Freedom to Offend: How New York Remade Movie Culture

In the postwar era, producers and consumers of cinema began to demand more freedom to make and view movies that accurately portrayed the complexities of real life. In Freedom to Offend, Raymond J. Haberski Jr. details the battles, fought largely in New York City, to secure freedom of the screen for film audiences. In the libertine 1970s, arguments supporting the right to see challenging films were twisted to provide intellectual cover for movies created solely to lure viewers with outrageous or titillating material. Haberski exposes the unquestioning defense of free expression as an absolutist approach that mirrors the censorial impulse found among the postwar era’s restrictive moral guardians.