Hollywood's prudish self-censorship

With the Great Depression and evaporating, income cinema attendance fell drastically. To counter this trend Hollywood became more and more violent and sexy, to a point that a call for censorship of some kind was in the air. Indeed the better organized catholic minority created the Catholic Legion of Decency and the clergy admonished their Sunday churchgoers to boycott certain cinemas and films. Hollywood became to be viewed as a place of the damned and sinful.

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But Hollywood did certainly not want the government to step in. The studios, therefore, decided to engage in their own self-censorship. They hired Will Hays, who had been a Republican and Presbyterian, non-smoker, non-drinker, but wired to power in Washington and Wall Street. He was expected to "clean up" Tinsel town. He implemented the Hays code which has been in force until the early 60s when it formally ended and was replaced by a rating system which rather warns than forbids. Ironically the enforcement of the code came as a challenge to scriptwriters and directors and one can say that Hollywood’s most creative era was due to it. Clara and Julia Kuperberg selected clips to demonstrate how movies often reflected their time from pre-code sexuality to post-code soberness in line with a Puritan heritage.

Original title: Hollywood censored
Directed by Clara & Julia Kuperberg
Produced by Wichita Films
Licensed by Poorhouse International, 2015

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