Given today's cancel culture, here's a look at how Hollywood, of all places, was America's first "woke" system. We look at more than 50 classic films such as Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, East of Eden, The Ten Commandments, Convention City, and Lawrence of Arabia through the eyes and blue pencils of the Production Code Administration, the industry's censors. What emerges is not a gaggle of prudes but a staff with deep knowledge and sensitivity despite their mission to cleanse. Here is a time capsule of American mores and Hollywood's excesses over nearly four decades that led to today's letter rating system.
Between 1934 and 1968, no Hollywood studio could make a movie without the permission of and a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration. The Production Code was Hollywood's official censor. Screenplays, books, plays, costumes and even story ideas and songs had to be okayed by the Code before they could be filmed, and the Code monitored every stage of the production process to ensure compliance. The correspondence between the Code and the studios was confidential, and the memos within the Code office itself were even more so.
Well, not any more. The Naughty Bits pores through those files to show how the censors did their job. What was the world prevented from seeing in some of the greatest movies ever made, including Stagecoach, Some Like It Hot, Psycho, and His Girl Friday? Here is the sometimes funny, sometimes outrageous, always riveting history of movie censorship on a nitty-gritty level.
Nat Segaloff is a writer-producer-journalist. He covered the film industry as commerce (rather than as gossip) 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, and independent stations).
He is the author of fourteen published books including Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin, Arthur Penn: American Director, and Mr. Huston/Mr. North: Life, Death, and Making John Huston's Last Film in addition to writing career monographs on Stirling Silliphant, Walon Green, Paul Mazursky and John Milius. He later turned his Silliphant work into a full-length biography of the Oscar®-winning screenwriter, The Fingers of God. His writing has appeared in such varied periodicals as Film Comment, Written By, International Documentary, Animation Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, Boston After Dark, Time Out (US), MacWorld, Documentary Magazine, and American Movie Classics Magazine.
Nat was senior reviewer for AudiobookCafe.com and contributing writer to Moving Pictures magazine. His The Everything® Etiquette Book, The Everything Trivia Book and The Everything® Tall Tales, Legends & Outrageous Lies Book are in multiple printings for Adams Media Corp.
As a TV writer-producer, Segaloff helped perfect the format and create episodes for A&E Network's flagship Biography series. His distinctive productions include episodes on John Belushi, Stan Lee, Larry King, Shari Lewis & Lamb Chop, and Darryl F. Zanuck. He wrote and co-produced the Rock 'n' Roll Moments music series for The Learning Channel/Malcolm Leo Productions, and has written and/or produced programming for New World, Disney, Turner Classic Movies, and USA Networks. He is co-creator/co-producer (with Gayle Kischenbaum) of Judgment Day with Grosso-Jacobson Communications Corp. for HBO.
His extraterrestrial endeavors include When Welles Collide, the cheeky sequel to the Orson Welles Invasion From Mars radio hoax that featured a Star Trek cast. Written with John deLancie, it was produced by L.A. Theatre Works and has become a Halloween tradition on National Public Radio. In 1996 he formed the multi-media production company Alien Voices® with actors Leonard Nimoy and 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 featured Star Trek casts. Additionally, his teleplay for Alien Voices' The First Men in the Moon was the first-ever dramatic TV/Internet simulcast and was presented live by The Sci-Fi Channel. He has also written narrative concerts for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, written special material for celebrity award events, and is a script consultant. He contributes Hollywood-themed fiction to Nikki Finke's celebrated website, HollywoodDementia.com.
Nat is the co-author (with Daniel M. Kimmel and Arnie Reisman) of the play The Waldorf Conference, a comedy-drama about the secret meeting of studio moguls in 1947 that triggered the Hollywood Blacklist. Waldorf had its all-star world premiere at L.A. Theatre Works. and was acquired for production by Warner Bros. Nat produced a subsequent production to benefit the Hollywood ACLU and the Writers Guild Foundation and has also produced such other celebrity events as a public reading of censored books and a recreation of the classic anti-HUAC broadcast, Hollywood Fights Back. He was staff producer for The Africa Channel, wrote the stage comedy Closets (produced at the Gloucester Stage Company), and was co-writer on the long-running public radio word/game show Says You! after having run the gauntlet as a guest panelist.
Nat's 2017 biography of award-winning speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison was nominated for Hugo and Locus awards and was updated with a second edition in 2020, both from NESFA Press. His first celebrity memoir, Screen Saver: Private Stories of Public Hollywood, was published in 2016 by Bear Manor Media and its sequel, Screen Saver Too: Hollywood Strikes Back, appeared the next year and pissed off a lot of people. He also personally recorded their audiobooks.
His additional books include an expanded second edition of Arthur Penn: American Director, Guarding Gable, Shari Lewis & Lamb Chop (with Mallory Lewis), More Fire! The Building of The Towering Inferno, The Town That Said No, The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear, Say Hello to My Little Friend: A Century of Scarface, Breaking the Coder: Otto Preminger vs. Hollywood's Censors (with Arnie Reisman), and many other books and audiobooks.
He lives in Los Angeles waiting for his phone calls to be returned.
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