Were movies better off under the studio system and the Hays Code?

If studios stick on the original script and not decide on what should be in a movie and what should be cut...there will be more movies with good stories...but the explosions and nudity are making money,not the story.

Hays?

We shouldn't be too quick in attributing the quality of old hollywood filmmaking to restrictive codes... there were other factors...

For example, under the old studio system, directors got to do a LOT of movies and thus became very masters of their work... Compare that with current filmmakers and you can see that it's only those who have been working for several decades who are at that level of command of filmmaking... Most directors only make a handful of movies, if that.. If it wasn't for cinematographers and the rest of the crew being so competant we'd really notice it...

Still, there are alternatives to today's very corporate way of making movies... The "New Hollywood" period of filmmaking that gave us Coppolla, Scorsese, Cimino, etc... Directors were able to be artists and take control of their fate and make very personal movies, but with scale.. The whole United Artists period and such... Then UA was taken over by the suits after Heavan's Gate's failure and the rise of Blockbusters like Jaws and child focused merchandise movies like Star Wars...

Also, we had the period in the 90s with the boom in the medium budget independent movies and production houses that gave us quality genre movies and dramas made with an adult audience in mind... Se7en, Pulp Fiction, etc... came out of this... it influenced movies in the early 2000s like Magnolia, Momento and other quality filmmaking... A lot of the better current filmmakers made their mark and got their experience in that period... Paul Thomas Anderson, Fincher, Aronofsky, etc... But that period ended gradually as the big studios/corporates bought up the smaller houses and made fewer of these mid-budget $50-80MM genre movies and dramas, by trying to turn them into $100MM+ blockbusters with mas appeal or scrapping them altogether... At the same time the adult minded audience lost the habit of going to see these movies in the theatre due to fewer of them being made and the rise of torrenting...

We'll see what's next.

No.

Thanks for doing this thread, though.

No I don't think so. Film makers should have freedom. There's still film makers out there that know how to use subtlety effectively.