The documentary "Bleep: Censoring Hollywood?" is about a new, high-tech approach to excising what some think are the excesses of modern movies.
It's called "third-party editing" and offers DVD titles for sale edited to remove profanity, graphic violence, nudity and sexual content.
The work is done by recently formed companies, with names like CleanFlicks, CleanFilm and FamilyFlix, some (but not all) of whose founders are Mormons. They, and the customers they service in franchise stores and retail outlets offering "movie sanitizing," don't like a lot of what they see in movies, but still want to see the movies. So they snip a little blood here, a little flesh there, and everybody's happy. Right?
Wrong.
While these entrepreneurs claim fair use as a legal argument, and purchase one official release of every sanitized DVD copy they sell, the legal and artistic questions are a lot murkier.
The ABC News co-production with American Movie Classics has filmmakers such as Marshall Herskovitz on hand to express their outrage over outside interests demanding "final cut" on their artworks, and producer Caroline Christopher also includes copyright lawyers and other specialists in the mix.
"Bleep," airing tonight at 10 on AMC, lays out the controversy, but neither takes a side nor tells a compelling story. The former can be a choice and a laudable attempt at objectivity; the latter, with material this incendiary, is inexcusable.
The documentary shows a few examples of movie scenes, including those from "Mean Girls" and "Troy," before and after they are edited for taste by these various companies. In "Saving Private Ryan," a movie already under fire recently by certain conservatives when rebroadcast on broadcast TV, we see a wounded soldier's guts spilling out next to him in the film's brutal opening sequence - then, in the altered version, we don't.
The new version, Herskovitz admits, is less upsetting than Steven Spielberg's original - but, he adds with passion, "It was supposed to be upsetting!"
"Bleep" explains that Hollywood directors contractually allow editing of their films for broadcast TV and airlines, but get to participate in that editing. In this case, it's an outsider making the calls - and while they claim they're only meeting demand, there is a slippery slope here, and a creepy one, that "Bleep" tends to underplay.
In the past, "sanitized" versions of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" have been published without the N-word - but also without damaging the context of Twain's message of tolerance and equality.
When one person makes a decision to edit a work of art, that's freedom of choice. When that decision-making process becomes an industry aimed at thousands of costumers, it's a different story altogether - one that's not very well told in "Bleep: Censoring Hollywood?"
Even the title's question mark is cowardly.
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