Censoring Hollywood: Sex and Violence in Film and on the Cutting Room Floor

by Aubrey Malone

Censorship has been an ongoing issue from the early days of filmmaking. One hundred years of film censorship, encompassing the entire 20th century, are chronicled in this work. The freewheeling nature of films in the early decades was profoundly affected by Prohibition, the Depression and the formation of the Legion of Decency--culminating in a new age of restrictiveness in the movies. Such powerful arbiters of public taste as Will H. Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and Joseph Breen of the Production Code Association fomented an era whereby films with contentious material were severely censored or even condemned. This held sway until rebellious filmmakers like Otto Preminger challenged the system in the 1950s, eventually resulting in the abandonment of the old regime in favor of the contemporary "G" through "NC-17" ratings system.

Genres: Film

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Born in the west of Ireland, Aubrey Malone was educated at University College, Dublin, graduating with a BA in English and philosophy. He did an M.A. in English, majoring in the literary style of Ernest Hemingway. He went on to write a biography of Hemingway for Robson Books in 1999. For ten years he was a teacher, before becoming a freelance journalist with various newspapers and magazines. He has written over fifty books, including the best-selling The Cynic's Dictionary (Prion). He mainly works in the non-fiction area but he has published two novels and a few collections of poetry and short stories. He has been writing professionally about the cinema since 1973.
His first book, Hollyweird (Michael O’Mara, 1994), focused on the eccentricities of film stars. He followed that up with two books on movies made in Ireland, Michael Collins and Ryan’s Daughter (GLI, both 1996). In 1997 he wrote The Rise and Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley (Leopold Publishing). Three years later he wrote I Was a Fugitive from a Hollywood Film Factory, subsequently reissued as Hollywood Trivia (Prion, 2004).
In 2011 he wrote Censoring Hollywood (McFarland), a book about the history of film censorship. The Defiant One, a biography of Tony Curtis (also McFarland) followed in 2013. In the same year he wrote Maureen O’Hara: A Biography for the University of Kentucky Press. McFarland also published Hollywood’s Second Sex, Malone’s history of the mistreatment of women in movies from 1900 to 1999, in 2016. ABC-CLIO published his study of spirituality in films, Sacred Profanity.
Writing Under the Influence, a study of the relationship between alcohol and literature for thirteen American authors, was published by McFarland in 2017. In 2018 he published a book about people who unfairly failed to win Oscars, And the Loser Is (Vernon Press). That year he also published The Elvis Diaries (One Media), a work of creative fiction based on fact. He is currently working on a biography of Sidney Lumet and an encyclopedia of LGBTQ films.