Screening the Troubled South: “Professional Southerners” in Hollywood Before and During the Code Era

The term “professional Southerner” was used by film scholars and historians to refer to several “agents” in Hollywood, whose often unstated roles were to act as mediators and negotiators between Hollywood and the South in the Production Code era. All born in the South, some were prolific screenwriters (Nunnally Johnson, Lamar Trotti, William Faulkner), theater chain owners (Steve Lynch), studio executives (Y. Frank Freeman) and others were purposefully hired by the PCA to appease tensions between the South – especially Southern state and city censors – and Hollywood (Francis Harmon). As “expatriates” in Hollywood who remained Southerners at heart, they walked a tight line between advocating for the South and its identity and condemning the South’s most violent practices, from segregation to lynching. They were indeed, most concerned with the notion of “trouble” and its paradoxes, wanting to show some of the South’s troubles, while at the same time making the motion pictures not “troubling” or “troublesome” for the South’s audiences.