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The First 'American' State  ** Ohio Goes to the Movies   In Your Head

October 2001

Ohio Goes to the Movies

In 1913, following the lead of Pennsylvania, Ohio became the second state to institute a board of film censors. All movies booked for exhibition in Ohio had to be reviewed by the state "Industrial Commission" -- at the distributor's expense.

When a film distributor sought an injunction against the Ohio censorship board, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. While all nine Justices found the censors in violation of due process, their ruling in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915) reassured bluenoses in Ohio and across the U.S. that movies had no constitutional protection. On behalf of the court, Justice McKenna wrote that "the exhibition of moving pictures is business pure and simple... not to be regarded as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion...."

Ohio's moral watchdogs remained in operation. By the early 1930s, state censorship boards had been upstaged by the efforts of pressure groups like the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency, which pursued its goals through boycotts, blacklisting, and intimidation. Martin Quigley, the Catholic publisher who in 1930 instituted the Hollywood Production Code, was a native of Cleveland. Quigley maintained close ties to John T. McNicholas, the Irish-born Archbishop of Cincinnati, who in 1934 was researching the identities of mortgage holders of Ohio movie palaces, apparently prepared to enforce propriety through blackmail.

Curiously, Ohio's 1933 banning of Fritz Lang's film M, in which Peter Lorre played a serial child murderer, was reversed by the Supreme Court. But the high court's dismissal of film as "business pure and simple" set the tone for censors' attitudes toward motion pictures nationwide until 1952, when the court ruled in Burstyn v. Wilson that Roberto Rosellini's short film The Miracle -- and all other films -- were protected, after all, by the First Amendment.

This made a limited impression on Ohio censors. In 1954 Howard Hughes sued the Ohio board when it tried to ban The French Line, a vapid musical whose principal asset was its 3-D display of Jane Russell's breasts. The result was that Ohio's censorship law was struck down by the state Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, in 1959, when Louis Malle's The Lovers opened in Cleveland, theater manager Nico Jacobellis was arrested. (The offending scenes belonged to an arty, Brahms-drenched, 20-minute lovemaking passage.) After Jacobellis was convicted, his employer pursued an appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. Jacobellis v. Ohio is remembered for Justice Potter Stewart's famous observation about hard-core pornography -- "I know it when I see it." The case's significance, however, lies in Justice William Brennan's statement on behalf of the majority that "material dealing with sex in a way that advocates ideas... may not be branded obscenity."

But by 1994, when a video edition of Pasolini's Salo was confiscated by police at Cincinnati's Pink Pyramid bookstore, few Ohio law enforcement personnel had any memory of that pronouncement. By 2001, when a sexually explicit vignette was censored out of Wayne Wang's The Center of the World by the management of an Ohio art house, scarcely anyone else remembered it, either.