On 24 August 1919, Joseph Breen, the director of the Production Code Administration (PCA), wrote to Harry Cohn about the draft script for a remake of THE FRONT PAGE, then called THE BIGGER THEY ARE. With a few exceptions, he noted, the script "appears to be acceptable under the provisions of the Production Code and reasonably free from the suggestion of difficulty at the hands of political censor boards." The exceptions included a warning that the British Board of Film Censors "will not approve any motion picture, in which any of the characters are, even suggestively, insane," and advice that the studio should shoot a "protection shot" of a gallows scene, since American states and foreign countries that did not have capital punishment "almost invariably deleted" such scenes. "Political" censor boards (as municipal, state, and foreign censorship authorities were always described) were also likely to delete "the talk about 'production for use only,' and 'doing away with the profit system.'" On his own behalf, Breen merely wanted the word "lousy" eliminated, together with any suggestion that the character of Mollie Malloy was a prostitute. In a separate letter, Breen also noted that the script "suggests to our minds the possibility that your story may carry an objectionable reflection on newspapers...
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