Silencing Cinema: An Introduction

In his vibrant cultural biography on Joseph I. Breen, the man who from 1934 to 1954 was in charge of the Production Code Administration (PCA) in Hollywood, Thomas Doherty reminds us how difficult it is to judge the legacy of the American film industry’s internal censorship system. While “Hollywood’s censor” Breen saw his work as a positive mission, most film scholars and people working in the industry are much more critical. “Hollywood under the Code,” Doherty reminds us, “was variously, cumulatively, and intractably racist, patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic, capitalistic, and colonialist,” along with promoting “bourgeois, heteronormative, American-centric values upheld and celebrated from genre to genre, studio to studio.”2 The PCA, which operated under Hollywood’s powerful film trade organization—the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (MPPDA)—served until the end of the 1960s as the central regulatory institution in the creation, production, and distribution of motion pictures in the United States. Using the Production Code (also known as the Hays or Breen Code)3 as its bible, the administration systematically intervened in the writing of script drafts, the shooting and editing of major Hollywood studios’ motion pictures, and finally decided about the MPPDA seal of approval for distribution and exhibition