Film Censorship in America: A State-by-State History

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Digital media delivers movies, music, and archives of information to our fingertips but not long ago morality police controlled content. This book focuses on the flamboyant state censors who tried to tame media and the filmmaking mavericks as they challenged the system. Forbidden films, banned b-movies, and European art house pictures are not just entertainment-they paved the way for greater free expression in America.

In this state-by-state guide to battles over banned films, colorful characters come to life. Readers will discover the handlebar mustachioed, iron willed Major Metallus Lucullus Cicero Funkhouser, censor of Chicago, Lloyd T. Binford, the backwoods race-bating Memphis regulator, and Myrtelle Snell, the Alabama authority who popularized the slogan Banned in Birmingham. On the other side are filmmakers who pushed the limits: including Robert Rodriguez who fought the Texas Film Commission over Machete Kills (2013), Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool (2016), charged with obscenity in Utah, and documentarians like Josh Fox and Frederick Wiseman, who clashed against whistleblower laws across the nation. These personalities, both familiar and newly rediscovered, tell an exciting story of the history of movies and the battle for free speech.