The film industry's rules for self-censorship, also known as the Production Code, that were designed in 1930 and originally administered by Will H. Hays. During the first four years of the code's existence, it was almost universally ignored because there was no enforcement mechanism.
Will Hays, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and U.S. postmaster general during President Harding's administration, was originally hired by the movie bigwigs in 1922 to head a newly formed industry-watchdog organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. The organization was brought into being as a response to the public outcry following a long string of Hollywood scandals, most notably the FATTY ARBUCKLE rape case. The MPPDA soon came to be known simply as the Hays Office. It was an organization with little clout during the 1920s, created merely as a smokescreen to keep the federal government from imposing its own brand of censorship or control over the wild and woolly film business.
In the early 1930s, however, filmmakers pushed the more conservative members of the moviegoing audience too far. MAE WEST's suggestive humor, JEAN HARLOW's harlotry, and a rash of violent gangster films all led to a public outcry that the film industry was corrupt and had to be censored. Fearing that their power might be circumscribed by Congress, the movie moguls went into action first, censoring themselves by putting genuine teeth in Will Hays's strengthened new production code in 1934. Any movie shown in any movie theater owned by the studios (which were the vast majority of the most successful, most profitable, theaters in the country) had to have the Hays Code seal of approval. Without that seal, a movie simply could not survive commercially.
Language was another area of concern. Certain words could not be used in films if said in a "profane" manner. Although there was a faintly liberal impulse behind the Hays Code's dictates concerning religion, it stated that no film "may throw ridicule on any religious faith"; in the application of that rule, one could not present any member of the cloth as a villain - or for that matter, even a bumbler or a fool - thereby implicitly upholding the institution of religion rather than merely protecting it from abuse.
As for violence, the guiding principle came to be known as the "Law of Compensating Values." Characters could be terribly evil and violent just so long as they were properly punished for their sins by movie's end. Films suffered from this dictum because audiences could always guess the ending; the bad guy would get his just deserts and the hero would always win. As a result, movies that purported to be realistic often had tacked-on happy endings that were anything but.
The examples of censorship imposed by the Hays Code are legion. Some of them, at least by today's standards, seem particularly ludicrous. For instance, the Hays Office ruled out the use of "razzberries" as an epithet in Bedtime for Bonzo (1951); W. C. FIELDS could not use the expression "Nuts to you," in The Bank Dick (1940). One of the great early battles between a producer and the Hays Office occurred over the famous line in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) when Rhett Butler says to Scarlett O'Hara, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." The line was so well known to the millions who had read the book that the movie's producer, DAVID O. SELZNICK, fought for its inclusion and won his case at the cost of a modest $5,000 fine. It would be many years before such a victory would come again.
The Hays Code stayed in effect long after Mr. Hays's departure from Hollywood in 1945. The cracks in the code finally began to show ever so slightly in the 1940s and particularly during the 1950s. HOWARD HUGHES titillated audiences with his sexy western The Outlaw (1943), skirmishing with the Hays Office for three years before finally rereleasing the movie in 1946 to a wider audience anxious to see what all the fuss was about.
OTTO PREMINGER was the next rebel, making two films that challenged basic tenets of the code during the 1950s. The Moon Is Blue (1953) dealt explicitly with the issue of virginity, but Preminger managed to get distribution for his film thanks to the publicity generated by his breaking of the Production Code taboo. Two years later, Preminger made a film about drug addiction - another taboo - when he directed The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), and again Preminger came away with a hit. The code began to crumble soon after.
By the 1960s, thanks to a more liberal moviegoing public, the incursion of successful foreign films on Hollywood's turf, and the softening of obscenity laws by the courts, the once-powerful Hays Code was markedly changed. In 1966 a new production code was created by the MPAA that made it a rating rather than a censoring device. The rating system and the criteria used to rate films have been adjusted since 1966 to reflect society's changing values. The code is now essentially designed to protect children from intimacy, violence, or dialogue that might be too explicit in certain films. For the most part, however, the code still seems to be far more concerned with intimacy than any other issue.
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1. Don Ameche was one of the leading men of 20th Century Fox
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