Theatre Police

[Phantom of London]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 2:53pm

In my native United Kingdom, we had a Lord Chamberlain, who had the authority to authorise drama, this position was established in 1737 and thankfully abolished in 1968.

He had the authority to licence a play, unless it might be reasonable held that:

- To be indecent.
- To Contain offensive personalities.
- To represent in an invidious manner a living person, or a person recently dead.
- To do violence to the sentiment of reigious reverence.
- To be calculated to conduce to crime or vice.
- To be calculated to impair friendly relations with a Foreign power.

In 10 years after the second world war, 42 plays were banned because:

18 - with alleged sexual impropriety
14 - contained the 'forbidden subject' homosexuality.
4 - Because how they represented Queen Victoria
3 - for referring to living people
2 - because of political objections
1 - deemed offensive to Christianity

The Lord Chamberlain powers was abolished on 29/09/1968, after the Lord Chamberlain tried to demand 54 significant changes, were requested.

I was wondering if such a prohibition happened in the United States?

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 3:05pm

Yes and no. As I'm sure you know, our constitution, though based in part on British tradition, is somewhat different; for one thing, it's written down.

We had no one official who was really equivalent to the Lord Chamberlain, but different jurisdictions (mostly states, but also New York City, IIRC) had their own obscenity laws.

Homosexuality on stage, for example, was taboo for roughly the same time periods in London and New York; but the legal authority was different.

Eventually some landmark Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s and 1970s made the prosecution for obscenity of plays and play productions much more difficult.

(TV and film have been different for most of their history: film studios agreed to censor themselves after a public outcry in the 1930s and established an office for that purpose; its successor now issues the infamously inconsistent motion picture "ratings". Broadcast television is deemed to use "public air waves" and so a federal department governs its practices to some extent, but the most recent court ruling on that loosened the controls, I believe. In general, our broadcast TV isn't as free as yours when it comes to nudity and the like, but our cable TV does as it pleases, short of libel.)



Updated On: 10/18/12 at 03:05 PM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 3:15pm

"Banned in Boston" was the phrase used here for a long time, because Boston had a Puritan tradition, but it became a selling point outside of Massachusetts.

The Comstock law outlawed using the U.S. Postal Service for material deemed "obscene," but that was overturned by a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s, under Chief Justice Earl Warren.

And then, of course, I'm sure you know about the Hays Code in Hollywood.

[After Eight]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 3:16pm

In 1927, The Captive, an adaptation of Edouard Bourdet's play La Prisonnière, was shut down for its "immorality."

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 3:25pm

Mae West was arrested when "Sex" premiered on Broadway in 1927.

"While in prison at Welfare Island, West reportedly dined with the Warden and his wife and was released early due to good behavior, something she remarked to reporters afterwards as “…the first time I ever got anything for good behavior.”"

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 3:27pm

And Mae West's Broadwaty play, SEX, was closed in 1927 and she was sentenced to 10 days in the "workhouse".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_(play)


(ETA since Henrik and I posted at the same time, I'll add that SEX ran for over 300 performances before the NYPD got around to shutting it down. henrik is correct that the prosecution made, rather than hindered, West's career.)
Updated On: 10/18/12 at 03:27 PM

[sinister teashop]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 6:09pm

Actually, New York City and New York State took the lead in censorship and the banning of plays and books through the Comstock Law. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was chartered by the New York State Legislature and ended up being something of a template for the NYPD's Vice Squad which is still in existence today.

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice famously took the lesbian run "Little Review" to court for serializing Joyce's Ulysses and less famously spent a lot of time going after homosexuals by blowing the whistle on sex at the Everard Baths. You might even say that their contemporaries are still up to the same tricks in the NYPD Vice Squad.

I personally think that Boston gets a bit of a bad rap with the phrase "Banned in Boston". NYC with is its Dutch merchant heritage seemed to generate more of a zeal for censorship that those Puritans up in Boston who during the period of the height of the Comstock Law were equally promoting progressive aesthetic and social ideas in their city. And in the case of Prof. Baker at Harvard, almost singlehanded working to bring the new European theater into the American mainstream.

[Jon]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 6:30pm

If you want to know about the Hays Production Code, here it is, as choreographed by Tommy Tune.
Do the Production Code!

[Playbilly]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 7:21pm

Cable television doesn't "do as it pleases" although it may seem that way.

[Plum]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 8:10pm

Depends on whether they're ad-supported or subscriber-supported, no?

[Playbilly]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 8:34pm

That's part of it.* Every cable network has to go through some distributor, be it a big corporation system, satellite or mom-and-pop system ( there are still some of them left ). There are still community standards statutes. Nobody in the industry wants that crap stirred up. For anyone who has watched porn on PPV (Jordan...) you know they cut stuff out.

* I assume when you say "subscription" you mean an HBO or Showtime, and not PPV.

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 10/18/12 at 9:18pm

Thanks for the correction, playbilly.

In the first place, I should have distinguished between pay-cable and basic cable. Of course the latter censors its material more strictly (which is just one reason why I never watch LOGO).

In the second, I've never watched porn on cable TV (except the asinine "Skinamax" soft-porn), so I have no idea what they include and what they don't.

"Cable TV" covers a lot of territory and I should have been more specific in my response.