The mid-sixties saw the final demise of the Production Code Administration and its replacement by the "voluntary rating system." Using Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as his focus, Leonard Leff, a film historian at Oklahoma State University, will discuss this watershed period in cinema history. Was this a moment of liberation for film, or merely the redesign of its shackles? A contributing essayist for the Banned in the U.S.A. catalog, Leff's books include The Dame in the Kimono (with Jerold L. Simmons), and Hitchcock and Selznick. Early in Mike Nichols's vertiginous portrait of a marital abyss, the shrewish Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) blurts out at her rickety husband George (Richard Burton), "I'll talk about any god damn thing I want to." And that's exactly what had Shurlock's Production Code Administration worried. But it wasn't simply what she talked about, it was how she talked about it. George, a failed history professor, and his festering wife pepper their troubled love with the wittiest of barbs: this is a marriage overwhelmed by a consciousness of life that requires mongrel words. When biology prof Nick (George Segal) and cloying Honey (Sandy Dennis) join them for a long night's binge, the self-disgust and invective grow to monumental scale. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman, realizing how the language of Edward Albee's popular play defined and invigorated the characters, in the end kept the original piquancy-"hump the hostess," "melons bobbing," and all. But a tattered Production Code was now flapping in the winds of change. By late '68, the industry had its new "voluntary movie rating system" and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had five Oscars.