[1] Holmby productions, the owner of the film The Moon is Blue, and its exclusive worldwide distributor, United Artists Corporation, pursuant to a Kansas statute (G.S.
The court said, The only question before us, then, is whether the statutes under consideration are unconstitutional because they are an abridgment or contravention of the first and fourteenth amendments to the constitution of the United States, or because they are couched in language so vague and indefinite as to offend due process.
We will first determine whether the words, "obscene, indecent, or immoral, or such as tend to debase or corrupt morals," are vague and indefinite terms so as to offend due process.
There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem.
These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or `fighting' words — those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace."
777 (New York state motion picture licensing system similar to the one in Kansas, which prohibited "sacrilegious" films was unconstitutional) in which the U.S. Supreme Court said,... it is not necessary for us to decide, for example, whether a state may censor motion pictures under a clearly drawn statute designed and applied to prevent the showing of obscene films.Since the court in Burstyn had excepted obscenity from First Amendment protection, the State Board of Review classifying the film as obscene meant the Board was within its power to ban the film.
[4] The US Supreme Court, in Interstate Circuit, Inc. v. Dallas, 390 U.S. 676 (1968), recognized that its decision in Holmby struck down the Kansas Film Censorship statute as unconstitutional.