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MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
When people talk about the more innocent Hollywood of years gone by, they're referring to an era when the movie industry policed itself. For decades, all of the major film studios were governed by a production code. It required that their movies be wholesome, moral, and encouraged what was called correct thinking.
But 40 years ago, in 1968, those rules went out the window. Our movie critic, Bob Mondello, looks back at what the Production Code was designed to do, and why Hollywood decided it was no longer worth doing.
BOB MONDELLO: It's easy to understand why average folks would have been upset with Hollywood in 1922. Even by the loose standards of the Prohibition-ignoring roaring '20s, the town was a moral quagmire - silent-film comic Fatty Arbuckle, charged with manslaughter for the death of an actress; a bisexual director found murdered; movie stars dying of drug overdoses. Small wonder the nation's religious leaders were forming local censorship boards and chopping up movies every which way to suit their communities.
And when Hollywood studios banded together under former Postmaster General Will Hays, who came up with a list of don'ts and be-carefuls, small wonder no one believed them. There were no penalties, no laws, no enforcement.
(Soundbite of movie "I'm No Angel")
Ms. GERTRUDE HOWARD (Actress): I don't see how any man could help loving you.
Ms. MAE WEST (Actress): I don't give them any help, they do it themselves.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. HOWARD: (Unintelligible) do keep me busy keeping track of your gentlemen friends.
Ms. WEST: Oh, I wanna make it easy for you, Beulah. I'm thinking about putting in a filing system.
MONDELLO: Mae West's casual slatternliness in "I'm No Angel," along with Barbara Stanwyck's promiscuousness in "Baby Face," and the release of Cecil B. DeMille's racy biblical epic "Sign of the Cross," so outraged moralists in the early 1930s that calls for government...