us had any clue what was going on. She wanted to call her dad. I was the only student in the class with a cell phone, which I promptly gave her. The call did not go through–he worked on one of the upper floors of the tower, and passed away.

We finished second period, apprehensively. I logged onto a computer, and attempted to check the news. I recall one friend told me to check MTV.com for news. At that point, the reports were unclear, and no one knew what was going on. We proceeded to 3rd period A.P. Calculus with Mr. Curry. At that point, someone told us that it was not a Cessna, but in fact a passenger jet. We were all getting nervous, and didn’t quite know what was going on. Later in class, a student came into the class and said a second plane had crashed into the other tower. We also heard that there was an explosion at the Pentagon. At that point, we knew it was not an accident.

I remember leaving the class (something I never did) and walked up to the library where I knew there was a T.V. Just as I arrived in the library, I saw the first tower collapse. I watched it live. I was stunned and could not believe what was happening before my eyes. I grabbed my cellphone to call home, and almost immediately after the tower collapsed, I lost all service. I was not able to call my mom in Staten Island, though I could call my dad who was working in Long Island. Long distance calls seemed to work, but local calls were not working. I remember my dad told me that this was a life-changing event, and he had no idea what would happen. I heard some rumors on TV that there were 15 planes that were hijacked, and unaccounted for in the skies.

By lunch time, the school guidance counselor set up a conference room where students could go to talk. I remember seeing student after student who had a family member or friend who worked in the World Trade Center or in Manhattan. A large number of firefighters and police officers reside in Staten Island. Tragically, many of the emergency responders who perished were from Staten Island. What could we even tell those students?

After that, the day become a blur. I remember hearing that the second tower had collapsed, though I did not see it.  I remember watching the entire United States Congress sing God Bless America on the steps of the Capitol. I had never been so afraid in my life. Later that night, I took a bus home. The New York City public buses were still running, and I remember the driver was not collecting fares.  On the bus, people were talking about the imminent war (against whom,  no one knew) and the imminent draft. Some were saying that students were exempt from the draft.

The next morning, September 12, 2001, I woke up and smelled this horrible smell. The air had this pungent odor, that reminded me of burned flesh at a BBQ. I went to school that morning, and attendance was low. In all of my classes, we were talking about war. I asked whether the US would need to use nuclear weapons. My teacher explained that carpet bombing–a phrase I had never heard of–could wreak plenty of damage in Afghanistan. Later that week students began making sandwiches for the relief workers, and collecting goods to donate to the relief effort.

From Staten Island, I could see the smoldering Ground Zero. It was surreal. The skyline looked so very empty. To this day, whenever I look at the Skyline, a sight I had seen thousands of times, I have the most bizarre feeling. Additionally, whenever we saw an airplane fly overhead, we all freaked out. This lasted for months.

For days, weeks, and months after 9/11, people in Staten Island were waiting for their loved ones to come home. Many patients were alive, but were so badly burned that they could not be identified. People prayed that these unnamed patients would soon come home. One woman whose husband was a firefighter waited outside her home every single night for months. She eventually put a candle in her window every night. Later, she put a memorial lamp in her window. He never came home. Others were simply waiting for remains of their loved ones to be returned. Many were never identified.

I ordered a gas mask from eBay, which I kept in my car, fearing a biological weapon attack on New York City. I remember I tried it on once and I almost suffocated. I wanted to order some Cipro for an anthrax attack, but I could not locate any.

It is hard to encapsulate what a New Yorker went through on 9/11. Thinking back on that day, when I was just 17 years old, I realized that I had to grow up awfully quick. It was a new world we were living in.

Never forget. Ever.

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Court Thwarts Trump’s Attempt To Exclude Undocumented Immigrants From Census

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A federal court has thwarted an executive order that said undocumented immigrants should not be counted in the 2020 Census. In a Thursday ruling, the court noted that President Donald Trump’s July 21 order runs contrary to America’s historical method of tallying an area’s population—a count that matters for purposes of determining how many seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that area gets. The judges ordered the secretary of commerce not to enact the order.

“Throughout the Nation’s history, the figures used to determine the apportionment of Congress—in the language of the current statutes, the ‘total population’ and the ‘whole number of persons’ in each State—have included every person residing in the United States at the time of the census, whether citizen or non-citizen and whether living here with legal status or without,” states the decision, penned by a three-judge panel from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“We declare the Presidential Memorandum to be an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to the President by statute,” the judges concluded.

The case—New York Immigration Coalition v. Trump—was brought by the national American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas, and Arnold & Porter on behalf of the New York Immigration Coalition, Make the Road New York, CASA, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the ADC Research Institute, and FIEL Houston.

“The constitutional mandate is clear—every person counts in the census,” said Dale Ho, who directs the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, in a statement. “Undocumented immigrants are people—and nothing President Trump does or says changes that fact.”

“The court order bars work by the Census Bureau that would allow it to produce a separate count excluding people in the U.S. illegally,” notes The Wall Street Journal:

There isn’t a citizenship question on the census, after the Supreme Court last year blocked the president’s plan to add one. To carry out the president’s latest order, the bureau had planned to match census responses with citizenship-verified records from state and federal agencies to estimate how many people in each state weren’t legal residents.

This, the judges ruled, would violate the law that requires Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who supervises the bureau, to send a single set of numbers—a “tabulation of total population by States”—to the president. The memo also violated the law because “so long as they reside in the United States, illegal aliens qualify as ‘persons in’ a ‘State’ as Congress used those words,” the panel ruled.

The Trump administration can still appeal the decision. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that “around a half dozen lawsuits around the U.S. were filed by states, cities, immigrant advocates and civil rights groups challenging its legality and constitutionality” of Trump’s July 21 order. “The New York case is the first to get a ruling, but there are other issues the New York judges didn’t address that could be addressed in the other court cases.”

QUICK HITS

• “A veteran Raleigh police detective is off the job while the department and the Wake County District Attorney investigate more than a dozen fraudulent drug cases,” reports a local ABC affiliate. “Some people sat in jail for weeks and months based on evidence that turned out to be fake.”

• Unprecedented wildfires are pummeling Oregon, prompting hundreds of thousands of residents to flee.

• A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study suggests restaurant diners are more likely than those not dining out right now to catch COVID-19. The study has spread a lot of fear about restaurants being coronavirus hotspots, but it’s important to remember that the study merely showed a correlation, not that folks are necessarily picking up the virus while dining out:

• “The American response to COVID is best characterized as…eccentric,” writes Daniel M. Rothschild, executive director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

• Yesterday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court told state election officials “that they can’t mail out absentee ballots until the court decides whether to add the Green Party’s presidential ticket to the ballot,” reports CNN. The ruling comes just a week before “the September 17 deadline for when the 1,850 municipal clerks need to mail out absentee ballots to Wisconsin voters who asked for one is set in state law.”

• Protecting and serving:

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9/11/2001 in Staten Island, New York

I post this essay every year in honor of September 11th, 2001 (see 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019).

Every generation has a defining moment. For my generation, it was 9/11/2001.

Here are my memories of 9/11/2001. It was a Tuesday.

I was a Senior at Staten Island Technical High School, which is about 20 miles from ground zero. We were about 1 week into the school year. I was sitting in Ms. Endriss’s 2nd Period A.P. Political Science class. We were going over some NYC Public School discipline policy, and discussing what kinds of weapons were forbidden in schools (brass knuckles were a no-no). A student walked into the classroom late. He had heard a rumor that a Cessna airplane had hit the World Trade Center. A girl in my class exclaimed that her father worked in the World Trade Center. I could see the look of fear in her eyes, even though none of us had any clue what was going on. She wanted to call her dad. I was the only student in the class with a cell phone, which I promptly gave her. The call did not go through–he worked on one of the upper floors of the tower, and passed away.

We finished second period, apprehensively. I logged onto a computer, and attempted to check the news. I recall one friend told me to check MTV.com for news. At that point, the reports were unclear, and no one knew what was going on. We proceeded to 3rd period A.P. Calculus with Mr. Curry. At that point, someone told us that it was not a Cessna, but in fact a passenger jet. We were all getting nervous, and didn’t quite know what was going on. Later in class, a student came into the class and said a second plane had crashed into the other tower. We also heard that there was an explosion at the Pentagon. At that point, we knew it was not an accident.

I remember leaving the class (something I never did) and walked up to the library where I knew there was a T.V. Just as I arrived in the library, I saw the first tower collapse. I watched it live. I was stunned and could not believe what was happening before my eyes. I grabbed my cellphone to call home, and almost immediately after the tower collapsed, I lost all service. I was not able to call my mom in Staten Island, though I could call my dad who was working in Long Island. Long distance calls seemed to work, but local calls were not working. I remember my dad told me that this was a life-changing event, and he had no idea what would happen. I heard some rumors on TV that there were 15 planes that were hijacked, and unaccounted for in the skies.

By lunch time, the school guidance counselor set up a conference room where students could go to talk. I remember seeing student after student who had a family member or friend who worked in the World Trade Center or in Manhattan. A large number of firefighters and police officers reside in Staten Island. Tragically, many of the emergency responders who perished were from Staten Island. What could we even tell those students?

After that, the day become a blur. I remember hearing that the second tower had collapsed, though I did not see it.  I remember watching the entire United States Congress sing God Bless America on the steps of the Capitol. I had never been so afraid in my life. Later that night, I took a bus home. The New York City public buses were still running, and I remember the driver was not collecting fares.  On the bus, people were talking about the imminent war (against whom,  no one knew) and the imminent draft. Some were saying that students were exempt from the draft.

The next morning, September 12, 2001, I woke up and smelled this horrible smell. The air had this pungent odor, that reminded me of burned flesh at a BBQ. I went to school that morning, and attendance was low. In all of my classes, we were talking about war. I asked whether the US would need to use nuclear weapons. My teacher explained that carpet bombing–a phrase I had never heard of–could wreak plenty of damage in Afghanistan. Later that week students began making sandwiches for the relief workers, and collecting goods to donate to the relief effort.

From Staten Island, I could see the smoldering Ground Zero. It was surreal. The skyline looked so very empty. To this day, whenever I look at the Skyline, a sight I had seen thousands of times, I have the most bizarre feeling. Additionally, whenever we saw an airplane fly overhead, we all freaked out. This lasted for months.

For days, weeks, and months after 9/11, people in Staten Island were waiting for their loved ones to come home. Many patients were alive, but were so badly burned that they could not be identified. People prayed that these unnamed patients would soon come home. One woman whose husband was a firefighter waited outside her home every single night for months. She eventually put a candle in her window every night. Later, she put a memorial lamp in her window. He never came home. Others were simply waiting for remains of their loved ones to be returned. Many were never identified.

I ordered a gas mask from eBay, which I kept in my car, fearing a biological weapon attack on New York City. I remember I tried it on once and I almost suffocated. I wanted to order some Cipro for an anthrax attack, but I could not locate any.

It is hard to encapsulate what a New Yorker went through on 9/11. Thinking back on that day, when I was just 17 years old, I realized that I had to grow up awfully quick. It was a new world we were living in.

Never forget. Ever.

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There Is No Defense for Looting

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National Public Radio’s interview last month with Vicky Osterweil, author of a new book called “In Defense of Looting,” generated so much pushback that the network had to add a clarification providing more “context” to help readers “fully assess” her “controversial” views. But there isn’t anything that NPR’s editors could do to contextualize Osterweil’s dangerous message.

In technical terms, her argument—that the American system of property rights is oppressive and looting and mayhem will bring about positive social change—is nuts. The interview contains myriad quotations that read like a parody from The Babylon Bee. I’m not unhappy that NPR published it, as it’s important to know what such people think. But why didn’t the interviewer ask any tough questions?

NPR asked Osterweil to talk about rioting as a tactic, in the way a lifestyle reporter might ask a celebrity to talk a little about a new movie. As the author explains, rioting accomplishes “important things.” For starters, “It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage…That’s looting’s most basic tactical power as a political mode of action.”

Got that? People steal stuff because they then don’t have to pay for it and, well, that means they don’t have to work to earn money to pay for those things. I’m not sure how theft becomes a “political mode of action,” but Osterweil assured readers that breaking store windows and grabbing consumer goods is more important now than ever—given that “during COVID times” jobs are unreliable, unavailable, or sometimes dangerous.

As an aside, many official coronavirus-related policies strike me as glorified looting, even though lawmakers don’t use bricks and Molotov cocktails. The governor, and even the president, can declare that people may live rent-free in other people’s buildings. Congress can run up debt to send us stimulus checks. Governors can arbitrarily force businesses to shut their doors, thus destroying what entrepreneurs have spent their lives creating.

Fortunately, the author explains traditional looting isn’t simply about stealing. It has a deeper and more uplifting purpose. “It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed,” Osterweil added. “It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things…It points to the way in which that’s unjust.”

Who knew?

When my oldest daughter was very young, she asked why we have to pay for things. “Why can’t everything be free?” I explained that if everything were free, no one would work or produce anything or invest in factories and stores. In almost no time, we’d be staring down vast shortages—and people would go hungry. Violent thugs would rob and pillage. Society would collapse. That was a great question from a 6-year-old, but Osterweil is an adult.

Unfortunately, many American adults seem to share this childish view of the world. After my column explaining what rent control does to small landlords was posted in a left-leaning social-media group, I was taken aback by the vicious ad hominem responses. As a building owner, I’m apparently a greedy oppressor—and never mind the investments, renovations, and hard work that goes into providing quality housing for others at an agreed-upon price. One poster even called me a member of the “petty bourgeoisie.” Good grief.

Modern-day leftists have no understanding of how society builds wealth and prosperity. They revile those who create it, even as they post photos to the Internet from their iPhones. Do they believe such wonderful innovations fell from the sky? Didn’t any of their professors teach them about the violence, starvation, and misery that took place in Soviet Russia—and every other society that attacked the idea of private property?

“Destroying a small business is akin to destroying an artist’s studio, a scholar’s library or a chef’s kitchen,” wrote Steven Horwitz, a professor of free enterprise at Ball State University in Indiana. “It’s not just a matter of the loss of material goods, and insurance isn’t the point. It’s a loss of the space in which they make meaning in their lives and for others.” People who defend rioting defend the destruction of the very things that make us human. They are the ones being unjust.

I’m a strong defender of peaceful protests against police abuse and have been writing about the need for reform for years. But it’s one thing to peacefully march against injustice, and quite another to burn down what others built up. It’s a warning sign for our society when it doesn’t occur to a major news outlet that a defense of looting deserves more scrutiny than a puff interview.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

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There Is No Defense for Looting

polspphotos686229

National Public Radio’s interview last month with Vicky Osterweil, author of a new book called “In Defense of Looting,” generated so much pushback that the network had to add a clarification providing more “context” to help readers “fully assess” her “controversial” views. But there isn’t anything that NPR’s editors could do to contextualize Osterweil’s dangerous message.

In technical terms, her argument—that the American system of property rights is oppressive and looting and mayhem will bring about positive social change—is nuts. The interview contains myriad quotations that read like a parody from The Babylon Bee. I’m not unhappy that NPR published it, as it’s important to know what such people think. But why didn’t the interviewer ask any tough questions?

NPR asked Osterweil to talk about rioting as a tactic, in the way a lifestyle reporter might ask a celebrity to talk a little about a new movie. As the author explains, rioting accomplishes “important things.” For starters, “It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage…That’s looting’s most basic tactical power as a political mode of action.”

Got that? People steal stuff because they then don’t have to pay for it and, well, that means they don’t have to work to earn money to pay for those things. I’m not sure how theft becomes a “political mode of action,” but Osterweil assured readers that breaking store windows and grabbing consumer goods is more important now than ever—given that “during COVID times” jobs are unreliable, unavailable, or sometimes dangerous.

As an aside, many official coronavirus-related policies strike me as glorified looting, even though lawmakers don’t use bricks and Molotov cocktails. The governor, and even the president, can declare that people may live rent-free in other people’s buildings. Congress can run up debt to send us stimulus checks. Governors can arbitrarily force businesses to shut their doors, thus destroying what entrepreneurs have spent their lives creating.

Fortunately, the author explains traditional looting isn’t simply about stealing. It has a deeper and more uplifting purpose. “It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed,” Osterweil added. “It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things…It points to the way in which that’s unjust.”

Who knew?

When my oldest daughter was very young, she asked why we have to pay for things. “Why can’t everything be free?” I explained that if everything were free, no one would work or produce anything or invest in factories and stores. In almost no time, we’d be staring down vast shortages—and people would go hungry. Violent thugs would rob and pillage. Society would collapse. That was a great question from a 6-year-old, but Osterweil is an adult.

Unfortunately, many American adults seem to share this childish view of the world. After my column explaining what rent control does to small landlords was posted in a left-leaning social-media group, I was taken aback by the vicious ad hominem responses. As a building owner, I’m apparently a greedy oppressor—and never mind the investments, renovations, and hard work that goes into providing quality housing for others at an agreed-upon price. One poster even called me a member of the “petty bourgeoisie.” Good grief.

Modern-day leftists have no understanding of how society builds wealth and prosperity. They revile those who create it, even as they post photos to the Internet from their iPhones. Do they believe such wonderful innovations fell from the sky? Didn’t any of their professors teach them about the violence, starvation, and misery that took place in Soviet Russia—and every other society that attacked the idea of private property?

“Destroying a small business is akin to destroying an artist’s studio, a scholar’s library or a chef’s kitchen,” wrote Steven Horwitz, a professor of free enterprise at Ball State University in Indiana. “It’s not just a matter of the loss of material goods, and insurance isn’t the point. It’s a loss of the space in which they make meaning in their lives and for others.” People who defend rioting defend the destruction of the very things that make us human. They are the ones being unjust.

I’m a strong defender of peaceful protests against police abuse and have been writing about the need for reform for years. But it’s one thing to peacefully march against injustice, and quite another to burn down what others built up. It’s a warning sign for our society when it doesn’t occur to a major news outlet that a defense of looting deserves more scrutiny than a puff interview.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

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Review: Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies

loder-skin2

Looking back on the cinematic sexy-wars of the last century from the promised land of total pornography we inhabit today must be a little puzzling for young cinephiles. Was there really a time when people got bent out of shape by the lewd wisecracks of Mae West, the rather basic butt-baring of Brigitte Bardot, the epic but completely covered-up bosom of Jane Russell? Yes, kids, it’s true.

This long-gone era is enlighteningly surveyed in a new documentary called Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies. Given the credits of some of the film’s producers (Paul Fishbein was a founder of Adult Video News, the porn industry trade mag, and Jim McBride is an internet archivist better-known by his nom de website, “Mr. Skin”), you might expect the movie to be raunchier than it is. Yes, there are plenty of boobs and bottoms on display here, in pictures ranging from the 1933 Ecstasy (Hedy Lamar striking a blow for naked forest-scampering) and the 1927 Wings (Clara Bow flashing a breast in the first movie to win an Oscar) up through the 1974 Big Bad Mama (Angie Dickinson totally, as they say, nude), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Phoebe Cates’s topless-red-bikini scene), and the incomparable Showgirls and American Pie (about which good-natured lust object Shannon Elizabeth has a few words to say).

But Skin also has considerable straight narrative history to impart. Reaching back to the turn of the last century, it shows that moving-picture pioneers like Edward Muybridge and Georges Méliès incorporated glimpses of nudity in their work without a second thought. D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance branched out into orgies, and filmmaking remained a relatively freewheeling proposition until the 1930s, when the industry cooked up the buzz-killing Motion Picture Production Code, a self-regulating dodge to head off government censorship. The MPPC started a long slow collapse in the 1950s, with the arrival of, among other things, primitive softcore movies called “nudies.” (Francis Ford Coppola launched his career with a 1962 nudie called Tonight for Sure, and the late Russ Meyer explains here how he shot The Immoral Mr. Teas, his big 1959 nudie hit, in four days for just $24,000.)

The movie is filled with fun stories, most of them fairly well-known but so what. The 1979 Caligula started out as a dignified historical drama with a script by Gore Vidal and a fancy cast that included Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud, and Peter O’Toole, but it was turned into a flat-out porn film with additional shoots by the movie’s producer, Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione. Oliver Reed and Alan Bates’s non-erotic nude wrestling scene in the 1969 Women in Love was clumsily reedited by nervous producers to dispel any gay overtones—and ended up having nothing but gay overtones. And then there was teenage Brooke Shields, who won the first Golden Raspberry Award—for worst actress—for her lightly attired performance in the 1980 Blue Lagoon.

Things are said to be different on the movie-nudity front these days. Now sex scenes are being shot under the watchful eyes of people called “intimacy coordinators,” whose job is to protect female actors from unwanted exploitation, and presumably to head off anything along the lines of Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange’s super-believable rutting in the 1981 The Postman Always Rings Twice. This is all good, surely. But when one of these intimacy coordinators pops up here to say, “We are thrilled to be part of the solution,” you can’t help reflexively wondering exactly which problem they mean.

(Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies is available on YouTube, Fandango, Vudu and other on-demand sites.)

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Review: Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies

loder-skin2

Looking back on the cinematic sexy-wars of the last century from the promised land of total pornography we inhabit today must be a little puzzling for young cinephiles. Was there really a time when people got bent out of shape by the lewd wisecracks of Mae West, the rather basic butt-baring of Brigitte Bardot, the epic but completely covered-up bosom of Jane Russell? Yes, kids, it’s true.

This long-gone era is enlighteningly surveyed in a new documentary called Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies. Given the credits of some of the film’s producers (Paul Fishbein was a founder of Adult Video News, the porn industry trade mag, and Jim McBride is an internet archivist better-known by his nom de website, “Mr. Skin”), you might expect the movie to be raunchier than it is. Yes, there are plenty of boobs and bottoms on display here, in pictures ranging from the 1933 Ecstasy (Hedy Lamar striking a blow for naked forest-scampering) and the 1927 Wings (Clara Bow flashing a breast in the first movie to win an Oscar) up through the 1974 Big Bad Mama (Angie Dickinson totally, as they say, nude), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Phoebe Cates’s topless-red-bikini scene), and the incomparable Showgirls and American Pie (about which good-natured lust object Shannon Elizabeth has a few words to say).

But Skin also has considerable straight narrative history to impart. Reaching back to the turn of the last century, it shows that moving-picture pioneers like Edward Muybridge and Georges Méliès incorporated glimpses of nudity in their work without a second thought. D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance branched out into orgies, and filmmaking remained a relatively freewheeling proposition until the 1930s, when the industry cooked up the buzz-killing Motion Picture Production Code, a self-regulating dodge to head off government censorship. The MPPC started a long slow collapse in the 1950s, with the arrival of, among other things, primitive softcore movies called “nudies.” (Francis Ford Coppola launched his career with a 1962 nudie called Tonight for Sure, and the late Russ Meyer explains here how he shot The Immoral Mr. Teas, his big 1959 nudie hit, in four days for just $24,000.)

The movie is filled with fun stories, most of them fairly well-known but so what. The 1979 Caligula started out as a dignified historical drama with a script by Gore Vidal and a fancy cast that included Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud, and Peter O’Toole, but it was turned into a flat-out porn film with additional shoots by the movie’s producer, Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione. Oliver Reed and Alan Bates’s non-erotic nude wrestling scene in the 1969 Women in Love was clumsily reedited by nervous producers to dispel any gay overtones—and ended up having nothing but gay overtones. And then there was teenage Brooke Shields, who won the first Golden Raspberry Award—for worst actress—for her lightly attired performance in the 1980 Blue Lagoon.

Things are said to be different on the movie-nudity front these days. Now sex scenes are being shot under the watchful eyes of people called “intimacy coordinators,” whose job is to protect female actors from unwanted exploitation, and presumably to head off anything along the lines of Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange’s super-believable rutting in the 1981 The Postman Always Rings Twice. This is all good, surely. But when one of these intimacy coordinators pops up here to say, “We are thrilled to be part of the solution,” you can’t help reflexively wondering exactly which problem they mean.

(Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies is available on YouTube, Fandango, Vudu and other on-demand sites.)

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