No Bluenoses Needed In Hollywood (1950)
Liberality, of sorts, is far from a modern invention. It even existed between the pages of large-circulation popular magazines in the staid and conservative 1950s. Nonetheless, I was rather startled to discover this editorial, cheerfully and no doubt expensively illustrated by Harry Devlin, in the May 13, 1950 issue of Colliers. Their editorial Sniffing Out The Sin In The Cinema politely eviscerates, in about a dozen paragraphs, a dumbass proposal by some deservedly-forgotten United States Senator. To save you reading most of those, I’ll tell you that the blue-nosed asshole suggested requiring federal licenses for everybody in Hollywood, under the threat of ganking said licenses whenever their personal behavior failed to live up to unspecified federal morality standards. Collier’s editors were not keen:
Ever since Puritan days there have been periodic attempts to banish sin from our land by means of blue laws. The attempts have been uniformly unsuccessful, probably because it goes against the tough grain of American character to have some pious legislator define virtue and enforce it by statute. But successive failures haven’t discouraged the sanctimonious solons. They’re still at it.
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Hollywood is already subjected to a lot of censorship and pressure, official and otherwise, which too frequently is reflected in the movies we see. We believe the threat of further censorship by Congress would simply lower the quality of Hollywood’s end product without improving the morals of the people who make the pictures or of the people who see them.
The only sensible and democratic censorship is individual discrimination. If you disapprove of the behavior of an actor or director or producer, you can stay away from his pictures. If enough people feel as you do and follow your example, the effect of your disapproval will be felt. Hollywood is very sensitive in the region of the box office. And it never fails to look for a remedy when that sensitive region is injured.
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Relying on the tastes of the public to always get good art into production isn’t terribly effective, nor is relying on the wisdom of studio execs. But certainly getting Gov censors involved more than they generally are now is likely to cause more problems, not less. A damn huge grey area. Public feedback is good, until that goes too far and people get cancelled for making terrible jokes 15-20 years ago (James Gunn et al), that they’ve since atoned for and the instant negative cycle tosses them on the dung heap before an informed analysis can even be found. But we still need people standing up for the downtrodden. Armie Hammer certainly seems to have earned his fall from grace, and not for old actions but rather current ones.