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This book chronicles for the first time the long and varied efforts of American Protestants—from Presbyterians and Episcopalians to fundamentalists and evangelicals—to influence the film industry. Representing the reigning religious and cultural establishment at the dawn of the cinema, Protestants struggled to formulate a constructive approach to Hollywood, which was a crucial site where non-Protestant and non-Christian players gained a new voice in the public arena. Drawing on personal interviews and previously untouched archival sources, this interdisciplinary study describes how mainline church leaders lobbied filmmakers to promote the nation’s moral health and, perhaps surprisingly, how they have by and large opposed government censorship, preferring instead self-regulation by both the industry and individual conscience. Tensions with Catholics, too, loomed large—many Protestant clergy feared the influence of the Legion of Decency more than Hollywood’s corrupting power. The rise of the evangelical movement in the 1970s radically altered the picture in contradictory ways. Even as born-again clergy denounced “Hollywood elites,” major studios began exploiting the emergence of a lucrative evangelical market. This book presents an original historical exploration that provides a corrective to the overemphasis on Catholic influence and makes a compelling case for a reassessment of the role that Protestants played in film regulation throughout the last century.

[...]acquiring \"personality\" replaced \"character\" formation, which was central to the Protestant worldview. Movies, the \"first art child of democracy,\" defied conventional notions of \"high\" art and presented a fundamental challenge to Protestant culture.4 Even if they were not always frequent moviegoers themselves, Protestant leaders were quick to recognize movies as a vital agent of enculturation and wanted them to work in harmony with home, school, and church to promote a truly healthy Americanism. In his drive for film freedom, Hays was unable to manage the crucial conflict between the film industry's interest in profit margins and the church's concern to protect civil liberties and the public welfare. The right of government to regulate business in the public interest was a basic tenet of the Progressive Era. [...]as legal scholar Mark A. Graber observes, federal and state censorship was considered constitutional based on the premise that \"government could regulate any form of economic or speech behavior that might adversely affect the public welfare.\"

This study is a close examination of The Nun's Story (Fred Zinnemann, 1959) and The Sins of Rachel Cade (Gordon Douglas, 1961), two Warner Bros, productions adapted, respectively, from a Catholic- and a Protestant-themed bestseller. The novels' similarity in subject and setting is as striking as the differences in their manner of production. Utilizing archival research, this analysis reveals Production Code Administration negotiations with producers and religious officials to be a crucible of concerns about aesthetics, religion, and market access, while also highlighting religious principles and crucial differences in Catholic and Protestant approaches to movie regulation when the Production Code era was showing its first signs of decline.

The phenomenon of film/record fusing is discussed in terms of its historical background. Conventional music industry wisdom prevented a total fusion of film and lp records until the Beatles reformed the lp into a conceptual whole, this fusion was underutilized. Later successes of film/record mergers such as the Bee Gees' \"Saturday Night Fever,\" shattered earlier records for sales.

The films are organized into four categories (the first three of which are adapted from the work of Frederick Buechner). \"Darkness Visible\" discusses three tales of darkness-the Godfather saga, Chinatown and The Deer Hunter. \"Light Shines in the Darkness\" is about Christian grace in Tender Mercies, Places in the Heart, The Mission and Babette's Feast. \"Fables of Light\" treats as contemporary fairy tales the Star Wars series, Superman and three Steven Spielberg films about...