As the American film industry expanded, so too did efforts on the part of various social groups to increase censorship. By the late 1910s and early 1920s, there was increasing pressure for a national censorship law, and more local boards were being formed. Many postwar films used the sort of subject matter associated with the Roaring Twenties: bootleg liquor, jazz music, flappers, and wild parties. Cecil B. De Mille’s sex comedies presented adultery as a frivolous, even glamorous, pastime. Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919) similarly treated a married woman’s flirtation as a fascinating violation of social norms.
Soon a series of scandals focused attention on the less palatable aspects of the lifestyles of famous filmmakers, including sex scandals and flagrant violations of the new Prohibition law. Mary Pickford’s image as America’s sweetheart received a blow in 1920 when she divorced her first husband to marry Douglas Fairbanks. In 1921, comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was charged with rape and murder when a young actress died during a drunken party; although he was ultimately acquitted, the charges wrecked his career. The following year, director William Desmond Taylor was mysteriously murdered in circumstances that revealed his affairs with several well-known actresses. In 1923, the handsome, athletic star Wallace Reid died of morphine addiction. The public increasingly viewed Hollywood as promoting excess and decadence.
Partly in an effort to forestall censorship and clean up Hollywood’s image, the main studios banded together to form a trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). To head it, in early 1922 they hired Will Hays, then postmaster general under Warren Harding. Hays had already proved his flair for publicity by chairing the Republican National Committee when Harding was elected president. That flair, combined with Hays’s access to powerful figures in Washington and his Presbyterian background, made him useful to the film industry.
Hays’s strategy was to pressure the producers to eliminate the offensive content of their films and to include morals clauses in studio contracts. Despite Ar-buckle’s acquittal on the rape and murder charges, Hays banned his films. In 1924, the MPPDA issued the “Formula,” a vague document urging studios not to make the “kind of picture which should not be produced.” Predictably, this had little effect, and in 1927 the Hays office (as the MPPDA came to be known) adopted the more explicit “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” list. “Don’ts” included “the illegal traffic in drugs,” “licentious or suggestive nudity,” and “ridicule of the clergy.” “Be Carefuls” involved “the use of the flag,” “brutality and possible gruesomeness,” “methods of smuggling,” and “deliberate seduction of girls.” The list was as concerned with the depiction of how various crimes were committed as it was with sexual content. Producers continued to circumvent the guidelines, however, and in the early 1930s the list would be replaced by the much more elaborate Production Code (see Chapter 10).
Although the Hays Office is usually thought of as a strategy to block domestic censorship, the organization also performed other services for the industry. The MPPDA gathered information on film markets at home and abroad, keeping up, for example, with censorship regulations in various countries. Hays established a foreign department that battled several European quotas that stifled American exports. In 1926, Hays’s group successfully lobbied Congress to form the Motion Picture Division of the Department of Commerce. That division then helped promote the sale of American films abroad by gathering information and bringing more pressure against harmful regulations. Indeed, the formation of the MPPDA provided a clear signal that motion pictures had become a major American industry.
World History
