Written under the supervision of doc. Mgr. Ondřej Pilný, Ph.D., and submitted on 14 January 2013, this essay was part of my total coursework at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. The essay is published with the kind permission of the faculty.

Who‘s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and American Film Censorship

Film censorship is nearly as old as film itself. In theory, censorship as such may be viewed as a device of social control, a process by which a society – or even a mere sub-group within this society – seeks to limit the expression of information and opinion which run counter to its standards or wishes (Elkin, 71). Since attitudes toward censorship are invariably linked with attitudes toward morality and social change it comes as no surprise that the social function of censorship is to defend this sort of established morality and thereby to inhibit and frustrate the rhythm of change (Wirt, 26-7). In terms of the film industry, such regulation is quite understandable for over the past couple of decades cinema has become one of the most influential of all medias, and so in the case of cinema the stakes seem to be very high. The problem is that it cannot last for very long. As the society develops and changes, as it grows, it will become aware of the reactionary character of censorship and it will begin to fight against it. As Frederick M. Wirt puts it: „Historically, censorship has never worked, except in short-run terms. […] The historical inefficacy of censorship in suppressing expression reflects its larger weakness – it cannot suppress social change“ (Wirt, 26).

The 1966 American movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, based on the play by Edward Albee, is generally discussed in terms of the cinematic qualities of the piece, Elizabeth Taylor’s and Richard Burton’s superb acting and, even more importantly, the movie’s impact on the workings and influence of film censorship in America. For instance, Leonard J. Leff presents the movie as a groundbreaking achievement for playing a pivotal role in defining the philosophy, structure, and operation of the major censorship agencies of the time (Leff, 41). He argues that „because of its explicit language, if not its theme, many assumed that the play could not be adapted for film,“ but it was and in doing so the filmmakers managed to dispatch „a whole era of film censorship“ (Leff, 42). This essay will discuss the operation of film censorship in Hollywood and its impact on adapting Albee’s play for the movie screen. It will scrutinize the changes and omissions to which the text of the play was – or was not – subjected, and consequently ponder over the question of whether the film was truly as groundbreaking as critics seem to suggest.

Before we even initiate our discussion of censorship and its effects on the text of the play, a special kind of omissions and changes ought to be addressed that appear in the script of the film but do not have anything in common with censorship. Firstly, a good deal of more or less innocuous phrases and sentences are left out most probably in order to ease the flow of dialogue and reduce the running time of the film. Such is the case, for example, in the following dialogue in which the parts in italics do not appear in the film:

HONEY: Oh, wasn’t that funny? That was so funny…

NICK [snapping to]: Yes… yes, it was.

MARTHA: I thought I’d bust a gut; I really did… I really thought I’d bust a gut laughing. George didn’t like it… George didn’t think it was funny at all…

GEORGE: Lord, Martha, do we have to go through this again?

MARTHA: I’m trying to shame you into a sense of humour, angel, that’s all.

GEORGE [over-patiently, to HONEY and NICK]: Martha didn’t think I laughed loud enough. Martha thinks that unless… as she demurely puts it… that unless you „bust a gut“ you aren’t amused. (Albee, 22)

Secondly, comparing the text of the play with the movie script, one immediately notices that not only nearly all references to and jokes about the age of George and Martha are missing, but also the length of their marriage and the age of their – for the lack of better expression – son are rarely mentioned. At one point in the first act, as Honey and Martha return from upstairs after changing, Honey even states that the son is supposed to be only sixteen that day, not twenty-one as he is in the play – the line, „Twenty-one… twenty-one tomorrow… tomorrow’s his birthday“ (33), is replaced in the film with, „Tomorrow he’ll be sixteen“ (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). The reason for all these alterations is at hand: In 1965, the year the principal photography of the film took place, Richard Burton was forty years old and Elizabeth Taylor even only thirty-three. In such a realistically shot film, it would simply not feel right if these young actors were to discuss and make fun of their old age, let alone pretend to have a twenty-one year old child together.

Thirdly and finally, words and references seem to be removed from the text of the play that would confuse the members of the audience who might not know them. Perhaps, this is the best possible explanation for why the short as well as shortly abandoned mention of Parnassus (25) or the following passage in italics were cut from the final version of the script:

MARTHA: He’s a biologist. Good for him. Biology’s even better. It’s less… abstruse.

GEORGE: Abstract.

MARTHA: ABSTRUSE! In the sense of recondite. [Sticks her tongue out at GEORGE] Don’t you tell me words. Biology’s even better. It’s… right at the meat of things. (44)

Even though most omissions in the script appear to be inconspicuous, the play is full of expressions and ideas which could have held within themselves the potential to cause trouble in the nineteen-sixties era of cinematic restrictions. Therefore, it is no wonder that the censors had such a big problem with the film that they didn’t even want to have it released into cinemas. Who are these censors, though, and how did this censorship machine of theirs work?

The birth of censorship in American cinema is dated to the nineteen-thirties when two regulatory agencies were established. The first one of these, founded by the movie moguls themselves, was called Production Code Administration. Will Hayes, a politician from the cabinet of Warren G. Harding, was hired as the spokesperson of the PCA, and it was him who provided the following statement which sheds light on the reasoning behind Hollywood censorship: „The code sets up high standards of performance for motion picture producers. It states the considerations which good taste and community value make necessary in this universal form of entertainment“ (The Celluloid Closet). In spite of the Code not being taken seriously at first, Hollywood’s position on the issue changed rapidly with the coming of the Legion of Decency.

„Founded by the U.S. bishops in 1934, the Legion aimed to elevate the moral tone of Hollywood films [and in order to] help Catholics to discern the harmful from the wholesome, the Legion reviewed and rated films according to its moral standards“ (Klejment, 867). To do so, the clerics used a three-tier scale, marking the films either with the letter A for Acceptable, B for morally oBjectionable, or C for Condemned (The Celluloid Closet).  Their influence was far reaching as their „ambition increasingly was to speak not only for their coreligionists but also for Americans as a whole“ (Couvares, 608). Eventually, „Hollywood promised to play by the rules“ (The Celluloid Closet). For the next three decades Hollywood’s censorship machinery was authorized to change words, personalities, even plots, the only reason for this being the confidence of the censors that:

Our American people are a homely and wholesome crowd. Cockeyed philosophies of life, ugly sex situations, cheap jokes, and dirty dialogue are not wanted. Decent people don’t like this sort of stuff and it is our job to see to it that they get none of it. (The Celluloid Closet)

According to all publications dealing with the issue of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and censorship, the biggest problem the censors had with the script was the heavy use of profanity by the older couple. In demanding the elimination of „over twenty ‚goddamns,‘ seven ‚bastards,‘ five ‚son-of-a-bitch,‘ and assorted anatomical phrases such as ‚right ball,‘ ‚monkey nipples,‘ and ‚ass‘,“ the censors proved their ignorance as to the purpose of all these words in the play. The profanities are used in this piece of drama with a very well though-out intent, which the censors either missed or did not care for, adhering instead to the extremely simplistic formula of „bad words are bad and so we have to get rid of them.“

Let us now briefly take a look at how the profanities work in the play. First of all, the controversial dialogues were necessary to provide George and Martha with proper psychological characterization. While abusive language can normally wound, their „uninhibited diction suggests how desperate their inability to communicate has become“ (Leff, 463). Ruby Cohn argues on this point that their marriage has a sado-masochistic quality, and that their malicious verbal dexterity actually only emphasizes how much they need each other (Cohn, 20). Secondly, Cohn adds, Albee reaches in this play a pinnacle of mastery of American colloquial idiom which would usually be associated with realism (Cohn, 24). Harold Clurman further develops this statement, claiming that the dialogue in the play is a „highly literate and full-bloodied distillation of common American speech“ (Clurman, 77). Finally, the heavy use of obscenities here goes hand in hand with the other overarching themes such as the breakdown of the American family and the death of the American dream. Diana Trilling suggests the following argument:

Although contemporary writing has accustomed us to what would once have been an inconceivable boldness of sexual expression, this explicitness has up to now been largely associated with the conduct of persons of low or no class, chiefly classless bohemians. […] The obscenities of Virginia Woolf are spoken by people of the highest education who are free to move into our most valued and respected posts, and what could be more delightful to a general public that the discovery that this class which is supposed to have our traditional idealism in its keeping is itself anything but ideal? (Trilling, 87)

Clearly, to remove all the profanity, blasphemous ejaculations, and the blunt sexual dialogue would inevitably change the tone of the play and reduce its impact on the audience. Yet, removing everything potentially insulting or immoral was precisely what was asked of the three men in charge of producing the script and making the film – producer-screenwriter Ernest Lehman, known for his smooth film adaptations such as West Side Story, director Mike Nichols, who had great respect for the source material and kept refusing to make any excessive alterations thereof in the script, and studio boss Jack L. Warner, whose job it was to monitor those elements of the script that bore on the film’s commercial value („Play into Film,“ 453) – lest it be denied the PCA seal of approval, which would make it impossible for the film to acquire a nation-wide release. In one of the first versions of the script, Lehman succumbed to the pressure, editing out many words and phrases and producing substitutions for those which were prohibited but at the same time vital for the story – „Hump the Hostess“ thus at first became „Make the Hostess“ and consequently „Hop the Hostess,“ „Goddamn“ and „for Christ’s sake“ were transformed into „gah damn“ and „for cry sake,“ and Martha’s exclamation of „Screw you!“ was rewritten as „Why you dirty lousy [a short pause, as she notices Nick and Honey standing in the door] poodle, do it on his lawn, not mine“ („Play into Film,“ 463). Obviously, such alterations would not work very well in the movie. The director Mike Nichols saw that and, having the last word on the issue, opted for a complete restoration of most of these expressions in the final version of the script („Play into Film,“ 464). It is true that some of the vilest vulgarities did have to be altered or blotted out altogether – Martha’s „Screw you!“ (19) was changed into „God damn you!“ (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) or Nick’s „I’d just better get her off in a corner and mount her like a goddamn dog, eh?“ (72) into „I’d just better get her off into the bushes right away, eh?“ – but most of them remained untouched.

The story which is often narrated to have followed is that of an underdog fighting against a much stronger foe, eventually beating him against all odds and thus bringing the much sought-for relief into the world. In his essay, Leonard J. Leff describes the moviemakers‘ refusal to bow before the censors‘ audacious demands and the PCA retaliating by simply not giving the film the Code Seal, which in the end caused the movie to be locked up in a vault for several months after its completion (Leff, 45). The studio consequently appealed to the censors and asked the Review Board to reconsider their decision, take the movie’s artistic qualities into account, and grant it an exception, which the Board – after much arguing – eventually did. Shortly after the exception for the movie was announced, the Code found itself under fire and after a couple of months it was obvious that its days were over (Leff, 51). Within two years of the premiere of Virginia Woolf, „films became increasingly more outspoken in theme, content, and language“ (Leff, 52). The play itself became a great financial success, and Elizabeth Taylor even received an Academy Award for her performance. It is a great story, ultimately an encouraging tale with a happy end, but it is by no means the whole story.

While most critics focus on what is in the film that the critics unsuccessfully wanted to cut out, no attention is generally paid to what is actually missing in the movie. Once again, scanning the omitted parts, one has to admit that a lot of them were left out either due to time constraints or in order to achieve better fluidity of dialogues. Nevertheless, there also appear thematic patterns in these omissions – phrases, sentences, even whole passages which deal with topics too risky to be mentioned in film. It is questionable, though, whether these passages were edited out due to the external demands of censors or whether they were excluded on the writers and producers‘ own volition, perhaps in the internal act self-censorship. After all, making a movie is an entrepreneurial activity as any other, and the studios‘ intention is to make money. Only the license for Virginia Woolf cost Warner Brothers $500,000 and a lot more money was invested in the production of the picture (Leff, 42). Having hot-button and controversial issues of the time discussed in the movie could have had an alienating effect on the audiences, perhaps making them feel uncomfortable or even enraged, and that would pose a financial risk for the studio. It may therefore not be that surprising to discover that some of the most contentious topics are nowhere to be found in the film.

First of these topics is religion. Juxtaposing the play and the film, we discover that most of the biting or suggestive remarks pertaining to anything associated with religion, even merely by proxy, are not present in the picture. Gone is the ambiguous passage in which Nick says about his father-in-law, „He was not a priest… he was a man of God“ (70), gone is the whole part of the conversation in which Nick possibly implies some sort of insurance scheme by saying about the aforementioned man, „he built three churches, or whatever they were, and two of them burned down… and he ended up pretty rich“ (69), and gone is also George’s later retelling of the same story, „…and he died eventually, Mousie’s pa, and they pried him open, and all sorts of money fell out… Jesus money, Mary money… LOOT“ (87)! Regarding the third example, a note was even preserved – which the head of the studio Jack L. Warner wrote in the margin of the draft of the script after having read it – that says, „Dangerous… Religion“ („Play into Film,“ 464). For the same sense of danger, the one brief exchange between George and Martha about her atheism does not appear in the movie as well. For any film character to admit, „And I was an atheist. [Uncertainly] I still am“ (49), would be completely unthinkable as atheism was – and to a great extent still is – a taboo in American society. Not even George’s attempt to make the statement seem less threatening by saying, „Not an atheist, Martha… a pagan“ (49) appeased the censors (whoever they were) enough to leave the exchange in the script. Martha’s narration of her previous marriage is likewise completely missing from the movie. In the play, she talks to Nick about her mother dying, her admiration for her father, and then she progresses to her life during and after her college studies. To be absolutely precise, she says:

Wellllll, I’d been married… sort of… for a week, my sophomore year at Miss Muff’s Academy for Young Ladies… college. A kind of junior Lady Chatterley arrangement, as it turned out… the marriage. [NICK laughs.] He mowed the laws at Miss Muff’s, sitting up there, all naked, on a big power mower, mowing away. But Daddy and Miss Muff got together and put an end to that… real quick… annulled… which is a laugh… because theoretically you can’t get an annulment if there’s entrance. Ha! Anyway, so I was revirginized […] (52-53)

Perhaps these details about her life prior to having met George would distract the viewers from her current marriage with the man; perhaps it would seem strange to them that a woman so young has already been married twice and is supposed to have a sixteen year old on top of that; or perhaps the very talk of second marriages, forced annulment, and revirginization did not seem kosher enough to the religiously-aware censors or scriptwriters, and financially safe enough for the studio executives.

Partially because of religion, most references to Nick’s occupation were cut out as well. The characters in the film do mention that Nick is employed in the Biology department, working with genes, but they do not discuss this as frequently as in the play, and they certainly never go in any real depth on the issue. For instance, the whole long passage in the first act is lost in which George at first depicts a brighter future wherein „chromosomes can be altered“ (45), „the genetic make-up of a sperm cell changed, reordered“ (45), a future wherein „we will have a race of men… test-tube-bred… incubator-born… superb and sublime“ (45), only to add moments later that „a certain amount of regulation will be necessary… […] A certain number of sperm tubes will have to be cut“ (45), thus assuring „the sterility of the imperfect“ (46). Suffice to say that human genome tests and stem-cell research remain a divisive issue even today with the religious leaders strongly opposing it on religious grounds. To have the characters merely mention it would undoubtedly spark controversy.

Another thematically broad area that is significantly reduced in the film is sexuality. Martha’s seduction of Nick is not only reduced in the film to a couple of glances, a touch, a dance, and a discussion of his athletic body, but she is also not nearly as audacious in what she says in the film as she is in the play. The whole passage in which she attempts to entice Nick by saying, „[W]ho could object to a little friendly kiss? It’s all in the faculty. […] So c’mon… let’s get to know each other a little bit“ (98) is absent. To be fair, this may have been done in order to make her action a bit more nuanced, a little less obvious, and to increase the shock effect of her later attempted infidelity. The omission of her soliloquy dealing with her past infidelities – „I pass my life in crummy, totally pointless infidelities… [laughs ruefully] would-be infidelities. Hump the Hostess? That’s a laugh. A bunch of boozed-up… impotent lunk-heads […]“ (111) – is less excusable, though, as it is an important moment in the development of the character, a moment that makes the audiences understand the character’s past and motivations a little better. However, such off-hand, matter-of-fact talk would go against the stereotype of the happy American family and as such would be unacceptable. Similarly intolerable would probably also be the references to „puntas – you know, South American Ladies of the night“ (71), Nick and Honey´s childhood play at doctor, the „good healthy heterosexual beginning“ (66), and finally also George’s potential emotionality-ergo-femininity-and-homosexuality-conflating gay joke:

NICK [a tight, formal smile]: I’m a… guest. You go right ahead.

GEORGE [mocking appreciation]: Oh… well, thank. Now! That makes me feel all warm and runny inside.

NICK: Well, if you’re going to […] start that kind of stuff again… (64)

All of these passages were cut from the film, most probably in order to make the movie less problematic regarding the viewers‘ morality codes.

Additionally, similar instances are to be found in the script; isolated words, phrases, sentences, and again whole passages which somebody must have thought could have caused too much offence to people. It is arguable, though, to what extent all of these were instances of true censorship whose aim was to protect the innocent, and to what extent they were pre-emptive measures taken by the writers and studio-heads themselves to secure a strong financial performance of the movie in the box office. Let us mention at least some of them so that we have an idea of what was deemed too risky to be featured in a movie dialogue. Among the missing parts are the following:

– George’s story of the late professor of Latin and Elocution, which may have been overly dark in its humor to be featured in the film: GEORGE: He was buried, as many of us have been, and as many more of us will be, under the shrubbery around the chapel. It is said… and I have no reason to doubt it… that we make excellent fertilizer. (31)

– George and Nick’s remarks about the puzzling nature of women which could have made the filmmakers vulnerable to accusations of sexism, even though it would not be their fault as the couple of lines are already present in the play:

GEORGE: What do you think they really talk about… or don’t you care?

NICK: Themselves, I would imagine. […]

GEORGE: Do you find women… puzzling?

NICK: Well… yes and no.

GEORGE [with a knowing nod]: Unh-hunh. (32)

– George’s remark about Martha passing out or throwing up „or something“ (18) in front of their guests after having consumed an un-lady-like amount of alcohol, his illuminating talk of Martha’s „crystallized“ (21-22) tastes in drinks, his description of her as having „a tiny problem with spirituous liquors“ (131), and finally also the amusing discussion on the effects of alcohol and its high consumption in America and various other parts of the world:

NICK: Everybody drinks a lot here in the East. [Thinks about it.] Everybody drinks a lot in the middle-west, too.

GEORGE: We drink a great deal in this country, and I suspect we’ll be drinking a great deal more, too… if we survive. […] We should live on Crete, or something.

NICK [sarcastically… as if killing a joke]: And that, of course, would make us cretins. (67)

– All mentions of WW2, for instance:

GEORGE: I did run the History Department, for four years, during the war, but that was because everybody was away. Then… everybody came back… because nobody got killed. That’s New England for you. Isn’t that amazing? Not one single man in this whole place got his head shot off. That’s pretty irrational. (30)

– The one brief mention of Prohibition: GEORGE: […] this was during the Great Experiment, or Prohibition, as it is more frequently called, and it was a bad time for the liquor lobby, but a fine time for the crooks and the cops […] (61)

– The country of origin of George’s fake gun – the line from the play, „No fake Jap gun for you, eh?“ (43) looses the word „Jap“ in the film.

– All mentions of Pigmies and „pigmy hunting“ (91).

– Probably due to the Cold War also everything leading up to the reference to „Moscow U.“ (31). Interestingly enough, even though this may be a bit of a stretch, the Cold War animosity towards anything politically leftist may have been the reason for the replacement of Albee’s line „NICK: Where’s the john? GEORGE: Through the hall there… and down to your left“ (42, italics are mine) with „GEORGE: It’s down the hall and to the right“ (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) in the movie.

Including this exhaustive list of bits and pieces missing from the picture is to prove a point. Even though Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is so often and so gladly presented as a milestone of a film, a groundbreaking cinematic achievement which proved that „almost anything can be said in a movie“ (Chan), it is necessary to realize that for every „bastard“ which made the final cut there are many words, sentences, ideas which did not. It is all rather understandable, though. Even if the censors let the apparently corrosive allusions slip into the film, the studio itself may not have wanted them there for fear that they might alienate the audiences and decrease the film’s box office. In spite of so many references not appearing in the film, Virginia Woolf is still a masterpiece which single-handedly accomplished to bring considerable freedom of artistic expression to Hollywood. Censors may delete many fragments but they rarely ban whole films, and generally do not interfere with the overarching themes in films (Wirt, 30). In Virginia Woolf the main themes were left untouched and so losing some words or passages, while certainly a shame, is but a small price for such quality cinema.

Bibliography:

Primary Materials:

Albee, Edward. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. London: Cox & Wyman, 1962.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Dir. Mike Nichols. Screenplay Ernest Lehman. Music Alex        North. Perf. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1966.

 

Secondary Sources:

Bigsby, C. W. E., ed. Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays. New Jersey: A Spectrum Book, 1975.

Chan, Andrew. „Film Notes: ‚Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?‘.“ New York State Writers Institute. 13 Jan. 2013. 13 Jan. 2013.                            <http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/filmnotes/fnf01n2.html>

Cohn, Ruby. Edward Albee. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1969.

Couvares, Francis G. „Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Trying to Censor the Movies Before the Production Code.“ American Quarterly 44.4 (1992): 584-616.

Elkin, Frederick. „Censorship and Pressure Groups.“ Phylon 21.1 (1960): 71-80.

Johnson, William. „Hollywood 1965.“ Film Quarterly 19.1 (1965): 39-51.

Klejment, Anne. „Review: Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry by Frank Walsh.“ Church History 66.4 (1997): 867-868.

Leff, Leonard J. „A Test of American Film Censorship: ‚Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?‘.“  Cinema Journal 19.2 (1980): 41-55.

Leff, Leonard J. „Play into Film: Warner Brothers‘ ‚Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?‘.“ Theatre Journal 33.4 (1981): 453-466.

The Celluloid Closet. Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Writ. Vito Russo, Rob Epstein,  Jeffrey Friedman and Sharon Wood. Music Carter Burwell. Sony Pictures Classics and       HBO, 1996.

Wirt, Frederick M. „To See or Not to See: The Case against Censorship.“ Film Quarterly 13.1 (1959): 26-31.