Hollywood - The Production Code

The awareness of the powerful role of motion pictures in relation to the wider society has created very different expectations and norms surrounding the film industry, both histori- cally and geographically. This entry focuses on Hollywood in the sense that the name Hollywood has been used from the 1920s to epitomize the world of American filmmaking, both studio-based and independent. The British industry is covered under the entry for cinema. The American film industry has been a model of the struggle between opportunistic capitalism and religious control, having operated under censorship in the sense of interference prior to publication, especially between 1934 and 1968, after which there was a greater degree of free enterprise. The effects of these changes on film language have been dramatic. Timothy Jay quantifies this in “A Study of Cursing in American Films 1939–89” (1992, 222-34), discussed further below.

Even by 1913 there was in existence a National Board of Review for Motion Pictures, which in its “Definition of Censorship” mentioned the medium’s potential for “political, social, religious propaganda, for muckraking … [and] for revolutionary ideas” (Ross 2002, 4). This educational and didactic assumption has remained ingrained: “Movies do more than simply show us how to dress, how to look, or what to buy,” runs the introduction to a recent collection of essays on Movies and American Society: “They teach us how to think about race, gender, class, ethnicity and politics” (Ross 2002, 1). No scholar or critic would write in such terms of the British or European cinema. The collection is illuminating in its focus on particular content-themes, such as the Cold War, the Vietnam War, race relations, feminism, and other political issues.

The history of the American film industry is very much bound up with the struggle between freedom of expression and prohibitions over the treatment of most of the topics just listed. In the early years the two principal antagonists, namely the Hollywood producers and their censors and critics, were capitalists and moralists, all unelected. As early as 1909 the mayor of New York, inundated by complaints of “indecency,” closed down the movie theatres. In a landmark case in 1915, the year of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation , the Supreme Court ruled that the motion picture industry was “business pure and simple,” and therefore not protected by the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech. Clarence Darrow commented: “It is an anomaly in a free country to guarantee freedom to speak, to publish, or to put anything upon the stage, and to single out the moving pictures as subject for censorship” (Darrow and Vittum 1918, 188). (This judgment has since been reversed and reinstated.) A complicating factor in this libertarian argument is that the movies attracted a vast, unselected, and growing audience: in 1922 the average weekly attendance at theaters was 40 million; by 1928 it had risen sharply to 65 million, and by 1930 it had leaped to 90 million.

Between 1915 and 1922 more direct control was passed to the National Board of Censorship, but producers felt sufficiently free to release films with salacious titles like A Shocking Night, Luring Lips, Virgin Paradise , and The Truant Husband , together with increasingly explicit love scenes. There were calls for tighter controls and for federal intervention to “rescue the motion pictures from the devil and 500 unchristian Jews” (Hamilton 1990, 58). This ugly religious and ethnic edge was given to the conflict since many of the studio owners were Jewish and most of the moralists were Catholic. In 1922, in response to the industry’s request for an outsider to head the newly created Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (M.P.P.D.A.), President Warren G. Harding appointed Will H. Hays, the former postmaster general, to this position. What became known as the Hays Office issued guidelines, which originally focused on content. With the arrival of sound, these perforce included the matter of “bad language,” another area of contention.

The Production Code

In March 1930, in response to waves of protests and threatened boycotts, the Hollywood producers negotiated a new form of censorship with one their most powerful and determined opponents, the Catholic owner and publisher of Motion Picture Herald , Martin Quigley. This resulted in a detailed Motion Picture Production Code, first known as the Hays Code, but actually drawn up by Quigley and Daniel J. Lord, S.J. (a St. Louis drama professor). The Code stressed “the MORAL IMPORTANCE of entertainment,” its overriding principle was that “Evil must not be presented alluringly,” and the section dealing with “Plot Material” spelled out particular stringent prohibitions concerning the handling of “‘the triangle,’ adultery, seduction and rape, scenes of passion, murder, crime in general, costume, dancing, locations (no brothels or bedrooms).” In addition there were certain banned topics, namely “sex perversion—or any reference to it”; “miscegenation (sex relationships between the black and white races)”; “sex hygiene or venereal diseases”; “scenes of actual childbirth, in fact or in silhouette.” Most germane to the present inquiry were the Code’s rulings on language in Section V, termed Profanity: “Pointed profanity (this includes the words God, Lord, Jesus, Christ—unless used reverently—Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd) or other profane or vulgar expressions, however used, is forbidden.” The Code was modified in various ways subsequently to include such restrictions as “Vulgarity: Oaths ‘should never be used as a comedy element. The name of Jesus should never be used except in reverence.’”

By all accounts, the films of the next four years blatantly ignored the Code in terms of content. The most notorious instances were Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel (1930) and Blonde Venus (1932), Joan Crawford in Possessed (1931), Jean Harlow in Red Dust (1930), and Mae West in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (both 1933). By 1934 more than 46 million people had seen the last two films. Representing the most insidious and subversive threat to the restrictions of the Code, “Mae West made any attempt at censorship look foolish [since] she could turn the most innocent-sounding dialogue in a script into blatant sexual innuendo” (Ross 2002, 109). Her most famous line is still: “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?” (Hamilton 1990, 66-67).

Within Hollywood itself, always both glamorous and suspect, a double standard obtained, as the magazine Confidential showed. Yet the film moguls imposed a rigid code of “family decency,” summed up in this lecture from Louis B. Mayer to Hedy Lamarr: “We have an obligation to the audience—millions of families. We make clean pictures … of course … if you like to make love … fornicate … screw your leading man in the dressing room, that’s your business. But in front of the camera, gentility. You hear, gentility.” He concluded the conversation on a more personal note: “you have a bigger chest than I thought! You’d be surprised how tits figure in a girl’s career” (Latham 1972, 154). Mayer’s oscillations of register from the formal make love and fornicate to the coarse screw and tits to the absurd euphemism chest reveal his essential hypocrisy.

Largely in response to the flaunting of the Code, a group of Catholic bishops formed in April 1934 the League of Decency and organized a nationwide boycott, which at one point obtained eleven million pledges. Faced with already declining audiences as a result of the Depression, the Hollywood producers agreed to a system of “prior restraint” or censorship in advance. The Hays Office appointed Joseph Breen, a Catholic journalist to head the Production Code Office, which would approve every film before distribution. The results were dramatic. Gangster films, which had achieved notable successes with Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932), were dropped (at a time when the Mafia was on the rise). There was an increase in musicals, costume dramas, and biographies. Within a few months commentators on the industry noted that “the obscenity that was found in four or five pictures before last June has disappeared.” In an unprecedented sign of approval from Rome, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical in July 1936 congratulating the League of Decency campaign, on “the outstanding success of the crusade” (Hamilton 1990, 68).

From 1934, until its abolition in 1968, the Production Code Office (P.C.O.) influenced the social, political, sexual, racial, and linguistic content of every American film. Furthermore, in response to demands, the industry withdrew from circulation a number of films deemed to be “immoral,” including Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1932) and the adaptation of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary , namely The Story of Temple Drake (1933).

Up to this point the principal site of struggle had been sex, that is to say, heterosexual sex, since the taboo on “perversion” was maintained. Studies such as The Lavender Screen (1993) and Queer Cinema (2004) explore what was going on behind the façade. With the outbreak of war, communications between the White House and Hollywood focused on how filmmakers might contribute to the propaganda potential of the war effort. Many films reflected the hysteria at the start of World War II by exploiting xenophobia and negative stereotypes, using such emotive titles as The Menace of the Rising Sun, Secret Agent of Japan , and Little Tokyo, USA . This last, actually shot in Chinatown in Los Angeles, has a scene with a police detective dragging off a spy suspect, saying “Take that for Pearl Harbor, you slant-eyed.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s representative, Lowell Mellet, had a team of analysts who interpreted the film as “an invitation to a witch-hunt” (Hamilton 1990, 218). In Objective Burma (where there were no actual American troops) a soldier surveys the remains of a village overrun by the Japanese and exclaims: “This was done in cold blood by people who claim to be civilized. Civilized! They’re degenerate, immoral idiots. Stinking little savages. Wipe them out, I say. Wipe them off the face of the earth” (Hamilton 1990, 229). By 1943 there were over two hundred screenwriters serving in the armed forces.

The involvement of Hollywood in the Vietnam War was, of course, radically different. During the war The Green Berets (1968), the result of a proposal by John Wayne to President Lyndon B. Johnson, presented America’s role as an idealistic mission. The correspondence is quoted in Ross (ed.) 2002, 303-5. However, after the war ended in 1975, a number of major antiwar films appeared frankly critical of America’s role, most notably Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986, although Oliver Stone actually wrote the script in 1976), and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). All had scabrous scripts.

The erosion of the Production Code was already being initiated by television, which had started transmission in 1939 and was to expand to twelve channels by 1952. Being essen- tially a family medium, television was subject to even more rigorous prohibitions against nudity, profanity, and immorality than film. With the consequent decline in cinema audiences, producers saw their opportunity to make films that were “alternative,” “adult” entertainment. In 1968 this development was formalized: the Production Code Administration became the Code Seal Rating Office, and films were rated G (General), PG (Parental Guidance), R (Restricted), and X (Over 16). However, “When classification started it was quickly found that the most commercially attractive rating was the ‘X’” (Trevelyan 1973, 195). In January 1988 the classification of video films included the categories L for “language” and EL for “extreme language.”

Among films of the 1960s that marked a shift away from the narrow prescriptions of the Production Code were Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Although the first attracted criticisms of excessive violence, both scripts were almost entirely “clean.” Edward Albee’s devastatingly frank depiction of domestic warfare in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) was also free of verbal overkill: a single witheringly contemptuous “screw you!” from the matriarchal Martha carried more weight than a train of four-letter words. Timothy Jay’s study Cursing in America (1992) contains an Appendix quantifying the “total Number of Bad Words” in films from 1939 to 1989. This endorses the general impression of a dramatic increase, the mean number rising from 1.58 for the period 1939–1960, to 24.8 in the decade of the 1960s, up to 84.1 in the 1970s, and flattening out to 81.03 in the 1980s. Gender stereotypes are also endorsed, since films with male leads show a rise from 1.5 in the first period to over 70 in the 1970s, while those with female leads predictably increase more demurely to a peak of only 19.48 in the 1980s (1992, 231-34).

An obvious, even extreme example of the absolute change in the values depicted in the American cinema lies in the work of Quentin Tarantino, notably Reservoir Dogs (1992), his directorial debut, Natural Born Killers (1995), and Pulp Fiction (1994). All the taboo topics, such as gratuitous violence, gangsterism, the drug culture, sexual promiscuity, sodomy, and racism are paraded without restraint, combined with a large measure of black or sick humor. Obscenity occurs in virtually every piece of dialogue. Sex is crudely chauvinist: “She’s getting this serious dick action…. Her pussy should be Bubble-Yum by now. But when this cat fucks her, it hurts” (1994, 5). Racism is overt and virulent. One gangster complains about the “inappropriate” allocation of parole officers to criminals: “Fuckin’ jungle bunny goes out there, slits some old woman’s throat for twenty-five cents. Fuckin’ nigger gets Doris Day as a parole officer. But a good fella like you gets stuck with a ball-busting prick” (1994, 48). Another is even more savage: “Now ain’t that a sad sight, daddy, walks into a jail a white man, walks out talkin’ like a nigger. It’s all that black semen been shooting up his butt. It’s backed up into his brain and comes out of his mouth” (1994, 51). Pulp Fiction won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1994 and a Golden Globe for the Best Screenplay. Publicity material for the film noted coyly: “The f-word is used 271 times.” Yet curiously, there are vestiges of the old code. For out of this miasma of savagery, a crude rough justice emerges: in the final shoot-out all the gangsters die, having shot each other or been killed by the police. More surprisingly, “pointed profanity” is comparatively limited, with Jesus, Christ , and God absent, and “Holy shit” or “What the Sam Hill?” making only the occasional appearance.

The American cinema has broken all the previous restraints to which it was subject. Virtually all the modern varieties of swearing now abound, to the point that sensitive audiences routinely face a virtual bombardment of obscenity, often combined with xenophobic, racist, and homophobic comments. Only profanity still carries the weight of a taboo, to the point that sacred names are commonly euphemized, “bleeped,” or even erased from the sound track. Rhett Butler’s famous violation of the Code in Gone with the Wind (1939): “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn!” is obviously tame alongside contemporary ejaculations. (Incidentally, the remark was not in the original script, was censored, but passed by Joseph Breen only after a personal written intervention by David O. Selznik, and the payment of a $5,000 fine.) The persistent avoidance of profanity in the American cinema is an enigma in a nation without an official religion. It is certainly not a feature of British or European film, which has evolved in avowedly Christian societies.