Referring to the Da Vinci Code movie, Thomas Doherty, in the Washington Post, points out that Catholic pressure group can no longer decide which films are made and which ones never get past the script stage. It wasn't ever thus. Doherty looks back on the not-so-good-old days of the Production Code and the National Legion of Decency — both essentially Catholic initiatives that tacitly encouraged boycotts of movies whose content was insufficiently moralistic.
With box offices hemorrhaging in the Catholic strongholds in big cities, Will H. Hays, Presbyterian Church elder and president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), turned to a Victorian Irishman named Joseph I. Breen to negotiate surrender terms with the Catholics. Hays told Breen that "the Catholic authorities can have anything they want."
What the Catholics wanted, and got, was a censorship regime that ceded dominion of Hollywood cinema to Catholic theology for the next 30 years. On July 15, 1934, Breen set up shop at the Production Code Administration, an in-house arm of the studio system that vetted film scripts for Code violations prior to production. Thus, before the cameras ever rolled, the fix would be in. The visible mark of quality control would be a quite literal Production Code Seal of Approval, an oval logo encircling the MPPDA initials, printed on the credits of every Code-worthy film. Between the Legion of Decency on the outside and the Breen Office on the inside, Roman Catholics made certain that Hollywood defended the faith.
It all came crashing down in the sixties,
when American Catholics responded to calls to boycott Hollywood blockbusters with approximately the same obedient deference they accorded the Vatican's advice on birth control ... And today the only Code that Hollywood adheres to is the kind authored by Dan Brown.
People deciding for themselves when to buy a movie ticket, and for which movie — what a concept.
ADDENDUM: Despite the protests — or because of them — interest in The Da Vinci Code is beyond anyone's expectations. Guess those boycott attempts didn't work too well.
But at least the movie must be struggling in mostly Catholic countries, right? Wrong. In its first two days after the release, The Da Vinci Code
was #1 in predominantly Catholic countries Italy and Spain, and #1 or #2 in every South American territory.
I won't challenge you on any of this Rogier, but I think it's fair to point out the Catholicism is a double-edged sword when it comes to morality.
At the same time--1930s and 1940s--that this Mr Breen (how Irish!) was censoring Hollywood, the whores in Montréal ( how Catholic!) were soliciting clients through loudspeakers.
And as a general observation; are not majority Catholic countries often the most interesting, the most artistic and the most sensual to visit?
All Italy is a work of art and what about that "CARNival" in oh so Catholic Rio?
Catholics alternate between sin and redemption.....like that Mrs Pendrake character in "Little Big Man".
There is a certain cleavage, I suppose, between the ideal (purity) and the reality (irresitable wickedness) that we often fall into.
Hence the institution of the "confessional!"
Posted by: John Palubiski | Wednesday, May 24, 2006 at 01:40 PM