Self-Regulation and the Film Industry

It wasn't long before people around the country worried that the violence and sex in the movies Hollywood was turning out were poisoning youngsters' minds and debasing American culture. Film titles such as Traffic in Souls (about prostitution) and drug, sex, and murder scandals in the movie community linked Hollywood with sin as well as with glamour.

Complicating the situation for the studio heads was a 1919 Supreme Court ruling that movies were entertainment and were therefore not protected by the First Amendment's free-speech guarantees (see Chapter 3). As states and towns passed censorship laws, the studios feared that they would have to make different versions of movies for different areas of the country. Instead, in 1922 they formed a self-regulatory body called the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of Amer­ica. Headed by Will Hays, it created a code that defined movie morality and had the power to enforce it. The plan worked: with the advent of the Hays Office or Hays Code (as it was sometimes called) the majors managed to stave off government regulation and keep the studios in control of their product. It also set a precedent for selfregulation in other media industries, including radio, television, and even comic books.

New Challenges for the Film Industry

series pictures movies that feature the same characters, storylines, and sets across a number of films

block booking a tactic under the studio system in which distribution executives ensured that theaters showed both their A films and their B films; if theater owners refused to carry a certain number of a studio’s B films, they would not be allowed access to certain A films produced by that studio

the majors the immigrant- built motion picture studios at the top of the movie industry during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s—Columbia Pictures, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, and Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer (MGM).The majors in the early twenty-first century are Disney, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Paramount, and Sony (Columbia)

talkies films that featured sound (such as singing, talking, sound effects, etc.) as well as images

Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America also known as the Hays Office, this self-regulatory body of the film industry created and enforced a code that defined movie morality, setting a precedent for self-regulation in other media industries

film ratings system the system by which a motion picture rating is assigned to a film by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), with regard to the amount and degree of profanity, violence, and sex found in the film

theatrical film or feature film a film created to be shown first in traditional movie theaters; once these films have had their run at movie theaters, often they are redistributed as home videos and DVDs for rental or for sale, as pay-per- view films in hotels and in homes, as in-flight movies on airlines, and as featured films on cable, satellite, and broadcast television channels

Star of stage, screen, radio, and vaudeville, A1 Jolson has the monumental credit of being the first person to speak in a feature film (in The Jazz Singer as shown in this photo). Jolson often performed in what is known as “blackface”—where white men blackened their faces and performed songs and dances in the style of African- Americans—a controversial part of the earlier era of show business. Ironically, The Jazz Singer and the advent of sound led to the demise of blackface’s popularity. With sound came a greater emphasis on realism, and it soon became impossible for the motion picture industry to maintain that white actors in blackface could realistically portray African-American characters.

By the late 1940s, the major U.S. movie companies were riding high. The difficult Depression years of the 1930s were behind them: people were going to neighborhood movie theaters an average of twice a week or more, and the studio system was working like a well-oiled machine. Just then, though, things began to fall apart. Two developments took place that led to major changes.

ANTITRUST WOES One was the 1948 settlement of an antitrust suit by the U.S. Justice Department against Paramount, Warner, MGM, and Fox—the majors that owned theaters. The suit claimed that these companies were preventing producers who were not affiliated with them from getting their movies exhibited. The settlement forced the firms to split off their production and distribution divisions from the theaters where the films were exhibited. Government officials hoped that these actions would weaken the studios and encourage competition.

THE ADVENT OF TELEVISION As television made its way into the mainstream of American life, attendance at movie theaters dropped. Studio executives argued that the drop was the temporary by-product of the post-war baby boom, which was keeping parents with babies at home. They refused to help the new industry by allowing stations to telecast their movies. Yet by the mid-1950s, the movie studios realized that television was not going away. After Warner Brothers and the Walt Disney Company (one of the smaller movie firms) made deals to produce programs for the ABC TV network, the gates opened wide and all the studios rushed in. Hollywood was now in the TV business.

Movie executives soon realized that television was a place where their B pictures could be shown. The challenge now became what to do with their traditional exhibition arena—the theaters. During the 1950s, movie studio executives believed that they could entice people back to "the big screen” by emphasizing its bigness. They made movies with ultra-wide projection technologies such as Todd-AO, Cinemascope, and Cinerama (think of today's IMAX). They even tried 3-D pictures, for which members of the audience had to wear special glasses. Although individual films such as The Ten Commandments drew huge crowds, the executives began to realize that neither ultra-wide screens nor 3-D gimmicks were going to bring the U.S. population back to the twice-a-week moviegoing habit that had been common during the 1940s.

Increasingly, studio executives no longer saw theatrical movies as part of Ameri­cans' weekly habits (now that they had TV); rather, they saw movies as individual events that had to lure people into theaters. Because of this lack of audience predictability, the studios could no longer afford to support the star system. The studios got rid of it, preferring instead to let talent agents find and cultivate actors and actresses.

Under the new model of films as special events, movie executives began to release their most expensive films at times when most people were at leisure (for example, during summer vacation and around Thanksgiving and Christmas) and had the time to go to a movie. Executives also believed that people wanted to see stories in the movies that they could not see on television. TV executives, wary of the FCC's ability to withdraw licenses, had picked up their own code of good practices that was modeled after the ones used by network radio and the Hays Code. Now movie people began to question whether their code was too rigid.

Happily for movie executives, in 1952 the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned its 1919 ruling and stated that movies were entitled to First Amendment protection. The upshot was that, as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, producers and directors increasingly ignored the Hays Code, turning out pictures with scenes of violence, sex, addiction, and other subjects. To replace the Hays Code, the industry began a very different self-regulatory activity: a film ratings system in which an independent panel of viewers assigned labels to movies that indicated their appropriateness for audiences of different ages (as discussed in Chapter 3). This meant that the film industry itself would no longer approve or disapprove a film's content. Instead, it would provide film consumers with advance warnings so that they could make their own decisions about which films to see and which films to avoid. (See Figure 12.1 for a snapshot of the percent of films with each rating classification.)