His Eyes Nearly Popped When He Read It: The Hays Code Pt 2
In the last post, we filled our wine glasses and gathered around to learn about Will H Hays, a man who will live in both political and Hollywood infamy for corruption, censorship, and all-around shitty behavior. That was Part One of my Motion Picture Production Code section of my 2021 Hollywood History series, which you can find here. Now, we have moved to Part Two, and I hope you brought more wine because things will stay just as juicy for even longer. Get your comfy pants on, fill up those glasses, and gather around as we discuss Hollywood’s first major scandal, Catholic bigots, and dumbfuck executives.
In September of 1921, months before Hays took up the position of President of the MPAA, successful comedian Fatty Arbuckle was talked into having, or decided to have, a Labor Day Party that was very debaucherous and very illegal due to the copious amounts of then-prohibited alcohol. Because rules, especially pointless and stupid ones, don’t apply to rich and/or famous people. Young actress Virginia Rappe was also at that party with her friend—or recent acquaintance, it is pretty unclear—Bambina “Maude” Delmont. Now, before I go on I do want to take a second to acknowledge Virginia Rappe as a person. I don’t want to strictly cover this as a sensational scandal because I think it’s important to remember her beyond this tragedy and controversy; especially given both the outcome as well as the coverage of her death at the time…and even in the years since.
Rappe, who was orphaned at 11, was a very talented model and actress who worked alongside some of the biggest names of her time. Much of her work has unfortunately been lost over the last 100 years, including her most prominent film Paradise Garden. She was also known as an up and coming fashion icon and considered “the best-dressed girl in pictures.” From what I can tell, she was someone who was socially conscious and outspoken for just causes such as the suffragette and other women’s rights movements, kind-hearted, and fun-loving. She was anti-war and wore Pro-Peace fashion items that she designed herself. She believed in the power of wardrobe and the power of social platforms and strived to use hers for the better. And honestly, that is more or less where my research on Virginia left me. Which is infuriating in a lot of ways, and also sad. I looked really hard for a detailed biography about her life rather than the mystery of what happened to her, and information was extremely scarce and even more unreliable. As this article I found states, “while several books have been written about Arbuckle, none have been written squarely about Rappe.” So, I mean, do with this entire story what you will, and believe what you will, but I think it’s worth remembering the parts of Virginia Rappe that are often overlooked, and remembering her as more than “a famous man’s possible victim.”
Now, we know that at this party, everyone was having a great night and getting plenty sauced. Otherwise, the events of the party are pretty unclear. But by the end of the night Virginia Rappe had been tended to by at least one doctor, was in unbelievable pain, four days later she died, and Fatty Arbuckle was arrested for her murder. For an account of the story and the controversy and the trial, I recommend reading the article from The Independent that I linked in the last paragraph, as well as this account from The Cut. (Also the approx. 20 pages in the book Hollywood Babylon, AND this podcast episode fact-checking it, ALTHOUGH CAVEAT I don’t love some of the comparisons they make at the end.) There is also this article from the Smithsonian, which takes a slightly different tone. This case is still a mystery, technically unsolved, and often speculated about. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that Fatty’s name was the only one dragged through the mud because the woman who DIED was framed as a slut, a drunk, and rumors circulated (and have often stuck) painting her, THE VICTIM, as deserving what happened to her, whatever that was. We don’t know if Arbuckle caused her death, intentionally or not, or if one of his versions of the story is true. We don’t know if he was having sex with her, consensual or not, or if the admittedly known con-artist Bambina Delmont was fabricating everything for money. Truthfully, I personally am inclined to believe that what really happened lies somewhere in the middle. This story could have its own post, which I may do after much more research, but I don’t have the word space to go much further than to mention that in 1921 this was a huge deal. A Chaplin-level star accused of the rape and murder of a promising young actress and fashion designer. It made all the headlines and made a brand new industry look baaaaaaad.
So, enter Hays. This event was the major catalyst to the MPAA and Hollywood studios deciding that they needed a solid PR move to clean-up the industry image. There were also movies coming out at the time that were on the more risqué side or whatever, but it was mostly the Arbuckle debacle. Hays promptly canceled Arbuckle after his acquittal, declaring he was not allowed to appear on-screen—which is importantly different than banned from the industry because as the Smithsonian noted, he was still allowed to direct under a new professional name. Also, Hays decided that eight months was long enough to pretend to punish Arbuckle for the bad press and allowed him to work again but most casting directors said “nah” and his career was effectively over. Again, I’m not going to say either way how I feel about the merits of this early bout of cancel culture under the premise that we still don’t know everything and probably never will. I will say, however, that Will H Hays was a cynical man working within a cynical industry. I do not believe that he banned Arbuckle because he believed that he was guilty, or what he was accused of was wrong and should end his career, but because it looked good in the papers and saved/made money. This cancellation was effectively his first move in damage control. And with the tiny little inch of damage control power Hays was given, he took a DAMN. MILE.
I already covered who Hays was, and why power should never have been handed to him, so now I want to discuss what he did with that power. Remember how I mentioned all bad things start in Ohio and the state set the standard that state-run (READ: government) censorship boards regulating movie content were legal? Well, what I didn’t mention last time was that they were also numerous and inconsistent. Hays was given the difficult burden of making sure that filmmakers adhered to these very much not standardized rules before the final cut of the film happened so that expensive reshoots were minimal. And, lining up almost exactly with the Arbuckle case, by 1921 there were 37 states that had instituted or introduced their own censorship committees. With this new self-censorship in place, filmmakers were to report the content of their films to the MPAA. There was also an industry-created list with “don’t” subjects and “be careful subjects.”
The “don’t” section was as follows:
Nudity of any kind, including silhouette or implied.
Drug dealing and consumption (and probably alcohol consumption, that isn’t clear to me though)
“Sexual perversion” (which was obviously meant to belittle and erase the LGBTQ+ community. Let’s not pretend otherwise.)
STDs or sexual healthcare
Childbirth
White slavery
Interracial relationships
Child porn (obviously this is totally reasonable and no one is modernly disputing that, though I will cover a horrific movie that uses the child abuse plot point as a form of protest in the next post)
Making fun of Christianity
“Willful offense to any nation, race or creed” (which is…..laughable given everything we know about early film content and how it portrayed BIPOC character and characters from “adversary” countries. I guess willful offense is a highly subjective term. Just saying.)
The topics to handle delicately (or, you know, to consider through the lens of not offending the conservative Christian rich white men making these rules) were:
Aforementioned international characters or relations
Use of the American flag
Use of guns
Arson
Any form of criminal behavior involving robbery because, and I’m going to paste the language of the reasoning here because it’s hilarious, “the effect which a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron.”
Violence and gore
Smuggling
Murder
Capital Punishment (I will review Gabriel Over the Whitehouse don’t you worry)
“Sympathy for criminals”
Adverse attitudes towards public figures/institutions of authority
Direct action/protest/rebellion against authority
Titles referencing police or policing
Cruelty to children and animals
Branding of people or animals
Female Trafficking
Prostitution
Rape/attempted rape
Wedding night scenes
Men and women in bed together at all
Intentional seduction of girls
Marriage in general (which I find interesting)
Surgery
“Lustful” kissing, especially if one of the two people is a criminal.
I just want to take a second to really consider how many of our favorite movies just wouldn’t exist if this was still the standard (LOL mine is Clerks), so let’s toast to progress really quick.
So this set of unenforceable (or at least, difficult to enforce) guidelines was created in 1927 and carries us up to 1929 when the next Baddie enters the scene. This guy’s name was Martin Quigley and he was a prominent Catholic layman. He was the editor for the film industry’s major trade paper (which is a newspaper dedicated to a particular trade, and all industries have them). This part is pure supposition, but I assume he saw the news happening and immediately saw this as an opportunity to implement his own agenda. He got together with his Priest friend Daniel A. Lord and together, with a Cardinal’s blessing…of course, they crafted a set of rules and submitted them to the MPAA. As an aside, I find it really rich that these two Catholic men were concerned about the effects that talkies would have on kids given their institution’s long history (continuing far after these events) of systemic brainwashing, emotional manipulation, and physical torture. Again, like with Hays, short-sighted executives agreed to most of their terms in order to avoid a larger government censorship issue.
So what was in this code? Well, in short, it was very similar to the list above but with more of an emphasis on policing moral values rather than skirting the whack-a-mole censor boards popping up across the country. Hays himself was so excited when he saw it that he exclaimed “my eyes nearly popped out when I read it! This was the very thing I had been looking for.” So it was presented as two-fold: part one was a list of subjective, general principles. This section is extremely offensive, as it stated movies were prohibited from influencing the more “susceptible minds” in the audiences—specifically noted to be women, children, and the “lower-class”—in a negative direction. Because poor people and women can’t think on their own, they need to be told. The other part of the code was the actual hard and fast rules. They’re very similar to the ones listed above but more succinct and much stricter. There was a particular focus on prohibiting interracial relationships, LGBTQ+ characters, in a relationship or not, and forbidding any kind of sympathy to be shown towards criminals. OH, AND, they also added in there that members of the Clergy were NOT to be shown comedically or as villains, because how dare those pesky filmmakers point out any hypocrisy or outright abuse by an institution built on guilt and destruction, right? Major publications like The Nation agreed and ridiculed this as obsolete before it even began, and pointed out all the benign topics that could not appear in film should this code be maintained. And the skepticism of the efficacy and adherence to the code was mostly correct for the next 4-5 years, given that during The Great Depression all bets were off—if racy sold (which it did) then everyone needed a naked Tarzan in their film.
That was, until 1934. In the summer of that year, the Code was officially adopted into Hollywood-Law. AND AGAIN, to be clear, it was not government regulation but it WAS required by the Studio System to avoid said government regulation. The man who was appointed by Hays to take up the censorship responsibilities was Joseph Breen (another Catholic) who REALLY liked telling people what they could and couldn’t say. He was infamous in his stringent interpretation of the Code and instrumental in making sure a lot of pictures did what he said. Including changing the dress of Betty Boop, the CARTOON. Even anti-Nazi/anti-concentration camp films were (at least briefly until we entered the War) banned as they showed another country in an unfavorable light. I think it’s worth noting, by the way, the Catholic Church’s participation in mid-century European fascism. (Those two links are legitimately interesting sources.) It’s also worth stressing, AGAIN, that they were racist as fuck, and HAPPY to be critical when it came to countries and religions not run by white people.
Once the Code came into play, and Mr. Breen got to play the Morality police (with the permission of the ever-ambitious and greedy Mr. Hays), there were a LOOOOOOT of voices that stopped being allowed to be heard. In my research for this part of this project, I came across a lot of comments on articles or videos that I used as sources (or, in some cases clicked on thinking they could be sources) that were sympathetic to the Hays Code and what Breen wanted it to do. These comments generally stated that while it may be bad that some films fell victim to the Hays Code, the Post-Code era has slipped into mindless violence, sex, and other immoral things and the quality of films have gone down and can never reach the incredible quality of Old Hollywood. I like Old Hollywood films, and I’m not here to trash the classics. But I am going to dive into why that sentiment is WRONG in the next post. I’m going to talk about how it wasn’t just “sex-obsessed” or “violent” people who had their voices silenced, but how people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, the counterculture, Religious minorities, the Left Wing, and SO MANY OTHER people who were not of the demographic of Breen and Hays were almost erased from the narrative and clever ways they fought back.