Wide World of Porn- In the latest dispatch from the front lines of America's culture war, a group of self-appointed conservative censors has created a cottage industry by digitally editing out nudity, sexual innuendo, violence, curse words and the like from Hollywood movies.
The butchered results then get openly rented or resold at a marked-up price as "family-friendly" versions of the originals - although the process takes place without the permission or knowledge of the screenwriters, producers, directors or actors who made the film in the first place.
The digital censorship has been going on for several years, but movie studios have remained relatively quiet because it doesn't hurt sales. It's film directors who are screaming bloody murder. We all should be doing the same.
The digital hacking up of movies includes "Titanic," where Kate Winslet's nude scene vanishes; "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Patriot," where the goriest sections of battle scenes disappear, and scores of other films that magically lose the F word, along with "bastard" and exclamations like "Oh, my God!" and "Jesus Christ!"
While many of the censor companies purchase original DVDs and digitally alter them before resale, Utah-based ClearPlay sells special DVD players for which users can purchase movie-specific filters that have been digitally precoded to recognize individual scenes that ClearPlay considers sexual, violent or profane. The DVD isn't changed, but the viewer automatically skips over those scenes or mutes dialogue.
All this unauthorized editing, called sanitizing, is performed by censors at companies with smiley-face names like CleanFlicks, Family Flix and CleanFilms. CleanFlicks boasts more than 700 censored titles.
Several of the censors appear, brimming with smarmy self-righteousness, tonight at 10 when the AMC cable channel airs a documentary called "Bleep! Censoring Hollywood." It's disturbing to watch the censors as they cheerfully discuss distorting the latest Soderbergh or Spielberg films. Marketing an unauthorized, chopped-up product under the name of its true director seems like plain fraud. It may seem humorous that ClearPlay's censors chopped "Pirates of the Caribbean" to mute reference to a "godforsaken island." But it's much less funny to discover the same company zapped a scene in "The Hurricane" depicting a raw, epithet-filled racial conflict between Rubin Carter and cops - a scene crucial to understanding the real-life story of how Carter ended up being jailed 20 years for a crime he didn't commit.
Congress last week opened the door to wholesale cultural censorship by passing the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, which now awaits President Bush's all-but-certain signature. The bill specifically protects companies like ClearPlay from being sued under copyright law.
Bill Aho, the CEO of ClearPlay, called the law "a real victory for families."
Voters should be shouting from the rooftops to make politicians promise to shut down the sanitizers before they do any more damage to creativity and historical truth.
