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trying to make it in Hollywood by “caring for” an older actress. Where Sunset Boulevard asks its audience to fill in the gaps, Sweet Bird makes the sex that has occurred between Chance and his benefactress, Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page), clear. After a heated discussion between Chance and Alexandra, Alexandra walks to bed, saying, “I have only one way to forget the things that I don’t want to remember, and that way is by making love. It’s the only dependable distraction and I need that distraction right now. In the morning we’ll talk about what you want and what you need.” Chance responds, “Aren’t you ashamed a little?” “Yes, aren’t you?” replies Alexandra. Although it seems that Chance has avoided sex for compensation up until this point, he ultimately succumbs to an act that makes him feel ashamed.
    Challenging Censorship
     
    The work of American playwright Tennessee Williams often pressed the Production Code Administration (PCA) beyond any previous films in terms of adult themes. R. Barton Palmer (1998) cites A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan, 1951) as a turning point in this respect. Palmer notes that, shortly before A Streetcar Named Desire, Bicycle Thief (de Sica, 1949) had been released in the United States without the approval of the PCA—a huge blow to the administration, in that the film went on to be “defiantly successful” at the box office. “After the Bicycle Thief embarrassment,” writes Palmer, “Breen [head of the PCA] could ill afford another public incident that suggested his office was narrow-minded in its opposition to modern art. Williams’s play, after all, had won the Pulitzer Prize” (p. 218). Even though these films were able to deal with male sex work, they sprung from the world of Broadway and literature, from a cultural form that “[catered] to a minority, elite culture.” This is exactly the kind of culture, however, that the PCA was beginning to fear censoring around the time of Streetcar . It is because of this precedent that, a decade later, Hollywood art films The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Sweet Bird of Youth , both penned by the critically acclaimed Williams, could be produced by major studios. 5
    Whereas Sunset Boulevard is unable to fully articulate the work that Joe Gillis is doing and the characters in Sweet Bird of Youth saw sex work as something of which to be ashamed, Andy Warhol’s My Hustler (1965) and Peter Emmanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence (1967) were some of the first American films to make their characters’ sex work an explicit and celebrated part of their story. Often discussed in relation to (and as a part of) the “highbrow underground art films” (Thomas, 2000, p. 69) of the 1960s New York avant-garde scene, these films broke ground in the filmic representation of the male sex worker. Working outside of Hollywood code-era restrictions and screening outside of mainstream venues, 6 art films were free to experiment with both content and form in ways that exceeded the freedom of the Hollywood studios. My Hustler , for example, is roughly an hour long and comprised of only two shots—one on a Fire Island beach, and the other in the bathroom of one of its characters. During the shot on the beach, Warhol spends 30 minutes focused on the reclined body of Paul (Paul America), a hustler from “Dial-a-Hustler” who has been hired to service Ed (Ed Hood) on Fire Island. The camera makes rough, choppy pans between Paul’s body on the beach and a conversation occurring between Ed, Joe (Joseph Campbell), and Genevieve (Genevieve Charbon) in Ed’s beachfront home. The second shot of the film, which also lasts approximately 30 minutes, takes place in a private bathroom. In this shot, Joe and Paul take showers, shave, and get dressed while discussing hustling as an occupation (Joe is a semiretired hustler himself).
    The rough camera work, 30-minute shots, and extended dialog allow My Hustler to “closely [resemble] a documentary