In 1922, Will Hays, called by one critic a "mail-order Moses," was hired by film-industry leaders to clean up what they saw as a raging mess. Scandals had smudged the star-studded skies of Hollywood and torrid topics had defaced many a motion picture. A former Postmaster General, Hays set up his infamous "office" and went about reining in the industry. The movie industry's interest in censorship-what would become the Production Code-was really about twenty-five years too late. There was already a history filled with incendiary, lurid, and sometimes tasteless films. Tonight, James Forsher, a film historian and documentarian whose new Time Machine series is on A&E, will take a leering look at the days before Hays. We'll see the 1896 landmark The Kiss, a bout of osculation that some thought smacked of immorality; we'll see a "nudie" film from 1900 in which two women go "bear" in the woods; we'll see the nasty Coon and Cohen, where a black man becomes the opposite side of a Jew; we'll see excerpts from The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (1913), a drama of prostitution. We'll also glimpse two films that resemble the "lost" works of Margaret Sanger, Law of the Population and Birth Control, both from 1917. To round out the evening's lecture, Forsher will show us the censors themselves, Will Hays and his cohort Joseph Breen, via untouched film of course.