Early Hollywood Censorship Code Adopted
The motion picture industry leaders on this day released a new version of voluntary censorship for movies. The 1930 Production Code spelled out specific restrictions on “offensive” language and behavior, particularly regarding sex and crime, and prohibited the ridicule of religion. It also forbade the depiction of illegal drug use, venereal disease, childbirth, and sexual relations between races.
This version of the code, however, had no enforcement mechanism and it had virtually no impact on movies.
Almost from the birth of the movies in America, films faced censorship efforts. Beginning in the early 1920s, leaders of the motion picture industry tried various methods to impose self-censorship on Hollywood films as a strategy to head off government censorship.
Catholic religious leaders especially had turned up the heat on Hollywood, calling for strict moral standards and a Code of Conduct for movie content. On March 31, 1930, the board of directors of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association formally adopted the Code that was published on this day.
Four years later, on June 13, 1934, facing serious threats of boycotts of “indecent” films, Hollywood adopted the famous and puritanical 1934 Production Code that imposed rigid censorship on American movies that lasted until the 1960s. When people talk about the Hollywood censorship “code, this is the version they are referring to.
Interestingly, the highly restrictive 1934 Production Code was in effect during what is widely considered to be Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” from the mid-1930s through the early 1960s. Go figure.
The last desperate attempt of Hollywood to control “indecency” and violence was the ratings system, which rated films as G, PG, R, and for a while, X, which went into effect on November 1, 1968. But even it soon had to be modified.
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 of movie censorship: https://www.aclu.org/files/multimedia/censorshiptimeline.html
Read: Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (1996)
Watch clips of pre-Code (that is, pre-1934) Hollywood films: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81DwZgieHmg
Read: Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (1990)