Censorship in Hollywood
Jan. 31st, 2013 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trueloveThis was my final paper in ENG102. It's not a good paper, really. Well, for an ENG102 paper, it was fine. As an upper division film paper, which is what it was trying to be despite the restrictions imposed on it by being a basic ENG102 paper, it probably would have been a C.
What I'm saying is, it's not brilliant. But it does cover some really damn interesting history in Hollywood, and I learned a hell of a lot more than what even made it into the paper. I should probably write some of that shit out, but in the meantime, here's this.
Censorship in Hollywood
The 1930’s to the 1960’s are often thought of as the Golden Age of Hollywood -- the era of the talkie and then later colour gave us good, clean, wholesome fun. While the objective quality and perceived wholesomeness of the movies can be argued it was certainly and inarguably the golden age of censorship.
The MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) was formed in the early 1920’s with William H. Hays as its President (Skinner, 1993, p. 7). It was a trade organisation that represented the interests of the major studios who formed it. In 1927, they instituted a list of “don’ts” and “be carefuls” that advised its member companies against the portrayal of many topics (Christensen & Haas, 2005, p. 46). This would serve the basis of the Hays Code that would replace it three years later (Skinner, 1993, p. 11). That new Hays Code was deeply Catholic in its formation, as the updates and changes made to it were spearheaded by a lay Catholic journalist and a Catholic reverend, Martin Quigley and Daniel A. Lord respectively (Skinner, 1993, pp. 13-14). Studios paid the new Motion Picture Production Code only lip service for several years, regarding it as little more than another public relations gimmick (Skinner, 1993, p. 15). However, in 1934 with the industry facing a serious, organised boycott by the Catholics, and the mounting pressures of state legislatures instituting censorship boards, the MPPDA created the Production Code Administration; these new keepers of the Code now had great power to regulate the content of motion pictures (Wittern-Keller, 2008. p. 5). Their newfound power lay in the granting (or, rather, the refusal) of a seal of approval that declared the films fit for distribution in the studio controlled theatre chains -- while they did not routinely refuse them for completed films, due to the political climate Hollywood found itself operating in they were now given access to the film-making process to ensure that the films produced would meet their seal of approval (Jacobs, 1991, p. 97-98).
The man charged with the PCA’s enforcement of this code was, perhaps unsurprisingly, another Catholic: Joseph Breen (Doherty, 2009, p. 79). He would shepherd the industry for two decades, retiring in 1954 to be replaced by Geoffry Shurlock who would implement a more liberal interpretation (Yagoda, 1980, p. 6).
Legally, they weren’t censors. They had no legal power to restrict content or the exhibition of motion pictures -- they could only suggest changes, deletions, and additions, rather than require them under penalty (Wittern-Keller, 2008, pp. 5-6). Nonetheless, that they did not have the government’s weight of law behind them didn’t change the fact that they had enormous economic clout. While the suggested term ‘content regulation’ might be more strictly accurate, in function they remained censors (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 6). They simply enforced it upon themselves rather than chancing their films in the hands of legally empowered censors.
And Hollywood was right to fear legal empowered censorship: in 1926, there existed seven state censorship boards and at least one hundred municipal censorship boards in twenty-three other states (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 30). Those seven state censorship boards were run under ill-defined, subjective mandates; it made producing motion pictures for national release far more difficult as there seven major masters to please and they were themselves unpredictable (Wittern-Keller, 2008, pp. 33-34).
Knowing what the Code was and the sorts of movies created under it and knowing where movies are now, it can be hard to see how we got from the former to the latter. Shifting cultural perceptions of censorship played a large part as they underlay the changing legal precedents on which feared government censorship must stand. It is important to understand that the censorship of concepts perceived as threatening was not commonly seen as a free speech issue until after the events of World War II left the concept with overtones of authoritarian totalitarianism (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 4). First Amendment speech protection was not established to cover motion pictures until the 1950s when The Miracle was granted it in a Supreme Court ruling, overturning the prior 1915 ruling Mutual (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 108).
Even so, there really was no single cultural event or court case that won or lost the fight against censorship in Hollywood. They gained ground against censorship slowly; they won some cases and lost others, even after winning First Amendment protection for the medium (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 15)
The most significant precedent they were up against regarding First Amendment protection started in 1915 when Mutual Film Corporation went before the Supreme Court and found no succor there (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 41). As Wittern-Keller notes:
Obviously, this left lasting marks on Hollywood, culturally and legally. It necessarily weakened any argument one might put forth that motion pictures were just like any other form of media. Reformers simply referred to Mutual as proof that they were, in fact, more dangerous. (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p.46). It also left motion pictures in a paradoxical place: they were not recognised as speech to be protected by the First Amendment, yet had to be strictly controlled because they were seen as so persuasive a medium. In the modern era, of course, this seems faintly absurd; something so persuasive as a medium must surely be seen as a valid form of expression.
Attitudes towards the Hays Code and censorship of motion pictures shifted slowly as it was a cultural, generational shift at work. But World War II can safely be said to have been a significant way point in that shift. Not only was there the shifting perception of the legitimacy of censorship as an American ideal but people began to have a better sense of what the world outside America’s borders really looked like and were also becoming more curious about the other styles of cinema, giving rise to legitimate and profitable arthouse theatres (Doherty, 2009, pp. 270-271).
Among those imported films was the Italian film The Bicycle Thief. According to Leff & Simmons, it opened on December 12th to acclaim at The World Theater and was the highest grossing foreign film to play there. Due to its success there, major release was sought – which required a seal of approval from the PCA. The original cut of the film was denied the seal by Breen on the basis of a scene where a young boy, the protagonist, pauses to pee in an alley and another scene wherein the search for the titular bicycle and thief takes the young boy and his father through a brothel (Schickel, 1990). Refusal of a seal to The Bicycle Thief infuriated the Code’s adversaries. It was also embarrassing and potentially economically negative, as denying such an important foreign film major release left the industry open to the possibility of retaliatory laws. That was very undesirable from the standpoint of the industry given that up to one-third of United States motion picture revenues derived from foreign rentals (Leff & Simmons, 2001, p. 156.) In the end, The Bicycle Thief never received a seal but was still booked into three of the Association’s five theater chains, making it the first since 1934 to receive wide release without the PCA’s seal (Leff & Simmons, 2001, p.165).
That was the death knell ringing in the distance for the Hays Code. If the seal was not required for economic success, if it was possible to book major theatres without one, then what teeth did the Code really have?
Over the course of the 1950’s, the PCA attempted to accommodate changing morality with revisions and lax interpretation of the Code (Yagoda, p. 6). However, even that attempted flexibility was not sufficient, in the end.
Though it would take another decade and a half before the final clang sounded, eventually it did: the motion picture Blowup failed to receive its seal due to a brief scene showing pubic hair. MGM, a long-standing member company of the MPAA (formerly the MPPDA), released it without trimming the offending scene and thus without a seal of approval under a subsidiary invented for the purpose, Premier Productions (Corliss, 2007).
The Hays Code was unenforceable and thus abandoned; what next for Hollywood, then? CARA: the Code and Rating Administration, which would be updated to the Classification and Rating Administration (Sandler, 2007, p. 249). Rather than playing a part in the creation of motion pictures, they merely evaluated the final product; their classification scheme would thus appear to provide freer expression than had the Hays Code. But as Sandler notes, it does not provide for actually free expression (Sandler, 2007, p. 250).
You’ve likely heard of the negotiations that occur in editing when the MPAA hands down a rating that is commercially unviable: cutting here and there to bring an R rating down to PG-13, or an NC-17 rating down to an R. Why do this? Why participate in this negotiation? Because releasing any major motion picture in America without a rating would render it unsalable. When was the last time you saw an NC-17 or an unrated motion picture playing in a major movie theatre?
Self-regulation of content still rules in Hollywood, but who determines those ratings? That’s a question that’s been asked, actually, within the confines of the same media. This Film Not Yet Rated was a documentary released in 2006 that delved into the membership, purpose, and conduct of the ratings board that provides those ratings that we are all so familiar with (IMDb). No clear answers are to be had as the ratings board is shrouded in secrecy.
The exact process by which the motion picture industry’s self-regulation evolved into its current form is still open to interpretation but the broad strokes certainly seem clear. The industry was ruled by censorship while American culture embraced the idea that there is any one single way of being moral. While my anti-censorship bias is surely evident, what I really hope you walk away from this brief history is the notion that the topic of censorship in Hollywood is one that we should all consider carefully. The past does not exist in isolation. It informs and shapes the present that we live in, as witnessed by the legacy of the Hays Code being carried on in the MPAA CARA ratings system. The censorship of the narratives that we enjoy in movie theatres surely must shape the fabric of our lives if only by the negative spaces that it leaves. If we wish to control the narratives we shape in our own lives, we must have a solid sense of what processes create the ones that we’re told.
Works Cited
Skinner, James M. (1993). The Cross and the Cinema. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
Christensen, Terry & Haas, Peter J. (2005). Projecting Politics. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc.
Wittern-Keller, Laura. (2008). Freedom of the Screen. Lexington, KY: The University Press ofKentucky.
Jacobs, Lea. (1991). The Fallen Women Film and the Impetus for Censorship. In Kevin Sandler (Ed.) Hollywood Film History (pp 89-105). Pearson Custom Publishing.
Yagoda, Ben (1980). Hollywood Cleans Up Its Act. American Heritage, Feb./March 1980. Retrieved May 7, 2011 from http://www.americanheritage.com/content/hollywood-cleans-its-act
Doherty, Thomas. (2009). Hollywood's Censor : Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Leff & Simmons. (2001). Dame in the Kimono. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky.
Schickel, Richard. “The church and the movies.” The Atlantic. Feb. 1990: 103+. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Retrieved May 7, 2011 from http://ic.galegroup.com.ezp.mc.maricopa.edu/ic/ovic/MagazinesDetailsPage/MagazinesDetailsWindow?displayGroupName=Magazines&prodId=OVIC&action=e&windowstate=normal&catId=&documentId=GALE|A201651875&mode=view&userGroupName=mcc_mesa&jsid=e4767eae5e02764cc3c0bed0104a2e8b
Corliss, Richard. (2007, August 5). When Antonioni Blew Up the Movies. Time. Retrieved May 7, 2011 from http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1649984,00.html
Sandler, Kevin. (2007). CARA and the Emergence of Responsible Entertainment. In Kevin Sandler (Ed.) Hollywood Film History (pp 249-264). Pearson Custom Publishing.
Blowup. (n.d.) Retrieved May 7, 2011 from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493459/, from the IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/
What I'm saying is, it's not brilliant. But it does cover some really damn interesting history in Hollywood, and I learned a hell of a lot more than what even made it into the paper. I should probably write some of that shit out, but in the meantime, here's this.
The 1930’s to the 1960’s are often thought of as the Golden Age of Hollywood -- the era of the talkie and then later colour gave us good, clean, wholesome fun. While the objective quality and perceived wholesomeness of the movies can be argued it was certainly and inarguably the golden age of censorship.
The MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) was formed in the early 1920’s with William H. Hays as its President (Skinner, 1993, p. 7). It was a trade organisation that represented the interests of the major studios who formed it. In 1927, they instituted a list of “don’ts” and “be carefuls” that advised its member companies against the portrayal of many topics (Christensen & Haas, 2005, p. 46). This would serve the basis of the Hays Code that would replace it three years later (Skinner, 1993, p. 11). That new Hays Code was deeply Catholic in its formation, as the updates and changes made to it were spearheaded by a lay Catholic journalist and a Catholic reverend, Martin Quigley and Daniel A. Lord respectively (Skinner, 1993, pp. 13-14). Studios paid the new Motion Picture Production Code only lip service for several years, regarding it as little more than another public relations gimmick (Skinner, 1993, p. 15). However, in 1934 with the industry facing a serious, organised boycott by the Catholics, and the mounting pressures of state legislatures instituting censorship boards, the MPPDA created the Production Code Administration; these new keepers of the Code now had great power to regulate the content of motion pictures (Wittern-Keller, 2008. p. 5). Their newfound power lay in the granting (or, rather, the refusal) of a seal of approval that declared the films fit for distribution in the studio controlled theatre chains -- while they did not routinely refuse them for completed films, due to the political climate Hollywood found itself operating in they were now given access to the film-making process to ensure that the films produced would meet their seal of approval (Jacobs, 1991, p. 97-98).
The man charged with the PCA’s enforcement of this code was, perhaps unsurprisingly, another Catholic: Joseph Breen (Doherty, 2009, p. 79). He would shepherd the industry for two decades, retiring in 1954 to be replaced by Geoffry Shurlock who would implement a more liberal interpretation (Yagoda, 1980, p. 6).
Legally, they weren’t censors. They had no legal power to restrict content or the exhibition of motion pictures -- they could only suggest changes, deletions, and additions, rather than require them under penalty (Wittern-Keller, 2008, pp. 5-6). Nonetheless, that they did not have the government’s weight of law behind them didn’t change the fact that they had enormous economic clout. While the suggested term ‘content regulation’ might be more strictly accurate, in function they remained censors (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 6). They simply enforced it upon themselves rather than chancing their films in the hands of legally empowered censors.
And Hollywood was right to fear legal empowered censorship: in 1926, there existed seven state censorship boards and at least one hundred municipal censorship boards in twenty-three other states (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 30). Those seven state censorship boards were run under ill-defined, subjective mandates; it made producing motion pictures for national release far more difficult as there seven major masters to please and they were themselves unpredictable (Wittern-Keller, 2008, pp. 33-34).
Knowing what the Code was and the sorts of movies created under it and knowing where movies are now, it can be hard to see how we got from the former to the latter. Shifting cultural perceptions of censorship played a large part as they underlay the changing legal precedents on which feared government censorship must stand. It is important to understand that the censorship of concepts perceived as threatening was not commonly seen as a free speech issue until after the events of World War II left the concept with overtones of authoritarian totalitarianism (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 4). First Amendment speech protection was not established to cover motion pictures until the 1950s when The Miracle was granted it in a Supreme Court ruling, overturning the prior 1915 ruling Mutual (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 108).
Even so, there really was no single cultural event or court case that won or lost the fight against censorship in Hollywood. They gained ground against censorship slowly; they won some cases and lost others, even after winning First Amendment protection for the medium (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 15)
The most significant precedent they were up against regarding First Amendment protection started in 1915 when Mutual Film Corporation went before the Supreme Court and found no succor there (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p. 41). As Wittern-Keller notes:
Writing for the unanimous Court in 1915, Justice Joseph McKenna found the free speech argument inconsistent with both “judicial sense” and “common sense.” Since movies could be used for evil as well as good, he wrote, their examination prior to exhibition was a necessary control.
Obviously, this left lasting marks on Hollywood, culturally and legally. It necessarily weakened any argument one might put forth that motion pictures were just like any other form of media. Reformers simply referred to Mutual as proof that they were, in fact, more dangerous. (Wittern-Keller, 2008, p.46). It also left motion pictures in a paradoxical place: they were not recognised as speech to be protected by the First Amendment, yet had to be strictly controlled because they were seen as so persuasive a medium. In the modern era, of course, this seems faintly absurd; something so persuasive as a medium must surely be seen as a valid form of expression.
Attitudes towards the Hays Code and censorship of motion pictures shifted slowly as it was a cultural, generational shift at work. But World War II can safely be said to have been a significant way point in that shift. Not only was there the shifting perception of the legitimacy of censorship as an American ideal but people began to have a better sense of what the world outside America’s borders really looked like and were also becoming more curious about the other styles of cinema, giving rise to legitimate and profitable arthouse theatres (Doherty, 2009, pp. 270-271).
Among those imported films was the Italian film The Bicycle Thief. According to Leff & Simmons, it opened on December 12th to acclaim at The World Theater and was the highest grossing foreign film to play there. Due to its success there, major release was sought – which required a seal of approval from the PCA. The original cut of the film was denied the seal by Breen on the basis of a scene where a young boy, the protagonist, pauses to pee in an alley and another scene wherein the search for the titular bicycle and thief takes the young boy and his father through a brothel (Schickel, 1990). Refusal of a seal to The Bicycle Thief infuriated the Code’s adversaries. It was also embarrassing and potentially economically negative, as denying such an important foreign film major release left the industry open to the possibility of retaliatory laws. That was very undesirable from the standpoint of the industry given that up to one-third of United States motion picture revenues derived from foreign rentals (Leff & Simmons, 2001, p. 156.) In the end, The Bicycle Thief never received a seal but was still booked into three of the Association’s five theater chains, making it the first since 1934 to receive wide release without the PCA’s seal (Leff & Simmons, 2001, p.165).
That was the death knell ringing in the distance for the Hays Code. If the seal was not required for economic success, if it was possible to book major theatres without one, then what teeth did the Code really have?
Over the course of the 1950’s, the PCA attempted to accommodate changing morality with revisions and lax interpretation of the Code (Yagoda, p. 6). However, even that attempted flexibility was not sufficient, in the end.
Though it would take another decade and a half before the final clang sounded, eventually it did: the motion picture Blowup failed to receive its seal due to a brief scene showing pubic hair. MGM, a long-standing member company of the MPAA (formerly the MPPDA), released it without trimming the offending scene and thus without a seal of approval under a subsidiary invented for the purpose, Premier Productions (Corliss, 2007).
The Hays Code was unenforceable and thus abandoned; what next for Hollywood, then? CARA: the Code and Rating Administration, which would be updated to the Classification and Rating Administration (Sandler, 2007, p. 249). Rather than playing a part in the creation of motion pictures, they merely evaluated the final product; their classification scheme would thus appear to provide freer expression than had the Hays Code. But as Sandler notes, it does not provide for actually free expression (Sandler, 2007, p. 250).
You’ve likely heard of the negotiations that occur in editing when the MPAA hands down a rating that is commercially unviable: cutting here and there to bring an R rating down to PG-13, or an NC-17 rating down to an R. Why do this? Why participate in this negotiation? Because releasing any major motion picture in America without a rating would render it unsalable. When was the last time you saw an NC-17 or an unrated motion picture playing in a major movie theatre?
Self-regulation of content still rules in Hollywood, but who determines those ratings? That’s a question that’s been asked, actually, within the confines of the same media. This Film Not Yet Rated was a documentary released in 2006 that delved into the membership, purpose, and conduct of the ratings board that provides those ratings that we are all so familiar with (IMDb). No clear answers are to be had as the ratings board is shrouded in secrecy.
The exact process by which the motion picture industry’s self-regulation evolved into its current form is still open to interpretation but the broad strokes certainly seem clear. The industry was ruled by censorship while American culture embraced the idea that there is any one single way of being moral. While my anti-censorship bias is surely evident, what I really hope you walk away from this brief history is the notion that the topic of censorship in Hollywood is one that we should all consider carefully. The past does not exist in isolation. It informs and shapes the present that we live in, as witnessed by the legacy of the Hays Code being carried on in the MPAA CARA ratings system. The censorship of the narratives that we enjoy in movie theatres surely must shape the fabric of our lives if only by the negative spaces that it leaves. If we wish to control the narratives we shape in our own lives, we must have a solid sense of what processes create the ones that we’re told.
Skinner, James M. (1993). The Cross and the Cinema. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
Christensen, Terry & Haas, Peter J. (2005). Projecting Politics. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc.
Wittern-Keller, Laura. (2008). Freedom of the Screen. Lexington, KY: The University Press ofKentucky.
Jacobs, Lea. (1991). The Fallen Women Film and the Impetus for Censorship. In Kevin Sandler (Ed.) Hollywood Film History (pp 89-105). Pearson Custom Publishing.
Yagoda, Ben (1980). Hollywood Cleans Up Its Act. American Heritage, Feb./March 1980. Retrieved May 7, 2011 from http://www.americanheritage.com/content/hollywood-cleans-its-act
Doherty, Thomas. (2009). Hollywood's Censor : Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Leff & Simmons. (2001). Dame in the Kimono. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky.
Schickel, Richard. “The church and the movies.” The Atlantic. Feb. 1990: 103+. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Retrieved May 7, 2011 from http://ic.galegroup.com.ezp.mc.maricopa.edu/ic/ovic/MagazinesDetailsPage/MagazinesDetailsWindow?displayGroupName=Magazines&prodId=OVIC&action=e&windowstate=normal&catId=&documentId=GALE|A201651875&mode=view&userGroupName=mcc_mesa&jsid=e4767eae5e02764cc3c0bed0104a2e8b
Corliss, Richard. (2007, August 5). When Antonioni Blew Up the Movies. Time. Retrieved May 7, 2011 from http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1649984,00.html
Sandler, Kevin. (2007). CARA and the Emergence of Responsible Entertainment. In Kevin Sandler (Ed.) Hollywood Film History (pp 249-264). Pearson Custom Publishing.
Blowup. (n.d.) Retrieved May 7, 2011 from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493459/, from the IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/