Made In America - Bill Bryson [204]
In 1927, the Hays Office, as it was immediately if informally known, issued a famous list of ‘Don’ts and Be Carefuls’. The list consisted of eleven proscribed acts, such as ‘excessive or lustful kissing’, and twenty-six acts to be handled with extreme caution. In 1930 this was superseded by a much more comprehensive Production Code, which would remain the bible of film production for half a century. The code decreed several broad principles – that pictures should be wholesome, that the sympathies of the audience should never be ‘thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin’ – and scores of specific strictures. It forbade the uttering on screen not just of every common swear word and racial epithet, but such dramatically useful terms as eunuch, floozy, louse (the Hays Office helpfully suggested stinkbug as an alternative), guts, in your hat, nuts, nerts, cripes, hellcat, belch and even, remarkably, virtuous (on the presumption that it was a too explicit reminder that some people weren’t). Liar was permitted in comedies but not dramas, and travelling salesman could be used but not in a context involving a farmer’s daughter.37 Lord, even in reverential contexts, had to be changed to Lawsy. One of the more indestructible myths concerning the code is that it decreed that when a man and woman were shown in bed together the man must always have at least one foot on the floor. It said no such thing. However, it did touch on almost everything else. As one movie historian has put it, ‘it prohibited the showing or mentioning of almost everything germane to the situation of normal human adults’.
Even the word it in the wrong context could be considered dangerously suggestive. In 1931 the Hays Office ordered Samuel Goldwyn to change the name of his comedy The Greeks Had a Word for It to The Greeks Had a Word for Them. In much the same spirit the title of a Joan Crawford movie was changed from Infidelity to Fidelity. Three years later, when Goldwyn bought the rights to Lillian Hellman’s play about lesbianism, The Children’s Hour, Hays told him that he could by all means make it into a movie, as long as it didn’t have anything to do with lesbians and he didn’t call it The Children’s Hour. The movie was made without lesbians and with the title These Three.38
Occasionally, producers could preserve a line through trade-offs. David O. Selznick managed to save Clark Gable’s famous, and at the time shocking, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ in Gone With the Wind – a line not in the original script, incidentally – by sacrificing ‘May your mean little soul burn in hell for eternity.’39 But for the most part films became sensationally cautious, and would remain so into the 1960s.
As late as 1953, the main character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was not permitted to say ‘Bottoms up’ when quaffing a drink. In the Broadway production of The Seven-Year Itch the main character commits adultery, but in the 1955 movie Tom Ewell could only agonize over the dangerous temptation of it. Captain’s Paradise, a 1952 British comedy in which Alec Guinness played a sea captain with wives in two ports, was allowed to be released in America only after the producers added an epilogue admonishing the audience not to try such a thing themselves.40 Even Walt Disney was forbidden from showing a cow with udders.41
Finally in 1968, with the Production Code almost universally ignored, it was abandoned and a new system of ratings was introduced. Originally films were rated, in order of descending explicitness, X, R, M and G. M was later changed to GP and later still to PG. XXX, or Triple-X, though favoured by owners of porno theatres (an Americanism of 1966), never had official standing.
Newspapers and magazines had no regulatory body equivalent to the Hays Office, but it wasn’t necessary because they were almost always prepared to exercise a rigorous self-censorship. In 1933, when there was a breakthrough in the treatment