Cut Before It Was Shot

The usual picture of film censorship is a man with scissors and a reel of finished film. For most of Hollywood's classical period that picture is close to useless, and the reason is worth understanding, because it explains why the most effective censorship in the history of the medium left so little footage behind.

The Production Code was drafted by a Jesuit priest, Daniel Lord, and a Catholic trade publisher, Martin Quigley, and adopted in 1930 by the studios' trade association, then run by Will Hays. It set out what American films should and should not show: crime must not be made attractive, the sanctity of marriage must be upheld, certain words and subjects were out altogether. It opened with a general principle, that no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.

For four years it was widely ignored. This is the period now sold as pre-Code Hollywood: gangsters who enjoy their money, women who sleep their way upward and are not punished for it, Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face rising through a bank's office building floor by floor. The Code existed. Nobody was making the studios obey it.

What changed in 1934 was not the rules but the machinery. The Catholic Legion of Decency began asking the faithful to pledge to stay away from immoral films, and the threat of boycotts in big cities concentrated minds. In July 1934 the studios created the Production Code Administration, put Joseph Breen in charge of it, and agreed that no member company would distribute or exhibit a film without its seal. A film released without one carried a $25,000 fine.

The fine was not the real enforcement. Ownership was. The companies that signed the Code also owned the first-run cinemas in the big cities, where a film earned much of its money, so a film without a seal had nowhere to play that mattered.

And here is what the scissors picture misses. Breen's office did its work on paper. Studios submitted scripts before shooting, the office replied with letters listing what would have to change, and writers and producers negotiated scene by scene. A line was softened, a crime acquired a consequence, a couple acquired a marriage certificate, a suggestive scene became a fade-out. By the time a camera turned, most of what the office objected to had already been rewritten.

That is why so little censored footage survives from the period. There was usually nothing to cut. The censored film is the one that was never shot, and its traces are in correspondence files rather than on the cutting-room floor.

Some of the Code's most famous effects are not in its text at all. Married couples in twin beds is the standard example. The Code says only that the treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy. Separate beds were what the negotiations tended to produce, script after script, until they became a convention everyone assumed was a rule.

The same mechanism shaped plots. The Code required that the audience's sympathy never be thrown to the side of wrongdoing, and in practice that meant a criminal had to be caught, killed or repentant by the last reel. A generation of crime films have endings that were negotiated rather than written.

None of this makes pre-Code films uncensored, which is how they are often marketed now. State and city censorship boards were cutting prints throughout the period, and once the Code was enforced, older films could not be reissued without a seal, so many were trimmed for re-release. The original version of Baby Face, as first shot, was rediscovered only in 2004, in a Library of Congress vault.

Then the machinery came apart, in roughly the order it had been assembled.

In 1948 the Supreme Court's Paramount decision forced the studios to sell their cinemas. In 1952, in the case over Rossellini's The Miracle, the Court held that films were protected speech, and a state could no longer ban one for being sacrilegious. Now an unsealed film could find independent screens, and the courts were steadily narrowing what state censors could forbid.

Otto Preminger tested this at once. The Moon Is Blue (1953), a comedy the office refused because it used words like virgin and seduce, went out without a seal and made money. He did it again with The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), about heroin addiction. The Code was loosened in 1956, and by the mid-1960s exceptions were being negotiated film by film. In 1968 it was replaced.

The lesson is about where censorship lives. It worked when it sat inside the production process and was enforced by the people who owned the screens. When the ownership changed it collapsed, without a single law being repealed. Keep that in mind for the last lesson in this book, where a different market finds it can get much the same effect without owning anything at all.