WI No Movie Production Code

Xen

Banned
One of the many examples of the moral majority strangling the freedom out of creativity so their own delicate sensibilities wouldnt be violated. What if the Movie Production Code, otherwise known as Hays Code (or any variant thereof) would never have been put in place?


Some of the things Hays Code would not allow

1) Couples sleeping in the same bed (regardless if they were married or not)
2) Milking a cow was considered sexual and thus could not be shown
3) Religious men of the cloth could not be shown in a negative or clutzy manner
4) Criminal activity could not be glorified
5) No hinting at or insinuating of or heaven forbid showing extra-marital affairs
6) And absolutley no nudity

How would Hollywood and the movie industry develop in the United States without a Code?
 

theReturner

Well, I still think the morality of the time would prevent hardcore violence and sex from appearing in movies at their early stages, but perhaps without the code, they would appear more quickly, whcih would cause reaction from the conservative community, which would cause a similar, possibly harsher code to be put in place.
 

alphaboi867

Xen said:
...5) No hinting at or insinuating of or heaven forbid showing extra-marital affairs...
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You could show adultery as long as the parties involved repented and/or were punished in the end. Take The Women for example; Joan Crawford's character has an affair with a married man, he even divorces his wife in order to marry her, but in the end she's caught cheating on him and he goes back to his first wife and it's implied she's out on the street.
 

mkdlsystem

Sir, the United States might want to establish a film ratings organization similar to the present-day MPAA as early as 1940.
 

Dave Howery

well, the Hays code apparently didn't last all that long, so are we assuming that it does, or that there is no kind of film ratings at all? What exactly is the POD here?
 

MerryPrankster

Even if there was no formal code, the Catholic Legion of Decency and other organizations would still boycott stuff they did not like. And the CLD and the like held sway over millions of consumers.

Things might still be pretty tame, even if much more liberal than OTL.
 

jycee

mkdlsystem said:
Sir, the United States might want to establish a film ratings organization similar to the present-day MPAA as early as 1940.
Click to expand...

This is quite likely. I'd had to say probably even earlier.

MerryPrankster said:
Even if there was no formal code, the Catholic Legion of Decency and other organizations would still boycott stuff they did not like. And the CLD and the like held sway over millions of consumers.

Things might still be pretty tame, even if much more liberal than OTL.
Click to expand...

Quite true. But this happens even today. I don't think mainstream films would be much more liberal than they were in OTL at least in the early days; after all the Production Code and the MPAA are studio self-censoring practices. If you want a movie to appeal to all you make it a movie that everyone, including the conservative types, will want to watch. It happens today when R rated movies are toned down to become PG13.
There might be a bit more experimenting with genres. The gangster film might solidify earlier. In OTL its development was held back because of the production code but demand for it was strong enough that studios managed get away with it eventually.
But the independent and b-film scene would be much more liberal and probably much more prosperous. You would see a lot more fringe b-films that contain nudity, violence, and certain taboos than in OTL. These will eventually reach the mainstream (earlier than OTL). But for the most part they would be restricted to certain urban enclaves in their early existence. Major studios might notice the commercial possibilities of such material earlier. This might actually cause the collapse of high and low cultures to happen much earlier. While today in OTL it is mostly independent filmmakers who make the high brow stuff and major studios who make the low brow stuff earlier it used to be the other way around. Major studios would pour enormous amounts of money into adaptations of classical pieces of literature while the indie scene was making zombie and comic book films into b-movies. Thanks to the possibility of having sex and violence in the mainstream earlier the flip would probably occur as early as the 1950s. (It was somewhere in the late 70s when it happen in OTL. Usually Star Wars in 77 is blamed for it).

Also commercial porn would be developed much earlier. In OTL porn had its big break in the 1960s when the production code broke down and before the MPAA rating system was established. This in particular might cause a lot of social changes that in the long run might make TTL much different than OTL socially.

Also all precedents established by film will then roll over into TV. Bringing many more social butterflies along the way.
 

jycee

lounge60 said:
I know that my position is unpopolar,but i believe that are connetction between the code and the golden age of Hollywood.
Sex and violence are cheap shortcuts;
If you are forced to eliminate them, must work with imagination and good taste for draw the public.
Is more simple make "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Texas_Chain_Saw_Massacre rather "The thin man" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thin_Man_(film)
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I actually agree with you. But believe it is more so for violence than for sex. That is why I mentioned that in such TL the collapse of high and low cultures and the switch from what major studios and minor studios are dedicated to will happen earlier, which is not a good thing overall.
 

Expat

While I do believe there's some validity in the claim that porn and low-brow violence would exist earlier, don't forget that the meat of the perceived threat came from more mainstream films that used sex and violence to sell to mass audiences. Griffiths and DeMille used nudity, and perhaps the most cited film that prompted calls for a code was Public Enemy. And many European classics from the mid-century featured significant abuses of the code and retained sterling quality. So the ability to use these avenues certainly wouldn't have degraded the quality of the films.

As for the several posters who have called these qualities "liberal," I'm not so sure about that. Take Public Enemy for example; it used the classic Police Gazette technique of presenting sex, violence and indulgence as paths to ruin. Hollywood at the time contained many more strong conservative voices than today, but even today we find examples of conservative filmmakers using sex and violence to further conservative agendas (Mel "Spacebat" Gibson fr'ex.)

I do think, however, that Hollywood at the time tended to throw its weight towards a more conservative outlook, and it's possible that that might be undermined. Without the need to rose-tint everything, we might see a more neutral country emerge. And if it went on relatively unabated (or with an MPAA-style system in place) Hollywood would become the First Amendment stronghold it was by the late 60s a couple decades earlier.

The only other thing I can think of right now is that this might make it harder to get Hollywood into lockstep behind the government during WWII.
 

MerryPrankster

lounge60 said:
I know that my position is unpopolar,but i believe that are connetction between the code and the golden age of Hollywood.
Sex and violence are cheap shortcuts;
If you are forced to eliminate them, must work with imagination and good taste for draw the public.
Is more simple make "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Texas_Chain_Saw_Massacre rather "The thin man" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thin_Man_(film)
Click to expand...

I actually agree with your position.

Plus a lot of stuff is just unnecessary--just because you CAN include something doesn't mean you SHOULD.
 
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