Abstract

"The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and Indirect Lobbying in an Entertainment Industry Trade Association, 1922-1945"

Paul Monticone, Rowan University (monticone@rowan.edu)

Shortly after their emergence as the major forces in the film industry, Hollywood studios recruited Postmaster Will H. Hays to found the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America (MPPDA). Under its so-called “czar,” the “Hays Office” guided Hollywood through star scandals and imposed content regulation in order to subdue reformers and stave off government censorship. But the MPPDA was both more than a morals office and its leader less than a czar.
As a full-service trade association, the MPPDA oversaw a broad array of cooperative activities supported by a budget and staff that, by the 1930s, exceeded virtually every other such association in the U.S. This “supercolossal lobby” attracted the attention of disenchanted New Dealer Raymond Moley, for whom it was an exemplar of industrial self-regulation. Hays himself, however, was not the industry czar of such popular accounts but the manager of an organization that expressed the fleeting cooperative impulses of Hollywood’s competitive “moguls.” As such, Hays’s MPPDA frequently encountered the indifference, skepticism, and resistance of its member firms, particularly with respect to long-range public relations.
Business historians studying the development of public relations and indirect lobbying have often focused on major firms (e.g. GM and AT&T (Marchand)) and peak associations (e.g. National Association of Manufacturers (Tedlow, Waterhouse)). This paper uses the example of the entertainment industry’s cooperative public relations to explore the shifting relationship between an industry trade association and its member firms in the midst of changes within an industry and the broader political economy. From its 1922 founding to its 1945 reorganization, the MPPDA was buffeted by economic crises, shifts in the regulatory environment, the passing of member firms from self-made entrepreneurs to more conventional businessmen, and the emergence of new forces within the industry, prominent independent producers.