Who is Joseph I. Breen? Most people have never heard of the man whom “Variety” called “one of the most influential figures in American culture” in 1965, adding that “more than any single individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American motion picture.” Thirty years earlier, American weekly “Liberty Magazine” said that Joseph Breen had “more influence in standardizing world thinking than Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin.” What was Breen’s position that he wielded such influence?
Joseph I. Breen was the director of the Production Code Administration (PCA), a branch of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), from 1934 to 1954. As the PCA’s first director, his job was to enforce the Motion Picture Production Code, commonly but inaccurately called the Hays Code. He did such a good job that many film buffs hate his memory, since he stopped the hanky-panky of dirty Pre-Code films in the 1930s by enforcing moral standards in American movie content. They think he stifled filmmakers’ creativity for decades, ruining movies with his prejudice, bigotry, and puritanism. In honor of today’s being Breen’s 134th birthday, I’d like to tell the true story of Joseph I. Breen, Hollywood’s best friend.
Censor or Not?
If Joe Breen, as his friends called him, read his Wikipedia page, he would get upset. “I’m not a censor! I’m a self-regulator!” he would protest to his wife, Mary. She would probably giggle at his temper, which was quick but short-lasting. He spent his twenty years at the PCA, and no doubt his eleven remaining years in retirement, protesting that the Code and its enforcement were not censorship but self-regulation. Nevertheless, the label stuck, with filmmakers, historians, and even his co-workers at the PCA referring to Code-enforcement as censorship.The Code was written by Martin J. Quigley, a film exhibitor trade paper publisher, in response to the problems he personally saw plaguing distributors. The Chicago media mogul saw local censorship destroying films’ artistic value without fixing their moral tone. As early as the 1910s, Quigley wrote that the only way to achieve clean, entertaining movies was for them to be made with decent content from the beginning of production. This belief led him to write the Production Code in 1929, aided by a Catholic priest with a film advisory background, Father Daniel A. Lord. MPPDA president Will Hays was trying to improve the film industry’s moral image, and he quickly saw that the Code could achieve that. In 1930, he presented it to the studios as his own writing to obscure its Catholic origin, hence its being called the Hays Code.
The Breen Office
Breen’s chance came in July 1934, when the PCA was formed as the MPPDA’s final attempt at making the Code effective after feeling pressure to reform from all sides. Breen had become director of the Studio Relations Committee (SRC), the ineffective board which first tried to enforce the Code, earlier that year, but even he couldn’t overcome the organization’s weakness. The PCA was completely different. All the major studios were MPPDA members, so they agreed to submit material to the PCA for review from the earliest stages of pre-production. Thus, they could collaborate at every step of the filmmaking process to make movies which were decent as well as artistically excellent. This was the Code’s original intention: not destructive post-production censorship but collaborative self-regulation throughout production, helping Hollywood make wholesome, entertaining movies for the whole family in the first place.No film could be released in the United States without a PCA Seal of Approval, since most theaters were also part of the agreement. Hollywood quickly realized that, if it wanted its movies to be successful, it would have to work with the Code. From day one, the PCA was affectionately called The Breen Office. While Will Hays was in charge of the MPPDA’s East Coast office, everyone knew that Breen was the heart and soul of the PCA headquarters at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue. Breen perfected the process of self-regulating movies to such an art that “Variety” nicknamed the PCA’s work “breening” or “joebreening” in his honor.
Breening started with a letter, telephone conversation, or even a lunch meeting at a local restaurant, discussing the story idea. No story was ever outright forbidden; the PCA merely pointed out Code violations which would have to be changed or eliminated for the finished film to be approved. Once an agreement was reached on the basic story, the screenplay would be submitted to the PCA, sometimes a few pages at a time. Self-regulators painstakingly combed scripts in pairs and sent letters with their findings, listing the objections by page number. This back-and-forth process could include several rounds of revisions, multiple drafts, phone calls, memos to the files, and more lunch conferences. The PCA also reviewed song lyrics and costume sketches/photos to make sure everything looked Code-compliant before filming began.
It was in a studio’s best interest to get PCA-approval on every detail before filming began, thus avoiding costly reshooting. If Breen thought a certain scene could cause problems, either he or some of his employees would visit the set to make sure it was executed with care. The final step was for the whole PCA staff to watch the finished film in their basement screening room. They often saw the black-and-white “mud” print, but they didn’t have to watch the glossiest print to see any Code violations, which they would ask to be trimmed or reshot. If filmmakers had followed all previous guidance and agreements, the movie would receive a PCA Seal of Approval, making it ready for nationwide release.
Remembering Joseph Breen
The Code was Hollywood’s shield against worldwide censorship. During the Pre-Code Era, city and state censor boards throughout the United States and national censor boards in foreign countries dissected movies to suit their own moral and social standards of acceptability. These censors knew nothing about film, so, although they meant well, they ended up butchering many movies with harsh, confusing cuts. The whole purpose of the Code was to provide guidelines for content which would be, to quote Joseph Breen, “reasonably acceptable to reasonable people.” That doesn’t mean that there was no censorship of PCA-approved films. In fact, the PCA kept detailed records of where and how movies were censored to better understand the peculiar objections of different regions. Nothing could be completely acceptable to every group and region in the entire country, let alone the world, but the PCA helped filmmakers get pretty close.Joe Breen was Hollywood’s best friend. During his tenure, the breening process was used on hundreds of feature films, shorts, and cartoons each year. This Herculean task seems like the work of hundreds, yet it was done by a staff of around eight men. The other self-regulators worked very hard, but no one understood the Code and its enforcement like Breen. That’s why he did far more than his share of the work. He often went to the office seven days a week, and he rarely accompanied his family to a weekend at their Malibu home without bringing along a few scripts to review. He visited studios before going to the office, after leaving the office, and on his lunchbreak. The strain of the job, plus the constant criticism, often aggravated the stomach ailments which plagued him most of his life, but neither abdominal surgery nor lung cancer kept him from his work. As a devout Catholic, he looked on his job as doing God’s work. As a father of six and a devoted husband, he believed in the family, and he worked hard to preserve its sanctity in movies.
The biggest misconception people have about Breen is that he was an outsider whom the filmmakers resented. On the contrary, he was a personal friend of A-list celebrities, especially the Irish ones like Spencer Tracy and Pat O’Brien. In addition, his grandson John Benton told me that, contrary to popular belief, he was friends with Howard Hughes, who made multiple films which famously challenged the PCA. Joseph I. Breen was never a household name, but people in the film industry knew that he helped them govern themselves to make the greatest films of all time. The beautiful values of Code films seem all but forgotten today, yet they live again every time someone’s life is touched by a PCA-approved film. Thank you, Mr. Breen. May your work never be forgotten.
