Will Hays Tells Film Industry to “Purify” Itself
Will Hays, former Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding and now head of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, on this day advised the film industry to “purify” itself.
Hays initially thought that exhorting Hollywood producers to clean up films would work. He hoped that self-censorship would forestall a federal censorship law. Hollywood movies, however, continued to be quite racy, however, and he eventually helped movie industry leaders develop a voluntary Production Code as a form of self-censorship.
One step on this path was a list of voluntary “Don’ts and Be Carefuls,” which the Hollywood producers on October 15, 1927. The Code went through several variations until the very restrictive June 13, 1934, version, which lasted until the 1960s. The 1934 Code is often referred to as the “Hays Code.” Hays finally retired from his position in 1945.
Somewhat ironically, as Postmaster General, Hays had ended the Post Office censorship of political material (but not of sexually related materials) that had prevailed during World War I (September 7, 1922).
Watch Will Hays introduce talking pictures in 1926: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtOKCQY58VI
Read: Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (1990)
Learn about “pre-Code” Hollywood films: Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 (1999)
Learn more at a timeline on movie censorship: https://www.aclu.org/files/multimedia/censorshiptimeline.html
Watch pre-1934 Code film clips (with Will Hays speaking): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3-XCvlTkK4