Screenwriting Advice From The Past: Writing for the Censors [Part 3]

“You must be twice as careful as writers in any other field or your story will surely be returned to you with a rejection slip.”

If you are a screenwriter, you should know about Anita Loos. Loos was one of the most influential writers in the early stages of American cinema, associated with 136 film projects per IMDB.

Married to writer John Emerson, the pair wrote one of the first books on screenwriting in 1920: “How to Write Photoplays”. I have been running a weekly series based on the book. You can access those posts here. Today: Writing for the censors [P. 87]:

Above all remember that the photoplay is the only form of art which is subject to a board of censors. Just because a novelist introduces spicy scenes in his story or a Broadway farce dwells upon the forbidden, don’t think you can get away with it on the screen.

You must be twice as careful as writers in any other field or your story will surely be returned to you with a rejection slip.

Of course since the 40s, we have had censorship for TV programming, handled by each of the broadcast networks, a much tighter rein than even movies largely because network licenses are granted by the government and controlled by the Federal Communications Commission.

The fact is while writers today may not have as stringent of censorship policies as existed in the 20's-50s, we invariably run up against issues: profanity, nudity, violence, drug use, smoking, and so forth. If you write an R-rated spec script and the buyer insists on a PG-13 movie to reach as wide of an audience as possible, you will be thrust into a situation where you are dealing with ‘censorship.’ And that threshold can be pretty low with [generally] the use of three F-words resulting in an R-rating.

So while we may think that censorship in movies is a thing of the past, the reality says otherwise.

You can read “How to Write Photoplays” via Google books online here.

To read my entire series of posts on highlighting takeaways from the book, go here.

Next week, more screenwriting advice from a century ago.