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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Lisa See Endowment Fund in Southern California History and Culture of the University of California Press Foundation.
The Rise of Early Hollywood
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That much, and little more, can be said with certainty about the circumstances from which the “ ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle Scandal” arose. What happened after Rappe’s death has interested many for decades, creating a powerful origins text about Hollywood that journalists, novelists, television writers, and popular historians alike return to again and again to convey how the movie colony’s licentious spirit combined with the venality of its producers to create its unrivaled moral hypocrisy. After the first jury deadlocked, the largest picture producers banded together in a new industry group, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA, or Hays Office) and hired William Hays as president. Will Hays was everything that the mostly immigrant, Jewish producers in the MPPDA were not: a native Midwesterner, a Presbyterian elder, and a leading Republican and Washington insider who became postmaster general after orchestrating Warren Harding’s successful 1920 presidential bid.35 Arbuckle’s second jury also deadlocked. The third jury acquitted the star, issuing an apology to Arbuckle in the press. Nonetheless, in his first public act, Hays shelved all of Arbuckle’s films and banned him from the screen. Scholars have mostly located the scandal’s significance in the way Hays’s act symbolized the rise of an internal system of regulation that controlled the images made by and about Hollywood. This emphasis follows Robert Sklar’s pioneering cultural history, Movie-Made America (1975). Others have looked to Richard deCordova’s work on the emergence of the star system, which emphasizes the scandal’s precipitation of a shift in the discourse about Hollywood. Before the scandal, deCordova argues, publicity about the spotless domesticity and fabulous consumptive patterns of stars established the respectability of the movies and their personalities. After the Arbuckle trials, attention focused on exposing the private lives of residents to public view, making the topic of Hollywood’s moral impact on fans a subject of social controversy. Yet such accounts fail to explain what made the scandal so scandalous in its day.36
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