Excerpts from Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” Grand Design 37-72

Their version of events adheres to the requirements of a familiar early Depression Hollywood story, in which the industry appears as a fallen woman, led by economic hardship into immoral behavior and a fall from grace. Being a Hollywood story, there is a happy ending when Hollywood, the fallen woman, is rescued from sin and federal censorship by virtuous hero Joe Breen riding at the head of the Catholic Legion of Decency. The culmination of the Legion's campaign against immoral movies, the July 1934 agreement between the MPPDA and the Roman Catholic hierarchy to fully implement the Production Code, is regarded in these "official" accounts as a watershed separating the two halves of the decade. (39)

The account offered here revises this history in a number of respects. In suggesting that the issues and motivations behind "self-regulation" were more complex and were determined more by economic considerations than by matters of film content, it also argues that the events of July 1934 are best seen not as the industry's reaction to a more or less spontaneous outburst of moral protest backed by economic sanction, but as the culmination of a lengthy process of negotiation within the industry and between its representatives and those speaking with the voices of cultural authority. (40)

Relocating the Code and its administrators as integrated participants in Hollywood's processes of production, rather than its philistine and picayunish villains, is in itself a contribution to a deeper understanding of how the motion-picture industry operated in practice. In viewing the Production Code as part of the much larger overall activity of the MPPDA, this account also integrates issues around the control of content within the broader concerns of the period about the movies as a cultural institution. Using this broader perspective, we can offer some revisions to the accepted history of Hollywood in the 1930s that, in particular, allow us to recontextualize questions of whether films produced in the early 1930s were "subversive" either in their intent or effect. Rather than identifying a clear-cut distinction between films produced before 1934 and those produced after, a recognition that the Code as a system of conventions was gradually developed during the early 1930s suggests that it is more appropriate to see "the Golden Age of Turbulence" as a period in which a system of representation acceptable both to the industry and to the cultural authorities to whom it deferred was negotiated. Those negotiations were clearly not concluded with the agreements of July 1934; questions of detail remained subject to constant discussion, and issues of broad principle, including the implementation of the Code itself, were as open to revision in the late 1930s as they had been earlier in the decade. (70-71)

Like other Hollywood conventions, the Production Code was one of several substitutes for detailed audience research. Having chosen not to differentiate its product through a ratings system, the industry had to construct movies for an undifferentiated audience. While the Code was written under the assumption that spectators were only passive receivers of texts, the texts themselves were, out of the straightforward economic logic of what Umberto Eco has called "the heavy industry of dreams in a capitalistic society," constructed to accommodate, rather than predetermine, their audiences' reactions. In its practical application, the Code was the mechanism by which this multiplicity of viewing positions was achieved. Once the limits of explicit "sophistication" had been established, the production industry had to find ways of appealing to both "innocent" and "sophisticated" sensibilities in the same object without transgressing the boundaries of public acceptability. This involved devising systems and codes of representation in which "innocence" was inscribed into the text while "sophisticated" viewers were able to "read into" movies whatever meanings they were pleased to find, so long as producers could use the Production Code to deny that they had put them there. Much of the work of self-regulation lay in the maintenance of this system of conventions, and as such, it operated, however perversely, as an enabling mechanism at the same time that it was a repressive one. (40-41)