Pre-Code Hollywood: State and Regional Censorship: Hot Saturday (1932)

This video is a look at the censorship the Hollywood studios faced from state and regional censor boards. Before the Production Code was strictly enforced in July 1934, the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) tried to help the Hollywood studios navigate the various state and regional censor boards by pointing out those scenes and dialogue that the censor boards may want deleted. I use as an example the film, “Hot Saturday” (1932), to illustrate just some of the scenes and lines of dialogue that various censor boards demanded to be removed from the film. Note not all deletions were required by all of the censor boards, which means that audiences across the country may have been seeing different versions of the film.

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Pre-Code Hollywood – An era in American film history between the introduction of sound in movies (1929) and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (commonly known as the Hays Code) in 1934. During this period, filmmakers had more freedom to explore controversial and explicit themes in their films

Pre-Code Hollywood Classic Clips