Since the beginning of movies, audiences have changed their point of views and also what they want to see. Movies are a way for the world to express themselves through creative visual aids. They have been ever-changing and since they began and some have overstepped their moral boundaries that withhold them. Film production has skyrocketed since it was invented and will continue bringing up diverse issues. The worldly culture surrounding the production code and the change to the rating system was influenced by changes occurring in families, conformity, and freedom. The film industry really started booming in the early 1900s and with that, it brought moral issues that would show up either subtly or very prominent. The 1920s were …show more content…
When the Great Depression started taking a toll on the family’s finances and joy, they needed entertainment that would be wholesome, but also work in their budget. Hollywood movies were continually becoming a bigger problem and in an attempt to stop the blows to morality they came up with the idea to censor. In the Journal of American Studies, Francis Couvares said, “the censors asserted confidently that they were protecting children from corruption, women from insult, and society from the lowering of moral standards” (Couvares 17-18). This was the beginning of the Production Code Administration (PCA). The comparison between now and when the censoring was this strict, movies are going in completely different directions. Almost any movie now would have a lot of the sequences shut down from the PCA. This comes back down to the fact how movies impact the family and children watching them. The censorship wanted to aid in stopping children from the corruption that comes at them all the time through movies and television. “The Code urged [the] promotion of wholesome, American values that would improve the morals of the audience” (Stanley 21). …show more content…
This might seem horrible to some, but it essentially means that the world keeps looking for ways to grow to become better. The worldly culture surrounding the production code and the change to the rating system was influenced by changes occurring in families, conformity, and freedom. There might be times where society views a movie as horrible but it all depends on the past experiences that have lead a person to watch a movie that helps them decide what their view on the movie is. Works Cited Black, Gregory D. “Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration and the Hollywood Film Industry, 1930-1940.” Film History, vol. 3, no. 3, 1989, pp. 167–189., www.jstor.org/stable/3814976. COUVARES, FRANCIS G. “So This Is Censorship: Race, Sex, and Censorship in Movies of the 1920s and 1930s.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 2011, pp. 581–597., www.jstor.org/stable/23016790. “History of the MPAA.” Mpaa.org, Motion Picture Association of America, www.mpaa.org/our-story/. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017. "Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)." Congressional Digest, vol. 84, no. 2, Feb. 2005, pp. 50-54. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=16486997&login.asp&site=ehost-live. Stanley, Tim. "Speaking in Code." History Today, vol. 64, no. 10, Oct. 2014, pp. 19-25. EBSCOhost,