Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code)

Hollywood was just fine avoiding all portrayals of the Central Intelligence Agency for years after the agency's founding in 1947.

When the 1930 Hays Code banned pregnancy in film, birds took over the business of birth.

Screwball comedies are beloved films, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.

Born out of the Great Depression, the genre reminds us that even in hard times there's laughter, love, and light.

A murder charge, a media frenzy, a banishment, and accusations of sexual abuse in Hollywood. What can the Arbuckle affair, now 100 years old, teach us today?

Novelist Richard Wright yearned to break into film, but Hollywood's censorship of black stories left his aspirations unfulfilled.

These days, Hollywood is more democratic than Washington.

This tale of two girlhoods, Shirley Temple’s and Lindsay Lohan’s, sheds light on what “woman” means in the world of eroticized youth.

Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.

A camp diva, a queer icon, and a model of feminism—the memorable Mae West left behind a complicated legacy, on and off the stage.

A zealot through and through, he ran the FBI like a religious sect.

Black femininity was always considered a hard sell in Hollywood, but Hattie McDaniels and Dorothy became the perfect women to peddle racist stereotypes.

For the Pentagon, films like "Top Gun: Maverick" are more than just a movie.

A new book explains why Americans know so little about other countries.

From the first morbid films a hundred years ago, scary movies always been a dark mirror on Americans’ deepest fears and anxieties.

Pioneering cartoonists were experimental, satiric, erotic, and artistically ambitious.

An insightful exploration of the ways America has read ‘the Great American Novel.’

Hollywood in its early days was not the kind of place where powerful men abused their power over women.

How the fight to ban "The Birth of a Nation" shaped the nascent civil rights movement.