Anyone who has seen Damien Chazelle’s recent epic Babylon will have been reminded that once upon a time, in its earliest days, Hollywood was a much racier place on and off screen than you may think.  

To bring the moral corruption of Tinsel Town under control, the president of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America, William H Hays, introduced a code that became known as the Hays Code, and which sought to regulate the portrayal of sex, violence, profanity and other morally dubious actions in the movies, by essentially deciding what was acceptable and forcing films, which wished to get certification for distribution to adhere to its rules...

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