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132 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
did not have an airtight alibi was hounded by either the district attorney's office or the newspaper reporters. There were plenty of stellar names in the cast of that drama; Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter headed the list. The murder, which was never solved, involved such sensational angles as dope peddling and the ownership of intimate feminine garments that were found in the murdered man's apartment. Twelve days later Will Hays took over the job of improving the public relations of the motion-picture industry— and not a moment too soon.
The organization that Hays headed is now called the Motion Picture Association of America, but it has seldom been spoken of in Hollywood as anything but the Hays Office, though now it is sometimes called the Johnston Office, after Eric Johnston, who succeeded Mr. Hays in the job of Czar. Mr. Hays's first accomplishment after he became Czar was to stop the rising tide of censorship in over thirty states as well as in Congress. After that the producers settled back with a sigh of relief and went right on making the same sort of pictures they had been making before the trouble started.
Naturally, Hollywood continued to be the target of reformers, moralists, and religious groups despite Will Hays's efforts as a front man to whitewash the industry. It was not until 1924 that he convinced the movie makers that the only way they could prevent serious censorship from outside the industry was to censor their own product. The producers then adopted a sort of gentlemen's agreement that they would not purchase or produce stories that did not meet with the " highest possible moral and artistic standards."
The trouble with this agreement was that gentlemen seldom agree on what constitutes the "highest moral and artistic standards," even outside Hollywood. Three years later, after continuous and expensive censorship troubles, the gentlemen met again and agreed to a list of "don'ts" that were supposed to keep pictures cleaned up. But there was still no power of enforcement in this agreement, so inevitably the "don'ts" crept back into pictures.