c. 2005 Religion & Ethics Newsweekly
BOULDER, Colo. _ Responding to the public outcry over sex and violence in contemporary movies, a number of companies have found a new niche _ cleaning up the content of offensive films.
Some firms are marketing filtering devices and others, more controversially, are editing scenes and then reselling the film.
Under the Family Movie Act, which President Bush signed into law in April, unauthorized editing of Hollywood movies is legal.
Critics, however, are challenging the law in court, contending the editing amounts to theft.
Others maintain that despite the outcry, there is little difference between the viewing habits of religious and non-religious people _ and thus limited financial potential for censoring devices.
But neither the challenge to the law nor the other critics are inhibiting the champions of cleaned-up films.
“I like being able to watch movies in my home without having that wince factor when something comes up,” said Bill Aho, chief executive officer of ClearPlay, a firm that manufactures censoring devices. “Nobody’s comfortable seeing that little shot of nudity in the movies, not the kids, not Mom, not Dad.”
Aho’s firm makes a filtering device that allows viewers to customize movies and delete what they find offensive. He says it is being marketed in all 50 states.
“We give you 14 different categories which allows for something like 16,000 permutations that you can customize,” he said.
More controversial is CleanFlicks, a company that physically edits the movies and then sells or rents the edited versions along with the originals. It is especially strong in the South, says founder Ray Lines.
“It’s about providing the consumer with a choice in entertainment,” Lines said.
Line has seven daughters and he said he wanted them to see movies like “Jerry Maguire,” “Braveheart” and “Saving Private Ryan.” He said the “F-word” appeared 125 times in the popular but R-rated movie “Good Will Hunting.”
These “are great movies that have great messages, you know, that people should see,” he said. “But I didn’t want them (his daughters) to have to watch the sex and the nudity and the gory violence and listen to the swear words.”
According to Lines, romantic comedies are the most difficult to edit while action movies are the easiest.
He cites a scene from the Brad Pitt movie “Troy” as an example. When Pitt kills a giant, the viewer watches the sword go into the victim in gory detail. Lines said, “We would find another shot … that we could use as a cutaway. … The point we would make here is that you still see the guy dies. You still see that Brad Pitt killed him and you don’t really take away from the story. … It’s just like the old John Wayne movies.”
His company even edits family films like the popular “Shrek.”
“You mean there’s violence in `Shrek’? There’s swear words in `Shrek’?” he asks rhetorically. “Absolutely. That’s one of the frustrating things, you know. Hollywood will make kids’ movies but there’s profanity in it, there’s swear words, there’s crude humor. … So these are things that parents ask us to take out for them.”
But some legal experts find the CleanFlicks editing legally _ and perhaps morally _ troubling.
“I think most of us would recognize that it would certainly be very, very problematic and obviously illegal for me, for example, to republish, say, a Harry Potter book with significant alterations to the dialogue and to the prose and the other aspects of it without the author’s permission and then sell this revised version of Harry Potter for profit,” said Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado.
“Do you or do you not have the right to alter a product that you’ve purchased _ that’s the issue,” responded Lines. “Whether you take out religious content or political content or whatever content you want, it’s your choice to do that because you’ve purchased the product.
“And so in our opinion, if you’ve purchased it, you have the right to alter it. And you have the right to resell it and to rent it out if you want to.”
Still others think the issue may be a tempest in a teapot. They argue that despite the uproar over the Janet Jackson-Justin Timberlake incident at the Super Bowl, Americans may not be especially upset about indecency.
“I would say the differences between the religious and nonreligious households, and between the conservative and liberal households (in viewing habits) _ the differences are smaller than the commonalities,” said Stewart Hoover, director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado.
“The fascinating thing is that all of them tend to watch pretty much the same TV,” he added. Religious or nonreligious, conservative or liberal, “they all watch pretty much the same stuff.”
An example, he said, is the sexually charged television drama “Desperate Housewives,” an ABC hit.
“`Desperate Housewives’ pulls a decent, very healthy _ in some ways some of its best audiences _ in the Bible Belt,” Hoover said. “So the very people who you think would be the most involved in criticizing something like this seem to be watching it.”
MO/DEA/PH END SEVERSON
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