When people talk about the "more innocent" Hollywood of years gone by, they're referring to an era when the movie industry policed itself. But that early Hollywood wasn't always so innocent.For decades, it's true, the major film studios were governed by a production code requiring that their pictures be "wholesome" and "moral" and encourage what the studios called "correct thinking."
But that code, which was officially abandoned more than 40 years ago, was the result of a nationwide backlash — an outraged reaction to a Hollywood that by 1922 had come to seem like a moral quagmire, even by the bathtub-gin-and-speakeasy standards of the Roaring '20s.Silent-film comic Fatty Arbuckle charged with manslaughter in the death of an actress; a bisexual director found murdered; movie stars dying of drug overdoses — small wonder the nation's religious leaders were forming local censorship boards and chopping up movies every which way to suit the standards of their communities.
And at first, when Hollywood studios banded together under former Postmaster General Will Hays to come up with a list of 36 self-imposed "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," it's no wonder no one believed them. There were no penalties, no laws, no enforcement.Moralists were so outraged, meanwhile — by Mae West's casual slatternliness in I'm No Angel, by Barbara Stanwyck's promiscuousness in Baby Face, by Cecil B. DeMille's racy biblical epic Sign of the Cross — that calls for official government censorship became overwhelming.
Of course, they were calls that Hays himself, working behind the scenes, had helped to make overwhelming — and he used the pressure to force filmmakers to toe his line and obey the new Production Code he eventually promulgated."The code sets up high standards of performance for motion-picture producers," Hays proclaimed when the new code was unveiled. "It states the considerations which good taste and community value make necessary in this universal form of entertainment."
Among those considerations: that no picture should ever "lower the moral standards of those who see it" and that "the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin." There was an updated, much-expanded list of "don'ts" and "be carefuls," with bans on nudity, suggestive dancing and lustful kissing. The mocking of religion and the depiction of illegal drug use were prohibited, as were interracial romance, revenge plots and the showing of a crime method clearly enough that it might be imitated.
Of course, you couldn't really do most of Shakespeare under those strictures. But you could hang a blanket across a motel room in It Happened One Night, and let Clark Gable embarrass Claudette Colbert into sleeping on the other side — with a mock tutorial on "how a man undresses." Colbert fled — she got an Oscar for fleeing, in fact — and propriety was upheld.
Now, the Production Code was voluntary for film companies, who figured it was a nifty way to avoid government censorship. But it was mandatory for filmmakers, if they wanted their films to play in American theaters. And filmmakers didn't much care who was doing the censoring if their scripts were getting watered down. Howard Hughes threw a well-publicized fit when his western The Outlaw was kept out of theaters — not for its content alone but because the film's advertising focused attention on Jane Russell's cleavage.
Even cartoon characters had to “beee-have”: Betty Boop stopped being a flapper and started wearing a longer skirt. (This from the temptress who once teased audiences with the musical double-entendre of "Don't take my boop-boop-a-doop away.")
But the thing about community standards is that they change — and codes either don't change, or they change slowly. And after World War II, with competition from TV on the family front, and from foreign films with nudity on the racy front, movie companies were less inclined to rein in filmmakers who couldn't wait for the rules to catch up.
The Catholic Legion of Decency notwithstanding, films about banned topics like drug addiction often made for intriguing, well-received movies: When Otto Preminger made The Man With the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra as an addict, he didn't get a seal of approval — but he did get good reviews, and enough theater bookings to make plenty of money. When Sinatra received an Oscar nomination in 1955 — from the same Hollywood establishment that had refused to give the film he was in its seal of approval — it was clear that something was amiss. And attempts to make the code flexible? They just made it meaningless.
By 1959, the man charged with enforcing the rules conceded that if a "moral conflict" provided "the proper frame of reference," a Code-approved film could deal with pretty much any topic but homosexuality. Famous last words. What came up that year? Some Like It Hot, with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, in drag, fending off male suitors. The film's plot was a veritable catalog of once-forbidden topics — gambling and racketeering to get the plot going, a booze-swilling Marilyn Monroe to keep it going.
When Monroe's Sugar Kane Kowalczyk climbed into a train berth with Jack Lemmon's "Daphne," there was no longer a hanging blanket to separate them — and when Sugar's breathless, dingbat recollections of bedtime games with her sister inspired a strangled, hormonal snort from Lemmon — the code was dead, whether Hollywood admitted it or not. And judging from attendance at the nation's theaters, it was not much missed. A year after Some Like It Hot was released, the head of the MPA began suggesting that some sort of classification system might work better than a censorship system that no one was paying attention to. In 1968, his organization finally shifted from restricting filmmakers to alerting audiences, using the film-ratings system we know today.
How's that approach been working out? It took all of one year for an X-rated movie to win an Oscar for Best Picture — Midnight Cowboy, which violated more "don'ts" and "be-carefuls" than it observed. And it took just two years after that for Midnight Cowboy to be re-rated from X to R, without a single frame being altered. Community standards had changed — as they invariably do.
Last Friday, Archie Comics Publications, Inc. announced that it would no longer feature the Comics Code Authority's Seal of Approval on the covers of its comics. Just a day before that, DC Comics made a similar announcement. So much for The Comics Magazine Association of America, which for over 50 years served as the comics industry's self-regulating (read: self-censoring) arm.
It's the end of an era that began back in 1954, when various comics publishers came together and created the CCMA in an attempt to preempt a government crackdown on their product. Comics were everywhere, at that time. They were sold in five and dimes, department stores, grocery stores, train stations, bookstores, everywhere. And American kids bought them by the tens of millions; they reached more homes than The Saturday Evening Post.
The point is, when it came to comic books, two conditions coexisted: 1. They were omnipresent and 2. Kids loved them. This, in the eyes of adults, made them Highly! Suspect! See also (in chronological order): television, rap, videogames, the internet.
Anyway: Parents groups protested, as they do. Scientists and academics ran over each other as they stampeded for the nearest soapbox to intone dire threats about Our Childrens' Future, as they do. In 1954, the guy who ran fastest and intoned loudest was psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham.
He was by all accounts sincerely motivated by a desire to keep kids from psychological harm, and he did a lot of good in his life. But in comics circles, he will be forever remembered for his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which placed the blame for the nation's juvenile delinquency squarely on funnybooks.
One can quibble with his reasoning, here: In his book, Wertham interviewed juvenile delinquents and asked them if they read comic books; most said yes.
"AHA!" he said. "Batman, j'accuse!"
But, remember: Most every kid read comics back then, whether or not they smoked Lucky Strikes behind the boys' gym. It'd be like asking everyone who has experienced suicidal thoughts if they had ever watched The Phantom Menace. To be fair, the guy had a point about the violence. The heyday of the superhero was fading by then, and in their place came Western comics, war comics, and — especially — crime and horror comics. Which could be gruesome, in a gleefully unapologetic way.
By 1954 things were coming to a head. There were congressional hearings on the scourge of juvenile delinquency and comics. Church groups were holding mass comic book burnings. Consumer groups urged parents to complain to their local grocers about the comics they stocked, in a bid to make those grocers conclude that the lousy pennies' worth of profit they were making off of a comic wasn't worth the headache.
So the publishers decided they'd rather self-police their wares than let the government tell them what was what. They created a Comics Code (technically, they added much stricter regulations to a loose set of guidelines they'd created a few years earlier).
The new code was to comics what the Hays Code was to movies — an attempt to ensure that the content was wholesome and morally upright. Crime would not pay, and iniquity and turpitude would be punished. For years after that, publishers would submit their comics to the CCMA prior to publication and the CCMA would make recommendations for changes. The CCMA had no legal authority, but it could decide not to put its seal of approval on a book — and many distributors and stores would not stock a comic book without that seal, for fear of the Helen Lovejoys and Fred Werthams of the world.
Did that shut Wertham up?
No, not particularly. He saw the Code as a cynical half-measure; he wanted comic books gone. Turns out it wasn't just the subject matter he objected to — he maintained that the form itself was harmful to Our Nation's Youth.
He asserted that the line-breaks necessary to fit comic-book dialogue into word balloons would wreak havoc on a child's ability to read long, unbroken passages of prose. Likewise, he didn't like the fact that comic books used only capital letters.
Exactly. And remember, he was an academic. "Publish or perish," and all that. So he kept publishing, and kept not-perishing.Until 1981. When "perish" won out.
A publisher that produced comics expressly for kids — Dell, which published Disney comics in the 1950s — didn't particularly need to bother with the CCMA, as it had its own internal editorial guidelines, which were plenty strict. The folks at Classics Illustrated never followed the Code guidelines, as they were adapting (non-Code-approved) classic fiction.And of course the underground comics movement of the 60s and 70s rejected everything the CCMA stood for; that was practically its organizing principle.
Marvel and DC were dealing with a comics audience that was growing steadily older. Their writers were now looking to tell grittier stories in the pursuit of "relevance" — and starting chafing under the (self-imposed) yoke. Technically, for example, the Code didn't look kindly on any depiction of drug use, even when said drug use led to a (dun dun DUN) tragic end.This eventually prompted the CCMA to start making some periodic revisions to the code, but the group, and the code, never had much of a public face — and the one that it did have was inscrutable. Which is notably odd, because the CCMA was ostensibly a comics trade organization with a mission of outreach, such as programs to get comics into more outlets.
A generation of parents came of age only dimly aware of what the Comics Code Seal on the cover of their kids' comics was, much less what it stood for. And still the bulk of the comic book audience grew older and began to abandon the grocery store spinner-rack for the comic book shop. Eventually, publishers began creating separate lines of comics intended for mature audiences, and these lines didn't bear the seal. In 2001, Marvel decided it could create an MPAA-like ratings system — and stop paying for the privilege of having its comics reviewed by a panel of scolds.
With DC and Archie — the last two publishers out the door — saying a big "Thanks, but no thanks, we're good?" The era of the Code is at an end.
Which is just as it should be. The code was an absurd relic of the Dragnet era, when no episode could end until Jack Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday upbraided the ne'er-do-wells he arrested in a condescending monotone — and supplied viewers at home with a reassuring weekly dose of normative morality. For years, the Code has been an appendix, a vestigial tail, a holdover from a time when comics were written for children.
