The Motion Picture Production Code was a set of industry guidelines for the self-censorship of content that was applied to most motion pictures released by major studios in the United States from 1934 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) from 1922 to 1945. Under Hays's leadership, the MPPDA, later the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Motion Picture Association (MPA), adopted the Production Code in 1930 and began rigidly enforcing it in 1934. The Production Code spelled out acceptable and unacceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States.
A famous shot from the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery. Scenes where criminals aimed guns at the camera were considered inappropriate by the New York state censor board in the 1920s, and usually removed.
Actor Boris Karloff as Doctor Frankenstein's creation in the 1931 film Frankenstein. By the time the film's sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, arrived in 1935, enforcement of the Code was in full effect, and the doctor's overt God complex was forbidden. In the first picture, however, when the creature was born, his mad scientist creator was free to proclaim "Now I know what it feels like to be God!"
Some directors found ways to get around the Code guidelines; an example of this was in Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film Notorious, where he worked around the rule of three-second-kissing by having the two actors break off every three seconds. The whole sequence lasts two and a half minutes.
Darryl Francis Zanuck was an American film producer and studio executive; he earlier contributed stories for films starting in the silent era. He played a major part in the Hollywood studio system as one of its longest survivors. He produced three films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture during his tenure at 20th Century Fox.
Zanuck at the Academy Awards celebration
Darryl Zanuck's grave at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery