If there is one thing I’ve learned from looking at the history of cinema, it’s that there have always been those who, for whatever reason, don’t like certain films and then get upset when others don’t feel the same. Some say there is too much violence, often trying to cite violent movies as the cause of real-world crimes, although countless studies into the subject have pretty much proved otherwise. Similarly, sex in the movies also gets a lot of debate and also similarly, some often attempt to point the finger of blame at these films for everything from sexual assaults to teenage pregnancy even though, once again, the statistics prove otherwise.
Other notable “concerns” (for lack of a better word) about movies include topics such as the use of drugs (and in more recent years, smoking – which honestly has led to some very funny attempts to remove cigarettes using CGI in some classic films) and, of course, language. (The latter of which has proven some hilarious results when certain films have been redubbed for television broadcast, including lines like “Thom one time, at band camp, I put my flute in my mouth” and “Yippe-kai-yay, Mr Falcon”. Or, how about “Your mother knits socks that smell” and “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday to Friday plane!” I think you can probably tell which films those censored lines came from.)
One of the main themes in censorship deals with ideas, themes, content, or even people that some find objectionable, offensive, or immoral. Even today, films have to be re-edited (sometimes multiple times) because of too much violence, certain taboo forms of nudity, or even sometimes because someone on screen but way off in the background was smoking a cigarette.
When we think of film censorship, we usually think of places way outside Ohio – most notably New York and California because that’s where most of the movie magic happens. So, I was a bit surprised to learn that Ohio has, throughout history, played some major roles in the history of film censorship.
Banned vs. Censored
Before I continue, I must make a note here on the difference between a film being censored and a film being banned.
By definition, a censored film is one in which certain things must be altered or removed and for the most part, this includes just about every major Hollywood film made today, as they all need to be submitted for a rating with the Motion Picture Association, who is likely to tell them that for a PG-13 rating, they need to make this scene less violent or that scene’s nudity lasts on screen for too long – just two examples out of many.
Banning a film, on the other hand, make it all but impossible to show, distribute, or even own a copy of the film. For example, from 1915-1916, the film The Birth of a Nation was banned in a bunch of cities and several entire states (including Ohio) on account of its “slaves were bad, slave owners were good” propagandic themes that many still find offensive today.
Banning and Censoring films are two completely different things, yet their histories often overlap because they are, essentially, two aspects of the same thing.
Early Ohio Film Censorship – Cleveland – 1912
For a few years leading up to 1912, if you wanted to show a movie in Cleveland, it first must be submitted to the police chief who would view the film and then decide if the public could see it or not. To be fair, this is how it was most places, but for now we’re focusing on Cleveland.
When Chief Kohler viewed the film The Bohemian Girl and decided that it should be banned, this nearly started a war. Kohler banned the film, calling it an illegal crime film because it told the story of a … well, a bohemian girl … or, a gypsy girl … and therefore he felt it should be banned.
The owners of all eight Cleveland movie houses disagreed. This movie was essentially the opera La bohème, just without the music of Puccini. Nobody called the opera a “crime” and attempted to ban theaters from performing it – so, why should the film be any different. The opera had been staged in Cleveland several times, and nobody said anything bad about it then.
Two other films were banned on the same day. The first, a film called Little Joe, The Pirate was banned because it encouraged children to read dime store novels and then pretend to be the characters from them. The movie also featured Little Joe fighting with his friend using wooden swords. The other film was called Brains versus Brawn in which a female character had to choose between two suitors, one an athlete, the other a scientist. Kohler believed this film somehow promoted criminal activity. (Your guess is as good as mine.)
Theater owners got together and had a meeting where they decided that while they had agreed in the past to work with the police to try and “clean up” overly violent films, those days had come to an end. They were not going to submit any further films for review, suggesting they self-regulate instead. Chief Kohler had the ability to ban any film just because he didn’t like the film, and that’s not good.
Kohler responded predictably by threatening to arrest everyone at the theaters (especially the owners) should they show any film not submitted to him first. So, technically not much changed, except that now the theater owners didn’t really want to work with Kohler anymore. In fact, now they were more determined than ever to show whatever films they wanted, and they started to find better ways to show them. This, of course, led people to complain that children should not see the petticoats of Vuadville films, but … whatever.
1922 – 1945 : The Hays Code
For a very small group of people, movies should be about only good people doing good things. There should be little to no violence, shown nor implied. A world where black people didn’t mingle with whites, where couples didn’t kiss on the lips for longer than about two seconds, even if they were married. There was no divorce because nobody had extramarital affairs, nobody did drugs or liked to do anything fun that Jesus wouldn’t do. Yeah, that sounded kind of boring to other people at that time, too.
One guy who felt that way was named William Harrison Hays Sr. When President Harding appointed him as Postmaster General in 1922, he came in with a plan. As movies at the time were sent via the United States Postal Service, and there were laws about transporting illicit, morally objectionable, or otherwise offensive materials through the mail – he created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America which allowed him to control what movies could and could not contain.
Hayes created a code that films had to abide by. Some things were completely off limits: There would be no profanity, or nudity – even suggested, no biracial relationships or miscegenation as it was called. There could be no poking fun at God or Religion or ridicule of religious leaders, no hints of white slavery (black slaver was fine), no depictions of childbirth because as everyone knows a stork brings a baby to a loving couple and ….
There was also a list of things that were not completely forbidden, but filmmakers were told to handle with extreme caution. These were things like … use of the flag, discussion of religion or religious topics, anything that might glorify or promote criminal activity or otherwise show how someone might try to get away with said crime.
This Hays Code did manage to have a profound effect on movies, effectively censoring them or, if filmmakers refused to make the necessary changes, they got banned.
Since they began making motion pictures, there had always been those who got offended by what they saw (or could see but choose not to.) Hays believed his new code system would put all that to rest for good. History tells us otherwise.
The Hays Code Isn’t Good Enough
In several cities and a few states, including Ohio, the Hays Code just wasn’t good enough. So, in 1925 they created the Ohio Division of Film Censorship, which they made part of the Department of Education because (damnit) movies should be educational, not entertainment, I guess…? Whatever.
During the Hays Code years, many (or maybe most) filmmakers hated being told what they could and couldn’t show on film. Sometimes, they would go right up to the line they could not cross, test the waters see what they could get away with and what they could not. Others used a code, something that if you knew what to look for, you could read between the lines. Occasionally, a filmmaker would get brilliantly creative. (One such example is from Alfred Hitchcock. When he wanted his two romantic leads to spend a romantic evening together, he simply had them board a train. He then showed that train going through a tunnel. It was obvious symbolism – but it passed the Hays Code.)
In Ohio, though, the two people appointed by the Ohio Division of Film Censorship, they seemed a bit more sensitive to things and refused to allow films to be shown in Ohio, even if the Hays Code said they were suitable for a general audience. Before any theater in Ohio could show the film, certain parts needed to be removed. (Think, something akin to a pair of scissors to remove the offending part of the tape, then put back together with tape.)
But that’s not all. All movies also needed to pay a fee, just to have their films screened. And that, over time, accrued quite a bit of fees that a lot of people thought was unfair.
I think part of the problem was that a minority of people tried to make the movies reflect a sanitized world that didn’t exist. The Hays Code, for example, suggested that married couples had to sleep in two separate beds with enough distance between them that you could park a car. (I’m exaggerating a bit.) On the more ridiculous side, it was also a world where nobody even used the toilet. Seriously, you can watch some old movies where the bathroom has a sink and a mirror, maybe even a bathtub, but since people back then didn’t pee or poop, there was nothing to sit on. Later it would be acceptable for movie characters to actually own a toilet, which of course they weren’t allowed to use. It wasn’t until Hitchcock (again) tried to thumb his nose at the censors that something finally changed. (His film Psycho was controversial for a variety of reasons, including that time that Janet Leigh flushed some incriminating papers down the commode – no body functions, just a flushing toilet.)
For the two ladies who screened movies, seems they found a lot about movies that they just didn’t approve of. Today, we’d call much of it sexist, racist, or super-prudish – yet scenes were censored if they didn’t like the way a white person looked at a black person (with disgust appeared okay, with admiration not so much). Or something that might poke fun at a religious concept – well, that blasphemy had to go.
1954 – Superior Films v Department of Education
By the early 1950s, the state of film censorship in the USA was, to put it mildly, a chaotic mess. Nearly every aspect of film censorship had been through the courts countless times, each scoring a minor victory or setback, depending on which side you were on.
What was allowed to be seen in a theater could vary from town to town, from State to State, and it often all came down to what a single person, or a rather small group of people, considered offensive, blasphemous, or otherwise inappropriate. And what a censor in one town might find offensive, another might deem acceptable. A film might be slightly censored in one town only to be outright banned in another. Another film might pass State censorship but still face banning in certain cities. And, sometimes, movies were censored or banned based on something other than the movie’s content.
One of the major criticisms for Film Censorship came from those who believed that the government shouldn’t be allowed to control what movies could say and what couldn’t. By now, most Americans felt movies should be covered by Freedom of Speech – that films were a form of artistic expression – and the government shouldn’t get to say what we could see or not … perhaps with a few commonsense exceptions (like, say, movies showing childbirth, or hardcore sexual acts being performed, or films showing excessive gratuitous violence.
Many people were also aware that banning movies often had the opposite effect. Today, we call this phenomenon The Streisand Effect, but back then they just knew that people would drive an hour or two just to see something without the “hot parts” taken out.
Then the movie Native Son came out, first as a book in 1951, then adopted by the author as a movie (which he starred in himself.) The story, in case you are unfamiliar, is that a black man is hired by a white family to be their chauffer. But, when he accidentally kills the family’s daughter, he tries to cover it up but gets caught.
The book and film both contained several controversial topics. Communism, or rather communistic values were discussed. And the topic of systemic racism is put out on full display.
The movie (not the novel) was banned in New York, and it was starting to look like Ohio was going to ban it too. Then the courts got involved.
In Superior Films v Ohio Department of Education, the US Supreme Court considered several past rulings regarding various aspects of film censorship and declared, with some degree of finality, that movies, plays, books, or any other form of media are covered as free speech under The First and Fourteenth Amendment.
Beyond Censorship
By 1966, the Hays Code was officially and totally out. The question was – what was going to replace it. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) needed to find a way to make sure movies were only shown to appropriate audiences. It came up with a rating system – based entirely on what kinds of things the films contained. Movies would be rated as one of four categories:
Rated G Movies are good for general audiences.
Rated M Movies are for more mature audiences and may contain content not suitable for some children.
Rated R Movies are for adults only – children must be accompanied with an adult in order to see the film.
Rated X Movies are not appropriate for children at all.
A Note here … There is not, nor has there ever been, a triple X rating. But, I guess if you’re going to note adults only films, might as well push that envelope as far as it can do, hunh. Unofficially, though, it was a way to separate films like Midnight Cowboy and A Clockwork Orange from more hardcore sexual films like In Diana Jones and the Temple Poon (an actual movie).
In the Early 1970s, there was a lot of confusion over the content of Rated M films – in other words, lots of questions on whether or not they were okay for children. Therefore a change was made. M movies became GP – Meaning General audiences with parental Guidance. This title was a bit confusing, so they changed it to PG for Parental Guidance.
By the 1980s, PG Rated movies were still a bit confusing, with films like Gremlins or the Indiana Jones movies having more violence than a typical PG film, but is otherwise not appropriate for an R rating. In 1984, the PG-13 rating was added to distinguish between films that were appropriate for younger children versus teenaged kids.
In 1996, thanks to critically renowned but still sexually graphic films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover the X rating was changed to NC-17, to better enforce that nobody 17 years old or younger was legally allowed to see the film.
This was and was not considered censorship, at least not directly. Movies could still be made, however in order for a movie to get a certain rating, the MPAA would suggest that changes be made before the film could be resubmitted.
As John Waters blatantly pointed out in his documentary movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated, rating guidelines were far from consistent. Certain elements in one movie could garner it an R ratings, while another movie with the same content could be awarded a PG rating.
Even with the current rating system, there were even further times movies were censored or banned, usually somewhat locally but also at times nationally.
For example, in 1980, the Al Pacino film Cruising proved to be controversial, mostly due to themes and depictions of certain aspects of the gay community. The film was banned in many cities, including several in Ohio.
Several years later, the film The Last Temptation of Christ faced similar city-wide bans, mostly spurred on from various church groups who failed to prevent the film from being seen, but did manage to get it pulled from a number of theaters.
In 2017, some people in Ohio even tried to ban a PG-rated Disney film. The movie in question was the live-remake of Beauty and the Beast – with some complaining about a potentially gay character being in the film while others accused the film of attempting to normalize bestiality (Beauty was a human, the beast was obviously a beast… sigh)
Finally: A Note
The entire history of film censorship in Ohio, as complex as it is, is not the kind of thing I can write about in a post like this. I tried to hit on some of the highlights (or low-lights depending on perspective).
If you want to research this topic a bit more, The Ohio History Connection in Columbus has a wide volume of materials in their archives.
