Reforming the Stage and Screen: How Expectations, Audiences, and Economics Shaped the Film and Theatre Censorship Movements in Early-1930s New York

Nineteen thirty-four: it was a year that changed Hollywood history. After decades of studio production codes, agitation for censorship, and broken promises, in the spring and summer of 1934 prominent reform groups organized and banded together to threaten a boycott strong enough to cripple the massive Hollywood complex itself. Major studios, already in difficult financial straits because of Depression losses and debts left over from theater building and the recent conversion to sound, were cowed at the possibility of a massive consumer boycott. They agreed (not for the first time) to abide by a strict code of movie morals, and this time they (more or less) stuck to it, inaugurating what would later be known as the Golden Age of Hollywood