Newstalgia Reference Room - Will H. Hays - 1920
(Will Hays - Postmaster, Chairman of the RNC, Censorship Czar. Put new meaning in the word Bluenose.)
When most people hear the name Will Hays they usually think about the "Hays Code" of censorship during the early days of the Motion Picture industry (well . . .all the way to the 1950s). He was the one who insisted bedroom scenes involving married couples had to portray them sleeping in separate beds. Anything remotely resembling a whiff of sexual innuendo was chopped out. The most obscene word uttered in a film was "damn". Basically, portraying an entire society and several generations on film as they never existed in real life.
But before that, Hays was Postmaster and just prior to that, in 1918 was elected Chairman of The Republican Party.
Will Hays: “What we need in this country is not less politics, but more attention to politics.”
And we wonder how we've arrived at this point now, and what happened to make it that way.
It goes back a long, long way.
He looks like a fun guy. The type to rock the party.
If I were a psychopath, I would join the republican party, and get in on the gravy train taking the Teabircher morons to the cleaners.
....the fools do not realize,a population that can ,..... not paticipate .............in the 'economy'...,can not keep it viable!..........."we are listening,.......and we're not blind.,......this is your life....this is your time."
....the fools do not realize,a population that can ,..... not paticipate .............in the 'economy'...,can not keep it viable!..........."we are listening,.......and we're not blind.,......this is your life....this is your time."
Morality police have aways been around, thats where prohibition came from after all.
When angry, count four, when very angry, swear.
-Mark Twain-
He looks sorta closeted to me. He would have gotten along well with Senators Tappy Craig and "Diapers" David Vitter, or Governor Appalachian Trail. The Party of Family Values has been damaging this country for a long, long time.
notKeith
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The Hays Code wasn't actually made so much to be a defender of Morality, (Though certainly there were those, especially in the church, who wanted such a thing to exist), but to set about an easy, pre-conceived set of standards which would make Henry Ford style Mass-production of films easier. Think about it, with a set of rules like this, you can figure out which plots will or won't make the cut, have more reliability and consistency in your product, and know roughly how customers will respond. I'm 90% sure that Hays was aware of this, and this was more how he ran the code than anything else.
Interestingly enough, Henry Ford actually produced short subject films. Some were just brief documentaries about mundane topics of the day like kit houses (the inspiration of Keaton's "One Week"). Others openly promoted his anti-Semitic (and other) politics.
your name's Lebowski, Lebowski... and your wife is Bunny
there was nothing obscene or irrelevant or offensive in that post, as swipe
cant handle the truth
google John Stagliano
terms of service my ass
your name's Lebowski, Lebowski... and your wife is Bunny
When Fascism comes to America...
Prayer breakfast... 1953
One nation under God inserted in our pledge... 1954
In God We Trust... 1956
Study the symptoms not the virus...
He just fudged his diapers.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Butt to be fair the Hays Office was something of a compromise, similar to the later Comics Code, of having an industry "police" itself, rather than have an official censor, and even then showed some awareness, presumably of the Ist Amendment...
In addition to the Hays Office, there was also the Catholic League of Decency, but what was really bad were state and local censorship boards (supposedly average citizens) who could ban a movie from their area. Supposedly they had this power under the X Amendment and the Police Powers Act of health, welfare, safety and morals. Often they seemed to share member rosters with churches so that's who dominated the boards. Finally, when the Doctrines Incorporationist and Interstate Commerce Clause kicked in there was finally a loosening of such strictures.
Funny thing, from 1937 to 1939 no American horror movies were made, not due to local censors, but the British ban. American movie makers weren't sure if movies could be profitable without the Commonwealth, so movies that could've easily been horror movies were instead milder and released as Science Fiction such as The Invisible Ray. It was not until the January 1939 release of Son of Frankensten, with Basil Rathbond, Lionel Atwell, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff was released and became a hit that they decided movies could be a hit without the Brits.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
have the film of Hays protestion the "damn" that was listed at the end of the film. Selznick had to prove that the word was a 'vulgar' not a swear word before he could release the film.
The good ole Catholics condemed the movie.
What a load of putz.
"Let's talk dirty to the animals"
"Banned in Kansas". Covers the Hays period (and earlier) pretty well. The state of Kansas had its own film review board, and subjects that got a film cut (or banned) were quite diverse. Pretty much every Theda Bara film, as you would expect (way too much sex). But also "Birth of a Nation". Kansas Republicans (I'm not kidding) felt it was too glorifying of the South in the Civil War and the KKK and would be offensive to the state's African American community -- a solidly Republican voting block.
Times have changed.
Nice. Short.
But this doesn't even come close to describing what a royal REPUBLICAN shit Hays was!!! Forget the crap about Hollywood and Hays. That's a mere nit.
Hays was deep into the bribery that was the Republican Convention that put Harding into the White House where the real looting of the United States began that led to Teapot Dome. The graft, patronage, bribery, murder (multiple), extortion, prostitution, illegal bootlegging, perjury, witness tampering, foreign interventions for corporations, the use of federal agencies for intimidation, corporate money-laundering, etc., began at that convention and with Hays. This is where future Republicans would learn from the masters how to steal government and wealth.
I heard about this book on NPR when the author was interviewed then went right out to buy it. At the time, a best-seller. Could not put it down. Reads like a novel with a "Holy shit!" coming to you every few pages. And Hays was in the thick of it all.
TEAPOT DOME
Laton McCartney
I heard somewhere that this rule was first broken by 'The Brady Bunch'. True?
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