LizzieMaine
Bartender
- Messages
- 33,715
- Location
- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
Carlisle Blues said:Because the public did not want them. Further, after the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1915 (Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio) that motion pictures were merely a business and not an art form, and thus not covered by the First Amendment, such ordinances banning the public exhibition of "immoral" films proliferated.
This was back in the days when the United States thought themselves to be puritanical and babies were born in a cabbage patch.
Well, to be perfectly fair, the vast majority of films that have been made since the industry began have been "art" only in the sense that a velvet Elvis is art: looked at dispassionately, the Court could have reached no other ruling in considering an industry where the vast majority of product was ground out according to production-line formulas to meet public demand. There was no other model but industrial manufacture for them to go by.