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The technology may be different, but otherwise there's nothing really new about the issues in some litigation that started in Colorado last month.
There are companies, many of them based in Utah and operated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which sanitize videos for like-minded people to buy and rent. Such purification can include the removal of sex, violence, nudity and profanity.
The litigation was started with a suit filed two of the sanitizers: CleanFlicks of Colorado, and Robert Huntsman, who makes film-editing technology. They wanted a ruling that what they were doing is legal under the copyright laws, and their attorney said their suit was a pre-emptive measure against an anticipated suit from Hollywood.
That suit came last week, when 16 prominent film directors, Steven Soderbergh and Steven Spielberg among them, filed suit in federal court in Denver. They charged that unauthorized revisions infringes on their trademarks and could represent false advertising. Their suit names several companies besides CleanFlicks: Trilogy Studios and ClearPlay, both of Utah; Clean Cut Cinemas of Arizona; and Video II of Sandy, Utah, which supplies videos to Albertson's supermarkets in Utah.
This whole process of taking an existing work, and modifying it for pure-minded sensibilities, is nothing new. Indeed, it's been around so long that it has a name: bowdlerism.
The term, along with the verb bowdlerize,
is an
eponym from Thomas Bowdler, a high-minded English
physician, philanthropist and man of letters who was active
about two centuries ago. In 1818 he issued his major work,
the Family Shakespeare.
As every English major knows (or at least, English majors of a certain age; for all I know, Shakespeare, as just another dead white guy, may no longer be part of the modern holistic multicultural appreciation curriculum), Shakespeare wrote many scenes that were raunchy, violent, bibulous, lewd and otherwise offensive to some eyes and ears.
But he still wrote some great stuff. As Bowdler put it
in his preface, I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the
world's greatest dramatic poet.
However, he regretted
that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the
hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the
Family Shakespeare... Many words and expressions occur
which are of so indecent a nature as to render it highly
desirable that they should be erased.... Expressions are
omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the
family.
That sounds about the same as the goal of his ideological descendants, the modern video purifiers. My reaction when I first read about them -- a few years ago, a Utah version of Titanic which omitted the heroine posing topless -- was that they were mutilating someone's artistic vision, which is of course an evil.
But then I happened upon Titanic on TV one night, and I decided to watch it again to examine the class-warfare angle (lock the steerage immigrants below so they'll drown because they can never get near the lifeboats that are reserved for the better elements of society), and lo and behold, Kate Winslet's bosom remained covered throughout the presentation.
Since it seemed unlikely that a television network was broadcasting the movie without the consent of the owners of the film's copyright, the only logical conclusion was that the film-makers had consented to this bowdlerizing.
The movie studio wasn't upholding the artistic integrity of Titanic director James Cameron. The studio was making some extra money from the broadcast rights, and it was willing to adjust the film's presentation as necessary to meet the puritanical restrictions of American network censors.
Thus the real issue isn't presenting an artistic
vision in an intact way,
since if Hollywood really
cared about that, movies would have to be televised without
changes and without commercial breaks. Instead, the issue
is who gets to do the mutilation, and who gets paid, and
how much?
I wouldn't want to rent or watch one of the modern
bowdlerized videos, any more than I'd want to replace my
complete Shakespeare with Bowdler's family version or my
full King James Bible with an abridged Family Bible.
Further, I hate to think how short and boring some great
works, like Gargantua and Pantagruel
by Francois
Rabelais, would be if they were converted into fare fit for
Utah families.
But as long as it's clear who did the abridging and why, as long as appropriate royalties are paid, and as long as the original is freely available to those of us who prefer to exercise our own judgment about what we watch, then I don't see a real problem with the Utah bowdlerizers. They aren't doing anything that Hollywood doesn't sanction -- if the censoring happens to be performed by a broadcast network.
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