Will H. Hays, the Preacher Who Saved Hollywood by Lying to America
The man who showed filmmakers how to beat censors by becoming them.
Hey everyone,
I keep coming back to how fast the conversation around AI in creative fields has evolved. Not long ago, it was mostly fear, hype, and hand-wringing. But we’ve also seen the tenacious ones who are optimistic, and see the potential to do more and make more. Filmmakers and video pros are realizing that AI doesn’t have to mean compromise. It can actually mean more space for creativity. We’ve been working on a fun video about this; it’ll drop next week.
That’s been our mission from the beginning: eliminate the painful work so video pros can stay focused on the storytelling. And to those ends, we will have an update in the next few weeks. (Eddie has also been brushing up on Duolingo…IYKYK.)
This week’s essay is a wild one. It’s about Will H. Hays—the preacher who never made a film, but still changed Hollywood forever. He didn’t cut, direct, or write a frame, but he taught studios how to cheat the system—and created a whole new playbook for storytelling inside constraints. If you've ever finessed a note from Standards & Practices, you’ve got Hays to thank.
Let’s dive in,
—Shamir
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Will H. Hays. He didn’t direct, act, or write a word of script. Couldn’t shoot, couldn’t cut. So what exactly is he doing here?
Simple: he taught filmmakers how to cheat the system.
If you’ve ever seen a movie that winked at sex, danced around crime, or made sin look stylish without saying a word, that’s his legacy. A preacher who became Hollywood’s human firewall. The man who showed filmmakers how to beat censors by becoming them.
Hollywood’s Wild West
Before we talk about how Will H. Hays tried to clean up Hollywood, we need to understand exactly what he was up against.
“Pre-Code” Hollywood was a five-year fever dream between 1929 and 1934. Think early 2000s internet, lawless, chaotic, decentralized.
Rules were unclear, limits untested, and every studio was scrambling to see how far they could go before someone said stop.
Some the films you could watch during Pre-Code Hollywood:
SPOILER ALERTS
(No, seriously. Scroll past to the next section if you actually want to watch any of these films)
Night Nurse (1931) - Pre-stardom Clark Gable plays sadistic chauffeur who starves children to death. Barbara Stanwyck as a nurse uncovering murder in a wealthy home. It features bootleggers, drug addiction, alcoholism, and an unflinching look at class inequality.
Island of Lost Souls (1932) - The plot revolves around a mad scientist who vivisects animals until they resemble humans. He even tries to, uh, "encourage" some sex between humans and his manimal creations. The film ends with said mad scientist being vivisected to death by his mutants.
Baby Face (1933) - Barbara Stanwyck (again), this time plays a cynical gold digger who uses sex to work her way up a bank. She's told bluntly at one point by an old mentor type (who urges her to read Nietzsche) to "exploit herself!"
The Preacher Who Became Hollywood’s High Priest
In 1921, Hollywood hit a wall of moral panic following the rape and murder of actress Virginia Rappe. When film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was accused of rape and murder Congress threatened to censor Hollywood by law.
Hollywood needed a savior. And fast. So they pulled a move straight out of a mob script: hire a holy man to front a godless business.
Hays was a perfect front. Clean-cut, conservative, a Presbyterian deacon. Respectable wasn’t enough. He was spotless.
In 1922, he left Washington for Hollywood to start his new job as head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA).
A job that would go on to pay him $100,000 a year. That’s 1920s money. So well over $1 million today.
On paper, he was hired to cleanse Hollywood.
In practice, he was giving sin a makeover, and making it marketable.
The Code That Wasn’t
1922 editorial cartoon by Cy Hungerford depicting Will Hays as Hollywood’s last lifeline.
At the time, state censor boards operated like traffic wardens. Each one having a different set of moral standards and rules.
Studios were charged per foot of film removed, per title card snipped, and for every alternate version they had to print and distribute.
It was chaos. And expensive.
Hays offered studios private advice. What to cut, what to soften, what might pass in Ohio but not in Kansas. He drafted a Hollywood survival guide for studios wanting to stay in business: The Don’ts and Be Carefuls.
No nudity. No profanity. No mocking religion. No good-guy criminals.
Yeah, that didn’t work.
If emojis existed in the ’30s, Hollywood’s response would’ve been: 😏
Birth of the Code
It was clear polite suggestions to studios was not enough and Catholic outrage had now turned into a full-blown siege.
The Legion of Decency called for boycotts. Bank of America (Hollywood lifeline) threatened to pull funding from films deemed immoral.
Studio bosses somehow suddenly found religion. They handed Hays authority not just to suggest, but to enforce.
And Hays made his move.
He launched the Production Code Administration, and with it came rules, red pens, and very little mercy.
No script approval? No film. No PCA seal? No release. No cut approval? No box office.
The Doom Book: Hollywood’s Most Sinister Secret
If the Code told filmmakers what not to shoot, the so-called “Doom Book” told studios who not to hire. Whispered about in studio backrooms and feared by every actor with a personal life deemed “unfit,” the Doom Book was a secret blacklist compiled under Will H. Hays’ watch.
The Doom Book never surfaced officially but insiders claim it named as many as 150 actors and actresses whose off-screen behavior made them studio poison.
Top of the list? Tallulah Bankhead.
A Southern firebrand. One of the finest actresses of her era. Bisexual, chain-smoking 120 cigarettes a day, and partying like prohibition never happened.
If your name was in that little leather-bound blacklist passed around Hollywood, it wasn’t just a bad look. It was career death. And to this day, no copy of the Doom Book has ever been found.
The Sin List: What the Code Actually Banned
The Code opened with three lofty “General Principles”. No glorifying evil, no lowering public morals, no mocking the law.
But buried under all that virtue was a blacklist so oddly specific it reads like a parody.
If memes existed in 1934, this would’ve gone viral.
Here are 10 of the wildest rules from the Hays Code.
Hays also imposed a “Three Second Kiss” rule. But directors got clever.
Hitchcock sidestepped the restriction in Notorious (1946) by telling Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to pause and resume their kisses every three seconds. A legal movel, but sensually uninterrupted, stretching the scene to over two minutes.
That spirit of workaround also gave rise to one of Hollywood’s most iconic romantic gestures: the “foot pop.”
Designed to comply with a rule requiring actresses to keep “one foot on the ground” during intimate scenes (so as not to imply they were in bed) the foot pop became cinematic shorthand for a swoon.
HIDDEN HANDPRINT: What We Owe Hays
After handing over the day-to-day enforcement to Joseph Breen, Hays stayed on as Hollywood’s moral mascot until 1945. He then left Hollywood and returned to politics.
He died in 1954, mostly forgotten by the public but immortalized in name. A name that’s shorthand for censorship, even though his greatest legacy might’ve been how he helped creatives learn to bend rules without breaking them.
He was the man who made “bad” look good.
Not a director. Not a star. Not even a filmmaker.
Just a man in a collar. Hollywood’s holy front. Playing preacher for the cameras while studios sold sin in shadow.
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