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FROM BERLIN TO BAGHDAD By Hal Brands
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For immediate release, December 14, 2007
Major Court Cases Involving Film Censorship
Lexington, KY--
Mutual Film v. Ohio (1915)
Mutual Film Corporation, a consortium of independent film studios, producer of newsreels, and well-financed national distributor, mounted the first challenge to governmental censorship by appealing to the free speech and free press guarantees of the First Amendment. It was the first time the U.S. Supreme Court considered freedom in the mass media, and they ruled that movies did not qualify for free speech and free press protection. This case stood as precedent for almost four decades.
United States v. Paramount Pictures (1948)
This antitrust case was brought by the U.S. Justice Department against Paramount Pictures. One of Hollywood's main reasons for maintaining the Production Code was to keep attention away from how it was getting movies into theaters in the first place: by monopolistic business practices that allowed enormous profits. Without the reward of guaranteed theater bookings, the PCA's censors would hold little authority over motion picture producers. A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court sided with the government, making independent production and distribution of films much easier. Furthermore, the opinion included dictum from Justice Douglas, who wrote, "We have no doubt that moving pictures, like newspapers and radio, are included in the press whose freedom is guaranteed by the First Amendment," opening the door to reconsidering the Mutual Film v. Ohio decision.
Burstyn v. McCaffrey/Burstyn v. Wilson (1950-52)
Joseph Burstyn distributed Roberto Rossellini's forty-one-minute film The Miracle in New York. Although the film passed the censors, New York City license commissioner, Edward T. McCaffrey found it "officially and personally blasphemous" and threatened to revoke the licenses of theaters which showed the film. The case eventually went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which handed down a unanimous decision that turned the tide of film censorship litigation. Although the Supreme Court decision that came from The Miracle would not overturn censorship statutes, as Burstyn and others hoped, it would specifically grant motion pictures the protection of the First and the Fourteenth amendments, something they had been denied since the 1915 Mutual decision.
Broadway Angels v. Wilson (1953)
Broadway Angels asked New York State for a license to show Teenage Menace, purportedly to warn young adults about the evils of illegal drug use, and was turned down. But Broadway Angels claimed that this film was different because it had been "conceived, produced, and completed as a tool in fighting dope addiction in the interest and welfare of American Youth." The New York appellate division ruled that the censors had been wrong about the picture's ability to corrupt morals. To the contrary, the justices found, the film "taught a moral lesson." This marked the first time the appellate division had overturned a censorship determination sustained by the regents.
Kingsley International Pictures v. Regents of the State of New York
(1956)
When Kingsley International Pictures submitted a French film version of D. H. Lawrence's sensational novel Lady Chatterley's Lover to the New York censors in 1956, only pirated and abridged copies of the book could be found anywhere in the United States. Since Lady Chatterley's Lover clearly shows two unpunished, unrepentant adulterers, the motion picture division found the film immoral and demanded removal of three romantic scenes. The case ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled unanimous against New York's censoring of immorality, which left only obscenity as reason to censor films.
Roth v. United States (1957)
Though not a case involving film, Roth had a major impact on later cases that did. Samuel Roth, a "smuthound," literary pirate, and First Amendment warrior, had been convicted under the federal Comstock law for mailing American Aphrodite, his magazine of literary erotica. After Roth, the new legal definition of obscenity boiled down to "whether to the average person" (not the most susceptible person), applying "contemporary community standards" (not just the ideas of individual censors), "the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole" (not isolated passages), appealed to the "prurient interest." A work's effect on the most susceptible persons of society would no longer suffice as justification to keep it from all; the effect of the entire work had to be considered in relation to its effect upon an average person.
Freedman v. Maryland (1965)
In November 1962, Baltimore theater owner Ronald Freedman and the brazenly anticensorship Times Film Corporation decided to flout Maryland's law by exhibiting Revenge at Daybreak without a license. Freedman was arrested and brought a case against the state of Maryland. This would turn out to be the biggest case in the razing of governmental film censorship. The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in favor of Freedman that transformed the course of governmental film censorship. The decision finally made good on the principle that the censors should bear the "heavy burden" of proving a film unworthy of exhibition and set up procedural safeguards that kept state and municipal film censorship bodies from delaying exhibition licenses.
Interstate Circuit v. Dallas (1968)
In 1965, the City of Dallas created a classification board with only two categories, suitable and not suitable for children under sixteen. Municipal lawmakers everywhere watched to see what would happen when Interstate Circuit challenged Dallas three years later over Louis Malle's Viva Maria. The U.S. Supreme Court found that the statute was unconstitutionally vague. This initially sounded like good news for the free screen forces, but the Court also clearly indicated that age classification under a better-crafted statute would survive.
Freedom of the Screen · Laura Wittern-Keller
Publication Date: January 11, 2008 · $55.00 cloth · ISBN: 978-0-8131-2451-3
Media contact: Mack McCormick
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