Hollywood photographer Whitey Schafer made it in 1940 to satirise the Hays Code — the censorship regime that had descended on American cinema like an unwanted guest. A reactionary minority had decided that ordinary Americans were too fragile to witness certain things on a movie screen. Schafer picked ten of those forbidden elements and squeezed them into a single frame: law defeated, inside of thigh, lace lingerie, dead man, narcotics, drinking, exposed bosom, gambling, pointing gun, Tommy gun. The machine gun he composited in. Everything else he appears to have simply staged.
He unveiled the photograph at the inaugural Hollywood Studios Still Show in 1941 — an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences event celebrating outstanding still photography. The response was a threatened $2,000 fine. He escaped the penalty, but the image was banned. It resurfaced in a newspaper decades later, posthumously; Schafer died in 1951.
The photograph is from 1940. It is not a document of the Code’s arrival. It is a provocation made by someone who had lived under it for years.
We don’t know who the model is. That information seems to be lost.
Old, sad, mad at the world!
Not giving up!
Neither was he.
Image: “Thou Shalt Not” by Whitey Schafer, 1940. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Public domain via Picryl. Historical detail via Pulp International.
