THE INTERZINE

by Mick LaSalle

The story of the Production Code is a special story, in that it’s the one time the producers didn’t win. They didn’t because of a single, dread miscalculation that ended up changing movies and American society, in both cases for the worse. The effects of this miscalculation are still being felt today.

Taking a step back: There’s a disease that seizes the imagination of both the right and the left in America, the conviction that if only the side of goodness and virtue had control of the movies, it could rid the world of everything bad. These are people inflicted with an idealism that takes the form of wanting to destroy art, and from the beginning, movie producers have known how to deal with such characters: Humor them. Give them a press conference. Give them a studio tour. Make them feel as if they’re being brought into the fold. Never say no to them. Only say yes, of course, we will do that. We’ve never thought of that. We must make an arrangement, immediately…

Then, photos taken, handshakes exchanged, and newspaper articles written and filed, the opposition invariably disbands. Its members return to their towns in the South or the Midwest, where they bask in their success and their brushes with glamour. Then they wait… and watch… as nothing happens.

But of course nothing can, not right away. They know this, they’ve been warned. A year’s worth of movies are always in the pipeline. So at first they don’t worry. They know, they believe, that soon the virtuous movies—the society-changing movies—will come along. Then a year passes. No change. Then eighteen months. No change. In confusion, they try to get their new friends on the phone, the ones at the studio, but somehow they’re always in conference. Laughing, probably. And finally the truth dawns, as all at once the reformers’ Hollywood memories, the ones they’ve been dining out on all year, turn bitter. They’ve been had.

At this point, they can re-group and try to galvanize a press that has since moved on and is reluctant to tell the same old story. Or they can give up. Most of the time, almost all the time, the crusaders give up, or watch their ranks dwindle to nothingness. This is how Hollywood deals with troublemakers.

The story of the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 begins in 1929, with a group of Catholic clergy and lay Catholics from Chicago coming together in the conviction that movies were undermining the moral structure of the nation. It was a time of technical, historical and social convergence. Movies were changing; the country was changing, and the Chicago group wanted to control the change.