Breaking the Code: Otto Preminger versus Hollywood’s Censors

by Nat Segaloff

Breaking the Code reveals the efforts of director-producer Otto Preminger to bring his aesthetic vision to the screen even if it meant challenging the Production Code, a system of self-censorship that shaped the movies during the four decades it was in force. Along the way, Preminger sent shock waves through Hollywood and a network of exhibitors, publishers, and religious leaders who had personal, and even financial, stakes in the repression of artistic freedom. The process of telling this story began in 2003 when Arnie Reisman and Nat Segaloff thought it might be interesting to write a play about Preminger's efforts to get a Code seal for his 1954 romantic comedy The Moon is Blue, based on F. Hugh Herbert's 1951 play. In those days, no film could be shown that did not receive authorization from the Production Code Administration, and his film was deemed too "adult" for even adults to see. Preminger was met with opposition from administrator, Joseph Breen, who was prepared to go to war to save the rest of the country from its sensibilities. Along with their play Code Blue, which dramatizes the clash between these two evenly matched but wildly disparate titans, Breaking the Code chronicles the battle between Otto Preminger and the Code. Between 1953 and 1962, he fought the censorship of The Moon Is Blue, The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, and Advise and Consent. The details of each skirmish vary, but they cover the same art versus commerce, freedom of speech versus censorship, and money versus principle. Times may have changed, but these battles continue. Breaking the Code is an attempt to go back and see how the walls can be made to crumble.

288 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2023

About the author

Nat Segaloff is a writer-producer-journalist. He covered the film industry for The Boston Herald, but has also variously been a studio publicist (Fox, UA, Columbia), college teacher (Boston University, Boston College), and broadcaster (Group W, CBS, Storer). He is the author of twenty books including Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin, Arthur Penn: American Director and Final Cuts: The Last Films of 50 Great Directors in addition to career monographs on Stirling Silliphant, Walon Green, Paul Mazursky and John Milius. His writing has appeared in such varied periodicals as Film Comment, Written By, International Documentary, Animation Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Time Out (US), MacWorld and American Movie Classics Magazine. He was also senior reviewer for AudiobookCafe.com and contributing writer to Moving Pictures magazine.

In 1996 he formed the multi-media production company Alien Voices with actors Leonard Nimoy and actor John de Lancie and produced five best-selling, fully dramatized audio plays for Simon & Schuster: The Time Machine, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, The Invisible Man and The First Men in the Moon, all of which feature Star Trek casts.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems almost quaint now but the battles director Otto Preminger had with the people enforcing the Production Code were turning points that eventually led first to their erosion and finally its replacement by the ratings system. Nat Segaloff does a good job setting forth the issues and battles over such movies as "The Moon is Blue" (an innocuous film that used the word "virgin" and was about a young woman NOT giving into seduction) and the "The Man with the Golden Arm" (an anti-drug addiction film made at a time when the Code prohibited any discussion of illicit drugs at all). As a bonus it comes with the unproduced play "Code Blue" which Segaloff wrote with the late Arnie Reisman about the fight over "The Moon is Blue." (Full disclosure: I was co-author with Nat Segaloff and Arnie Reisman on The Waldorf Conference.)

[Malcolm Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is very little that is new in this nook.I would not have bought it if I had known that half of it was an unpublished play.So basically the book is 128 pages long.The first 13 pages deal with The Code.The next 26are potted bios of Green and Preminger.We every a couple of pages about Marvel ComicsThere is a transcription of a speech from Jack Valenti and 2 appendices totalling 29 pages.So you're how insubstantial this book is.