Waugh and Laura's post-war jaunt to Hollywood in 1947 was engineered, not entirely seriously, to discuss the filming of Brideshead with MGM's executives. Waugh's diary entry for the first ‘conference’ on 7 February is ominously ironic. The ‘writer’ (not Waugh) enters in ‘local costume – a kind of woollen blazer, matelot's vest, buckled shoes. He has been in Hollywood for years and sees Brideshead purely as a love story. None of them see the theological implication’ (D 673). Waugh gamely discovered ‘something a little luxurious in talking in great detail about every implication of a book which the others are paid to know thoroughly’. But his succinct Memorandum summarized the novel's implications in vain, and within a month the censor rejected the project. Waugh turned with relief to his new discovery, ‘a deep mine of literary gold in the cemetery of Forest Lawn’ (D 675), the source of The Loved One. This ‘beautiful tale about corpses’ (L 252) was exultantly written at speed, in his old, terse style.

Ostensibly, MGM rejected Brideshead because it infringed the Motion Picture Production Code's requirements on SEX, Section II: ‘The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld’, Subsection 1: ‘Adultery, sometimes necessary plot material, must not be explicitly treated, or justified, or presented attractively’. Further explanatory sub-sub-sections forbade ‘sensuous scenes’ and ‘more glamour and luxury than is consonant with the plot’. Brideshead clearly broke these rules, for good reasons that MGM's executives chose not to understand. The censor, Mr Breen, dismissed it as ‘a story of illicit sex and adultery without sufficient compensating moral values’:

According to his astonishingly inattentive summary, sympathy for the lovers’ ‘unacceptably light attitude’ might only have been permissible if due emphasis had been laid on their ‘punishment, reform and repentance’.