Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code

Abstract

Few new technologies have affected communication and society more profoundly than motion pictures. A far more elastic than the stage, movies made ideas previously restricted to comparatively small groups of readers and urban theatergoers accessible to virtually everyone by projecting them on film screens everywhere, from the largest city to the smallest village.' By speaking to mass audiences directly, movies all too easily bypassed traditional agencies of socialization the church, the school, the family. For many they came to symbolize the important changes taking place in the structure of power and influence in the early twentiethcentury United States, and those groups who feared that their own influence in society was diminishing viewed them as a threat. Fierce debates over the content and control of this new medium arose in the early days of silent film and intensified with the advent of sound technology. Out of these controversies emerged efforts to regulate motion picture entertainment, efforts that culminated in the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, an attempt to bind movies to Judeo-Christian morality.2