Hollywood v. Hard Core

How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry

Jon Lewis

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814729335
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In 1972, The Godfather and Deep Throat were the two most popular films in the country. One, a major Hollywood studio production, the other an independently made "skin flick." At that moment, Jon Lewis asserts, the fate of the American film industry hung in the balance.

Spanning the 20th century, Hollywood v. Hard Core weaves a gripping tale of censorship and regulation. Since the industry's infancy, film producers and distributors have publicly regarded ratings codes as a necessary evil. Hollywood regulates itself, we have been told, to prevent the government from doing it for them. But Lewis argues that the studios self-regulate because they are convinced it is good for business, and that censorship codes and regulations are a crucial part of what binds the various competing agencies in the film business together.

Yet between 1968 and 1973 Hollywood films were faltering at the box office, and the major studios were in deep trouble. Hollywood's principal competition came from a body of independently produced and distributed films--from foreign art house film Last Tango in Paris to hard-core pornography like Behind the Green Door --that were at once disreputable and, for a moment at least, irresistible, even chic. In response, Hollywood imposed the industry-wide MPAA film rating system (the origins of the G, PG, and R designations we have today) that pushed sexually explicit films outside the mainstream, and a series of Supreme Court decisions all but outlawed the theatrical exhibition of hard core pornographic films. Together, these events allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what films got made and where they were shown, thus saving it from financial ruin.

1

How the Blacklist Saved Hollywood

WHEN THE HOUSE Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) first convened in the fall of 1947, the film industry was on the verge of some very big changes.¹ The stability and profitability of theatrical exhibition were severely threatened by the shift in population out of the big cities (prompting a decrease in revenues at the studios’ first-run deluxe theaters), the Justice Department’s rekindled interest in breaking up the studio trusts, and the development of a competitive audiovisual pop culture on television.² Talent agents exploiting movie stars’ growing independence from the contract system and the threat of job actions from the various industry guilds and unions made the business of producing and distributing motion pictures increasingly expensive and complicated. By 1947 the studios’ relations with exhibitors and the industry workforce had become profoundly adversarial.

Beginning in 1947, HUAC provided the studios with lists of unionized writers, actors, and directors who, despite National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) protections, could for reasons of national security be fired without cause, without severance, and in a number of cases without concern for previously earned wages or option fees. In doing so, the committee helped the studios better manage an uncertain labor situation; moreover, it helped them cut expenses and payrolls in preparation for a widely predicted postwar box office decline. The so-called free market got a whole lot less free during the blacklist era because the studios discovered that they could circumvent the spirit of the various antitrust decrees, keep production costs down, and control the industry guilds if they just learned to work better together. The new Hollywood we see in place today—a new Hollywood that rates and censors its own and everyone else’s films, flaunts its disregard for antitrust legislation and federal communications and trade guidelines, and has reduced filmmaking to a science of market and product research is very much the product, the still-evolving legacy, of the blacklist.

To fully understand the complex history of regulation in the post-war film industry, we have to view the blacklist as not just an ideological struggle. Of course the Red Scare was political, but in Hollywood it is difficult to separate the ideological from the industrial. The studios’ cooperation with HUAC featured ample anticommunist rhetoric. But at the same time, the industry blacklist was designed as, or evolved into, a complex and collusive business strategy that diminished the threat of further federal regulation of the business of making movies and censorship of film content. The blacklist may well have reflected shifting political alliances among studio ownership, management, and the industry’s celebrity workforce. But it also enabled the studios to establish a new way of doing business that solved several larger, long-term problems that were plaguing them at the time.

Two parallel dramas emerge once we begin to look at the blacklist as a fiscal as well as an ideological struggle. The first involves a residual, pervasive postwar anti-Semitism that got HUAC interested in (Jewish) Hollywood in the first place. The committee members’ efforts to clean up the film business focused in large part on the industry’s workforce, which in their minds was overrepresented by American Jews. That HUAC also set in motion larger changes in the management of the industry proved an added bonus. The New York offices—the mostly non-Jewish, old money corporate owners—of the West Coast studios exploited postwar anti-Semitism not only to combat the unions but to force out the first-generation Jewish studio moguls. In doing so, they put an end to an entrepreneurial system run by charismatic but inefficient self-made businessmen, a system that seemed suddenly out of step with postwar American capitalism. Impending market deregulation and the resulting industry-wide panic prompted change, and the Red Scare made it all not only possible but easy. In the final analysis, the blacklist did not save America from films promoting communism, liberalism, or humanitarianism. Instead, it encouraged studio ownership to develop and adopt a corporate model more suited to a future new Hollywood, one in which studio ownership, exploiting stricter self-regulation, might maintain profitability and control.

The shift from the entrepreneurial model that seemed to prevail in the time of the moguls to the more anonymous conglomerate model that is in evidence today involved a complex assimilation of one sort of business into another. The 1948 Paramount decision put an end to the contract system that supported the entrepreneurial model. The blacklist enabled the MPAA to establish in its place a system far better suited for business in postindustrial, postwar America and far more suitable ethnically and politically for doing business with the federal government, as would become increasingly necessary in the forties and fifties.

A second story involves the Motion Picture Association of America, which allied with HUAC seemingly against its own best interests, only to emerge from the fray as a powerful industry gatekeeper. In 1947 the MPAA was little more than a new name for the old and fraying MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America). It got its charter in 1945 at the very moment the Justice Department resumed its antitrust suit against the studios. The studio membership of the MPAA used the Waldorf Statement in 1947 (which made public their intention to cooperate with HUAC) to establish an identity and moreover to assert studio unity in the face of a seeming ideological and very real fiscal crisis. Over the years, the MPAA has done well to downplay its roots in the Red Scare. But its power today seems very much indebted to right-wing congressional support at its inception and the collusive strategies it by necessity developed during the late 1940s and 1950s.

The Hollywood guilds and unions that had gained so much power and influence in the thirties and forties lost their momentum during the blacklist and have never recovered. In the new Hollywood, the guilds are so weak that strikes afford little hope for even celebrity talent. For example, in 1980 the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) organized a strike to establish residual pay scales for films reproduced for and exhibited in the home box office market (including videocassette sales and rentals and cable television). The studios responded by locking out the entire union workforce. Universal announced in the trades its intention to invoke the force majeure clause in its contracts with talent, effectively suspending all projects on film and television. Other studios, it was fair to assume at the time, were inclined to follow suit. SAG leadership, which had timed the strike to coincide with the beginning of the fall television season, underestimated the extent of studio collusion and misunderstood how little filmmaking mattered in the new Hollywood. What the guild members discovered in 1980 was that the studios were so well diversified, their entertainment industry interests so extensive and lucrative, they no longer needed to make movies or TV shows to make money. Such is the legacy of the Red Scare in Hollywood.

The decline in the effectiveness of the industry guilds has been accompanied by dramatic growth at the MPAA. The very antitrust regulations that promised to break up the studios in the late forties are no longer enforced: witness Time Warner Turner, Disney/Capital Cities/ ABC, Viacom/Paramount. The regulation of film content, formerly complicated by grassroots organizations like the Legion of Decency, and state and local censorship boards, is now wholly supervised by the MPAA. Through its rating system, first adopted in 1968, the MPAA not only self-regulates its various product lines, it monitors all participation in the legit theatrical and home box office markets.

The operative roots of the MPAA’s Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), which supervises and enforces the film rating system, lay in the various industry modes of self-regulation that preceded it. The Production Code Administration (PCA), its industry predecessor, was rooted in anti-Semitic assumptions about the dangers of movies and the men who made them. Joseph Breen, one of the co-founders of the PCA and its chief censor for much of its existence, was a Catholic procensorship activist before he became an industry player. His mission to regulate Hollywood cinema can be traced in large part to his dislike and distrust of the Jews who seemed to run the business. “These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence,” Breen wrote in a letter to a fellow Catholic activist. “They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.”³

As a business practice, the rating system dates most immediately and directly to 1947, when the studio membership of the MPAA began to understand and exploit the complex relationship between censorship and other forms of industrial regulation. What the studio ownership discovered was that self-regulation in compliance with HUAC and grassroots pressure to make less political, less meaningful films enabled them to better control the industry workforce and exploit the increasingly international postwar theatrical marketplace.

When the House Committee on Un-American Activities made its recommendation to indict Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo, the so-called Hollywood Ten, for contempt of Congress, the MPAA at first assured those under investigation that it would oppose government regulation. “Tell the boys not to worry,” MPAA president Eric Johnston remarked on October 18, 1947. “There’ll never be a blacklist. We’re not going to go totalitarian to please this committee.”⁴

But just twelve days later—five days before the full House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on the contempt citations—Johnston issued a stunning public reversal: “We did not defend them. We do not defend them now. On the contrary, we believe they have done a tremendous disservice to the industry which has given them so much material rewards [sic] and an opportunity to exercise their talents.”⁵ Indictments, incarcerations, and an industry-wide blacklist followed, all with the cooperation and much of it under the supervision of the MPAA.

Some of the more famous “unfriendlies” and their attorneys, October 27, 1947. Front row, left to right: Lewis Milestone, Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, and Bart Crum; center row, left to right: Gordon Kahn, Irving Pichel, Edward Dmytryk, and Robert Rossen; third row, left to right: Waldo Salt, Richard Collins, Howard Koch, Albert Maltz, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr., and Martin Popper (UPI, 1947).

This sudden change in policy at the MPAA was a source of considerable speculation at the time. The hearings were a public relations nightmare, but capitulation was not the most fiscally prudent way for the studios to deal with the situation. Reliable polls revealed that public opinion was split especially with regard to the way HUAC treated the unfriendly witnesses. The results of a Gallup poll were released on November 29, 1947. The poll highlighted two questions, the first of which focused on the conduct of the committee: “What is your opinion of the investigation—do you approve or disapprove of the way it was handled?” 37 percent approved, 36 percent disapproved, and 27 percent had no opinion. A second question regarded the jail time sought as a consequence of the ten’s refusal to answer questions: “Do you think the Hollywood writers who refused to say whether or not they were members of the Communist Party should be punished or not?” 47 percent maintained that they should be punished, 39 percent that they should not be punished, and 14 percent had no opinion.

Close examination of the Gallup poll results revealed a relationship between public opinion and educational experience. College graduates voted 54 percent to 34 percent against punishment; high school grads were split 43 percent against, 44 percent in favor of punishment. Citizens with just a grammar school education were 53 percent to 31 percent in favor of punishment. The congressional vote was 346 to 17 in support of the contempt indictments, which works out to approximately 80 percent in favor, 8 percent against, and 12 percent either abstaining or absent.

The Audience Research Institute (ARI), a Gallup unit formed to perform market research for the studios, produced data that complicated matters further. The ARI data revealed that the moviegoing public was evenly split over the conduct of the committee. Only 10 percent of those polled believed that there were all that many communists in the film business. The majority of those who believed HUAC’s contention that communism posed a significant threat in the motion picture business were not regular moviegoers before or during the Red Scare.⁶

Several big city newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, openly criticized the way HUAC conducted the hearings. While skirting the central ideological issues—anticommunism, patriotism, anti-Semitism, antiunionism—editorials in major newspapers across the nation highlighted the committee’s seeming disregard for due process and its apparent disinterest in the civil rights of the unfriendly witnesses.

Gordon Kahn, one of the original nineteen, attempted to explain the MPAA reversal by alleging that the Hollywood Ten were sacrificed as part of a complicated deal between the feds and studio ownership.⁷ “[The MPAA’s] surrender was the result of a deal,” Kahn wrote in 1948 in Hollywood on Trial. “They would immolate on the altar of hysteria and reaction … they would purge other writers, directors, producers and actors from the industry … in return for all of this, [HUAC chair J. Par-nell] Thomas would promise to call off any further investigation of Hollywood. ”⁸ Attractive as Kahn’s theory was at the time, no such conspiracy ever existed and no such bargain was ever struck. Thomas and his successors (after Thomas’s conviction and incarceration) continued to investigate and terrorize the liberal and radical Left in Hollywood through the end of the 1950s.⁹ But Kahn was right about the industry-wide panic, the roots of which lay not, as is commonly assumed, solely, or even primarily, in the politics of patriotism.

In the fall of 1947 studio executives had something bigger than HUAC to worry about: United States v. Paramount Pictures, an antitrust case before the Supreme Court that had turned decidedly against their interests (see chapter 2).¹⁰ The government’s eventual victory in the Paramount case in 1948 put an end to the distribution/exhibition guarantees that supported the old studio system.

In the fall of 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities benefited from and capitalized on studio panic over the impending and inevitable decision in the Paramount case by offering a means by which the studios might continue to control their workforce despite divestiture and despite the unions. The working relationship between the MPAA and the committee was less a concession vis-à-vis control of a product line than a strategy on the part of the studio establishment to regain control over the marketplace, itself in the process of postwar privatization.

When HUAC began its investigation of the movie industry, a new Hollywood seemed imminent. In concert with the forthcoming decision in the Paramount case, this new Hollywood promised or threatened to be a place in which talent, suddenly organized, seemingly radicalized, and soon to be further empowered by the free market engendered by divestiture, held significant power. It was thus in the best interests of studio management to find a way to control the industry workforce before it controlled them.

THE JEWS

Please get me the names of the Jews. You know, the big Jewish contributors. … Could we please investigate some of those cocksuckers.

—Richard Nixon, former HUAC member, on the campaign trail, 1972

The Hollywood Ten hearings revealed a tendency on the part of HUAC and those who shared its politics to conflate communism with unionism and antiracism. Since the union and civil rights movements were, in the committee’s peculiar view of things, Jewish causes, they further conflated communism with Jewishne...