[78-L] ^Hays Office query off topic

[Donna Halper]

On 8/2/2011 6:51 PM, Michael Biel wrote:
>
> Hays retired in 1945, so when he died is moot.  However, he was
> succeeded by Eric Johnston who himself died in 1963, leaving the office
> vacant until Jack Valenti took over in May 1966.  But I am not sure that
> the bed rule had not been relaxed by then anyway.  It was no longer the
> 1930s.  The rule was still in force on TV but even by then it probably
> was becoming looser.
>    
On radio, stations had been complaining to the FCC from the mid-1930s 
onward to loosen the rules that forbade even mild oaths like "damn"  As 
for the movies, little by little, similar battles were waged-- there was 
the famous fight over Jane Russell's cleavage in "The Outlaw," circa 
1943, for example.  There were also assorted "B" movies that showed 
(alleged) drug use and assorted examples of debauchery in the early 
1950s-- their producers defended them as educational-- they were 
supposed to warn impressionable youth about the dangers of drugs.

The Hays Office (later run by arch-conservative Joseph Breen) was at the 
height of power in the 30s and even the 40s, spurred on by the Catholic 
Church, which put the Legion of Decency in place to exert pressure on 
movies (and sometimes radio shows) considered indecent. But after the 
Howard Hughes controversy in 1943, I think it was the film "The Moon is 
Blue" in 1953 that was the defining moment for when the line began to 
really move and the censors began losing their grip on movie morality.