Things have gone from bad to worse in the pop culture landscape. After months of worry about what Netflix and its antagonism toward movie theaters would do with Warner Bros., the streamer has withdrawn its bid and now Paramount is poised to acquire its longtime rival. While it would be somewhat better for another studio that has silent era roots and at least an appreciation for the cinematic experience to take over Warner, Paramount’s current CEO David Ellison has been quite open in his plans to create material that pleases the current administration.If there’s a sliver of hope to be found in this turn of events, it can be found in the early days of Hollywood. In 1922, Adolph Zukor, who ran the studio Famous Players-Lasky and recently acquired smaller competitor Paramount, met with other Hollywood heads to discuss the rising public outcry against immoral movie content. Hoping to stave off government interference and to protect their profits, Zukor and the other studio heads formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. They appointed as head of the group Will Hays, former postmaster general and President Warren G. Harding crony to help clean up Hollywood’s image.What followed was a decade of mass censorship in the movies. But a contradictory and creative spirit also followed, resulting in some of the best movies in Hollywood history.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Sanitizing CinemaFive years after the MPDAA formed, the organization agreed on a list of guidelines, a collection of “Don’ts” and “Be carefuls” intended to help filmmakers avoid public scrutiny. The former included bans on profanity or nudity, as well as “miscegenation” (romantic interactions between people of different races), and ridicule of the clergy. The latter spanned from use of the American flag and religious ceremonies to depictions of safe-cracking or law-enforcement officers.Certainly, the studio heads encouraged their filmmakers to follow these rules… as long as they didn’t interfere with profits. But if the public wanted to see violent gangsters gunning down their enemies, the Warner Bros weren’t about to tell Darryl F. Zanuck not to make The Public Enemy. They would just hope that the other studio heads would be more faithful to the rules, and they certainly wouldn’t fear any reprimand from Hays.Despite the big box office returns from The Public Enemy, Scarface, and Little Caesar in the early ’30s, religious and community groups demanded more attention, and the MPDAA had to amend the code to create the Motion Picture Authority in 1934. From that point on, no movie theatre—which were then owned by the studios—would play a film without MPA certification.That addition of real consequences to the MPA coincided with the assent of a man who was willing to wield them, Joseph Breen. All film scripts made their way through Breen’s office, and everyone from studio heads to directors to actors complained about the battles they had to wage against Breen to get their movies made.And what kind of films did Hollywood release during this two decade era of increased censorship? Only some of the best movies ever made.Encoded ResistanceWhile some certainly recognized its significance, most moviegoers in 1941 didn’t leave the theaters after watching Citizen Kane thinking they’d just watched one of the greatest movies ever made. Heck, some didn’t get to see it at all, as exhibitors feared reprisal from Nelson Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst, the latter of whom inspired Orson Welles‘ character Charles Foster Kane. And yet, despite pressure within and without, Citizen Kane did make it to theaters as both an angry polemic against the strength of the rich and a dazzling technical achievement.That same year, audiences could watch Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade lech on grieving women, grouch about incompetent police, and down copious amounts of alcohol in The Maltese Falcon. Writer and director John Huston, adapting the hard-boiled novel by Dashiell Hammett, had to fight Breen about Spade’s sexual activities and his hard drinking, losing the battle about the former but winning the right to keep plenty of the latter. But even with those concessions, Huston brought to the screen a moody, bleak bit of work with no reverence for authority.Some might dismiss the previous year’s His Girl Friday as a breezy screwball comedy, thanks to the rapid pace that director Howard Hawks shot the one-liners that Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell fire at each other as reporters and former lovers Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson. But driving their will they/won’t they energy is an upsetting story about anarchists, dead cops, and sleazy reporters. There’s just as much ill-repute and excellent filmmaking at work here as in the other greats of the era.And that doesn’t even get into the nastier noirs, the more absurd Marx Bros comedies, or the innuendo-laden Preston Sturges films. In some ways, Breen and the Hays code made movies better, because they forced directors to get more creative with the way they told their stories.Audience AutonomyAs we stare down the prospect of another corporate merger shrinking the potential to make movies and deal with the ramifications of conservative politics being prioritized over art, that last sentence seems foolish. Certainly, Welles, Huston, and Hawkes would have preferred to have simply made the movies they wanted to make, without having to deal with Breen and the Production Code Authority. Perhaps saying that the movies are better is just apologizing for a horrible regime.But even if we don’t want to say that the Hays Code made for better movies, we can at least agree that the code didn’t destroy movies. No matter how much control those in power wanted to exert over the creation and reception of films, moviemakers and movie watchers continued to find meaning in the cinematic arts, even meaning that directly resisted those power brokers.So while Paramount may very well acquire Warner Bros. and David Ellison may very well use his clout to create a right-wing media empire, the Hays era reminds us that no rich person can control what we as humans do with the art we create.The post What Hollywood’s Hays Code Era Can Teach Us About the Warner/Paramount Merger appeared first on Den of Geek.