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The exploitation genre burst onto the American scene after the Big Crash and before the New Deal. It was Hollywood itself that tilled the soil on which grindhouses would grow, through the creation of the Production Code Administration, commonly known as the Hays Office. Will Hays was a former postmaster general and professional lapdog bureaucrat, chosen by the studios to serve, at $100,000 per year, as the industry's censor.

Prior to the creation of the Hays Office, movies eagerly depicted all sorts of sex, vice and general moral corruption, from "expos?s" of white slavery like Traffic in Souls (Universal, 1913) to grandiose epics that featured nubile Christians lashed naked to the stake (Erich von Stroheim's The Merry Widow and The Wedding March).

Hollywood's excesses didn't go over well with the puritanical movement that was exerting itself in American culture. Many high-minded community leaders believed that America, having beaten back the Kaiser in World War I, was destined to be a moral utopia. The Volstead Act, prohibiting the distribution of liquor, was soon enacted. Obviously, if reality could be regulated, so could the movies.

Once installed as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, Will Hays created a list of "Don't and Be Carefuls" in response to growing pressure by politicians and churches over Hollywood's salacious image.

Talking pictures were still a rumor when Hays became Hollywood's morality czar. With the advent of sound, his job became tougher. Subtlety and innuendo crept into the movies, and Hays was overwhelmed. Then the stock market crashed, scaring the hell out of the East Coast financiers whose money fueled Hollywood. The movie business, even with the advent of sound, was in a precarious state. Hollywood couldn't afford to offend anyone, lest the studios lose their vital Wall Street backers.

Into the breach stepped a Catholic layman named Martin Quigley, moneybag publisher of Motion Picture Herald, who was well-connected to the church's hierarchy. Quigley deemed Hays "Don't List" inadequate: Hollywood needed a guiding light, Quigley believed, to ensure that films strengthened moral character. He nominated himself for the job. Investors convinced themselves that Quigley's holier-than-thou approach would sanitize their Hollywood product for public consumption.

In practice, the revised Code was much more stringent about sex than it was about violence. Quigley and Joe Breen, who would later run the Production Code office, were both Irish Catholics. As MPPDA staffer Jack Vizzard noted in his 1970 memoir See No Evil: Live Inside a Hollywood Censor, the Irish culture "dreaded sex as being identified with darker forces," but didn't mind brutality as much, since it wasn't deemed to be "catching."

From 1930-1968, Joe Breen's Production Code office previewed ninety-eight percent of the movies released in the United States. Because major studios controlled most film distribution in the country, Breen had almost complete control over the subject matter viewed on America's movie screens. A movie couldn't be screened in a first-run house without the PCA seal. Studios wouldn't allow their films to be shown on a double bill with a film that wasn't PCA-approves.

It could be argued that the day Hollywood accepted the revitalized Production Code-February 17, 1930-was the day that the "Golden Age" of exploitation began. It was out of this moral lock-down that the Forty Thieves emerged: A loosely affiliated cadre of independent producers not only from Los Angeles, but Texas, Florida, New York, Chicago and other predominately rural territories on what they called "the Sucker Belt." Former carnival operators, con men and roadshow hucksters, the self-anointed "Thieves" saw Hollywood's new code as the opportunity of a lifetime. Will Hays' list of dreaded "don'ts"-white slavery, vice, nudity, prolonged love scenes, gambling, drunkenness and depictions of the underworld-provided the essential ingredients for dozens of low budget melodramas, sold as the Shocking Truth for ADULTS ONLY.

The Forty Thieves were jacks of all trades. Some were primarily distributors, some producers, others mainly exhibitors. In operation, everybody in the dodge had a hand in everything. Exhibitors might finance their own product, then sell outright to distributors in other territories. Producers didn't just make films, they often acted as distributors as well. Some Thieves, like Dwain Esper, did everything from loading the film into the camera to threading it through the projector in some scratch-house on the roadshow circuit. What united them was their willingness to handle the types of films that Hollywood shunned.

The Thieves who worked roadshows were a cross between cowboy and carny, cruising an overheated Plymouth across the American outback-Omaha one night, Cedar Rapids the next-showing in tiny grindhouses, staying in flops to keep overhead low and schmoozing exhibitors to stay on their good side, hoping to hit a "red one" (carny lingo for a big payday) in the next town. They were traveling salesman of cinematic sin.

And, of course, they were characters in their own right. S. S. Millard, nicknamed "Steamship," was a Thief in good standing. He made a couple of early exploitation films in the late twenties, Pitfalls of Passion and Is Your Daughter Safe?, but spent most of his life as an itinerant showman, buying, selling and, in some cases, stealing films. A favorite story about Millard holds that, being of Romanian extraction, he conned his way into a three-day wining and dining binge in San Francisco with the visiting ex-Queen of Romania, passing himself off as a Stateside diplomat. By day, he was grinding Jungle Virgins at a dingy sleaze-pit on Market Street.

Howard "Pappy" Golden was another of the Forty Thieves who lived up to the larcenous nickname. He had a reputation for swiping films from exchanges, and hitting the road with purloined promotional material.

J. D. Kendis operated two production companies, Jay Dee Kay and Continental. He was a jeweler from Sedalia, Missouri, who moved to Hollywood and started out as a tour guide at MGM. Rumor had it that he had a cousin at the studio who ended up bankrolling his exploitation ventures.

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