Sanitizing Hollywood, one DVD at a time

I originally heard of the practice of "sanitizing" movies by editing out content that some find objectionable and then renting or selling the edited copy a few years ago, when a Utah-based company called CleanFlicks sparked controversy and a round of lawsuits by basing their rental business on the practice. Back then, the practice was mostly confined to Utah, but it has since spread to other states as multiple competing sanitized video rental companies have entered the field. The Washington Post has an article on the practice that covers the ongoing dispute between the Director's Guild of America and the film sanitizers.

Film sanitizers say their business falls within the "fair use" exception to copyright law, a concept that, among other things, allows artists to create parodies that look similar to an original work. Because they don't make multiple copies of an edited DVD, they say they aren't engaging in video piracy. To earn a profit, the companies typically mark up the original retail price of the DVD by $6 or $7. Lines compares film sanitizing to buying a new sports car, repainting it or restoring the interior, then reselling it. "Spielberg says no one has the right to impose their truth on top of his," he says. "My response to that is, he's the god of truth? We just want to watch a movie without sex and nudity."

But critics say sanitizers sometimes alter a film so much that its original themes are muted or even turned upside down. Robert Rosen, dean of UCLA's film, theater and television school, points to a sanitized version of "The Hurricane," about African American boxer Rubin Carter, that eliminated racial epithets uttered by police officials investigating Carter. That, according to Rosen, undercut two of the movie's central themes, racism and police corruption. "This has very little to do with protecting children," Rosen says. "There are all kinds of religious, political and ideological biases at work."

According to the article the type of sanitizing done by ClearPlay, where the DVD is edited in real time as it's played by special software in the DVD player, is only slightly preferable to Hollywood than out-and-out editing, though they still don't like it.

I personally am a bit torn over film sanitizing. Obviously, there's a market for content with toned-down sex, violence, and profanity that Hollywood just isn't filling. If that weren't the case, then companies like CleanFlicks and its competitors wouldn't be in business. So the free-market advocate in me is happy to see that demand being met by someone. Furthermore, the historian in me recognizes that CleanFlicks and its ilk are simply doing what storytellers have done for millennia, i.e. adapting someone else's material to fit the tastes of a specific audience in a specific time and place. Finally, I'm in full support people's right to do whatever they want with stuff that they pay money for, including mangling it and reselling it.

On the other hand, however, as a writer I'd really hate to fall victim to something like this, especially if I felt strongly about content that had been deleted and the sanitized version was more popular than the original. No artist wants to see some well-meaning but aesthetically challenged Philistine making a complete hash of something that they've labored over for years of their life. If I spent years and vast sums of money crafting the perfect cinematic experience, and I then learned that hundreds of thousands of people in Utah were renting and watching some horribly botched version of it that did no justice to my vision, I'd hunt down the person responsible and do something that would land me on the evening news.

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