Just about the time the first movies were screened, there were those who considered the moral aspects of the new medium and determined that "guidelines" needed to be established to prevent these new-fangled motion pictures from corrupting America.
The Hays Code was created in 1926. It wasn't formally adopted until 1934 by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. The Hays Code, of course, forbade nudity and profanity, but it went further than that. The Hays Code set up "principles" by which the movie industry was to be governed. The Hays Code supplied the guiding principles of what movie makers could and could not show on the silver screen and the words that actors and actresses could utter.
The Hays Code was replaced in 1966 by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) rating system. Censorship was abandoned and replaced with a rating system that was intended to guide movie goers as to the content of a movie.
You can get arguments on both sides of the issue and you'd better believe that the issue is not dead and buried. There are those who see movie content censorship as a violation of "free speech," and then there are those that see movie content censorship as the very reason that great movies of the past were great. Producers and directors, say these proponents of censorship, had to be more creative in the ways that sex and violence were portrayed on the screen. There are valid points on both sides of the line, and like with many issues such as this, it is sometimes best to meet somewhere in the middle where the artist can maintain freedom of creativity, to make a picture their own, without becoming distasteful.
Read more - Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America
Which side are you on?
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