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Saturday, July 08, 2006
Hollywood to America: You Must Watch Our Smut In what seems like a simple compromise, a company would pay for the video, sanitize the content for those who request that service, and then sell the video to the consumer. In these cases, Hollywood gets paid for the price of the movie. That apparently is not enough. It isn't enough for Hollywood to get paid for their trash, consumers must watch the garbage in unedited form to make sure that viewers either have to manually fast-forward or otherwise endure pornography that is completely irrelevant to the storyline. Hollywood says that editing their films destroys the "creative intent" of movie producers. Exactly what does a nude Kate Winslet add to the storyline of Titanic… well, besides masturbatory material? Christians and other groups have responded to the trend of Hollywood being barely able to make a movie without some B-rate actress flashing the audience by setting up companies to siphon out the irrelevant content. Again, in cases where people buy these movies with the cleaned content, Hollywood gets paid full price. They make exactly as much as they would if someone bought the unedited film some place else. There is simple economics involved. This is a free country, if people demand porn; they can get porn (despite the clear objectification of women and harm it does to society). However, if people want movies without the extraneous and non-plot enhancing nudity, violence, or profanity, that is something that presents a clear and present danger to our nation. In this case, we cannot allow supply to meet demand. Here's the interesting feature, by pursuing this line of litigation with firms like Clean Flicks, Hollywood is causing direct harm to their bottom line. Instead of allowing consumers to buy the films edited to their standards, it generates a conflict. Consumers are now faced with the choice to either buy the film that they object to as-is, or to not buy it at all. This litigation has made the voice of the American Family Association, Coral Ridge Ministries, and the like that much louder. Ever better, it gives a catalyst to help propel the nascent efforts of a Christian movie-making industry into a viable movement. The ability to choose to terminate a pregnancy (or more accurately, murder their child) is celebrated. The ability to choose the gender of one's sexual partner is hailed. The ability to choose to have sexual relations outside marriage (or adultery for that matter) is elevated to civil right. In all areas of American life, the right to choose whatever one wills is held up as the central and united ideal. That is, until someone chooses to express their Christian values in their economic activity. (Or for that matter, if they dare utter the name of Christ in anything that can be labeled a "public square".) Hollywood, in rejecting a compromise that allows everyone to benefit, has chosen to bring the culture war to the forefront and fired the opening volleys. They believe that their monopoly on American moviemaking gives them the right to dictate what society's values should be. As a result, they've directly attacked one their streams of revenue. Hollywood has the right to produce trashy films, or to attempt to integrate trashiness in films that can stand on their own without it. However, the consumer has the right not to buy such trash. With the incredible success of films like The Passion of Christ, Lord of the Rings, and other family-friendly films one would think that the movie industry would see that there is an untapped market to be exploited. Instead, they've chosen against their financial interest and decided to alienate that market. In a free market, businesses that tell their customers that their values don't matter tend to not do well in the long term. Time will tell how long it will be until another entity fills the void. John Bambenek is a columnist for the Daily Illini and an academic professional at the University of Illinois. He blogs at Part-Time Pundit. Blogger News Network is advertiser-supported, and your visits to our advertisers help BNN to meet its expenses. Help keep us afloat! posted by John C. A. Bambenek at 9:02 PM |
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7 Comments:
So let's say you've published a book of your own based on your blogs, and the bookseller doesn't like some of the issues you discuss, such as abortion or homosexuality. "Too controversial," he says. "My customers won't like it." So he decides what parts of your book are acceptable and sells your book with paragraphs blotted out with Magic Marker and whole pages missing.
Readers are now getting a false sense of your ideas, your vision, and your 'voice'. They think they're getting the actual book you published, but they're not and it's not your fault. And you know that's wrong.
I think the creator's of the films and whatever should have the rigt to see to it that their products are not sliced and diced based on the prejudices of others. It's bad enough when the movies are edited for TV, most of the time they remove things that obliterate important parts of the movie. If people have a problem with certain parts of movies, they just shouldn't watch them, or even have a desire to.
Myself, I think rap music is for the most part rude, lewd and obscene. I solve that by never listening to rap music, not trying to find examples of rap music that is not offensive.
As far as the nude scene in "Titanic", I think it was representative of her character coming out of her shell and finally opening up to the real world. She had grown up in very protective surroundings and didn't really know much about the real world. Once she started hanging out with jack, she discovered the world was a much more interesting place. And besides, nudity itself isn't lewd or obscene. The nude scene in "Titanic" certainly wasn't.
What the ruling really says is that you cannot choose your viewing experience. If you are watching TV and something you find offensive is displayed, the ruling indicates that you should just sit and watch because if you get off the couch and turn it off "you are interfering with the artist's vision." and in the words of the ruling "causing irreparable damage to the artist and their creative talents." In my opinion this ruling is unconstitutional. I may not have the right to grow drugs in my house or shoot kiddie porn, but if I buy a book, I can use it for a doorstop. If I buy a CD I can copy only the songs I want to my Ipod, If I buy a DVD I can use it for a coaster or skip content I find offensive. If I record something with my Tivo I don’t think twice about skipping commercials. But this ruling is only the beginning of the limiting of rights that you may all believe are fundamental. And each loss removes more of your right to choose. Land of the free….yeah right! If you don't think that Big Brother is watching... Think again.
I think a lot of people are over-extending the effects of this ruling. You'll always have the freedom to watch what you want. You can always buy a book, hack it to bits, and do whatever you want with it. Same thing for movies. What you can't do is edit a movie and then commercially distribute it.
Imagine going the opposite way, and ADDING smut to movies and books. If this truly is a freedom of speech issue, I should be able to buy Harry Potter books, scan them into my computer, add material to them, and turn them into pornographic novels and sell them to willing adult buyers. (Of course, I'll keep an original copy for every one I sell in a 1:1 ratio so I'm not breaking copyright law, just like how all the clean film companies do it.) I'll also add disclaimers saying that the author, JKR, had absolutely nothing to do with the editing. Shouldn't JKR have the right to stop me? It was her original work and speech that I'm editing in the first place.
If you generalize all directors and writers as "Hollywood," it's easy to say they're forcing you to watch smut. But this "Hollywood" is really composed of individual directors, writers, and others who have a right to creative speech without other companies interfering with their creative vision for a profit.
Come one, people let's get real. All the outrage over abuse of "artistic control" is clearly a smokescreen for the true control issue on the table: who gets to determine how to define morality. If the directors and producers were genuine in their concern over editing for commercial purposes, they would be outraged by editing for television. If they were genuinely concerned to maintain the integrity of their art, they would not allow editing of content for airline broadcast. If their concern was truly about freedom of expression, they would walk away from the studios, which control their content in multiple ways.
No, this is not about control over the artistic content. Actors, writers, directors and producers all give up that control every day and willingly submit to "censorship" in order to keep the dollars flowing. The outrage arises when Hollywood perceives the censorship to be morality-based rather than commercially-based. Pure hypocrisy.
Don't believe it? Then let's tell Jon Stewart (Daily Show) he can no longer use clips of political speeches because his version doesn't represent the original author's creative vision. Let's also ban most of the material from Doonesbury, South Park, Saturday Night Live, E! Talk Soup and thousands of others who take creative material from original authors and edit or modify it. Oh no! Suddenly, the First Amendment is under fire!
Face it -- Hollywood only opposes Clean Flicks because they are in essence saying to Hollywood "You're dirty and need to be cleaned."
The copyright violations are the issue. If you ask and make an agreement, they'll provide the edited version. If you do it without asking and distribute it for money, that's a copyright violation, which is all the cut and dried Cleanflicks ruling actually is. The Cleanflicks ruling did not effect the Clearplay system which allows you to edit the film in situ in your home for private viewing. But burning new copies and distributing them for profit without permission edited or not is a copyright violation, and that's what Cleanflicks was doing. You can disagree with the law, but you're not given dispensation to break it and steal on the grounds that you are moral and the person you're stealing from isn't. The act of theft is by definition not a moral act.
"Thou shalt not steal" *is* still a commandment as far as I know. It's just sort of dismaying to me that so many have such flexible ethics and think it's okay to steal under certain circumstances.
The reason I care about copyrights is as a nationally known visual artist (who does clean work, for the record) I've heard all sorts of excuses as to why it's ethical to steal from me- from "copyrights hold up communal human progress" to "you don't sell that sold out limited edition print anymore so why do you care if we're printing new unlimited editions" to "my cross stitch company is small time compared to what you make so it is unfair to stop us from making your designs without paying you" to "it is unfair to expect people to put in the 20 years to get good enough to compete" to "why do you care, it's free advertising" etc. etc. etc.) You must understand that everyone we artists catch stealing our IP claims a right to take whatever they want for one reason or another, nearly all claim superior morals, either extreme communist type morality, "art belongs to the world" ethics and now, appallingly, Christians want in on the swiping! All artists authors and musicians would be effected if Cleanflicks won the right to reproduce and distribute copyrighted work without permission. The bottom line is no one deserves to exploit the work of another for profit without permission or paying the original creator.
The example cited by another poster in regards to Jon Stewart touches another issue: parody is protected speech under the law. So you could lawfully parody any of the movies in question,(even parody the things you don't like in them to make your point) but you cannot burn the actual movies to disc and sell that disc without permission.
Someone should simply ask the movie studios to provide cleaned up versions on their discs that you can choose on the main menu instead of just taking and pompously declaring a right to steal. If there's money in it, they'll respond.
The Passion of the Christ is "family-friendly?"
Are you out of mind? Kate Winslet's breasts represent the demise of American morality, yet the bloddy torture of the Christ character is fun for all ages?
Supporters of CleanFlicks are a naive group of vigilantes that see good as being simply the absence of bad.
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