I’m responding only to be argumentative, but “Fatty” Arbuckle killed a woman in the silent era and if things were so moral back then why were the Hayes codes instituted? Wasn’t it because the viewing public was fed up with the immorality in motion pictures and was hitting Hollywood in the pocketbook by not patronizing the filth it was producing?
Arbuckle didn’t kill anyone. That was one of the biggest examples of yellow journalism in the country’s history. Now, the relatively concurrent scandal involving Mary Miles Minter was indeed a genuine scandal, and gave the industry a black eye.
But yeah, in the early-30s, there was some increasing raciness in films, and with the combination of the various states each having their censor boards with varying standards, along with the Legion of Decency, it made sense for the industry to go for the uniformity of the Hayes code. But I don’t think it was so much that Hollywood was being hit in the pocketbook, as the Depression years of 1932-33 were actually pretty profitable for the studios.
Anyway, gee whiz, I never remotely argued that Hollywood was some kind of moral mecca. Quite the opposite. Only that it’s not really accurate to think of it as existing on the same level of abject deviancy as what we see now in 2012, when the whole culture is now awash in filth and absolutely zero moral standards. Remember also, in the 20s/30s/40s, most of the people in Hollywood gravitated there from mid-America, and were more apt to maintain at least some of those values. Later on, the industry became vastly more populated by lefties from NY/Broadway and home-grown CA hippie-scum, who had HORRID moral values. That’s when the big difference started occuring.
It wasn’t instituted for commercial reasons. The industry wanted to stave off federal censorship - which there was a very real threat of since a 1915 Supreme Court decision had stated that films did not have free speech protection (that would be overturned by another decision in 1952).