Scene: Burbank, California, January, 1944.

    Producer Jerry Wald is adapting the James M. Cain novel Mildred Pierce for Warner Brothers Pictures. Published in 1941 Mildred Pierce is a quintessential Southern California story about a working class woman who stops at nothing to please an ungrateful daughter—first by building a restaurant empire and finally by marrying a man she doesn’t love. It’s a sordid drama full of infidelity, ruthless social climbing, rotten business deals, and ultimately, murder.
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    Before Wald can proceed he needs the cooperation and approval of the Production Code Administration. The Production Code was administered by the Motion

​Picture Producer’s & Distributors of America, Hollywood’s own in-house censorship board. Joseph Breen, a Catholic layman, served as principal enforcer of the Code from its inception in 1934 until his retirement in 1954. During the heyday of the Code Breen had unprecedented control over what could be depicted in American movies.

 

    The Production Code identified eleven topics that were never to be depicted onscreen including “white slavery,” “miscegenation,” “sex perversion,” and “ridicule of the clergy.” Additionally there were twenty-five further stipulations to the Code about acceptable screen content. The lists were nicknamed the “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls.”

​Adapting a Classic