THE UNKINDEST CUTS OF ALL

Some recent court cases have widened the debate over one of the most prized perks in all of Hollywood: the right to make the final cut.

It seems that there are certain specialty video outlets with names like CleanFlicks, Clean Cut, and Family Flix. Their main selling point is that they offer "family-friendly" versions of popular movies. These are, essentially, big-time movies on video or DVD where the companies have edited out the parts that, if the kids walked in the room, you’d have to lunge for the off-button on the VCR. The apparent target audience is made up of people who, for example, might want to watch "Saving Private Ryan" but don’t want to see a bunch of icky violence. Or people who may want to see what all the fuss was about in Halle Berry’s Oscar-winning performance in "Monster’s Ball" but who don’t necessarily want to look at the graphic scene where she gets it on with Billy Bob Thornton. I myself have seen the footage in question, and I have to say, I wish I hadn’t. I mean, Halle is babe-o-licious, but Billy Bob? EEEuuuw. Both of these movies, and dozens of others, have been edited by CleanFlicks, who can turn a "hard R"- rated film into a "G" with a stroke of the editor’s razor (or, in the modern world of computer-editing, a click of the mouse).

Unfortunately, this hasn’t set too well with the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) who has filed a lawsuit against CleanFlicks and its ilk, alleging copyright infringement. "What these companies are doing is wrong, plain and simple," huffs DGA president Martha Coolidge, herself a director of such classic cinema as "Valley Girl". CleanFlicks, for its own part, has filed its own lawsuit, seeking to have the courts uphold their own First Amendment right to free expression in making their own "cleaned up" copies of movies.

What these companies are doing is actually a high-tech version of an old tradition. It’s known as "Bowdlerization" after Victorian doctor and self-styled "man of letters" Dr. Thomas Bowdler. In 1807, Bowdler (and, some say, his sister Harriet) released a ten-volume, sanitized version of Shakespeare known as "The Family Shakespeare". In Bowdler’s version, as he put it, "those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family." For instance, in the play "Othello," the nasty villain Iago no longer tells Desdemona’s father that "your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs" but more discreetly states that "your daughter and the Moor are now together."

The news media has spun the CleanFlicks story as yet another case of "Hollywood versus the Heartland": corrupt and decadent movie execs versus that vast silent horde out there who just want good decent movies about good decent folks doing good decent things. But I think the case actually points up a more interesting conflict: the way technology has outrun the law. Here in the 21^st century, computer and DVD technology has made it possible to alter the images fed to us in ways previously thought unimaginable. There’s even said to be a version of "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" out there on the Internet, re-edited by fans and available for download, that, incredibly, doesn’t suck. And, they tell us, the era of totally computer-generated actors and actresses is just around the corner. (They can’t be any worse than Kenau Reeves). We’ve already seen commercials where John Wayne hawks beer and Fred Astaire dances with vacuum cleaners. Technology makes anything possible.

So why not let people see the movie they really want to see? If people would rather see "Titanic" without gazing at the scene where Kate Winslet exposes her naughty bits—hey, that’s their kink. Because think about it…you could also go completely the other way and have releases where they actually put the sex and violence in. Like, for instance, imagine a revamped "Gone With the Wind" where they actually show what happened between the shot where Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs and the shot where she wakes up in bed grinning from ear to ear.(Come on, people, you know what that scene was about. I first saw that movie with my fifth grade class and, young as we were, we were rolling in the aisles laughing). Or how about, instead of a fat, balding angel, we have Donna Reed cheering up Jimmy Stewart by dragging him off the bridge, taking him home, and showing him just how "wonderful" life can be?

Hmmm…on second thought , maybe we better not let that genie out of the bottle. Maybe we ought to just let the movie (or play, or book) stand the way its creator made it. If you don’t want to see violence, "Saving Private Ryan" probably wasn’t for you, anyway.

COPYRIGHT 2002 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.