While the scene in Hail, Caesar is an exaggeration, the American film industry did go to some lengths not to offend religious sensibilities, though the best example of this is in the Motion Picture Production Code.
During the 1920s, as Hollywood was increasingly seen as immoral and hedonistic (both as the result of film content and the numerous tabloid scandals that plagued Hollywood during this time), there were many, many attempts throughout the country to censor motion pictures at the state and local level, which created increasing problems for studios that had to worry about different standards of decency in different states and municipalities, and this was strongly influenced by the many clergy across the country who were preaching against movies in their churches. New York created the first state censorship board in 1921, and several other states soon followed suit (and there were many more at the local level). The even bigger problem, however, was fear that the federal government might step in and institute a nationwide system of censorship. One might presume that the First Amendment would preclude such a thing from happening, however a 1915 Supreme Court ruling (Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio) declared that motion pictures were not, in fact, "free speech", a decision that would not be overturned until 1952 (the gist of it was that the court viewed motion pictures as an amusement, like a merry-go-round, rather than an art form or means of expression).
So in 1922, the studios hired former Postmaster General and Presbyterian Elder Will Hayes to clean up the film industry's image, and the choice was deliberate: at this time, Hollywood's two biggest concerns were fears of censorship by the federal government along with protests and boycotts by religious groups, so Will Hays's background was intended to address both of these. In 1927, Hayes recommended that the industry form their own censorship board to assure the public that the industry could police itself, and the studios produced The "Don'ts" and "Be Carefuls", a list of eleven subjects that were forbidden (the "Don'ts") and 26 more that must be handled with care and discretion (the "Be Carefuls"). And two of those forbidden topics included "Ridicule of the Clergy" and "Willful offense to any nation, race, or creed".
Unfortunately, they did not have any means of enforcing these rules, so they were mostly just a PR move that did little to curtail calls for national censorship. So in 1929, a Jesuit Priest (Daniel Lord) and a Catholic (Martin Quigley) created a new set of rules and standards for motion picture content, which they submitted to the studios. After some tweaks by the studio heads, those rules were adopted in 1930 as the Motion Picture Production Code. It's a fascinating read, so I highly recommend that link.
The Code, in general, was largely ruled by religious standards of morality and decency. It had obvious things like "Crimes...shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime...or to inspire...imitation", however much of it dealt with with prudish concerns about sex and obscenity -- it forbid "scenes of passion", "sex perversion", "miscegenation", "obscenity in word, gesture, reference, song, joke, or by suggestion", "dances which emphasize indecent movements", "any lecherous or licentious notice" of someone even suggested to be nude, and so on. However there was also an overt section dedicated specifically to religion:
Religion
For four years, the industry still didn't have any means of enforcing those rules. Then in 1933, the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency was founded, and the Legion, along with various Protestant groups, began threatening to boycott films that they deemed lurid or otherwise immoral. Further, the Legion of Decency began its own rating system, where they gave films an A ("Morally unobjectionable"), B ("Morally objectionable in part") or a C ("Condemned by the Legion of Decency"), and they directly advised Catholics to avoid any movie given a C rating. So in 1934, the studios finally created an enforcement organization -- the Production Code Administration -- and they hired a prominent Catholic, Joseph Breen, to head the PCA.
The PCA added a very clear enforcement method: the studios owned roughly 20% of all the motion picture theaters in the country, and since many of those were the biggest theaters in the biggest cities, those theaters represented about 80% of box office revenue. And the studios pledged that they would not exhibit any movie unless it was given a Production Code seal of approval. Further, they instituted a $25,000 fine to any producer who attempted to run an unapproved picture. This gave Joseph Breen incredible power in Hollywood.
Breen would lead the PCA for the next 20 years, and he was, without exaggeration, one of the most influential men in the American film industry. The PCA was involved in the production process at multiple steps -- at minimum, (1) studios would submit their scripts to the PCA before going into production, so that Breen or one of his associates could provide feedback on any area that might be in violation of the Code, allowing changes to be made before filming, and (2) Breen would also view the final film for ultimate approval or rejection. I've read through many of the PCA files in the Motion Picture Academy archives while doing research, including numerous letters written by Breen himself, and it's astounding how much control he had. Even beyond the explicit rules of the Code -- which he was very strict in enforcing -- Breen would sometimes include other areas that he felt were inappropriate when viewing the initial script (he'd say something like "and lastly, while not violating any particular section of the Code, I would also recommend changing this scene..." and would justify it with ambiguous phrases like "in keeping with general industry policy"). In most cases, the producers would just consent to his changes rather than worry about not getting PCA approval.
It's worth noting that the PCA did indeed soothe the concerns of the Legion of Decency. The Legion condemned more than 60 fims in 1934, another 20 in 1935, and only three in 1936.
Officially, the Code lasted until 1968, when it was replaced by the MPAA Ratings Board, however the Code began weakening in the 1950s. The Supreme Court's United States v. Paramount Pictures decision in 1948 ruled that the studios were in violation of antitrust laws, and forced the studios to sell off their theaters, which resultantly weakened the Code since independent theater operators were under no obligation to require a Code seal of approval. Further, movie attendance went into continual decline during the '50s and '60s (for many factors, though the competition from television and the move to the suburbs were the biggest), which made producers more desperate to push the envelope and try to grab an audience, especially since various foreign films were gaining popularity in the US while doing exactly that. And, lastly, the Code was a product of 1930, and the times they were a-changin'.
Yet while the Code's effectiveness went into decline, Hollywood's desire to appease religious groups certainly continued. If nothing else, Hail, Caesar best demonstrates this in the very fact that they're producing a biblical epic. The prevalence of biblical epics throughout the '50s and '60s was partly to appeal to Catholics and Protestants interested in such a thing -- even as late as 1966, you see The Bible: In the Beginning... and Hawaii (about Catholic missionaries in Hawaii) becoming two of the most popular films of the year. However, more cynically, one of the big reasons that Hollywood made so many religious epics during this time was because it was much easier to include sex and violence when it was justified as coming from the Bible! Salome in 1953 is the classic example of this -- it has Rita Hayworth, as Princess Salome, performing a lot of what the Code would have called "dances which emphasize indecent movements", however its being loosely based on a Biblical tale (and I emphasize the word "loosely") helped to get the film past the PCA censors.
But that also speaks to the attention to Biblical detail that Hollywood was practicing. Unlike Hail, Caesar's suggestion, the studios did not go to great lengths to get the details of the Bible accurate; on the contrary, they often took great liberties with the Bible in the interests of storytelling, and only felt obliged to get details "correct" insofar as the films matched popular familiarity with Biblical tales (the same went for historical stories as well). So while The Bible: In the Beginning... did try to match the popular renditions of Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark, producers felt little need to consult Biblical scholars when dealing with a film like Salome, knowing that few Christians know much about the story of Salome anyway.
For more info, I highly recommend The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code by Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons (University Press of Kentucky, 1991, 2nd Ed. 2001), as well as Thomas Doherty's Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (Columbia Press, 2007). Gregory D. Black also has a couple books on the influence of Catholics and the Legion of Decency, rooted in primary research in archdiocese archives, including Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Can a reddit historian explain why this question keeps being asked and why reddit allows it? For instance can reddit algorithms not detect duplicate posts?
Plus why do people keep up voting? And is this considered karma farming?
Huzzah!!! I must say, I was almost as invested in this getting an answer as you were at this point, and was going to just research the damn thing myself if you had to post it another time. I'd put in a little work on that front already, but by no means enough to really get down to it, but I do have a small addendum I can add to what /u/GeekAesthete has already covered, if only because I don't want the pitch-perfect source I tracked down to go to waste, namely on one adaptations of Ben-Hur, which is definitely one of the epic films on which Hail Caesar was drawing on as the film-within-a-film.
The best known of course is the 1959 epic, and the portrayal of Jesus was of key importance, something which earlier productions also had to grapple with, as the wrong portrayal could of course cause offense. For instance the original play done of Ben-Hur, authorized by the author Lew Wallace, in fact simply didn't show Jesus, and simply used "a shaft of blue light" as Wallace considered actually portraying him on the stage to be blasphemy. Later versions would show 'The Christ', but take precautions, and Hark notes that this wasn't unique to Ben-Hur either, as in the 1927 film The King of Kings Cecil B. DeMille was scrupulous his management of the cast off-screen even, compelling them:
to abstain from off-set activities such as dancing, drinking, or gambling that some devout people think irreligious. Additionally, the actor who played Jesus was whisked to and from the studio in a car with darkened windows; he also wore a black hood over his head when he was not filming.
In short, to many filmmakers, making a movie that showed Jesus required tact both on and off-screen. In the 1959 production, although not following precisely in Wallace's chosen path, the portrayal was kept distant. The audience never sees the face, nor does he speak, in essence insulating the audience as much as possible from "access to his subjectivity" as Hark terms it. While perhaps still offending those who believe you simply cannot portray 'the Son of God' on screen, it is at least a mechanism to avoid touching on the particular sensibilities of those who at least accept placing him there, although of course the entire work itself is intended to provide not terrible subtle ways around that too:
In addition to this method of portraying Jesus, Wyler provides a way into the savior’s subjectivity at a safe distance for avoiding blasphemy. He does this via Judah Ben-Hur’s narrative, which in many instances parallels Jesus’s narrative even though the divine-human distinction dictates that Jesus must die for humankind’s sins while Judah must live to experience this redemption and pass it on to others. The latter, the victim of unjust arrest and persecution by Romans, spends years rowing in a galley (a prolonged Passion). After a symbolic death when the galley sinks, Judah is “resurrected” as Young Arrius. He is present, later, to offer succor to Jesus on his way to Calvary, just as Jesus gave Ben-Hur water as he marched to the galleys.
There is of course a flip-side. The first being simply that just because some productions may have taken precautions, others did not. Late in the 'Code era', but Hark notes both King of Kings from 1961 and 1965's The Greatest Story Ever Told as films which didn't go out of their way either like DeMille, or Wyler, but of course in the latter case it would have been tough when Jesus was such a central character in the films!
Second though is that just because Ben-Hur might have been tactful in some ways, doesn't mean it was in all ways. Gore Vidal, one of the scriptwriters, straight up admitted that the homoerotic subtext between Judah and Messala many see in the film was intentional, and further, the 'Story of the Christ' that is told in via Judah Ben-Hur, even with Jesus a distant figure, nevertheless is one that not all would agree with. Hark harks back to another scholar, Gordon Thomas, whose reading of gender in the work paints a picture that not all could agree with:
the thoroughly male Judah impulsively taking up arms only to encounter a womanish Man of Peace arriving just in time to disarm him. So much for the insurgency, a bad idea, apparently, caused by too much testosterone.
To be sure, this is an issue with the novel itself, so one that can't be avoided, and if anything, the film doesn't lean so strongly into it in portrayal of Jesus, but nevertheless does so, and purposefully.
So anyways, its only one fairly narrow view of one production, so it doesn't really provide a full picture of the period, but with the existing answer already, I think it does give a look at how concerns both could be balanced... but also not.
HARK, INA RAE. "The Erotics of the Galley Slave: Male Desire and Christian Sacrifice in the 1959 Film Version of Ben-Hur." In Bigger than Ben-Hur: The Book, Its Adaptations, and Their Audiences, edited by RYAN BARBARA and SHAMIR MILETTE, 162-78. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1j1nvdj