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 20th … 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, including a lengthy article by Joan Goodman in New York Magazine, … 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 make it into the top 50 highest-grossing films of both 1978 and 1979. By December … See more

While majoring in French literature at Princeton University, Shields went on to write her senior thesis, The Initiation: From Innocence to Experience: The Pre-Adolescent/Adolescent Journey in the Films of Louis Malle, Pretty Baby and Lacombe, Lucien (1987), … See more