As part of our examination of the role of movies in U.S. society, it is worthwhile looking at efforts to “control” Hollywood and to “protect” Americans from undesirable movie content.
In addition to the Pease chapter on Hollywood and Free Expression elsewhere on AskDrTed, I recommend this from National Public Radio for more on issues of “controlling” film. Read, listen and view this piece by Bob Mondello, and think about these issues in the context of what we’ve been discussing about the roles, impacts and relationships between mass media messages and society. The motivation behind the Hays Code was....what? And how can you relate those issues to the mass communication theories we’ve studied, and what we’ve been examining in terms of free expression and mass communication and society?
(here’s an excerpt)
Movies: Remembering Hollywood's Hays Code, 40 Years On
by Bob Mondello
All Things Considered, August 8, 2008
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 40 years ago this year, 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.
