The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code

1. Welcome Will Hays!

1 Welcome Will Hays! In the late teens ofthe twentieth century, America lost her innocence. The Great War not only tarnished her ideals but cast doubt on her national goals. Painters and poets, reporters and Rotarians, laborers and politicians-all experienced the bitter aftershock ofthe war. Some turned to God, some to pessimism, and some, especially in Hollywood , to the hot-cha-cha. The California sun warmed the innocent and the corrupt, both of whom could overheat. By the 1920s, scandal seemed rife. ACTRESS DIES AT DRUNKEN PARTY, one 1921 headline shouted. FAMOUS COMEDIAN CHARGED WITH MURDER. For the Labor Day weekend, Fatty Arbuckle had taken a suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. As the alcohol flowed, he disappeared into the bedroom with model Virginia Rappe. Hours later, the young woman became ill and, after a short hospitalization, died. The autopsy report led the city's district attorney to hold Arbuckle responsible. With kinky sex as the main attraction , the rape and murder trial ofFattyArbuckle drove Hollywood from the entertainment section ofAmerican newspapers to the front page. The Arbuckle affair was not the only "drunken party" of the decade. The murder of director William Desmond Taylor and the deaths of young actors Olive Thomas and Wallace Reid from narcotics abuse fed the suspicion that film artists were bohemians and debauchees, perhaps even criminals. The erotically appealing films that brought Sodom and Gomorrah to the provinces confirmed the suspicion. Bluenoses led the assault against the movies; yellow journalists followed; then came antagonistic legislators waving censorship proposals. In 1921 alone, solons in thirty-seven states introduced nearly one hundred bills designed to censor motion pictures. The rules 4 The Dame in the Kimono ofthe extant censor boards were mine fields. Women could not smoke on-screen in Kansas but could in Ohio; a pregnant woman could not appear on-screen in Pennsylvania but could in NewYork. All six censorship states-which controlled over thirty percent of the theater seats in America-condemned illegitimacy and sexual deviance. After producers cut their films, censors recut them. The outcome was mutilated prints and adverse pUblicity. Local exhibitors bore the cost of censor cuts and the abuse of press and patrons. Why should producers care? Washington and Wall Street offered one answer: by 1922, the motion picture business had become an industry. Famous Players studios (later Paramount) had merged with a theater chain, while First National Exhibitors planned the construction ofa Burbank studio. Other companies that wanted to integrate production, distribution, and exhibition understood the formula : expansion meant capital, capital meant Wall Street, and Wall Street meant conservative business practices. The movie companies, aware of the hazards of antitrust action, could not afford scandal or the federal probes of Hollywood high finance that might follow. Neither could they afford clean movies. They could afford-and very much needed-an astute public relations campaign that would content Washington and strengthen motion picture securities. With Wall Street assured that the industry was stable, Hollywood would never have to choose between Fatty Arbuckle and venture capital. In 1922, the movie company presidents fonned a trade association with Postmaster General Will Hays as head. An ex-Republican national chainnan with White House connections, Hays was a booster straight out of Babbitt. He was an elder of the Presbyterian Church and had a shrill voice that could assume an evangelical roar. He also had enonnous ears and asked photographers to use "an ear-reduction lens" when snapping him. Ring Lardner whimsically noted that the youthful Hays had been a traffic cop in his native Sullivan, Indiana. Whenever he wished to stop northbound vehicles, he faced north and nothing could pass. At Sunset andVine, the oncoming traffic included professional do-gooders, crusading reporters, vindictive congressmen, and, in early 1922, Mexican solons who had banned American films for their consistent representation ofMexicans as greasers. Could the General halt them? Welcome Will Hays! Within months of the formation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors ofAmerica (henceforth, "theAssociation"), Hays not only helped the moguls defeat a Massachusetts censorship law but also persuaded many industry critics to join the Association's Committee on Public Relations, an advisory group on "public demands and moral standards." He later created the "Formula," which made Association members "exercise every possible care that only books or plays which are ofthe right type are used for screen presentation ." As the public continued to agitate for control...