Good Vibrations Magazine

Hollywood’s tender beginnings may seem cute and innocent by our present standards. But back in the 1920s before moving pictures learned to speak, the nation saw Hollywood as a modern-day Sodom. Weekly movie attendance was 35 million, and while actors like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were the perfect symbols of all-American sex appeal, exotic new matinee idols that represented a different sort of sex appeal — one more controversial and forbidden — took center stage.

In his debut film, Rudolph Valentino painted nudes in his studio, then dashed off to dance smoldering tangos and make love to women. A sumptuous Gloria Swanson emerged from a bath in a Cecil B. DeMille epic. A smoldering Greta Garbo seduced and abandoned John Gilbert. It seemed that anything was possible on the silver screen.

But a “moral” backlash wasn’t far off. By the end of 1921, spurred on by scandals and rumors of witchcraft, adultery, and sexual perversion, 37 state legislatures introduced 100 separate censorship bills.

To avoid congressional intervention, studio heads hired Will Hays, former head of the Republican National Committee and darling of the purity movements, to head the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

Hays demanded that morals clauses be put into actor’s contracts, hired private detectives to aid in blacklisting 117 stars he considered unsafe and created the “Hays Code,” a list of two dozen do’s and don’ts for film. Hollywood responded with a new formula: six reels of vice and one reel of retribution. Cecil B. DeMille’s lurid epics depicted all the sins of the Old Testament by cloaking them in the plain brown wrapper of moral condemnation. By 1930, a cardinal, two catholic reporters and two catholic priests felt that the Hays Code was not enough and drafted the Motion Picture Production Code.

This new code prohibited passionate exchanges except when they were essential to the plot of the film. It also banned suggestive postures, lustful kissing, seduction, “sexual perversion,” relationships between blacks and whites and scenes of childbirth. But some wanted to go further. Virulently anti-Semitic Joe Breen threatened to organize a huge boycott of movies by Catholics — then a third of the U.S. movie audience — if films didn’t take a stand for moral rectitude.

Hollywood capitulated: by the time Breen was done, married couples in films slept in separate beds (always keeping one foot on the floor), no woman ever appeared pregnant onscreen (nor could pregnancy ever be mentioned), and no bathroom had a toilet. You couldn’t say “hold your hat” onscreen, nor could you show the udders of a cow. Breen’s promise to America seemed to be that by controlling the make-believe, he would help the country ignore its realities.

Mae West arrived in Hollywood as a 39-year veteran of Broadway, a woman in complete control of her public persona. She’d accomplished what no Hollywood actor, writer or producer had done before — she had gone to jail for what she had to say about sex. The Hays Office might have changed the title of her successful play Diamond Lil to She Done Him Wrong and made the storyline incomprehensible, but nothing could be done to restrain Mae. She had her own views of sexuality, and 46 million Americans flocked to her first two films to hear it, bringing Paramount back from the edge of bankruptcy.

West bucked the Production Code and played it to the real jury — the audience. She proved it wasn’t what you said, but how you said it. The censors cut her (and many others’) films to shreds, but clipping a line here or a scene there couldn’t diminish either the excellence of the films or the sex appeal of the stars. The code could not repress attitude, beauty or pure animal magnetism. But what they did was place their seal of approval on polite films, sending the rest to the B circuit.

Just as Prohibition produced a lucrative business for bootleggers, the Production Code created a burgeoning market for low-budget exploitation films. These films largely came from a group of men with carnival sideshow backgrounds who called themselves the Forty Thieves. Advertised as “adults only” to escape censorship (and lure thrill-seekers), these films sold themselves as sensationalized subjects forbidden by the code but were actually re-packaged government-made drug, gambling and ‘hygiene’ films.

Americans learned in Reefer Madness (1936) that marijuana led to sex and murder. In Sex Madness (1938), visiting burlesque shows led to extra-marital sex, syphilis and suicide. The 1935 sexual hygiene film Damaged Goods (about venereal disease) was re-marketed as Forbidden Desires. For the public conscience, the genre married sex with sleaze, sex with shame, sex with horrible consequence and sex with fear. Joe Breen and the founding fathers of the Motion Picture Production Code couldn’t have asked for more!

Information from The Century of Sex by James R. Petersen (available at 1-800-BUY-VIBE) and Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger.