The Press: Censoring Sex

As movie after movie offers ever more explicit sex, their teasing ads continue to nudge the boundaries of good taste. On the Los Angeles Times, those perimeters have been patrolled for the past four years by a two-man screening board that has let few slips show. Now the Times is determined to mount a tougher guard than ever.

Henceforth, decreed Assistant Display Advertising Manager Marvin Reimer, 52, the Times will reject all copy or pictures dealing with "burlesque, bust measurements, couples in bed, excessive cleavage, horizontal embrace, nude figures or silhouettes, nymphomania, promotional use of the word 'sin,' vulgar anatomical displays." Lest that list missed anything, Reimer also embargoed "violations of normal moral standards."

The advisory, sent to stage and screen accounts, also included a lexicon of forbidden words and phrases: "cuties, flesh-a-scope, girlie, homosexual, immorality, lesbian, lust, naked, nothing on, nudies, nudist camp, nymphs, party girls, pervert, play girls, professional girls, prostitutes, rape, scanty panties, seduce, skin-a-scope, sex, sex rituals, sexpot, sexsational, strippers, third sex."

The Times has been as good as Reimer's word. In one movie ad, the picture of a couple in passionate horizontal embrace was rotated 90° and ran vertically in the Times—in compliance with the paper's upright code. Another ad filled with misspelled suggestion ran in the Times one day—and was censored the next. Copy plugging a movie title, The Cave Girls, read "See What the Girls Did 50,000 B.C. (Before Clothes) (Costumes by Mother Nature)"—but only in Hearst's Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. In the Times the ad came out: "See What the Girls Did 50,000 B.C. ( ) ( )." Even

film titles are now subject to scrubbing. Playmates for the Candidate, read the title of Mamie Van Doren's newest film, as edited by the Times. Originally the picture was called Party Girls for the Candidate.

Reader complaints about movie ads were a principal reason for the Times's purer code. "We are convinced that moral and social values have not decayed as frequently portrayed," Reimer told advertisers, "and we trust that together we can find a better standard of values in the area of 'good taste.' "