In 1922, Will Hays was hired as chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, at a princely salary, with the idea that his political connections would help the movies through the minefield of censorship that was hampering them. Local censorship boards had been set up everywhere, each one full of quirky moralists whose eccentric opinions became law to the industry, so that the same film had to be edited a different way in every jurisdiction. How would Will Hays tackle that intractable difficulty? Since Hays had been Postmaster General and chairman of the Republican National Committee, he was a force to reckon with, and bringing him to the movie business created exactly the right impression: the movies were serious about addressing the problem of clean entertainment, and might be trusted to censor themselves.
We, of course, know how Hays instituted that self-censorship; and, much as movie historians deplore the Hays Code, it had the intended effect. It replaced an impossible hydra of censorship with one uniform standard that made it possible to produce pictures for a national audience. It is interesting, therefore, to see the speculations a movie magazine made at the beginning of Hays’ tenure. At least one of this article’s predictions seems definitely to have come true: “Motion pictures are now wearing their first pair of long pants; in the near future, with the able help of Will Hays, we will not know this infant prodigy in the full maturity of its strength and accomplishment.” When we think of the movies made fifteen or twenty years later under the Hays Code—Citizen Kane, The Philadelphia Story, The Wizard of Oz, The Maltese Falcon, and dozens more you could surely name with a moment’s thought—we must admit that motion pictures had indeed reached the full maturity of their strength and accomplishment.
WILL HAYS?
The motion picture industry passed out of its swaddling clothes by its acquisition of the service of Will Hayes for a period of the next three years.
Mr. Hays, the youthful president maker, and head of the greatest distributing business in the world, Uncle Sam’s mails, brings to the business a capacity for organization that augurs well for the future. His salary will be the tidy sum of $150,000 per annum and while the enemies and self-appointed critics of the industry will make capital of this fact, political and otherwise, by comparison with the salaries of other capable men, it is safe to say that every cent will be earned in this job of coordinating the interests now so widely at variance in a business whose gross turnover per annum is a billion dollars and constitutes the fourth industry in size in the country.
Speculation is rife as to how Mr. Hays will function in his new office; in short, what he will do to improve present deplorable conditions that offer so many opportunities for prejudiced and unfounded attacks on both the people and the products of the industry and how he will do it.
The facts of the situation are that the leading producers and other principals of the business who, in the words of one of them, “have been working at cross purposes and cutting each other’s throats for years” have come together in a friendly arrangement and set up a form of organization similar to that employed by nearly every large industry in existence; namely, a national association which will function like a Chamber of Commerce or National Bankers’ Association. On the larger aspects of the business which effect the weal or woe of all its members, this body with Will Hays as its presiding head will be the court of last resort.
May he find strength to combat and overcome the influence both within and without the industry which today makes [im]possible1 the full realization of the potentialities of the films as a source of clean amusement and a means of popular education.
Motion pictures are now wearing their first pair of long pants; in the near future, with the able help of Will Hays, we will not know this infant prodigy in the full maturity of its strength and accomplishment.
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Legal censorship is already affecting motion pictures in a way that is handicapping the production of good films. Producers throughout the country are buying stories of the most insipid type solely because the cost of screening a comedy or drama even in a most modest way, means the expenditure of many thousands of dollars. With money more than difficult to obtain, no company is able to risk any appreciable sum on pictures which may be utterly ruined by a board of censors whose knowledge is wholly alien to the screen and whose rulings are actuated at times by excessive and almost unbelievable prudery and love of notoriety.
Many standard works have been changed almost beyond recognition simply because producers have feared the result of the censorial imagination and have therefore refrained from presenting scenes vitally necessary to the shadowing of a picture true to life.
It is certain that censorship of this type cannot in any way be conducive to the production of really worthwhile entertainment.
Only by portraying life as it is can the screen hope to progress. If that right is denied the screen cannot survive the mediocrity, banality and artificiality that assails it.
For purposes of self-preservation, the producer is bound to protect himself against loss. Therefore, the public will be the loser. Your favorite theatre will show more and more meaningless stories and your favorite story will come to the silversheet absolutely devoid of the interest it formerly held for you, You can read that same story in print—you can see it on the speaking stage but you can’t spend twenty-five cents at your neighborhood house and see it on the screen.
——Silverscreen, March 30, 1922.
- The hurried writer wrote “possible,” but almost certainly meant “impossible.” ↩