The New York Times profiles a company called ClearPlay which makes a DVD player that sanitizes movies. You put in a movie that has swearing, nudity, sex, violence, or drug references, and this DVD player automatically mutes the bad words and skips the offensive scenes.
The way this works is that ClearPlay (based in Utah – surprise!) has a database full of movie data that tells the DVD when to mute and when to fast-forward. So you put “The Matrix” into your ClearPlay player, it looks up “The Matrix” in its database, and it learns that it should mute from 1:15:06 to 1:15:08 and it should skip the violent scene from 1:07:46 to 1:09:01, for instance.
This is a boon to both parents (or squeamish adults without children) who want to skip the naughty bits in an otherwise decent movie. ClearPlay also suggests it’s a boon to the movie industry by opening up a new demographic of potential viewers who would otherwise shun an “R”-rated film.
The Director’s Guild isn’t too happy about it, and has sued ClearPlay. They claim that ClearPlay’s edits amount to censorship, and that they’ve ruined the artistic integrity of the artists’ vision (“Scarface”, for example, wouldn’t be the same without the “say hello to my little friend” scene). ClearPlay is re-editing the director’s work without permission.
I have sympathies for both sides. My mother is the perfect candidate for a ClearPlay machine. Even though my brothers and I are grown adults and out of the house, she still hates to see movies with cursing in them (“That movie would have been so good if they just wouldn’t have cursed so much,” is her refrain). So it would be nice for ma to be able to see the latest films without being subjected to the filth-flarrin’-filth.
But I agree with the directors; you can’t have a third party cutting up your films for profit. Besides, they way ClearPlay decides on the cuts is too arbitrary and subject to personal bias (read the Times’ article for its “Black Hawk Down” example). However, the directors must admit there’s a huge audience they’re missing just because a stray curse word or naked boob or exploding brain that’s secondary to the plot and artistic vision is scaring my mom away.
I have the solution. Studios should allow the directors to make their own cuts to their films and package it as a DVD extra. Imagine you could purchase “Saving Private Ryan” on DVD. Encoded on the disc are little digital codes whenever there’s a severe curse word (e.g., the F-bomb) or tame curse words (damn, hell!), a little nudity or a full-blown (pardon the pun) sex scene, moderate violence or severe violence. Then when you start the DVD, you go to the Setup Options, there’s a menu item for “Content Filters” and then you check or uncheck the filth-flarrin’-filth that offends you.
Everybody wins. The directors keep control of their art, the sensitive viewer controls what gets into their brains, and movie studios make more money. Besides, it already happens in some circumstances. The creator of “Sex & The City” purposefully shot alternate takes of some HBO-uncensored scenes, knowing that he’d eventually license the reruns to a broadcast or cable network. Porn producers regularly produce both hardcore and softcore versions of the same films for distribution in states with more severe censorship.
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