hollywood on trial :: essays papers

hollywood on trial The world is full of injustice. Of programs that want to accomplish the right things but get twisted by the people that run them. This essay will deal with the reasons and Birth of the Hays Commission, the ludicrous steps they took to add "morality" to the motion picture industry, and some other sensors of the time. All things said in this essay are true and taken from the Hays correspondence its self. It is a known fact that sex sells. It is used by advertisers to get us to by there product, and likewise it is used by producers and directors to get us to see their films. During he Depression, no one had enough money to buy dinner much less go see a movie. So, there was a increase in the sex that was on the screen to pull in people. Not that there was any rules or guidelines of the studios to follow. It was just they didn't care. There was a outcry by the catholic church and in April, 1934 a committee of bishops were set up named The Legion of Decency. These Bishops would tell all the priests, and they in turn would in turn tell the parishioners what movies were proper to see and what was not. This thought scared the Hollywood studios. A boycott of that size in the middle of a depression would crush them. The heads of all the major studios got together to solve this problem. They knew that they didn't want to lose the Catholics, and they didn't want government intervention. Their solution was to have a board to censor all the movies coming from the major studios (at that time it was legal for studios to own their own theaters so independent films weren't generally seen by the public at large). To head this committee was William Hays. "William Hays was a Republican politician from Indiana with the impatient look a mailman whose paycheck was being sent by mail. Actually he was the Postmaster General in one of the most corrupt administrations of the century, Warren G. Harding"(Gardner, xvii). Because of this, he had friends on high places in the movie industry. Even though his name was on the committee all he was responsible for was making the set of rules.