Welcome to Sex in Cinema Week, Consequence‘s deep dive into movies, the Hays Code, and what society labels taboo. Check back throughout the week for essays, interviews, and lists examining censorship of movie sex scenes and the creativity it inspired in filmmakers.
American cinema can be divided into three eras of censorship, and William H. Hays played a part in all of them. The first era, wild and sexy, stirred a backlash to young Hollywood that allowed Hays to leave his political career and consolidate power in film. The second, from 1934 to 1968, saw the industry policed by the Motion Picture Production Code, colloquially known as the Hays Code. During the third period Hays’ ideas evolved into the MPAA rating system, when his influence could be felt in almost every undeserved R and bizarre NC-17.
In retrospect, his rise to power in the movie industry feels unlikely, though that may be because all of 1920s Hollywood is almost beyond belief. If Thomas Edison hadn’t pursued a vicious monopoly on film patents from his home base in New Jersey, he might not have pushed aspiring filmmakers to the opposite end of the country, where long train rides sapped the power of his hired thugs and wildcat judges laughed his lawsuits out of court. And if the film industry had instead grown up amid the old money and entrenched values of the East Coast, then the early movies might have looked very different, and the world outside Hollywood might not have been quite so scandalized at what they saw.
Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (Paramount Pictures)
And sex is what they saw. Usually not explicitly, though some people filmed sexual documentaries as well as wink-wink “documentaries.” But many early silent films pulsed with the idea of fucking: sly innuendos, suggestive costumes, lusty character arcs, and more. Just as bad in the eyes of conservative critics, some movies voiced young Hollywood’s radical politics, challenging traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity with independent flapper women, gay-coded characters, drag performers, and more. A few filmmakers offered at-the-time progressive ideas on race, and like many vibrant artistic scenes around the world in the 1920s, Hollywood was full of socialists.
Plus, the film industry came of age alongside national and international media organizations. Other famed art scenes — the impressionist painters of Paris, the poets of London, the playwrights of Ancient Athens — surely threw wild parties, but they did so without the whole world knowing about it. The young stars of Hollywood had no such luck. At the height of Prohibition, breathless newspaper reports carried wild tales not just of drinking, but “dope parties” where revelers partook of the devil’s lettuce.
The media fascination with Hollywood reached new heights of frenzy in 1921 and 1922 with two high-profile investigations: the death and alleged rape of Virginia Rappe at the hands of Fatty Arbuckle (later acquitted), and the unsolved killing of director William Desmond Taylor. These scandals damaged the film industry. In Robert Giroux’s A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor, one Los Angeles official surveyed the aftermath: “The industry has been hurt. Stars have been ruined. Stockholders have lost millions of dollars. A lot of people are out of jobs.” And in the midst of crisis, Will Hays was meant to be a savior.
