A closer look

For decades, Hollywood was held hostage by a man who weaponized a stopwatch against onscreen intimacy. As the brutal enforcer of the Production Code, Joseph Breen dictated that a cinematic kiss could not exceed three seconds without becoming a crime against American morality. He turned script sanitization into a bizarre, obsessive science, banning everything from 'lustful embraces' to the mere utterance of the word 'nuts'.