Hays Code

In the 1920s, Hollywood was rocked by a number of notorious scandals, such as the murder of William Desmond Taylor and the alleged rape of Virginia Rappe by popular movie star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, which brought widespread condemnation from religious, civic and political organizations.

In 1922, as they were faced with the prospect of having to comply with hundreds and potentially thousands of inconsistent, easily changed decency laws in order to show their films, the studios chose self-regulation as the preferable option, enlisting Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays, Postmaster General under former President Warren G. Harding and former head of the Republican National Committee,[4] to rehabilitate Hollywood's image.

[6] In 1924, Hays introduced a set of recommendations dubbed "the Formula", which the studios were advised to heed, and asked filmmakers to describe to his office the plots of films they were planning on producing.

[8] In 1915, the Supreme Court had decided unanimously in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that free speech did not extend to motion pictures.

By the 1920s, the New York stage, a frequent source of subsequent screen material, had topless shows, performances filled with curse words, adult subject matter, and sexually suggestive dialog.

[14] Filmmakers were facing the possibility that many states and cities would adopt their own codes of censorship, necessitating a multiplicity of versions of films made for national distribution.

Irving G. Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sol Wurtzel of Fox Film Corporation, and E. H. Allen of Paramount Pictures responded by collaborating on a list they called the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls", based on items that were challenged by local censor boards.

The list was approved by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Hays created the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) to oversee its implementation;[15][16] however, there was still no way to enforce tenets.

[20] "Those things which are included in the following list shall not appear in pictures produced by the members of this Association, irrespective of the manner in which they are treated":[19] "Special care [must] be exercised in the manner in which the following subjects are treated, to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized":[19] In 1929, Catholic layman Martin Quigley, editor of the prominent trade paper Motion Picture Herald, and Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord, created a code of standards[21] and submitted it to the studios.

[31] Homosexuals were de facto included under the proscription of sex perversion,[32] and the depiction of miscegenation (by 1934, defined only as sexual relationships between black and white races) was forbidden.

[5] On February 19, 1930, Variety published the entire content of the Code, and predicted that state film censorship boards would soon become obsolete;[42] however, the men obliged to enforce the code—Jason Joy (head of the committee until 1932) and his successor, James Wingate—were generally unenthusiastic and/or ineffective.

On the other hand, Wingate struggled to keep up with the flood of scripts coming in, to the point where Warner Bros.' head of production Darryl Zanuck wrote him a letter imploring him to pick up the pace.

[49] When the Code was announced, the liberal periodical The Nation attacked it,[42] stating that if crime were never to be presented in a sympathetic light, then taken literally that would mean that "law" and "justice" would become one and the same; therefore, events such as the Boston Tea Party could not be portrayed.

Thomas Doherty, Professor of American studies at Brandeis University, has defined the code as "no mere list of Thou-Shalt-Nots, but a homily that sought to yoke Catholic doctrine to Hollywood formula.

As having a major character get away with murder and living happily ever after would have been a flagrant violation of the Code, Hitchcock's version had Rebecca die in an accident with Maxim de Winter being only guilty for hiding the facts of her death.

When Warner Bros. wanted to make a film about Nazi concentration camps, the production office forbade it, citing the prohibition on depicting "in an unfavorable light" another country's "institutions [and] prominent people", with threats to take the matter to the federal government if the studio went ahead.

Breen influenced the production of Casablanca (1942), objecting to any explicit reference to Rick and Ilsa having slept together in Paris, and to the film mentioning that Captain Renault extorted sexual favors from his supplicants; ultimately, both remained strongly implied in the finished version.

However, the most famous defiance of the code was the case of The Outlaw, a western produced by Howard Hughes, which was denied a certificate of approval after it was completed in 1941 since the film's advertising focused particular attention on Jane Russell's breasts.

[64] The David O. Selznick production Duel in the Sun was also released in 1946 without the approval of the Hays Office, featuring several on-screen deaths, adultery and displays of lust.

The financial success of both films became deciding factors in the weakening of the Code in the late 1940s, when the formerly taboo subjects of rape and miscegenation were allowed in Johnny Belinda (1948) and Pinky (1949), respectively.

In addition to the threat of television, the industry was enduring a period of economic difficulties that were compounded by the result of United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948), in which the Supreme Court outlawed vertical integration as it had been found to violate anti-trust laws, and studios were not only forced to give up ownership of theaters, but they were also unable to control what exhibitors offered.

[66] This led to increasing competition from foreign films which were not bound by the Code, such as Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), released in the United States in 1949.

Some British films, such as Victim (1961), A Taste of Honey (1961), and The Leather Boys (1964), challenged traditional gender roles, and openly confronted the prejudices against homosexuals, all in clear violation of the Hollywood Production Code.

[75][76] Owing to its themes, Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) was not granted a certificate of approval, but still became a box office smash, and as a result, it further weakened the authority of the Code.

His 1953 film The Moon Is Blue, about a young woman who tries to play two suitors off against each other by claiming that she plans to keep her virginity until marriage, was released without a certificate of approval by United Artists, the first production distributed by a member of the MPAA to do so.

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 Pictures at a Revolution, a 2008 study of films during that era, Mark Harris wrote that the MPAA approval was "the first of a series of injuries to the Production Code that would prove fatal within three years".

The chaos of the interim period had rendered enforcement impossible and Valenti, an opponent of the Production Code, began working on a rating system under which film restrictions would lessen, an idea that had been considered as early as 1960 in response to the success of the non-approved Some Like It Hot and Anatomy of a Murder.

By the end of 1968, Geoffrey Shurlock stepped down from his post, and the PCA effectively dissolved, being replaced by the Code and Rating Administration (CARA), headed by Eugene Dougherty.

[30][80] In 1969, the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), directed by Vilgot Sjöman, was initially banned in the U.S. for its frank depiction of sexuality; however, this was overturned by the Supreme Court.