Film censorship in the United States
[4] In 1915, the US Supreme Court determined in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that motion pictures were purely commerce and not an art and so not covered by the First Amendment.
The public exhibition of obscene films may still incur legal difficulties after the fact, under the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Miller v. California decision.
[5] Public outcry over perceived immorality in Hollywood and the movies, as well as the growing number of city and state censorship boards, led the movie studios to fear that federal regulations were not far off; so they created, in 1922, the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (which became the Motion Picture Association of America in 1945), an industry trade and lobby organization.
The association was headed by Will H. Hays, a well-connected Republican lawyer who had previously been United States Postmaster General; he derailed attempts to institute federal censorship over the movies.
In 1927, Hays compiled a list of subjects, culled from his experience with the various US censorship boards, which he felt Hollywood studios would be wise to avoid.
Depression economics and changing social mores resulted in the studios producing racier fare that the Code, lacking an aggressive enforcement body, was unable to redress.
For the three-plus decades that followed, virtually all motion pictures produced in the United States and released by major studios adhered to the Code.
Some films produced outside the mainstream studio system during this time did flout the conventions of the Code, such as Child Bride (1938), which featured a nude scene involving 12-year-old actress Shirley Mills.
In 1936, Arthur Mayer and Joseph Burstyn attempted to distribute Whirlpool of Desire, a French film originally titled Remous and directed by Edmond T. Greville.
Preminger later made The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which portrayed the prohibited subject of drug abuse, and Anatomy of a Murder (1959) which dealt with rape.
Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) were also released without a certificate of approval due to their themes and became box office hits, further weakening the Code's authority.
[12] On a 6–3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable."
In his 2008 study of films during that era, Pictures at a Revolution, author Mark Harris wrote that the MPAA's action was "the first of a series of injuries to the Production Code that would prove fatal within three years.
"[13] When Jack Valenti became President of the MPAA in 1966, he was immediately faced with a problem regarding language in the film version of Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The 1982 documentary film If You Love This Planet was officially designated as "foreign political propaganda" by the United States Department of Justice and temporarily banned.
It removes or minimizes references to sexism, racism, war crimes, PTSD, and veteran suicide, and generally acts to portray the military in a positive light.
Changes have included altering the Tony Stark character in Iron Man from being opposed to weaponizing his technology into an arms dealer who sells it to the U.S. military, and deleting a reference to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from Godzilla.
