In 1917, during the final months of legal prostitution in Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans, Louisiana, Hattie is a prostitute working at an elegant brothel run by the elderly, cocaine-addicted … See more

• Brooke Shields as Violet
• Keith Carradine as E. J. Bellocq
• Susan Sarandon as Hattie
• Frances Faye as … See more

Development
Screenwriter Polly Platt developed the idea for the film after meeting with Louis Malle and learning of his love of New Orleans jazz music, which was an integral part of the Storyville red-light district in the city in the early-twentieth … See more

ABC Records released a soundtrack of the film's ragtime score, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adaptation Score in the "Adaptation Score" category. See more

Marketing
Despite Malle's concerted effort to make the film sanitized of explicit sex, it received significant salacious pre-publicity leading up to its release, … See more

Box office
The movie was met with a lackluster response from moviegoers. It performed poorly in terms of box office revenue, failing to even … See more

While majoring in French literature at Princeton University, Shields went on to write her senior thesis, The Initiation: From Innocence to … See more