Word: code
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is how things went during the three decades when Catholicism's Legion of Decency (later the Catholic film office) exercised vast moral sway over U.S. film making-in league with Hollywood's own self-censoring agency, the Production Code Administration (P.C.A.). The church's ultimate weapon was an ungentlemanly C (for condemned) rating, a box-office kiss of death partly because U.S. Catholics used to take a public pledge at Mass, once a year, to boycott movies that were designated trash...
...freewheeling Hollywood of the early 1930s, two Catholics wrote a moral code for the industry. It forbade not only overt sex and brutality but sympathy for any evildoers and even the very word "damn" (Gone With the Wind got a special P.C.A. dispensation). As the film industry created the P.C.A., the church created the National Legion of Decency. Soon it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The major studios owned some 70% of first-run theaters and refused to distribute any film that did not have P.C.A. approval. Over the next 33 years the P.C.A...
...Supreme Court had already applied First Amendment free expression to motion pictures, then to nearly any thing that called itself artistic expression. The watershed in the decline of standards, however, was 1968, when the Motion Pic ture Association replaced the old P.C.A. code with the G, PG, R and X system. According to Sullivan, film producers "decided, now that the kiddies were protected, anything goes for adults." Because TV had come to dominate family entertainment, movies went for specialized audiences. Then the new wave of "adult" films began entering American homes via network and cable...
...final years, during the deluge of violence and pornography, the film office struggled to maintain reasonable standards despite changing times. After 1971, the year the Catholic office withdrew its support of the Hollywood rating code, the Review branded 15% of releases with a C. But Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy, rated X by the film industry itself, got the Catholics' A-4 (O.K. for adults "with reservations") because it was seen as a serious slice-of-life film, homosexuality and all. Another A-4 film, John Travolta's disco epic Saturday Night Fever, was deemed to contain positive moral...
...once enveloped Hughes' vast and tangled affairs. Recalls William Rankin, a longtime Hughes employee who is now No. 2 at Summa: "Everything was secret unless we were told otherwise. We hired a p.r. agency to say, 'No comment.' " Top executives no longer have to punch a code into an elevator in the parking garage before they can enter the firm's unpretentious headquarters two miles from the Las Vegas strip. Company officers now work in fourth-floor offices rather than the windowless basement rooms that Hughes' aides occupied...