WI: Rating System Instead of Hays Code

The Hays Code was a reaction against moral outrage by traditionalists against the motion picture industry. The American film industry was not explicit by today's standards, but it did feature such things as innuendo, moral ambiguity, progressive roles for women and non-whites, sexual maturity such as non married couples, premarital sex, abortion and open relationships, and other issues, and even occasional swearing. The Hays Code removed all that, and lead to an immature American cinema for decades, which waned in later decades until about the 1960s. For roughly the next thirty years, American film had to have clear good and evil where anyone bad had to lose, only traditional male and female roles could be portrayed (meaning docile, homemaking women), no sexuality was permitted, only traditional marriage could be portrayed, and innuendo and sex was totally taboo. There is a view that the Hays Office was dumb, and this only forced writers to get better at subverting it, which is not true. There is not a silver lining.

The Hays Code was essentially a one-size-fits all censorship in regards to film, where by today's standards, every film had to be for a General Audience. What if instead of the Hays Code, they had instituted a ratings system from day one? This is what replaced the Hays Code in later years, allowing for variable film maturity intended for different audiences.
 
You potentially butterfly away a lot of great films.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Breakfast at Tiffany's
It's A Wonderful Life
The Wizard of Oz
The War of the Worlds
Casablanca
Gone With The Wind
Citizen Kane
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
12 Angry Men
Strangers On A Train
A Farewell to Arms
A Streetcar Named Desire
Bridge On The River Kwai
On The Waterfront
Lady and the Tramp
Rebel Without A Cause

All of those were made during the Hays Code era. They may or may not have been produced under the modern Hollywood ethos of loading up movies with gratuitous explosions, F bombs, and nudity; or the titles would have been made but with more focus on shock value and less on developing a good storyline.
 
You potentially butterfly away a lot of great films.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Breakfast at Tiffany's
It's A Wonderful Life
The Wizard of Oz
The War of the Worlds
Casablanca
Gone With The Wind
Citizen Kane
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
12 Angry Men
Strangers On A Train
A Farewell to Arms
A Streetcar Named Desire
Bridge On The River Kwai
On The Waterfront
Lady and the Tramp
Rebel Without A Cause

All of those were made during the Hays Code era. They may or may not have been produced under the modern Hollywood ethos of loading up movies with gratuitous explosions, F bombs, and nudity; or the titles would have been made but with more focus on shock value and less on developing a good storyline.

Why would there be swearing and Judy showing her boobs in _Wizard of Oz_? How do you give _It's A Wonderful Life_ the Michael Bay treatment with plenty of FooGas explosions and building demolitions?

Just because you can get an 'R' doesn't mean you have to.

Also note that _The Andromeda Strain_ was G rated, and had Nudity. _Logan's Run_ had a lot, and it was PG. Standards and Ratings change on the Tastes of the Decade.

I really don't see how keeping the Pre-'33 Standards would butterfly any of those
 
Why would there be swearing and Judy showing her boobs in _Wizard of Oz_? How do you give _It's A Wonderful Life_ the Michael Bay treatment with plenty of FooGas explosions and building demolitions?

Just because you can get an 'R' doesn't mean you have to.

Also note that _The Andromeda Strain_ was G rated, and had Nudity. _Logan's Run_ had a lot, and it was PG. Standards and Ratings change on the Tastes of the Decade.

I really don't see how keeping the Pre-'33 Standards would butterfly any of those

There would be no reason to have Judy Garland take her clothes off in the Wizard of Oz.

There was also no reason for Halle Berry to appear topless in Swordfish, or for the n-bombs that were dropped in Pulp Fiction, but Hollywood did it anyway.
 
You potentially butterfly away a lot of great films.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Breakfast at Tiffany's
It's A Wonderful Life
The Wizard of Oz
The War of the Worlds
Casablanca
Gone With The Wind
Citizen Kane
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
12 Angry Men
Strangers On A Train
A Farewell to Arms
A Streetcar Named Desire
Bridge On The River Kwai
On The Waterfront
Lady and the Tramp
Rebel Without A Cause

All of those were made during the Hays Code era. They may or may not have been produced under the modern Hollywood ethos of loading up movies with gratuitous explosions, F bombs, and nudity; or the titles would have been made but with more focus on shock value and less on developing a good storyline.

There would be no reason to have Judy Garland take her clothes off in the Wizard of Oz.

There was also no reason for Halle Berry to appear topless in Swordfish, or for the n-bombs that were dropped in Pulp Fiction, but Hollywood did it anyway.


We have the pre-code era as a reference as well as the films of the 1950s and 1960s when the code weakened, and none of that extremeness happened in the pre-code era or the latter era. Nor did the existence of films that were more mature or of a different subject matter preclude the existence of other types of films of different material or for a general audience. "Vertigo" did not mean "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" did not exist. "Bonnie and Clyde" did not prevent "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes". I don't really understand that interpretation. There is absolutely no reason to hold this view. All a rating system would do is allow film makers to do the films they wanted, which are not going to be exploitative pornography. If Orson Welles can do "Touch of Evil", he can do "Citizen Kane". There's no reason to expect him not to. My reaction to this is as if I posited "What if there were no Apples", and the response was "People would eat babies. Do you want that?". No ... what? That's my reaction to this interpretation.
 
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Norton wrote:

(...only traditional male and female roles could be portrayed (meaning docile, homemaking women)

The closest I can find to any such restrictions in the wiki "Hays Code" article is...

And be it further resolved, That special care be exercised in the manner in which the following subjects are treated, to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized:

etc etc etc
The institution of marriage;
etc etc etc

I can't imagine how they would even begin to enforce that, in a manner allowing for only the portrayal of "docile, homemaking women". What about Gone With The Wind, where Scarlett is shown, later in the story, as married and having children, but also involved in business-pursuits outside the home, and sporting an overall attitude that even Union soldiers would consider headstrong? ("The Yanks better hope they don't get ahold of you!")

A lot of the gender-related requirements are more cut-and-dry(eg. no men and women in bed together), but I'm guessing that enforement of "the instiitution of marriage" provision was pretty much subjective.
 
Norton wrote:

(...only traditional male and female roles could be portrayed (meaning docile, homemaking women)

The closest I can find to any such restrictions in the wiki "Hays Code" article is...



I can't imagine how they would even begin to enforce that, in a manner allowing for only the portrayal of "docile, homemaking women". What about Gone With The Wind, where Scarlett is shown, later in the story, as married and having children, but also involved in business-pursuits outside the home, and sporting an overall attitude that even Union soldiers would consider headstrong? ("The Yanks better hope they don't get ahold of you!")

A lot of the gender-related requirements are more cut-and-dry(eg. no men and women in bed together), but I'm guessing that enforement of "the instiitution of marriage" provision was pretty much subjective.


 
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It depends. Really. The BBFC started out with a rating system with just two certificates, U and A (Universal and Adult, respectively - basically equivalent to G and 14A in the modern Canadian motion picture rating system), and even then the British censors included censorship alongside the ratings. Even the two rating systems most modelled on the Hays Code - (West) Germany with the FSK system and Japan with Eirin - also included ratings alongside censorship. So it could be possible for censorship to be included alongside with the ratings; all that's needed are some basic guidelines and then tailor it based on certificate/rating/classification.
 
I've heard it argued that a lot of Hitchcock's greatness was due to his working within the restrictions of the Hays Code, testing its boundaries, and that he might not be a particularly memorable director without it. I honestly haven't seen enough Hitchcock to judge that argument, but it seems plausible at least.

Don't get me wrong, more creative freedom is a good thing, on the whole, but given the sheer volume of great cinema that came out during the code era indicates that the censorship wasn't totally crippling, and I can buy that some filmmakers may have been sharpened by it.

That being said, I don't think we would see anything super extreme in OTL's Code Era if it were replaced by a rating system. A lot of pre-Code cinema wouldn't be acceptable under the Code, but none of it was characterized by gratuitous profanity or nudity or violence. More like explicitly acknowledging characters having sex. How scandalous.
 
We have the pre-code era as a reference as well as the films of the 1950s and 1960s when the code weakened, and none of that extremeness happened in the pre-code era or the latter era. Nor did the existence of films that were more mature or of a different subject matter preclude the existence of other types of films of different material or for a general audience. "Vertigo" did not mean "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" did not exist. "Bonnie and Clyde" did not prevent "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes". I don't really understand that interpretation. There is absolutely no reason to hold this view. All a rating system would do is allow film makers to do the films they wanted, which are not going to be exploitative pornography. If Orson Welles can do "Touch of Evil", he can do "Citizen Kane". There's no reason to expect him not to. My reaction to this is as if I posited "What if there were no Apples", and the response was "People would eat babies. Do you want that?". No ... what? That's my reaction to this interpretation.

It's speculation.

Maybe those classics would gave been exactly the same in the pre or post Code eras. But maybe the writers would have been less creative. There were good movies in the past 50 years that didn't include gratuitous violence, profanity, or objectification of women. On the other hand, the examples I gave made absolutely no contributed to the storyline. The writers did it simply because they could.
 
I've heard it argued that a lot of Hitchcock's greatness was due to his working within the restrictions of the Hays Code, testing its boundaries, and that he might not be a particularly memorable director without it. I honestly haven't seen enough Hitchcock to judge that argument, but it seems plausible at least.

Don't get me wrong, more creative freedom is a good thing, on the whole, but given the sheer volume of great cinema that came out during the code era indicates that the censorship wasn't totally crippling, and I can buy that some filmmakers may have been sharpened by it.

That being said, I don't think we would see anything super extreme in OTL's Code Era if it were replaced by a rating system. A lot of pre-Code cinema wouldn't be acceptable under the Code, but none of it was characterized by gratuitous profanity or nudity or violence. More like explicitly acknowledging characters having sex. How scandalous.

Hitchcock was great where he was able to subvert the limitations of the Hays Code. "Vertigo", for instance, ends with the bad guy getting away scott free. An alternate, Code friendly ending was shot, but never used. Censorship does not sharpen art. That is wishful thinking to make it feel less terrible. At the end of the day, it only limits what an artist is able to do.
 
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