As nasty as they wanna be…

I wondered when this would finally happen. When Titanic hit video stores in the late 90s, a company called CleanFlicks began selling edited copies with nudity and foul language removed. Since then, CleanFlicks and a couple of competitors have built a nice business around cleaning up other feature films.

I sympathize with this idea, but the practice never seemed quite legal to me. Last week, an appeals court in Denver agreed, saying that cleaning up films without permission is an illegitimate business.

OK, but I have to scoff at this bit of sanctimonious pap at the bottom of the article: “Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor,” said the President of the Director’s Guild of America.

Hey, I’m in favor of artistic freedom, but follow the money on this one. Every movie you watch on TV is cleaned up, edited for time, chopped up for commercials, and (worst of all) “panned and scanned” to make a wide-screen feature fit your TV, in effect redirecting the movie by reframing every shot, often without the director’s approval.

OK, so this post is nothing but a rant. And the point is…CleanFlicks can keep doing this by making it profitable enough to fit the “vision” of the filmmakers…or at least the studios.

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July 11, 2006 · Filed Under Movies

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