Cinema Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era by Ellen C. Scott (review)

While much has been written about classic Hollywood in both popular and academic film history, surprisingly little has addressed the issue of race. The absence or abjection of cinematic representation of people of color is one explanation for this silence. Ellen C. Scott has attempted to look deeper into the politics of representation to find out the ways that race factored into production decisions within the Hollywood studio system.

Scott does an excellent job of situating her work alongside other film historians like Thomas Cripps and Ed Guerrero, who have also grappled with similar problems regarding representations of race in Hollywood. Borrowing from queer film theory, Scott offered the idea of “representability” as a lens into the decisions that lead to both the representation and its absence on Hollywood screens. Scott does so by looking at the repressed materials that reveal the racialized code that comes to define race in Hollywood.

Much of her research focuses on a nexus of regulating agency and civil rights activists, most notably, the Production Code Administration, several state censorship boards, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Archives. This research leads to analysis of the representational politics that regulated the depiction of civil rights issues. During the 1930s, Scott convincingly argues that studios did all they could to “manage” controversial themes such as racial lynching, miscegenation and social equality so as not to offend distributors and exhibitors. With examples from films such as the 1934 version of Imitation of Life, Scott provides evidence of how the studios and censors influenced script revisions from screenplay to final cut.

Not only the studios, but independent black film producers faced obstacles posed by state censors. Scott examines the difficulties Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams confronted during the 1930s and 1940s. Censorship and outright bans of both filmmakers’ work were common. As with the studios, state censors were sensitive to any depiction of miscegenation or racial violence.

In the final chapters of her book, Scott emphasizes the influence of “interpretive activism,” most prominently the NAACP, on the politics of representation in Hollywood. Walter White of the NAACP worked behind the scenes and on occasion encouraged public protest. In the case of Pinky (1949), White used his influence with Wendell Willkie and the studio board of what is now 20^th Century Fox to lobby Darryl F. Zanuck to foreground civil rights issues. Scott also describes in detail the NAACP protests against the release of Gone with the Wind (1939) and other Civil War and antebellum set era works that provided film representation to the all too popular “plantation myth” that unfortunately also existed in some quarters of academic history during this time.

One issue I do have with Scott is her periodization of the “Classical” era which I found confusing, especially concerning her argument regarding cultural hegemony and representational politics. I was uncertain if she was referring to the mode of studio production or the period of the production code before the rating system of the 1960s. However, overall her book is a valuable addition to the literature on American film, race, and representation politics.