Censorship/ Production Codes/ Investigations/ Blacklists

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Barbas, Samantha. “The Political Spectator: Censorship, Protest, and the Moviegoing Experience, 1912-1922.” Film History 11:2 (1999): 217-229.

Bentley, Eric.  Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? The Investigation of Show Business by the Un-American Activities Committee, 1947-1958.  New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Bernstein, Matthew, ed.  Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999.

Black, Gregory D. Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Black, Gregory D.  The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, 1940-1975. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Brasell, R. Bruce.  “A Dangerous Experiment to Try’: Film Censorship During the Twentieth Century in Mobile, Alabama.”  Film History 15:1 (2003): 81-102.

Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner.  Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Butters, Gerald R., Jr.  Banned in Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915–1966.  Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007.  

Cadegan, Una M.  “Guardians of Democracy or Cultural Storm Troopers?  American Catholics and the Control of Popular Media, 1934-1966.”  Catholic Historical Review 87:2 (April 2001): 252-282. 

Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund.  The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Ceplair, Larry.  “Ring Lardner, Jr. and the Hollywood Blacklist: A New Perspective on the Perennial Struggle Against Thought Control in the United States.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 39:1 (2019): 75-95.

Cocks, Orrin.  “What Standards Shall We Have for Motion Pictures to be Shown to Children?”  Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 6:4 (November 1915): 627-629.

Couvares, Francis G., ed., Movie Censorship and American Culture. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.

Czitrom, Daniel.  “The Redemption of Leisure: The National Board of Censorship and the Rise of Motion Pictures in New York City, 1900-1920.” Studies in Visual Communication 10:4 (Fall 1984): 2-6.

Czitrom, Daniel.  “The Politics of Performance: From Theater Licensing to Movie Censorship in Turn-of-the-Century New York.” American Quarterly 44:4 (December 1992): 525-553.

de Grazia, Edward, and Roger K. Newman.  Banned Films: Movies, Censors, and the First Amendment.  New York: Bowker, 1982.

Dick, Bernard F.  Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten.  Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989.

Doherty, Thomas.  Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Doherty, Thomas.  Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

Eaton, Walter Pritchard. “The Menace of the Movies.”  American Magazine 76 (September 1913): 55-60.

Eckstein, Arthur.  “The Hollywood Ten in History and Memory.”  Film History 16:4 (2004): 424-436.

Fisher, Robert.  “Film Censorship and Progressive Reform: The National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures, 1909-1922.” Journal of Popular Film 5:2 (1975): 143-156.

Fronc, Jennifer. “Local Public Opinion: The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures and the Fight Against Film Censorship in Virginia, 1916-1922.” Journal of American Culture 47:3 (2013): 719-742.

Gardner, Gerald C.  The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters From the Hays Office, 1934-1968.  New York: Dodd Mead, 1987.

Geltzer, Jeremy.  Filthy Words and Dirty Pictures: Film and the First Amendment. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

Geltzer, Jeremy.  Film Censorship in America: A State-By-State History.  Jefferson: McFarland, 2017.

Gladchuk, John Joseph. “Reticent Reds: HUAC, Hollywood, and the Evolution of the Red Menace, 1935-1950.”  PhD dissertation, University of California- Riverside, 2006.   

Gladchuk, John.  Hollywood and Anticommunism: HUAC and the Evolution of the Red Menace.  New York: Routledge, 2006.

Greene, Jane M. “Hollywood’s Production Code and Thirties Romantic Comedy.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 30 (March 2010): 55–73.

Grieveson, Lee.  Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth Century America.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Harris, Albert W., Jr.  “Movie Censorship and the Supreme Court: What Next?”  California Law Review 42:1 (Spring 1954): 122-138.

Horne, Gerald.    The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Hrach, Thomas J.  “Local Film Censorship’s Last Stand: The Memphis Board of Review, 1967 to 1976.” American Journalism39:3 (Summer 2022): 267-292.

Humphries, Reynold.  Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.Inglis, Ruth.  Freedom of the Movies: A Report on Self-Regulation from the Commission on Freedom of the Press.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947.

Jacobs, Lea.  The Wages of Sin: Censorship in the Fallen Woman Film.  Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Jarvis, Arthur R., Jr.  “The Payne Fund Reports: A Discussion of their Content, Public Reaction, and Effect on the Motion Picture Industry, 1930-1940.”  Journal of Popular Culture 25:2 (Fall 1991): 127-140.

Jowett, Garth.  “Social Science as a Weapon: The Origin of the Payne Fund Studies, 1926-1929.”  Communication 13:3 (1992): 211-225.

Jowett, Garth S., Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller.  Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kahn, Gordon.  Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the Ten Who Were Indicted.  New York: Boni & Gaer, 1948.

Koppes, Clayton. “Show Stoppers: Movie Censorship Considered as a Business Proposition.” Essays in Economic and Business History 30 (2012): 63–76.

Krutnik, Frank, et.al. eds.  Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Leff, Leonard J., and Jerold L. Simmons.  The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s.  New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1990.

Lorence, James L.  The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle.  Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Meeks, Jack D. “From the Belly of the HUAC: Investigations of Hollywood, 1947–1952.” PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2009.

Moley, Raymond.  The Hays Office.  New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1945.

Moser, John E.  “Gigantic Engines of Propaganda: The 1941 Senate Investigation of Hollywood.” Historian 63: 4 (Summer 2001): 731-751.

Noriega, Chon.  “Something’s Missing Here: Homosexuality and Film Reviews During the Production Code Era, 1934-1962.” Cinema Journal 30:1 (1990): 20-41.

Nurik, Chloe.  “Fifty Shades of Film Censorship: Gender Bias From the Hayes Code to the MPAA Ratings.” Communication, Culture & Critique 11:4 (2018): 530-547.

Ooten, Melissa Dawn.  “Screen Strife: Race, Gender, and Movie Censorship in the New South, 1922–1965.” PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2005.

Ooten, Melissa. “Censorship in Black and White: The Burning Cross (1947), Band of Angels (1957), and the Politics of Film Censorship in the American South After World War II.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 33:1 (2013): 77-98.

Orbach, Barak Y.  “Prizefighting and the Birth of Movie Censorship” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 21 (Summer 2009): 251–304.

Palmer, Tim.  “Side of the Angels: Dalton Trumbo, the Hollywood Trade Press, and the Blacklist.”  Cinema Journal 44:4 (Summer 2005): 57-74.

Prime, Rebecca.  Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014.

Quigley, Martin S.  Martin J. Quigley and the Glory Days of American Film, 1915-1965.  Groton, Conn.: Quigley Publishing, 2006.

Rice, Tom.  “Protecting Protestantism: The Ku Klux Klan vs. the Motion Picture Industry.”  Film History 20:3 (2008): 367-380.

Rosenbloom, Nancy J.  “Between Reform and Regulation: The Struggle Over Film Censorship in Progressive America, 1909-1922.” Film History 1:4 (1987): 307-325.

Rosenbloom, Nancy J.  “From Regulation to Censorship: Film and Political Culture in New York in the Early Twentieth Century.”  Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3:4 (October 2004): 369-406. 

Ross, Harris.  “D. W. Griffith v. City Hall: Politics, Ethnicity, and Chicago Film Censorship.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society  100 (Spring 2007): 19–40.   

Ross, Harris. “The Pennsylvania State Board of Censors: The Great War, the Movies, and D. W. Griffith.”  Pennsylvania History 75 (Spring 2008): 227–59.

Sbardellati, John.  “Brassbound G-Men and Celluloid Reds: The FBI’s Search for Communist Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood.”  Film History 20:4 (2008): 412-436.

Schumach, Murray.  The Face on the Cutting Room Floor: The Story of Movie and Television Censorship.  New York: William Morrow and Co., 1964.  (1975 reprint also available)

Scott, Ellen C.  “Black Censor, White Liberties: Civil Rights and Illinois’s 1917 Film Law.”  American Quarterly 64:2 (June 2012): 219-247.

Scott, Ellen. “More Than A ‘Passing’ Sophistication: Dress, Film Regulation, and the Color Line in 1930s American Films.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 41 (Spring–Summer 2013): 60–86.

Scott, Ellen. “Regulating “Nigger”: Racial Offense, African American Activists, and the MPPDA, 1928–1961.” Film History: An International Journal 26, no. 4 (2014): 1-31.

Simmons, Jerold. “Violent Youth: The Censoring and Public Reception of The Wild One and The Blackboard Jungle.” Film History: An International Journal 20, no. 3 (2008): 381-391.

Sligar, Sara. “Reserving the Kill: The Suicide Ban and Criminal Punishment in Code-Era Hollywood Film.” Film History: An International Journal 31, no. 4 (2019): 1-29.

Smith, Jeff.  Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Springhall, John.  “Censoring Hollywood: Youth, Moral Panic, and Crime/Gangster Movies of the 1930s.”  Journal of Popular Culture 32:3 (Winter 1998): 135-154.   

Staiger, Janet.  Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Stamp Lindsey, Shelley.  “Oil Upon the Flames of Vice’: The Battle Over White Slave Films in New York City.”  Film History 9:4 (1997): 351-364.

Strassfeld, Ben. “We Want to Be Neutral: The Right-Wing Extremist Politics of 1930s Detroit Policy Movie Censorship.” Film History 34:2 (Summer 2022): 92-117.

Strub, Whitney. “Black and White and Banned All Over: Race, Censorship, and Obscenity in Postwar Memphis.”  Journal of Social History 40 (Spring 2007): 685–715.

Vaughn, Robert.  Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting.  New York: Putnam, 1972.

Vaughn, Stephen.  “Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code.” Journal of American History 71 (June 1990): 39-65.

Vaughn, Stephen. “The Devil’s Advocate: Will H. Hays and the Campaign to Make Movies Respectable.” Indiana Magazine of History 101 (June 2005): 125­-152.

Vaughn, Stephen.  Freedom and Entertainment: Rating the Movies in an Age of New Media.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Walsh, Frank.  Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Wertheimer, John.  “Mutual Film Revisited: The Movies, Censorship, and Free Speech in Progressive America.” American Journal of Legal History 37:2 (1993): 158-189.

Wilinsky, Barbara.  “A Thinly Disguised Veneer Covering a Filthy Sex Picture’: Discourses on Art Houses in the 1950s.”  Film History 8:2 (1996) 143-158.

Wittern-Keller, Laura. Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915-1981.  Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008.

Wittern-Keller, Laura, and Raymond J. Haberski Jr. The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court.  Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.

Yogerst, Chris. “Hughes, Hawkes, and Hays: The Monumental Censorship Battle Over Scarface (1932).” Journal of American Culture 40:2 (2017): 134-144.

Yogerst, Chris. “Searching for Common Ground: Hollywood Prior to the Senate Investigation on Motion Picture Propaganda, 1935-1941.” Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 39:4 (December 2019): 725-748.

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