Motion Picture Production Code

The Motion Picture Production Code was a set of industry guidelines for the self-censorship of content that was applied to most United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1934 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Will H. Hays, who was the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) from 1922 to 1945. Under Hays' leadership, the MPPDA, later known as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), adopted the Production Code in 1930 and began rigidly enforcing it in mid-1934. The Production Code spelled out what was acceptable and unacceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States.
From 1934 to 1954, the code was closely identified with Joseph Breen, the administrator appointed by Hays to enforce the code in Hollywood. The film industry followed the guidelines set by the code well into the late 1950s, but during this time, the code began to weaken owing to the combined impact of television, influence from foreign films, controversial directors (such as Otto Preminger) pushing boundaries, and intervention from the courts, including the US Supreme Court. In 1968, after several years of minimal enforcement, the Production Code was replaced by the MPAA film rating system.
Background.
In 1922, after several risqué films and a series of off-screen scandals involving Hollywood stars, the studios enlisted Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays to rehabilitate Hollywood's image. Hollywood in the 1920s was rocked by a number of notorious scandals, such as the murder of William Desmond Taylor and alleged rape of Virginia Rappe by popular movie star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, which brought widespread condemnation from religious, civic, and political organizations. Many felt the movie industry had always been morally questionable.
Political pressure was increasing, with legislators in 37 states introducing almost one hundred movie censorship bills in 1921. Faced with the prospect of having to comply with hundreds, and potentially thousands, of inconsistent and easily changed decency laws in order to show their movies, the studios chose self-regulation as the preferable option.
Hays was paid the lavish sum of $100,000 a year (equal to $ today). Hays, Postmaster General under Warren G. Harding and former head of the Republican National Committee, served for 25 years as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), where he "defended the industry from attacks, recited soothing "nostrums", and negotiated treaties to cease hostilities".
The move mimicked the decision Major League Baseball had made in hiring judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as League Commissioner the previous year to quell questions about the integrity of baseball in the wake of the 1919 World Series gambling scandal; "The New York Times" even called Hays the "screen Landis". 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 pictures they were planning on making.
The Supreme Court had already decided unanimously in 1915 in "Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio" that free speech did not extend to motion pictures, and while there had been token attempts to clean up the movies before—such as when the studios formed the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI) in 1916—little had come of the efforts.
New York became the first state to take advantage of the Supreme Court's decision by instituting a censorship board in 1921. Virginia followed suit the following year, with eight individual states having a board by the advent of sound film, but many of these were ineffectual. 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.
Early in the sound system conversion process, it became apparent that what was acceptable in New York might not be so in Kansas. Film-makers 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. Self-censorship was deemed a preferable outcome.
In 1927, Hays suggested to studio executives that they form a committee to discuss film censorship. Irving G. Thalberg of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Sol Wurtzel of Fox, and E. H. Allen of Paramount responded by collaborating on a list they called the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls", which was based on items that were challenged by local censor boards. This list consisted of eleven subjects best avoided and twenty-six to be handled very carefully.
The list was approved by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Hays created the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) to oversee its implementation; however, there was still no way to enforce tenets. The controversy surrounding film standards came to a head in 1929.
Pre-Code: "Don'ts" and "Be Carefuls", as proposed in 1927.
In a resolution passed on June 29, 1927, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America codified a lists of "don'ts" and "be carefuls" into what they colloquially called their "Magna Carta". Many of these would later become key points in the Code. Specifically, the MPPDA resolved, "that 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":
Creation and contents.
In 1929, a Catholic layman, Martin Quigley (editor of the prominent trade paper "Motion Picture Herald") and the Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord created a code of standards and submitted it to the studios. Lord was particularly concerned with the effects of sound film on children, whom he considered especially susceptible to their allure.
In February 1930, several studio heads—including Irving Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)—met with Lord and Quigley. After some revisions, they agreed to the stipulations of the Code. One of the main motivating factors in adopting the Code was to avoid direct government intervention. It was the responsibility of the SRC (headed by Colonel Jason S. Joy, a former American Red Cross Executive Secretary) to supervise film production and advise the studios when changes or cuts were required. On March 31, the MPPDA agreed it would abide by the Code. The production code was intended to put a limitation on films which were distributed to a large audience, making it more difficult to appeal to all individuals in the audiences.
The code was divided into two parts. The first was a set of "general principles" which prohibited a picture from "lowering the moral standards of those who see it", so as not to wrongly influence a specific audience of views including, women, children, lower-class, and those of “susceptible” minds, called for depictions of the "correct standards of life", and lastly forbade a picture to show any sort of ridicule towards a law or "creating sympathy for its violation".
The second part was a set of "particular applications", which was an exacting list of items that could not be depicted. Some restrictions, such as the ban on homosexuality or on the use of specific curse words, were never directly mentioned, but were assumed to be understood without clear demarcation.
Homosexuals were de facto included under the proscription of sex perversion. The depiction of miscegenation (by 1934, defined only as sexual relationships between black and white races) was forbidden. It also stated that the notion of an "adults-only policy" would be a dubious, ineffective strategy that would be difficult to enforce; however, it did allow that "maturer minds may easily understand and accept without harm subject matter in plots which does younger people positive harm". If children were supervised and the events implied elliptically, the code allowed "the possibility of a cinematically inspired thought crime".
The code sought not only to determine what could be portrayed on screen, but also to promote traditional values. Sexual relations outside marriage—which were forbidden to be portrayed as attractive or beautiful—were to be presented in a way that would not arouse passion or make them seem permissible. Any sexual act considered perverted, including any suggestion of same-sex relationships, sex, or romance, was ruled out.
All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behavior is wrong, usually through "compensating moral value". Authority figures had to be treated with respect, and the clergy could not be portrayed as comic characters or villains. Under some circumstances, politicians, police officers, and judges could be villains, as long as it was clear that those individuals portrayed as villains were the exceptions to the rule.
The entire document was written with Catholic undertones, and stated that art must be handled carefully because it could be "morally evil in its effects", and because its "deep moral significance" was unquestionable. It was initially decided to keep the Catholic influence on the Code secret. A recurring theme was "that throughout, the audience feels sure that evil is wrong, and good is right". The Code also contained an addendum commonly referred to as the Advertising Code, which regulated advertising copy and imagery.
Enforcement.
Pre-Code Hollywood.
On February 19, 1930, "Variety" published the entire content of the Code and predicted that state film censorship boards would soon become obsolete; however, the men obliged to enforce the code—Jason Joy (head of the Committee until 1932) and his successor, Dr. James Wingate—were generally unenthusiastic and/or ineffective. The first film the office reviewed, "The Blue Angel", which was passed by Joy with no revisions, was considered indecent by a California censor. Although there were several instances where Joy negotiated cuts from films and there were definite—albeit loose—constraints, a significant amount of lurid material made it to the screen. Joy had to review 500 films a year with a small staff and little power. He was more willing to work with the studios, and his creative writing skills led to his hiring at Fox. 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. In 1930, the Hays office did not have the authority to order studios to remove material from a film, and instead worked by reasoning and sometimes pleading with them. Complicating matters, the appeals process ultimately put the responsibility for making the final decision in the hands of the studios.
One factor in ignoring the code was the fact that some found such censorship prudish, owing to the libertine social attitudes of the 1920s and early 1930s. This was a period in which the Victorian era was sometimes ridiculed as being naïve and backward. When the Code was announced, the liberal periodical "The Nation" attacked it. The publication stated 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. If clergy must always be presented in a positive way, then hypocrisy could not be dealt with either." The Outlook" agreed, and, unlike "Variety", "The Outlook" predicted from the beginning that the Code would be difficult to enforce. The Great Depression of the 1930s led many studios to seek income by any way possible. Since films containing racy and violent content resulted in high ticket sales, it seemed reasonable to continue producing such films. Soon, the flouting of the code became an open secret. In 1931, "The Hollywood Reporter" mocked the code and quoted an anonymous screenwriter saying that "the Hays moral code is not even a joke any more; it's just a memory"; two years later "Variety" followed suit.
Breen era.
On June 13, 1934, an amendment to the Code was adopted which established the Production Code Administration (PCA) and required all films released on or after July 1, 1934, to obtain a certificate of approval before being released. The PCA had two offices - one in Hollywood, and the other in New York City. The first film to receive an MPPDA seal of approval was "The World Moves On" (1934). For more than thirty years, virtually all motion pictures produced in the United States adhered to the code. The Production Code was not created or enforced by federal, state, or city government; the Hollywood studios adopted the code in large part in the hopes of avoiding government censorship, preferring self-regulation to government regulation.
Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit, wrote: "Silent smut had been bad. Vocal smut cried to the censors for vengeance." 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. The guilty are punished, the virtuous rewarded, the authority of church and state is legitimate, and the bonds of matrimony are sacred." What resulted has been described as "a Jewish owned business selling Catholic theology to Protestant America".
In 1934, Joseph I. Breen — a prominent Catholic layman who had worked in public relations — was appointed head of the new Production Code Administration (PCA). Under Breen's leadership of the PCA, which lasted until his retirement in 1954, enforcement of the Production Code became notoriously rigid. (Even cartoon sex symbol Betty Boop had to change from being a flapper and began to wear an old-fashioned housewife's skirt.) However, the prohibition against miscegenation was by 1934 defined only as sexual relationships between black and white races.
Breen's power to change scripts and scenes angered many writers, directors, and Hollywood moguls. Breen influenced the production of "Casablanca", 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; however, both remained strongly implied in the finished version. Adherence to the Code also ruled out any possibility of the film ending with Rick and Ilsa consummating their adulterous love, making inevitable the ending with Rick's noble renunciation, one of "Casablanca"'s most famous scenes.
The first major instance of censorship under the Production Code involved the 1934 film "Tarzan and His Mate", in which brief nude scenes involving a body double for actress Maureen O'Sullivan were edited out of the master negative of the film. Another famous case of enforcement involved the 1943 western "The Outlaw", produced by Howard Hughes. "The Outlaw" was denied a certificate of approval and kept out of theaters for years, because the film's advertising focused particular attention on Jane Russell's breasts. Hughes eventually persuaded Breen that the breasts did not violate the code, and the film could be shown.
The PCA also engaged in political censorship. When Warner Bros. wanted to make a film about Nazi concentration camps, the production office forbade it—citing the above-mentioned 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. This policy prevented a number of anti-Nazi films being produced. In 1938, the FBI unearthed and prosecuted a Nazi spy ring, subsequently allowing Warner to produce "Confessions of a Nazi Spy", with the Three Stooges' short subject "You Nazty Spy!" (January 1940) being the first Hollywood film of any sort to openly spoof the Third Reich's leadership.
Some films produced outside the mainstream studio system flouted the code. One example is "Child Bride" (1938), which featured a nude scene involving a twelve-year-old child actress (Shirley Mills). The Code began to weaken in the late 1940s, when the formerly taboo subjects of rape and miscegenation were allowed in "Johnny Belinda" (1948) and "Pinky" (1949), respectively. In 1951, the MPAA revised the code to make it more rigid; the 1951 revisions spelled out more words and subjects that were prohibited. In 1954, Breen retired, largely because of ill health, and Geoffrey Shurlock was appointed as his successor.
Some of Hollywood’s creative class managed to find positives in the Code’s limitations. Director Edward Dmytryk later said that the Code "had a very good effect because it made us think. If we wanted to get something across that was censorable… we had to do it deviously. We had to be clever. And it usually turned out to be much better than if we had done it straight."
Decline.
Hollywood continued to work within the confines of the Production Code throughout the 1950s, but during this time, the movie industry was faced with very serious competitive threats. The first threat came from a new technology, television, which did not require Americans to leave their houses to watch moving pictures. Hollywood needed to offer the public something it could not get on television, which itself was under an even more restrictive censorship code. In addition to the threat of television, there was also increasing competition from foreign films, such as Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" (1948), the Swedish film "One Summer of Happiness" (1951), and Ingmar Bergman's "Summer with Monika" (1953). Vertical integration in the movie industry had been found to violate anti-trust laws, and studios had been forced to give up ownership of theaters by the Supreme Court in "United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc." (1948). The studios had no way to keep foreign films out, and foreign films were not bound by the Production Code. Some British films — "Victim" (1961), "A Taste of Honey" (1961), and "The Leather Boys" (1963) — challenged traditional gender roles, and openly confronted the prejudices against homosexuals, all in clear violation of the Hollywood Production Code.
In 1952, in the case of "Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson", the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled its 1915 decision ("Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio") and held that motion pictures were entitled to First Amendment protection, so that the New York State Board of Regents could not ban "The Miracle", a short film that was one half of "L'Amore" (1948), an anthology film directed by Roberto Rossellini. Film distributor Joseph Burstyn released the film in the U.S. in 1950, and the case became known as the "Miracle Decision" because of its connection to Rossellini's film. That reduced the threat of government regulation, which had formerly been cited as justification for the Production Code, and the PCA's powers over the Hollywood industry were greatly reduced.
By the 1950s, American culture also began to change. A boycott by the National Legion of Decency no longer guaranteed a film's commercial failure, and several aspects of the code had slowly lost their taboo. In 1956, areas of the code were re-written to accept subjects such as miscegenation, adultery, and prostitution. For example, the re-make of a pre-Code film dealing with prostitution, "Anna Christie", was cancelled by MGM twice, in 1940 and in 1946, as the character of Anna was not allowed to be portrayed as a prostitute. By 1962, such subject matter was acceptable, and the original film was given a seal of approval.
By the late 1950s, increasingly explicit films began to appear, such as "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), "Suddenly, Last Summer" (1959), "Psycho" (1960), and "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" (1960). The MPAA reluctantly granted the seal of approval for these films, although not until certain cuts were made. Owing to its themes, Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" (1959) was not granted a certificate of approval, but it still became a box office smash, and, as a result, it further weakened the authority of the Code.
At the forefront of contesting the Code was director Otto Preminger, whose films violated the Code repeatedly in the 1950s. 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. He 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 murder and rape. Like "Some Like It Hot", Preminger's films were direct assaults on the authority of the Production Code, and their success hastened its abandonment. In the early 1960s, films began to deal with adult subjects and sexual matters that had not been seen in Hollywood films since the early 1930s. The MPAA reluctantly granted the seal of approval for these films, although again not until certain cuts were made.
In 1964, the Holocaust film "The Pawnbroker", directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts, as well as because of a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Sánchez described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful". Despite the rejection, the film's producers arranged for Allied Artists to release the film without the Production Code seal, with the New York censors licensing the film without the cuts demanded by Code administrators. The producers appealed the rejection to the Motion Picture Association of America. 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". The requested reductions of nudity were minimal; the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.
"The Pawnbroker" was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case" and was described by "The New York Times" at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent". 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".
In 1966, Warner Bros. released "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", the first film to feature the "Suggested for Mature Audiences" (SMA) label. When Jack Valenti became President of the MPAA in 1966, he was faced with censoring the film's explicit language. Valenti negotiated a compromise: the word "screw" was removed, but other language remained, including the phrase "hump the hostess". The film received Production Code approval despite the previously prohibited language.
That same year, the British-produced, American-financed film "Blowup" was denied Production Code approval. MGM released it anyway, the first instance of an MPAA member company distributing a film that did not have an approval certificate. That same year, the original and lengthy code was replaced by a list of eleven points. The points outlined that the boundaries of the new code would be current community standards and good taste. Any film containing content deemed suitable for older audiences would feature the label SMA in its advertising. With the creation of this new label, the MPAA unofficially began classifying films.
Abandonment.
By the late 1960s, enforcement had become impossible and the Production Code was abandoned entirely. The MPAA began working on a rating system, under which film restrictions would lessen. The MPAA film rating system went into effect on November 1, 1968, with the four rating symbols: "G" means suggested for general exhibition (persons of all ages admitted), "M" means suggested for mature audiences, "R" means suggested as restricted (persons under 16 not admitted unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian), and "X" means persons under 16 will not be admitted. By the end of 1968, Geoffrey Shurlock stepped down from his post.
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. In 1970, because of confusion over the meaning of "mature audiences", the "M" rating was changed to "GP" meaning "for general exhibition, but parental guidance is suggested". and then in 1972 to the current "PG", for "parental guidance suggested". In 1984, in response to public complaints regarding the severity of horror elements in PG-rated titles such as "Gremlins" and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", the "PG-13" rating was created as a middle tier between "PG" and "R". In 1990, the "X" rating was replaced by "NC-17" (under 17 not admitted), partly because of the stigma associated with the "X" rating, and partly because the "X" rating was not trademarked by the MPAA; pornographic bookstores and theaters were using their own "X", "XX", and "XXX" symbols to market products.
As the American Humane Association's Hollywood office depended on the Hays Office for the right to monitor sets, the closure of the Hays Office in 1966 corresponded with an increase in animal cruelty on movie sets. According to a writer for Turner Classic Movies, the association's access did not return to Hays-era standards until 1980.