  urlLink Flicker: The Hollywood Production Code : "I am fascinated with Pre-Code Hollywood films. The term “pre-code” generally designates films made between the advent of talk pictures—circa 1929-1930—and the strict enforcement of the censorious Hollywood Production Code in 1934. I am planning a series of entries discussing pre-code films, but for now I want to take a look at the actual “code”.
The film industry has long been under scrutiny of cultural conservatives, fearful that movie content may lead the public’s morals astray. In the 1920s, the most popular stories of the day depicted Jazz Age excess—wild youth, adulterous spouses, sophisticated seducers, and such. To fend off increasingly combative civic and religious groups and possible government regulation, the studios hired Will Hays—a former postmaster general under President Warren G. Harding—to clean up the industry. In 1930, under Hays’ direction, Father Daniel Lord (a Jesuit priest) and Martin Quigley (a prominent Roman Catholic layman) wrote the Hollywood Production Code.
The overriding theme of the document is stated as such: “No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it.” The multi-page code and its addenda spell out everything, from a film’s “moral obligation” to how to depict certain plots such as crime and love, to certain strictures on costumes and dancing and definitions of what is obscene and vulgar. I have tried to find the entire Hollywood Production Code text on the internet to no avail, but a tiny sampling of some of its content is as follows:   Not plot theme should definitely side with evil against good.
The courts of the land should not be presented as unjust. “Pure Love”—the love of a man for a woman permitted by the law of God and man—is a rightful subject for plots. Miscegenation (sex relationship between white and black races) is forbidden. Ministers of religion…should not be used in comedy, as villains, or as unpleasant persons. Bedrooms: in themselves are perfectly innocent…However, under certain conditions they are bad dramatic locations [when they suggest sex laxity and obscenity]. " 
