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The History of American Film Censorship

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June 28, 2026
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Independence Day brings with it Sounds of Cinema’s annual controversial films special, celebrating freedom of speech with a look at movies that have been censored, banned, or were otherwise controversial. With America’s semiquincentennial at hand, this year’s show did something a little different. Today’s program looked back at the history of film censorship in the United States including the organizations and free speech fights that have defined the issue.

Below you will find the commentary from today’s show.

The First Amendment

Before getting into the movies, let’s first consider freedom of speech in the United States. I want to state on the outset that I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.  

The legal foundation for freedom of speech is found in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Of that text, the key phrases are “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”

Although the free speech clause of the First Amendment is straightforward, American history is full of examples in which that freedom has been limited. Not all of those infringements are necessarily bad. For example, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of assembly but in the interest of public safety, communities can require permits for marches so long as the administration of those permits is viewpoint neutral. Threats can be punishable if the speech is specific enough and there is legal recourse for libel and slander. The legal thresholds for incitement and defamation are quite high, as they should be.

Incitement was defined in the 1969 United States Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio. In this case, a Ku Klux Klan leader was arrested and convicted of incitement after he used racist language and said that “some vengeance” might need to be taken. The court determined that speech could only be restricted if the communicator directed the audience to imminent lawless action and the speech was likely to incite or produce such action. In the Brandenburg case, the KKK leader’s call for “some vengeance” was vague and no specific person was targeted, so the Court overturned his conviction.

The legal system came to a similar decision in 1977 in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. A neo-Nazi group planned to parade through Skokie, Illinois which was home to a large number of Holocaust survivors. The community tried to block the demonstration but the courts ultimately sided with the Nazis, determining that they had the right to assembly.

The Brandenburg case and the Skokie case illustrate a consistent principle of free speech: this legal protection exists specifically to protect speech that is unpopular. The fact that many people find these groups and what they represent abhorrent is ultimately irrelevant as to whether their speech is protected.

Defamation, which includes libel and slander, also has conditions to be met. First, the speech at issue has to be a statement of fact, not opinion. Saying that someone is a bad person is not defamation but saying that a particular person did something illegal or immoral could be actionable. Second, that factual claim has to be false. Third, the speech has to be proven to cause demonstrable harm such as loss of economic opportunities. The defamation threshold is a bit higher for people in public life. 

The 1988 Supreme Court case Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell was fought over a parodic liquor ad featuring televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. Because the ad was a parody, Falwell’s claims of defamation were rejected. Falwell also claimed emotional distress from the ad, which the Court rejected as well. This case was dramatized in the 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt.

As you may notice, many of the cases I’ve mentioned were decided after the 1960s. It’s only relatively recently that the culture and the courts have taken the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause to heart. Upholding freedom of speech, as a legal principle and as a cultural value, is an ongoing struggle.

Censorship and Early Cinema

From the beginning, cinema was regarded with a certain amount of suspicion. Part of that suspicion can be attributed to it being a new technology. Whenever a new communication technology is invented and becomes popular, it’s almost always followed by a moral panic. This was true of the printing press, the phonograph, telephones, television, the internet, and cell phones. Movies were no different and they had the added quality of being in disreputable company. Very early films were shown in vaudeville theaters, creating an association between the cinema and unseemly, low brow environment. Early films were not narrative. They were spectacles, like contemporary theme park attractions, and audiences were dazzled by the novelty of moving images. The kinescope was a private viewer in which the user would insert a penny or a nickel to watch a loop of a special effect or footage of a burlesque act. The environment and the content of early film exhibition enhanced the suspicion around this technology.

One of the early movies to cause a moral uproar was 1896’s The May Irwin Kiss. The clip, which ran less than 30 seconds, showed actors May Irwin and John Rice kissing as part of their performance in the Broadway play The Widow Jones. The moment was filmed in a medium closeup and moral watchdogs of the day considered The May Irwin Kiss to be inappropriate for public viewing.

The kinescope became increasingly popular in the first decade of the twentieth century and with popularity came an increasing concern about cinema’s effect on public morality and its potential to corrupt children. Films featuring women dancing or frolicking in what was deemed to be an immodest way got those theaters raided and shut down by police. Newspapers ran editorials about the effect cinema was supposedly having on the youth. The negative press and calls for regulation led Chicago to be the first American city to actively censor movies by requiring theater owners to secure permits. Other communities followed Chicago’s example. States and major cities formed their own film censorship boards often justifying incursions on freedom with concern for the wellbeing of children.

1915 was an important year in American cinema history. The United States Supreme Court decided Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio. Mutual Film Corporation was a distributor who challenged Ohio’s censorship board. In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court sided with the Industrial Commission of Ohio and upheld the state’s right to censor films. In the decision, the Court decreed that motion pictures were industrial products, not speech, and therefore were not protected by the First Amendment. The decision emboldened censors and put the filmmaking industry on its heels. As such, this case set the tone for the motion picture industry for the next four decades.

The other major cinematic event of 1915 was the release of The Birth of a Nation. Based on the novel The Clansmen by Thomas Dixon, The Birth of a Nation dramatizes the history of the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Blacks are depicted as stupid and vicious thugs who prey on white women and members of the Ku Klux Klan are cast as noble defenders of justice who restored law and order.

The Birth of a Nation was a major box office success at the time. It was also hotly contested. The Birth of Nation was condemned by the NAACP and some of the protests against the film turned into riots which lead community leaders to ban the film. The Birth of a Nation was banned in several major cities including Denver, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis. Ohio’s censorship board also banned the film.  

The objections to The Birth of a Nation were vindicated. Prior to the film’s release, the KKK was mostly defunct but the popularity of The Birth of a Nation led to the organization’s resurgence. The KKK used The Birth of a Nation as a recruitment tool and saw a surge in its membership. It’s also alleged that they changed their presentation and tactics to match the images in the film, namely wearing masks and burning crosses. The ahistorical but heroic narrative seen all over country also probably broke the Klan out of the south. It was no longer a specifically regional organization.

A century later, The Birth of a Nation remains controversial with art house and academic screenings protested. It’s also a fixture of film studies programs, a fact that is ever more contentious. Some academics point to The Birth a Nation’s historical significance and its usefulness as a way of talking about representations of history and race. But the film’s ugly and racist content have made others question its place in the canon.

The Production Code Administration

Following the 1915 Supreme Court decision Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, which determined that motion pictures were industrial products and did not qualify for First Amendment protection, film censorship ramped up across the country. This created a headache for moviemakers. They had to recut their films to satisfy different censors in different markets which was both artistically frustrating and expensive.

In the 1920s Hollywood suffered a series of embarrassing public scandals involving movie stars, most sensationally the sexual assault accusations made against Fatty Arbuckle. Although Arbuckle was acquitted, his story and others reinforced the notion that Hollywood was the devil’s playground. There were calls for federal regulation of the movie industry.

Following the Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio decision, Hollywood mobilized and formed the National Association for the Motion Picture Industry. The organization was committed to lobbying on behalf of the film industry and especially staving off legislation that advanced censorship.

Despite the legal uncertainty, filmmakers continued to produce movies that upset cultural watchdogs calling for regulation. In the early 1930s several films shook up audiences and upset moralists including The Sign of the Cross, 1932’s Scarface, and Babyface.

The Sign of the Cross was a historical epic directed by Cecil B. DeMille and set in Rome during the reign of Emperor Nero. It featured some of the excesses of ancient Rome including an orgy and an erotic dance number. Scarface was one of several gangster pictures released in the 1930s. These film were criticized for their violence and were accused of glamorizing organized crime. Scarface was banned by several censorship boards. Babyface starred Barbara Stanwyck as a woman who uses her sexuality to climb the social and economic ladder.

The controversy over these films and others led the film industry to create its own self-regulating censorship body. In 1934 the studios founded the Production Code Administration, also referred to as the Hayes Code after William H. Hays, the first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. (Today this organization is known as the Motion Picture Association.) The Production Code forbade certain topics and content from appearing in studio films. Profanity, nudity, drugs, sexuality or even the inference of sexuality, ridicule of the clergy, and interracial romance were all preemptively struck. The Code also reined in sympathy for criminals, subversive attitudes toward public institutions, use of firearms, and kissing. All the major Hollywood studios signed onto the code and all of their films were required to achieve the PCA’s seal of approval. At this time the Hollywood studios had leverage over the theaters or owned them outright so they and the Production Code Administration had nearly total control over the American cinema marketplace.

The Production Code was not implemented out of concern for morality or a belief in creating wholesome entertainment. It was created to protect the movie industry from outside regulation and to standardize Hollywood’s output so that their movies would have fewer encounters with state censorship boards.

Films that were released after 1934 were crafted to fit the Production Code and movies that had been made previous to 1934 were edited to fit the code before they could be reissued to theaters. Those PCA approved versions of pre-1934 films were often the versions that circulated for decades and in some cases were the only version that survived. Furthermore, it appears that the PCA not only protected the movie industry from outside regulation but also protected Hollywood studios from competition. Because they controlled the theaters and the PCA, Hollywood shut out international and independent films.

What’s so strange about the censorship of the Production Code era is that it was unique to cinema. Other dramatic forms, namely novels and stage plays, were widely accessible to the public but they had creative freedom that was denied to motion pictures. A key example of this is The Bad Seed, a story of an eight-year old girl who is revealed to be a murderous psychopath. The novel by William March was published in 1954 and was nominated for the National Book Award. The story was then adapted into a popular stage play. The book and the stage play conclude with a shocking ending. When The Bad Seed was adapted into a motion picture, the original ending was unacceptable to the Production Code Administration which required bad people to be punished. The ending of the film version of The Bad Seed was changed and the little girl is killed in a deus ex machina resolution. It’s a ridiculous conclusion to an otherwise brilliant film and it illustrates the way cinema was uniquely restricted during the Production Code era.

The Legion of Decency and the Red Scare

Parallel to the Production Code was the Catholic Legion of Decency. In the early twentieth century, religious groups and the Catholic Church in particular had been outspoken about their concerns for the morality of motion picture entertainment. The Legion established a rating system that identified movies as morally permissible or unacceptable. Although The Legion of Decency was a Catholic organization, it had buy-in from other denominations and many Catholics signed pledges to only see movies that were given an acceptable rating. In 1965, the Legion of Decency was reorganized as the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures. Today, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops continues to evaluate media through the Catholic News Service. The USCCB’s opinions don’t have the cultural traction they once did but in its heyday from the mid-1930s through the early 1960s, a Legion of Decency rating had real power in the cinema marketplace and filmmakers and studios accommodated the organization, self-censoring their movies to ensure a good rating.

Although the Legion of Decency and the Production Code Administration were separate entities, their histories were intermingled. In 1933, Archbishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani delivered a blistering speech that called for “the purification of the cinema, which has become a deadly menace to morals.” The speech was actually written by Joseph Breen, who was the head of the PCA. Jesuit priest Daniel A. Lord, who had been a technical advisor on the 1927 Biblical drama The King of Kings, was the primary author of the Production Code.

While their values were aligned, the Legion of Decency sometimes took a harder stance on cinematic morality. The western Duel in the Sun and the comedy And Baby Makes Three and the 1951 adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire were approved by the Production Code Administration but had to be edited to appease the Legion.

The Production Code era and the height of the Legion of Decency overlapped with another censorial movement, the Red Scare. After World War II and the start of the Cold War, American culture was gripped by paranoia over the supposed threat of communism. It was believed that there was a worldwide communist plot to undermine democracy and capitalism and that communist agents had infiltrated American society, in particular government and entertainment.

Between 1947 and 1956, the Federal Employees Loyalty Program scoured the lives of federal workers and led to the termination or resignation of tens of thousands of people. The House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated the political beliefs of public figures, with a particular interest in Hollywood. The committee and the FBI investigated and harassed actors, filmmakers, and writers suspected of being communists and derailed the careers of Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, and Dalton Trumbo, among others. Suspected communists were blacklisted and denied employment. Many had their livelihoods destroyed and some of them sank into depression and alcoholism. Some of the blacklisted talent, like Trumbo, were communists but many others were blacklisted merely by association.

Hollywood institutions cooperated with the blacklisting. William R. Wilkerson, publisher and founder of The Hollywood Reporter, used his publication to name suspected communists as did gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Hollywood studio bosses also collaborated with the Red Scare, in part out of fear of government power, but also for their own self-interest. The blacklist was used by studio heads as leverage over the Hollywood unions.

Some blacklisted filmmakers found ways to create during that time, often working uncredited or under pseudonyms. Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay for 1960’s Spartacus under the name Sam Jackson, for which he won an Academy Award. To keep his anonymity, Trumbo did not attend the ceremony but actor Kirk Douglas later confirmed that Trumbo had written Spartacus which contributed to the end of the blacklist era.

Burstyn v. Wilson

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood produced films under a repressive set of circumstances but filmmakers nevertheless found ways to challenge or subvert the Production Code. Howard Hughes’ 1943 movie The Outlaw did that directly with its lascivious appeal based around star Jane Russell. Other filmmakers took an indirect route, finding creative ways of implying subjects that the PCA forbade. Alfred Hitchcok got around the taboo of showing a toilet by making the lavatory a plot point in 1960’s Psycho.

Just as the Supreme Court teed up the reign of Hollywood censorship with its Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio decision, two of the Court’s decisions would also induct the end of that era. The first of these was the 1948 antitrust case United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. Known as the Paramount Decree, the decision broke up vertical integration in the film industry. The studios had owned many of the theaters and engaged in practices like block-booking. When the studios were forced to give up ownership of the theaters, that eliminated the key enforcement mechanism of the Production Code. Previous to the Paramount Decree, the only way to the theatrical market was with a PCA seal of approval. Now that cinemas were independently owned, unapproved movies could play at the theaters and the market was now open to independent and international films.

The Paramount Decree set the stage for the other relevant Supreme Court case, 1952’s Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, also known as the Miracle Decision. Burstyn v. Wilson was fought over the Roberto Rossellini film The Miracle, which depicted a woman who might be eccentric or might in fact carry a miraculously conceived pregnancy. The Miracle caused an uproar. The Legion of Decency accused the film of blasphemy and protesters demonstrated around the Paris Theatre in New York City. The censorship fight went to the United States Supreme Court which reversed their previous opinion about film and speech. The Court affirmed that motion pictures were indeed protected by the First Amendment. The Burstyn v. Wilson decision cleared a path for distribution of The Miracle and marked the beginning of the end of the Production Code and state censorship of motion pictures.

Filmmakers immediately began testing the new limits. Released a year after the Burstyn v. Wilson decision, Otto Preminger’s The Moon is Blue concerns a woman who is aggressively courted by two men. The movie is fairly innocuous but it includes discussions about sexuality and the dialogue featured words like “virgin” and “seduce” and “mistress” which were not allowed under the Production Code. The PCA refused to issue the film a seal of approval but instead of cutting the objectionable material United Artists withdrew from the Motion Picture Association and Preminger took the unprecedented step of releasing The Moon is Blue without a PCA seal. The film was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency and challenged by several state and local censorship boards but the controversy turned The Moon is Blue into a hit at the box office. When The Moon is Blue was banned by the Kansas Censorship Board, the filmmakers filed suit in a case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the ban was struck down and the Kansas Censorship Board was dissolved.

The Motion Picture Association and the Ratings Board

The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Paramount Decree ended Hollywood’s hold on American theaters which broke down the control mechanism that gave the Production Code Administration its power. Then the Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson decision granted First Amendment protection to motion pictures which curtailed state and local censorship boards. The two decisions opened up America’s theatrical market at an opportune time. European cinema was going through a renaissance with the French New Wave movement and Italian neorealism. Filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica manipulated the film form and pushed boundaries of sexuality and other taboo topics. As their movies found their way to America, the public quickly realized what they’d been missing. The sanitized entertainment of the Production Code era no longer cut it especially as cultural mores changed throughout the 1960s.

One of the notable European imports from this time was the 1967 Swedish film I am Curious (Yellow). The movie was an avant-garde piece of work that included explicit images of nudity and sexuality but also explored nonviolent political activism including a brief interview with Martin Luther King Jr. Although the Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson decision made clear that motion pictures were speech, that didn’t automatically clear all movies of all regulation. Obscenity was still illegal and I am Curious (Yellow) was seized by U.S. Customs authorities. A New York district court found that I am Curious (Yellow) was not obscene and the film was released by Customs but it ran into legal trouble throughout the country. The film was banned in several states and cities and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Maryland’s decision to decline an exhibitor a screening license.

The opening in the American film market and the arrival of drive-ins made room for independent and exploitation filmmakers such as Roger Corman, William Castle, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and Russ Meyer. Their movies featured lurid (for the time) images of sexuality and violence and Corman, Castle, and Lewis knew how to use those base appeals to promote their movies. Lewis’ 1963 movie Blood Feast is regarded as the first splatter film. 

Hollywood filmmakers also pushed boundaries of sexuality and violence in the mid-to-late 1960s. One of the signature films of this era was 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, a dramatization of the life and crimes of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, a pair of young lovers who went on a bank robbing spree throughout Depression-era Texas. Warner Bros. president Jack Warner hated Bonnie and Clyde and the movie was dumped into theaters with a limited release and a lackluster marketing campaign. Producer and star Warren Beatty persuaded Warner Bros. to rerelease Bonnie and Clyde and it became a generation-defining hit. New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther launched a crusade against Bonnie and Clyde which he derided for its violence and glorification of criminality.The editors of the New York Times concluded that Crowther was out of touch with public opinion and pushed him out of the job, replacing Crowther with Pauline Kael, who had been a vocal champion of Bonnie and Clyde and would become one of the most influential writers in American film criticism.

Although some of the censorship laws had changed, the controversy over I am Curious (Yellow) and Bonnie and Clyde and others upheld Hollywood’s fear of outside regulation. It was also in the interest of the studios that their industry be regarded favorably. In 1968 the Motion Picture Association replaced the Production Code with the Classification and Rating Administration, which is the rating system in place today. The original ratings included G (general audiences), M (mature audiences), R (restricted to persons over 16), and X (no one under 16 admitted).

The MPA rating system is imperfect and has been criticized by filmmakers and commentators both for being too lenient and for being too restrictive. The ratings process has also been accused of being arbitrary and favoring studio films and meting out harsher ratings to independent and international films. The documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated took a close look at the rating system and pointed out some of its inconsistencies.

The MPA rating system arrived just ahead of a wave of American films that had unprecedented levels of violence and sexuality. This probably reflected what was happening in the culture at the time. Between 1968 and 1973, American filmmakers released Rosemary’s Baby, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy, A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, The Last Picture Show, Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song, Last Tango in Paris, Pink Flamingos, Last House on the Left, and The Exorcist. (See this post for fuller coverage of some of the films from that time.)

Among the many controversial films released in this period was Mike Nichols’ 1971 film Carnal Knowledge. The picture starred Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel and follows their characters’ romantic and sexual exploits over several decades. For its time, Carnal Knowledge was extraordinarily frank about sexuality. This movie allegedly has the first appearance of a condom in a motion picture and the dialogue includes many blunt exchanges. As a product of the sexual revolution, Carnal Knowledge was reflective rather than celebratory of the new freedoms; as Bruce Eder puts it, Carnal Knowledge was “the rude awakening following sexual awakening.”

A print of Carnal Knowledge was seized by police from a cinema in Georgia and the theater owner was arrested and convicted of distributing obscene material. The United States Supreme Court acquitted the theater owner and struck down the Georgia’s obscenity law.

Obscenity

The growing boldness among filmmakers of the 1970s was inevitably leading toward a reckoning around obscenity. The key problem is defining that term. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his 1964 decision of Jacobellis v. Ohio, “I know it when I see it.” That’s how most of us determine obscenity in our daily lives but it’s a useless definition for administering the law.

In the early 1970s the Supreme Court took on a few cases that addressed the matter of obscenity and free speech. United States v. Thirty-seven Photographs was about the seizure of sexual images that an American publisher had imported from Europe. The Court upheld the seizure and found that citizens did not have a right to import material that was obscene and therefore illegal.

In the 1973 case Miller vs. California, the Supreme Court established a three-part test for obscenity. First, the average person, applying community standards, would find that the work appeals to the prurient interest (which basically means it is sexually stimulating). Second, the work must depict or describe sexual conduct or excretory functions in a patently offensive way. Third, the work must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The Miller test remains the standard for judging obscenity in the United States. It’s notable that the first two prongs of the test define obscenity in specifically sexual terms. That means violence and vulgar language are generally excluded from a legal definition of obscenity. The third criterion, that the work must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, has been the saving grace for many contested works.

The 1970s saw sexuality come to the fore in Hollywood films as well as independent and arthouse cinema. 1972’s Last Tango in Paris was rated X by the MPA. At that time the X rating did not have a pornographic stigma attached to it; the rating simply described movies that were intended for adult audiences. Last Tango in Paris was among the first mainstream films to get an X rating and it went out to U.S. theaters intact rather than appeal or cut content to achieve an R, although it was cut for later re-releases. In the Realm of the Senses, a Japanese film that included unsimulated sex scenes, was seized by U.S. Customs officials.

The 1970s also saw the rise of the pornographic film industry. Sex films of one sort or another go all the way back to the days of the kinescope but porn was generally an underground industry. In the 1970s theaters began specializing in showing adult films. Throughout the 1940s and 50s a lot more of the population lived in urban areas and neighborhoods had local cinemas. Between competition from television and their customers moving to the suburbs, a lot of urban theaters went out of business. The cinemas were picked up by speculators who wanted to hold onto the real estate until it gained value but invest as little as they could into the property. The solution was pornography which was a lucrative business.

The signature sex film of this era was 1972’s Deep Throat. This was not the first film of its kind nor is it a particularly exceptional sex film but it was an important picture because of the events that happened around it. When Deep Throat opened in New York City, it became a social event. Public showings drew audiences from all levels of society, including celebrities. Screenings of Deep Throat were raided by police, the film was banned in twenty-three states, and actor Harry Reems was indicted on charges of conspiracy to distribute obscene material across state lines. The legal prosecutions only furthered the movie’s box office success and the court battles were ultimately won by the filmmakers. Deep Throat widened the latitude for filmmakers to explore sexuality in films of all kinds, from independent features to mainstream Hollywood movies. It also established the foundation for the contemporary porn industry which is now a multi-billion-dollar business. Those interested in learning more about the political and cultural legacy of this film should check out the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat.

Today pornography is so ubiquitous that its legality seems like a forgone conclusion. That’s not necessarily the case. Paul F. Little, known professionally as Max Hardcore, was convicted of obscenity in 2010. To be clear, his videos featured legally aged performers engaging in consensual acts. Nevertheless, Little was convicted in a jury trial with the court applying “community standards” for obscenity. The outcome of that trial illustrates the precarity of freedom of speech and the persistence of authorities to prosecute speech they deem to be obscene.

PG-13 and NC-17

The Motion Picture Association tweaked their ratings system over the years. By the early 1980s the rating system consisted of four categories: G, PG, R, and X. Two films released in 1984, both associated with Steven Spielberg, prompted the creation of the PG-13 rating. Gremlins was a fantasy about a young man who inadvertently unleashes an army of destructive reptilian monsters. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom included brutal scenes of child abuse and a gory human sacrifice. Many parents felt misled by the PG rating. In the official making-of documentary about the original Indiana Jones trilogy, Spielberg claims that he requested the Motion Picture Association create a new rating between PG and R which eventually became the PG-13. However, both Gremlins and Temple of Doom are officially rated PG by the MPA.

The first film to play in theaters with the PG-13 rating was Red Dawn, an action film that imagined the Soviet Union invading the United States. Teenagers engage in guerilla warfare against the occupying Soviet army. Red Dawn was said to be the most violent film produced to that point; the National Coalition on Television Violence claimed that the movie contained 134 acts of violence an hour. Although it was rated PG-13 in 1984, Red Dawn would probably get an R rating if it were released today.

More contentious than the PG-13 was the X rating. This classification had been intended to identify films that were only appropriate for adult viewers and in fact 1969’s Midnight Cowboy was released with the X rating and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. However, when the adult film industry adopted the XXX rating this created confusion in the marketplace. The two ratings were indistinguishable to the public.

The X rating became a form of control in much the same way the Production Code had been. The independent theaters that might have played an X rated movie mostly disappeared by the mid-1980s. The exhibition industry was taken over by massive corporate chains that refused to play X rated films. The major theater chains colluded with the Motion Picture Association to treat unrated movies as those rated X. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, newspapers and local television stations would not run ads for X rated films and Blockbuster Video refused to stock them. As a result, the only path to the mainstream market was through the MPA’s ratings board. This recreated the power structure of the Production Code, allowing the MPA to control filmmakers and protect the industry’s public image.

Filmmakers and critics attacked the MPA for the way it applied the X rating. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert spoke out against the slasher films of the 1980s, deriding them as misogynistic, nihilistic, and artlessness. Siskel and Ebert pointed out that those slasher movies got R ratings while appealing to teenagers whereas more artful films intended for adults were forced to compromise.

One of the key titles in the history of the X rating was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The film is a gritty character study and the film was rated X. Typically filmmakers would edit problematic sequences to achieve an R-rating. In the case of Henry, the MPA claimed the film had an unacceptable moral tone and there was nothing to be done. The MPA was criticized for blackballing a celebrated movie.

In response to the criticism, the MPA changed the X to NC-17. The first film to play in theaters with the new rating was Henry and June, a drama about writer Henry Miller and his wife. The film was respectable but didn’t do much to change the status of the rating. 1995’s Showgirls was intended to be the breakout NC-17 film but it was a critical and financial disaster. Showgirls has since become a cult favorite but updating the X to NC-17 proved to be a change in name only. The reluctance of the theater owners and the advertisers remained and the NC-17 was still box office poison. 

If you recall, the Production Code Administration was accused of protecting Hollywood studios by keeping independent and international films out of theaters. It’s been claimed that the MPA ratings board has done exactly the same thing. South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker got their start making independent films and their 1997 comedy Orgazmo was rated NC-17. Parker and Stone claim that when they asked the ratings board what to change to get the R, the board members refused to tell them. A few years later, Parker and Stone submitted the Paramount film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and had a completely different experience with the MPA. They claim the board was much more transparent about how to edit the film to get an R-rating. It’s also claimed that South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut went through several rounds of edits and instead of cutting out offensive footage, Parker and Stone swapped out objectionable scenes with even lewder material. This went back and forth and after six screenings the MPA apparently gave up and approved an R-rating. This suggests that the ratings criteria are capricious.

There are some signs that the ratings board’s control over the movie industry has diminished. The horror films Terrifier 2 and Terrifier 3 were released to theaters unrated and they played in corporate owned cinemas alongside major studio releases. The 2025 remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night was also released in an unrated form. This happened in the post-pandemic years when theaters struggled to sell tickets and horror movies were booming. It also occurred  against a fundamental shift in what we expect from media. For decades, movies exclusivity provided images of carnage and carnality that we could not see anywhere else. Today, Hollywood competes for attention with the unrestrained content on the internet. It remains to be seen if unrated releases are part of a trend or if the MPA will reassert its control, if that’s even possible.

Corporate Power and the Future of Film Censorship

As I’ve covered here, the history of film censorship in the United States is a triangular relationship between moviemakers, government, and industrial power. Historically, artists and legal authorities were generally in direct conflict while industrial forces like the Production Code Administration and the Motion Picture Association have played a mediating role, reining in artistic excess while fending off government regulation all to preserve the economic interests of the studios.

We’re reached a point where that may be changing. In the present moment, films are rarely banned in the United States by government decree. The most recent bans were not provoked by obscenity charges or community standards but some other legal consideration. 1981’s The Last Shark was so similar to Jaws that Universal successfully sued to get the movie pulled from U.S. theaters. It’s now available on streaming platforms. 1987’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story was an experimental short film that was sued for copyright infringement due to unauthorized use of The Carpenters’ music. The film is legally prohibited from being sold or commercially exhibited but Superstar has been shown at the Museum of Art and Design and bootleg versions are widely available. 

Films censorship in the United States was historically driven by concerns about morality. Government agents responded to their constituents or acted upon their own principles, often founded in traditional religious beliefs. While that will continue to some degree, future threats to freedom of speech in American cinema probably won’t come from government sources. In fact, the government may have an important role in preserving free speech in the film and media industry. Instead, corporate power may emerge as the primary threat to free speech in American film.

In recent years we’ve seen major movies be shelved or deleted by Hollywood studios. All-Star Weekend is a completed but unreleased film directed by Jamie Foxx. The movie is described as an outrageous comedy. Foxx reportedly plays multiple characters including a white police officer and Robert Downey Jr. is cast as a Mexican.All-Star Weekend was shot in 2016 but it has been shelved indefinitely, allegedly because no one would release it in the present cultural climate. Batgirl was a nearly completed superhero movie starring Leslie Grace in the title role. The film was allegedly deleted in 2022 when Warner Bros. Discovery executives decided Batgirl was worth more as a tax write off. More recently, Amazon MGM exited its deal to distribute a drama about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The decision came after Amazon made a $50 billion investment in OpenAI.

The vast majority of our media is controlled by a handful of companies: Disney, Comcast, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony, Amazon, and Netflix. That may be about to change. Not in the number of companies, but their names and priorities.

For about a century, the American film industry has been run by Hollywood studios. About fifty years ago, those studios were bought up by corporations and now those studios are but one asset in a media conglomerate’s portfolio. The future of media is going to be run by the tech industry. YouTube is the world’s largest media company and Roku is an integral part of the television market. It may well be that legacy Hollywood studios become intellectual property libraries and little else, especially if they continue to shy away from original content in favor of recycling familiar properties.

A lot of our political discourse is built around binaries: Democrats versus Republicans, liberals versus conservatives, the public sector versus the private sector. This binary thinking obfuscates the real issue which is the concentration of power. Whenever a single entity or a small network of elites with convergent interests are disproportionally invested with power, that is a threat to freedom. The Founders understood this. It’s why they created three branches of government.  The threat of consolidated power is true of government but it’s also true of industry.

Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Merger

This brings me us to the planned merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. This merger will be a disaster for everyone: consumers, theaters, and filmmakers. But let’s consider the merger through the lens of freedom. Filmmakers want to tell their stories and make their art. It has always been difficult for filmmakers to find funding especially if they are making new and innovative projects. Mergers inherently eliminate competition and give control over production to a shrinking number of people. Creativity requires competition. A monopolistic market does not innovate. It can get by reworking the same old products and formulas. This is not an abstract theory. We can see it in action. Hollywood’s trend toward remakes and sequels coincided with the consolidation of the entertainment industry.

And even if filmmakers are able to produce their films independently, where will they be shown? Hollywood consolidation like the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger puts the theatrical industry at risk. If the theaters go under, not only will it economically devastate the film industry, but all we’ll be left with are streaming services that are owned by the major media companies. That risks duplicating the closed and anticompetitive market that characterized the Production Code era.

Freedom of speech is partly about the rights of the speakers but it’s also about the audience and their right to a marketplace of ideas. Mergers and media consolidation bring an array of studios and streaming platforms under a single corporate roof. This creates the illusion of choice. We will only be able to select from presorted offerings approved by the corporate office. Perspectives that challenge power, that deal with difficult subject matter, or are perceived to be a hard sell or have niche appeal will simply be unavailable.

This dystopian scenario is not inevitable. The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger can be stopped. It’s become clear that state governments and federal legislators are our best hope to stop the merger. It is going to be up to citizens to lobby their representatives, their state film commissions, and their state attorneys general.

Click here for contact information and snail mail addresses as well as a draft of a letter you can use as a basis for those messages. When you do reach out to these politicians, please be concise, impassioned, and respectful.

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