Once Herbert’s screenplay was finished, Preminger submitted it to Joe Breen, who for nearly twenty years, as chief enforcer of the Motion Picture Production Code, had been the de facto guardian of screen morality. Breen did exactly what Otto expected and hoped he would: he rejected The Moon Is Blue. Twice. (Written and formally adopted by the Association of Motion Picture Producers [California] and the Motion Picture Association of America [New York] in March 1930, the Motion Picture Production Code had had no force until 1934, when Breen devised an economic sanction. Any film in violation of the Code and given a condemned rating—the dreaded “C”—by the Catholic Legion of Decency would be subject to a widespread Catholic boycott. Since its inception, as Breen had intended, the C rating had hovered like the sword of Damocles over filmmakers. In league with the fearsome Legion of Decency, Breen had thus been able to force the studios to comply with the Code.)
Preminger claimed that Breen’s objections focused on the use of such then taboo words as “virgin,” “seduce,” and “pregnant,” but in fact Breen’s disapproval was more far-reaching. He cited a provision in the Production Code that specifically interdicted seduction as “a subject for comedy” and assailed The Moon Is Blue for exuding “an unacceptably cavalier approach toward seduction and illicit sex.”30 Fearing Breen’s power, Paramount and then Warner Bros., Otto’s first two choices, turned down the project; it was only at that point that Otto approached Arthur Krim and Robert S. Benjamin, two young lawyers who had taken over United Artists in February 1951. In record time they had managed to convert the ailing studio’s red ink into black by attracting independent producers with promises of creative autonomy. United Artists had no studio of its own, but rented space from other studios. Krim and Benjamin quickly agreed to support Otto, pledging front money, distribution, and almost complete artistic freedom.
Krim and Benjamin, however, tried to talk Otto out of hiring David Niven to play the third principal role, David Slater, a potentially sleazy character who, in effect, pimps for his daughter while making a play for his downstairs neighbor’s virginal pickup. The lawyers thought Niven was out of fashion. But when he had seen Niven on Broadway in December 1951 as a debonair lover in a short-lived boudoir farce called Nina, Otto knew he had found the actor for Slater. Preminger went to bat for Niven with the same persistence he had shown in his campaign to cast Clifton Webb in Laura. “Otto is an immensely determined individual, and what Otto wants, he usually gets. He got me—bless him!” Niven recalled.31
The lawyers backed down, and Preminger thought he was ready to go when, late in 1952, the screenplay received yet another blistering rejection from the Production Code Administration office. Jack Vizzard, Breen’s associate, attacked the movie Preminger was planning to make as “unclean.” “The story was saying that ‘free love’ was something outside the scope of morality altogether, was a matter of moral indifference,” Vizzard protested. “What came into contention was the Code clause that stated, ‘Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationships are the accepted or common thing.’ Philosophically this was one of the most important provisions in the entire Code document.” According to Vizzard, what “made the hackles rise on the back of Joe Breen’s neck” was the way the script seemed to trump virtue in favor of sin. “To the devotees of sexual continence, the figure [Patty O’Neill] … is made to seem eccentric for being ‘clean,’ an oddball for clinging to her virtue in the midst of this ‘characteristically’ loose [and, by inference, preferable, more enjoyable] way of life.”32
In early January Preminger met with Vizzard and his colleague Geoffrey Shurlock for lunch at “21,” where Otto made it clear that he intended to shoot the script he had submitted to the Production Code Administration office. “As a token concession, [Preminger] offered to add dialogue at the end… condemning the ‘immoral philosophy of life’ expressed by Slater; beyond that, he would not budge,” as Leonard Leff and Jerold L. Simmons reported in their history of film censorship, The Dame in the Kimono.33 Dartmouth-educated and at that time Breen’s second in command, Geoffrey Shurlock was more modern than his boss. He had seen The Moon Is Blue onstage and thought it was “swell. A lot of fun.” He also believed that the Code prohibition against comic seduction was “idiotic.”34 Because of Shurlock’s conciliatory tone, by the end of the lunch Preminger modified— or at least pretended to—his defiant stance, and in principle even agreed to review Breen’s original list of objections as well as to submit the completed film to the Code office.
Preminger sensed that in Geoffrey Shurlock he had an ideological ally. Perhaps carelessly, Shurlock privately shared with Otto his dismay that just the week before Breen had approved the screenplay based on From Here to Eternity, James Jones’s “near-scandalous” novel. As a result Shurlock felt that Breen’s outrage over Preminger’s “harmless comedy of manners” seemed “not only irony but hypocrisy”35 Preminger may well have felt that, with a “mole” like Shurlock in the Production Code Administration office, Joe Breen’s tenure had a termination date. Nonetheless, he was resolved not to make any changes in the script in order to pacify Breen, and he fully expected that his film would not be given the Production Code Administration Seal of Approval.
Krim and Benjamin were not as fearless as Otto. They began to express concern that if the film did not receive the Code Seal, as it surely wouldn’t if Otto shot it as he was planning to, they would be unlikely to find any theaters in which to show it. They were reluctant to cancel their contract with Preminger, however, because to do so would seriously tarnish the image they had been working to build of United Artists as a place uniquely welcoming to independent producers. They hesitated, but by the end of January, allotting Preminger a modest $250,000 budget, they decided to go ahead: Otto could film his comedy exactly as he wanted. After deleting a clause from Preminger’s contract that “required delivery of a Code-approved” product, they negotiated a production loan from the Chemical Bank of New York and thereby, as Leff and Simmons reported, “committed UA to a frontal assault on Joseph L. Breen.”36
Otto moved quickly. He assembled his small cast and began three weeks of rehearsals. With his two male leads, Preminger was home free. David Niven had exactly the right touch. He tickled his lines as if delivering bons mots in a Noël Coward drawing room and raised his eyebrows at an expressive slant that suggested civilized wickedness. Not only was Niven tough enough to weather any Preminger assaults, in a way he even welcomed them. “Many actors don’t like working with Otto because he shouts even louder than Goldwyn [to whom Niven had been under contract] and can be very sarcastic. I love it. Actors have a certain amount of donkey blood in them and need a carrot dangled in front of them from time to time. The directors I dread are the ones who say, ‘You’ve played this sort of thing before—do anything you want.’ Otto dangles carrots.”37 William Holden was a little too solemn for the material and didn’t seem to be having as much fun as Niven. Nonetheless Holden had an intuitive sense of how little the camera needs—to Preminger’s delight, his star seemed incapable of overacting. Maggie McNamara, however, provoked a few Preminger tantrums. Although she had played the role in Chicago and then in New York (“I know she had trouble during the New York run,” Biff McGuire recalled),38 she was a jittery newcomer with a fragile ego (McNamara was to commit suicide in 1978). When, unlike her costars, she was unable to give him what he wanted on the first take, Otto would roar that her flubs were costing him time and money. McNamara brought out both the best and the worst aspects of the director’s temperament. As with all of his young discoveries in the future—the performers he would pluck from obscurity because he believed he could develop them into screen stars—Otto was alternately cranky and caring. After one of his flare-ups, which would pulverize his protégée, he would shower her with reassurance. He knew that McNamara, pert and appropriately dignified, indeed “virginal,” had the right qualities for the role, and like everyone in the company, he genuinely liked her. “Maggie was dear and sweet,” as Biff McG
uire said, “but she wanted desperately to be an intellectual—to be someone other than who she was.”39
Preminger shot the film in twenty-one days, an impressive achievement considering the fact that he also filmed a German-language version on the same sets in the same time frame, getting two films for the price of one. For
With his insecure young discovery, Maggie McNamara, on the set of The Moon Is Blue.
the German version, called Die Jungfrau auf dem Dach (The Virgin on the Roof), Preminger cast Hardy Krüger and Johanna Matz, both with major careers in German theater and films. “When the American actors would leave the set, we would go in and do the same,” Matz recalled.
I had to do exactly like Maggie, which was hard, but she was very nice. It was very quick and very disciplined work. Not everybody likes this kind of work—it was unique. But I liked to do it. Otto was a little bit nervous—we worked so fast. He was sometimes a little bit loud, but Germans are loud anyway. I like to have “temperament,” and he had it! So what? It was very modern, very simple: he says what he wants and we do it. Only one thing was hard: in German you need more words than in English. So sometimes there were complications.40
By early April Preminger sent a completed film to the Production Code Administration office. He had made a few minor concessions to Breen, but he received exactly the response he wanted: Breen denied certification to The Moon Is Blue because of its “unacceptably light attitude toward seduction, illicit sex, chastity and virginity”41 Fully prepared, Preminger went into attack mode, writing a letter of defense in which he claimed that his film was highly moral. “Our picture … is a harmless story of a very virtuous girl, who works for her living, who neither smokes nor drinks, who is completely honest and outspoken, who resists temptation and whose one aim in life is to get married and have children… . There are no scenes of passion … no scenes of crime or vice.”42 Breen was immovable. As a last resort Preminger and United Artists decided to appeal his decision to the board of the Motion Picture Association in New York. The lawyer representing the Production Code Administration office argued that The Moon Is Blue would be “highly offensive to many parents to whom virginity of their daughters is still a matter of greatest concern, and who do not consider this a matter to be laughed at.”43 Headed by Nicholas Schenck, the president of Loew’s and the brother of Otto’s original American mentor, Joe Schenck, the Motion Picture Association upheld Breen’s condemnation. Nicholas Schenck maintained that he wouldn’t “let [his] daughter see it. It’s true that the girl is not seduced in the time she spends with the boy, but other girls in a similar situation might get closer to the flame.”44
For Preminger and United Artists, the moment of reckoning had arrived. Had they been bluffing all along? Had their defiance been an act of bravado that would now crumble? Would they—indeed, could they— release The Moon Is Blue without a Production Code Administration Seal of Approval? Many industry pundits predicted that no major theater chains would book the film. But working arm in arm with United Artists, Preminger persevered and in a short time secured a few key theaters in Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, Preminger was fortunate in booking the Four Star, a sedate house on Wilshire Boulevard in the then fashionable Miracle Mile district. The theater had a distinguished history and only recently had presented a lengthy, reserved-seat engagement of MGM’s Julius Caesar. An exclusive booking at this location would give Preminger’s film a touch of class.
When Otto saw the ad that the studio’s publicity department had designed—a half-nude young woman gazing up at the moon—he was apoplectic. “The ad suggested] that the movie after all was pornographic,” he maintained.45 In another decision that was to have historic reverberations, he hired a New York graphic designer, Saul Bass, to prepare a new ad. Preminger and Bass set to work under terrific time pressure. “We were like Samurai warriors, and always going up in smoke,” as Bass recalled.
Oh, the screaming, and we threw things. He really taught me how to fight. Otto, you see, liked to fight. It was half-serious and half ritual; he was tough, autocratic, he jealously guarded his prerogatives: he was the boss. But there was also such generosity of spirit, and he was so accessible—it was always so easy to get an appointment. He was the best client I ever had—and the most difficult. He brought out the best in me and at times I really wanted to throttle him. He was very critical, very difficult to satisfy, but what I discovered is that with all the conflict and the yelling the work was better at the end than at the beginning. And that was a powerful realization. Ours was a richly volatile relationship. Eventually, I learned to love the guy46
Although Bass judged his first important work with Preminger to be the ad he designed in 1955 for The Man with the Golden Arm, his whimsical design for The Moon Is Blue— a drawing of two pigeons perched on a win-dowsill—is also noteworthy. “Suggestive” in the mildest way—no one could possibly have read the design as “pornographic”—it evoked the film’s light tone. And in focusing on one image it represented an entirely new approach to film advertising. “Otto and I made a commitment to one central idea to promote a film, rather than the potpourri stew notion that was customary at the time, in which you threw everything into the advertisement on the theory that there will be something in it for everyone.”47
Long before it opened on June 3, 1953, The Moon Is Blue was a cause célèbre. For weeks prior to the premiere, Preminger held dozens of press conferences during which he defended his film’s morality while deriding Breen’s “hypocritical interpretation of an antiquated Code.” “Nobody’s character can possibly be corrupted by this harmless little comedy,” Otto asserted repeatedly. “Why did nobody object to the play when it ran in theatres across the country?”48 Indeed, the whole point of the piece is that nothing sexual happens. A young professional man picks up a perky young actress and takes her home, where they talk and flirt and make plans for a cozy dinner. When she meets her new beau’s dashing upstairs neighbor, the young woman flirts with him, chattering gaily about her virginity. In the end, after all the palaver about seduction, and with the young woman’s chastity undefiled, a once-in-a-blue-moon event occurs: a pickup blossoms into romance, and the bachelor and his date decide to get married.
Preminger opened the discussion to concerns that went far beyond his “little comedy.” He contended that his refusal to cut any “offending” words from the film was not because he believed the excisions would inflict irreparable damage but because he was opposed to censorship. “It is an evil institution, and if we give in to it on small matters this is the first step toward the kind of totalitarian government that destroyed my country, Austria,” he thundered with impressive conviction.49
“A middling and harmless little thing, speciously risqué,” opined Bosley Crowther in the New York Times on June 3, setting the terms in which the film was received. “The film is not outstanding as a romance or as film,” he noted, adding that “at times it gets awfully tedious and the talk is exceedingly long.” “There are bubbles in this film but champagne is mixed with baser stuff in about 50-50 proportions,” Otis Guernsey commented in the New York Herald Tribune. “The action has little more area than it did on the stage, but mostly Preminger has filmed the script as a photographed play The farce is so fragile, so pleasantly evanescent, that it might not have stood the strain of ordinary movie emphasis.”
But as Preminger had hoped, the reviews didn’t matter. Opening business was brisk, and when the Legion of Decency, always working hand in glove with the Production Code Administration office, gave the film a C rating, calling it “an occasion of sin, sophisticated smut,” it got even brisker. “I didn’t negotiate with the Catholic Legion of Decency,” Preminger said. “If they wanted to instruct Catholics not to see the film, fine. They had every right to do so. But I am not Catholic and they could not tell me what to take out of my picture.”50 State censorship boards joined in the attack. Three states—Ohio, Maryland, and Kansas—banned it outright. Preminger and United Ar
tists took the case to a Maryland court. On December 7, 1953, Judge Herman Moser, describing the film as “a light comedy telling a tale of wide-eyed, brash, puppy-like innocence routing or converting to its side the forces of evil it encounters,” reversed the State Censor Board, ordering it to grant a license to the film.51 The Supreme Court of Kansas, however, unanimously upheld the decision of the state board of review to ban the film. Refusing to be silenced, Preminger and United Artists, at considerable cost, took their case before the United States Supreme Court—and won. On October 24, 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the finding of the Supreme Court of Kansas.
In early July, after the film had broken box-office records at the Four Star in Los Angeles and in the other, carefully selected houses in the tryout cities, three theater chains, United Paramount, Stanley Warner, and National Theatres (by now divorced from the studios that had originally owned them), made the momentous decision to book The Moon Is Blue. By July 15 the film that had opened without the industry’s Seal of Approval was playing in two thousand large theaters across the country and was on its way to grossing $3.5 million, a considerable sum at the time. Preminger, Hugh Herbert, William Holden, and United Artists made a substantial amount of money.
“ The Moon Is Blue sounded the death rattle of the Legion of Decency and the Production Code,” conclude Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons in their history of Hollywood censorship.52 Joe Breen’s battle with Preminger was the censorship czar’s “last great orchestral flourish,” as Breen’s lieutenant Jack Vizzard commented.53 Not surprisingly, on the eve of his downfall Breen was awarded an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony on March 25, 1954. (That night, The Moon Is Blue was nominated for three awards, including a best actress nod for Maggie McNamara.) On October 15, 1954, Geoffrey Shurlock succeeded Breen. On June 28, 1961, Shurlock personally issued a Certificate of Approval to The Moon Is Blue, and at that point United Artists rejoined the Motion Picture Association. The Production Code Administration operated with diminished impact, a situation Shurlock himself approved of, until November 1,1968, when a system of classification replaced it and the former enforcers of the Code became the honchos of the Code and Rating Administration.
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