Also, if an action did not happen as planned, the shot would be discarded and shot again. As the story goes, Méliès happened upon the phenomenon of stop-action shooting by accident when his camera jammed and restarted while shooting a traffic scene. Additional scenes were then staged, shot and edited together with the stock footage, creating The Life of an American Fireman. For the most part, audiences reacted positively to the innovations in editing. By 1908, the conventions of editing were mostly set in place.

The enforcement of the Production Code forestalled government-imposed censorship and dramatically improved Hollywood's relationship with innumerable local censorship boards, but movie producers were forced to make countless artistic compromises to appease the Hays OfÞce. In 1927, the MPPDA's Hollywood ofÞce, headed by Colonel Jason Joy, began developing a preliminary code of content by reviewing material that was commonly rejected by local censorship. The provisions of the Production Code ranged from the sensible to the downright silly. The next blow to the Code's dominance came in 1955.

Soviet society and government are the brunt of much mockery throughout the film. Kubrick, recognizing that a good deal of absurdity lied beneath the Cold War's terror politics, shifted gears and made the film a satirical black comedy, bringing in writer Terry Southern to add further humor to the screenplay. After the mid-1960s, thanks to faltering public interest in atomic testing, and perhaps owing to films like Dr. Strangelove's reduction of the Cold War to the level of satire, Hollywood slowed down production of nuclear-themed films. Still, one notable comedic film explored Cold War topics, 1966Õs The Russians Are Coming!