This is later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast More what You Hear weekday Afternoons.
On the Drive That Segeloff as a writer and producer and journalist. He is the author of fourteen published books, including books on the life and films of William Friedkin, Arthur Penn, John Houston, and many many more. His newest creation is something I have a lot of interest in. It's called The Naughty Bits What the censors wouldn't let you see in Hollywood's most famous movies. Welcome, That's good to have.
You along, Thanks Lley. I'm looking forward to talking to you too.
What brought you to this topic? I mean, we all know that there were certain amounts of censorship back in the early days of film. What brought your interest to it?
When I was writing another book on Auto Premager, who pretty much broke the production code back in the nineteen fifties and sixties, the Emotion Picture Academy gave me access to thousands of letters from the Production Code office, and I just started going through them like a little kid reading World Book. I couldn't stop reading them and figure there was a book in here somewhere. And then at some point it occurred to me that the motion picture
industry was the first woke organization in America. They were so concerned about offending anybody that they wound up offending no one. Things have changed, of course, WILK has a quite different meeting today. But I was fascinated with going through all these things and realizing what they had to cut out of movies which you couldn't imagine they would have had anything bad in.
And this was all self imposed. Did not the government come to the movie industry at some point say, okay, start governing yourself, or we will.
It was even worse than that. It wasn't the government, It was hundreds of governments. That was municipalities. You see a series of sex and drug scandals in the nineteen twenties in Hollywood brought down the wrath of all the local communities who wanted to sensor movies. And that was impractical, because how does a film company make twenty different versions of the same movie, depending whether you can show it in Oklahoma or Grand Rapids or San Diego or whatever.
A industry got together informed what is now the Motion Picture Association, but back then was called the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors association. They appointed a man named will Hayes, who looked like he fell out of the grant Wood painting, to be the Czar of all the Rushes, as they called him. And they established a list of don'ts and be careful of things that would get you in trouble with local communities if you dared put them in your film.
And I can't read that because it's one solid list of trigger warnings, but it's all in the book Naughty Bits. At that point the industry took over censoring itself and forestalled, if you will, having lots of local communities, do.
It the naughty bits what the censors wouldn't let you see. And Hollywood's most famous movies that Segal office, the author. Let's start with some of those classic films like the Biggie Gone with the Wind, that.
Of course is most famous for Frankly, my dear and I don't give a damn. But in fact there were also other elements of the film, in particular the birth of Melanie's child which might have been too explicitly shown,
the portrayal of African Americans. They actually used the N word in the book, and they wouldn't let that in the movie, the producers consulted the NAACP about the treatment of black people in slavery, of course, And the thing that most people don't realize is after Scarlett is attacked going over the bridge, Rhet and the other man go out and try to roust all of the people who were living homeless in that encampment. Well, Rhet and Ashley, that's the gu Glux klan ah, and they cut that
part out. They couldn't call them that. So there was quite a bit of changing done between the book Gone with the.
Wind, one of my favorites, Casablanca.
H that's great. Rick and Ilsa, of course, were involved in an illicit romance when she thought that Victor was dead, rather than finding out that he was in a concentration camp. And in fact it was she who abandoned Rick at the train station along with Sam when she found out that Victor was alive. But we really don't know if she took off her dress before the Germans left her below.
Ah, so they weren't allowed to tell us if that was actually what happened.
There are some indications that they may have done some hanky panky, but we really don't have any sense of that the film moves along so fast, I don't think anybody thinks about it.
No no, and film naw was coming along then anyway, So a lot of the way you produced and wrote was changing.
Everything was changing after World War Two. Of course, Casablanca was during the war, and it was geared to the war effort at a time when the Allies weren't doing very well. But you're right. After World War two, film noir came along, and that was much more of an adult genre, and in fact, audiences who had been hired by the war were not about to go back to the pablem they'd have to endure from the nineteen thirties.
That caused a lot of pressure on the Production Code to change, and one of the reasons the Production Code was in trouble was it couldn't change. That led to its eventual dissolution in the nineteen sixties.
The Naughty Bits what the censors wouldn't let you see in Hollywood's most famous movies, and that segal Off is the author, and we're talking to him about some of the favorite movies where this happened. The Ten Commandments. We are talking the nineteen fifties version, not the original silent version.
That's right. I had to put the Ten Commandments and the Sound of Music in just to show that the Production Code office looked at every movie, whether it was supposed to be scurrilous or not. Of course, sound of music coast to thrill with no problem. The Ten Commandments actually had a censored moment at the very beginning, when Pharaoh hears that there's going to be a deliverer born
among the Hebrews. He orders the slaughter of all the firstborn male Hebrew children, and there's a shot where a soldier from the Pharaoh's army comes out and wipes blood off his broadsword as a mother is in tears on the side of the screen. Even today, that's a horrific moment, and that stayed in the movie.
Yes it did. And I was about to say the only other thing I could think of was when Nephertieri was trying to seduce Moses. That got a little steamy.
But I think we can trust Chuck Heston not to give into that start of temptation.
Not at all. Lawrence of Arabia, that's a pretty benign film other than maybe violence.
Well, it's long been argued that te Lawrence himself was homosexual, or at least was into s and m in some way of that. In the scene with Jose Ferrer at the Turkish Bay, when basically the Jose Ferrah hits on him, Lawrence knees the bay in the groin. The producers were cautioned not to show it actually happening, and of course David Lean did it offscreen because he's a tasteful man.
But Peter O'Toole's daughter did tell me that they did add a lot of eyeliner to Peter Row' tool in certain scenes to try to suggest what his.
Other life was, the naughty bits, what the sensors wouldn't let you see in Hollywood's most famous movies. And then there were times Nat segal Off I can even catch now where it seems like the writers went out of their way to suggest something rather sad actually or otherwise that only the adults in the room would pick up upon.
That was the trick. Trick was to make it for all audiences. You see, when the production code was initiated in nineteen thirty they didn't enforce it until nineteen thirty four, and so we had four years of what we now called incorrectly pre code films things like Night Nurse and the Story of Temple Drake and Babyface, which were really
scurless and wonderfully vulgar. That was cleaned up after Joe Breen took over in nineteen thirty four, and the adults were able to pick up a lot of things after that which went over the hedge of the kid because remember, people went to the audience. People went to the movies as a full family.
Yeah, I'm thinking of the naughty divorcee and go ahead, put your arms around them. You know that was okay, hug, Is that what you're talking about? Or what else are you talking about?
So you couldn't show a kiss that was longer than three seconds, which, by the way, is the story of my life. You also couldn't show a toilet in the toilet. I mean, Psycho Jenny Lee is killed in the bathroom. Hitchcock couldn't show a toilet in the bathroom. Yeah, I don't know where people went. They probably staved it and put it on top forty.
There was a lot more great bits in the naughty bits. What the censors wouldn't let you see in Hollywood's most famous movies. If you love this behind the scenes stuff like I do. You'll love this for a summer read from Nat segel Off. And we thank you for joining us and for bringing us the book.
Thank you Lee very much.
Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation