EXTRA   MATERIAL

Chapter Fourteen - 1930
The Motion Picture Production Code

This article gives a more detailed account of Lord in Hollywood:
Daniel Lord and the Motion Picture Production Code:
The Story of the Hollywood Priest
By Stephen A. Werner, Ph.D.
Link will open in a new tab.

The Coming of Sound to Movies

Figuring out how to best use the developing and changing technology and figuring out which silent film stars could make the transition to sound films involved some stumbling along the way.

Ray Graham of the Graham-Paige Motor Corporation asked me to go with him to the opening night of one of Vitaphone’s first part-talking films shown on Broadway.  Most of the film had been silent.  Dolores Costello starred with Conrad Nagel in a stereotyped drama to which had been added a few scenes of dialogue.  The audience sat pained through a quartet scene singing Sweet Adeline.  When the heroine spoke, the s sounds were prolonged hisses.  Nobody had bothered to hire a dialogue writer, and the climax came when the villain broke into the heroine’s room.  He put his foot through the door and Vitaphone recorded the sound of a man shattering an empty orange crate.  He tore a sheet of paper and the sound was the ripping of oilcloth.  He moved toward the heroine, panic-stricken in the fashion of that day at impending rape, and then she opened her hissing lips and cried: Don’t look at me like that!  Oh, don’t look at me like that!  You too may have a sister.

The Broadway audience howled.  It was the old ten-twent’-thirt’ melodrama at its worst.  The word sister came out shisther . . . and the whole scene fell into the realms of low comedy.¹

Dirt on the Stage

In 1933 The Queen’s Work ran an article: DIRT ON THE STAGE AND THE SCREEN DOES NOT PAY: They’ve Killed the Theater With Their Dirt and Now They’re Killing the Movies, Asserts Patrick Casey: And Patrick Casey Ought to Know.  Casey, the VP and General Manager of the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit, described the demise of Vaudeville:

Then a lot of other birds got into the business.  They started to put a ‘punch’ into the acts.  They began to make the actors put in offcolor jokes.  They started the rush for nudity.

I saw the vaudeville theaters that used to clear ten thousand a week falling off until they were just making their overhead.  These fools thought they could get the crowds back with more dirt, when dirt was driving all the decent people away. . . . And I’m telling you, dirt did it.

I’ve road-showed great pictures and great plays, and I know what makes money.  And I’m telling you that nobody ever makes a thin dime out of a dirty show or a dirty movie.²

This article helps explain Lord’s views on the movies.  Lord saw Vaudeville go from family entertainment to adult entertainment, ruining itself in the process.  Lord feared this for movies.

More on Lord’s Alternative Vision

Interestingly, Lord thought the place to explore important moral issues and social problems was in the live theaters not in movies.  In that way, an adult audience could consider adult moral topics.  The problem he saw in 1930—long before the movie rating system—was movies with adult themes being watched by children.

Because it seemed to me that there is an audience for problem stories, I urged that the motion-picture theater operators, besides their vast theaters and their neighborhood theaters reaching out to men, women, children, the young, the old, the educated and the illiterate, should think in terms of small theaters.  I suggested they build or rent theaters to seat perhaps five hundred to a thousand, and for these theaters produce an inexpensive but well-acted story that would face problems, bring into discussion subjects that for vast, uncontrolled audiences would be taboo, charge almost theater prices instead of the mass-box-office rates, and cater to that sophisticated audience about which we hear so much.

. . .

I am sorry that the small theaters which since developed to a very limited degree are called by the unfortunate name of art theaters.  Art has a way of scaring off the average American.  Yet I was glad when the small theater began to have a slight but recognized place in the motion-picture scene.  Hardly a beginning has been made on this, however.  And the vast audience of the churches and the schools is almost totally ignored.³

Although Lord’s proposal for these theaters was perhaps unrealistic, he did believe in addressing important moral and social issues such as racism and workers’ rights.  He believed that live theater should be the forum.

Lord would later comment

I still believe in the small theater and the film for the limited audience.  The fault of the motion picture is not mentioned in the code; it is in the desire of the producers to have enormous audiences, to get out films that will please everybody, to aim at the universal man who simply does not exist.  When the day comes that films are produced for various levels of intelligence and culture, as books are or music or paintings, or magazines or food or clothing, the films will grow up.⁴

Looking Back

Lord would later write:

Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine, in the course of a book review in the issue of January 29, 1940, referred to the immortally funny motion-picture Code.  Since I had written the Code at the request of the industry, I was interested in this viewpoint.

Now from the fact that the Code forbids pictures to show sympathy for crime and villainy or present explicit methods of murder, scenes exciting to lust, attacks on marriage as an institution, insults to our flag and country, obscenity, perversions, the dope traffic, one could draw the not-unnatural conclusion that the smart aleck who wrote that review for Time thought anyone who opposed these rather obvious crimes a very, very amusing, highly stupid, and—to use his other choice expression—anthropologically fascinating person.

Perhaps the reviewer thinks that he would not have been funny had he written a code of motion-picture ethics and advocated films to praise murder, obscenity, lust, the destruction of the family, and treason to one’s county.  Because with the collaboration of other men interested in the good of my country and mankind I asked the motion pictures to veto these things, I am anthropologically fascinating and immortally funny.⁵

Lord later wrote in 1954:

It is my conviction that, were the companies themselves to work on a revision of the code, they would turn up with a stricter one than they now work by.  Notably they would exclude the horrible cruelty which has become too much a part of modern films.  And I fancy that in the excitement over communism and subversive activities they would write a highly restrictive and perhaps a not-too-wise section on patriotism and the way in which motion pictures should lash out at our country’s enemies.⁶

NOTES

• ¹ Played by Ear, 283.
• ² “Dirt On The Stage And The Screen Does Not Pay” The Queen’s Work, XXVI (December 1933), 6.
• ³ Played by Ear, 294-95.
• ⁴ Ibid., 300-301.
• ⁵ Lord, What is Decent Literature? (QW, 1940.)
• ⁶ Played by Ear, 301.

Chapter 13    Chapter 15

Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner