Quotes About Hays Code

After nearly half a century, it's easy to forget that the Hays Code was not some outside limitation imposed by the government. It was a content standard imposed by motion picture companies voluntarily.

The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the '20s and '30s, and it has really nothing to do with the West and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was.

A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.