Today’s amusing item from behind the Zion Curtain takes a bit of set-up, but the payoff is utterly delicious. Bear with me on this.
The first thing you need to know is that many observant LDS people have a general policy of avoiding R-rated films. Their religion counsels them to eschew profanity and depictions of sex and violence on moral grounds, and since R-rated movies usually tend to have copious amounts of these things, such movies automatically go on the “do not see” list. While I can respect the moral stand taken by these anti-R Mormons, I personally think they miss out on a lot of good movies — good both in the sense of entertaining, but also frequently in the sense of good art. (I think it’s very difficult to intelligently explore many areas of the human condition without including profanity and sex, because life is just like that. I do find, however, that the constant use of the F-word in some flicks gets pretty tiresome. I’ve always said that I don’t mind profanity in my dialogue, but I hate it when it is the dialogue.) Still, it’s their choice to make, and I support their right to make it. And anyway, I much prefer that people who are offended by certain content simply not watch that content, rather than attempting to enforce any form of censorship that would prevent me from watching it.
A few years ago, a Utah entrepeneur named Daniel Thompson apparently thought anti-R Mormons were missing out on a lot of good movies, too, so he came up with a novel idea: he started a video sales-and-rental business called CleanFlicks, which offered popular R-rated movies with the offensive bits cut out so as to suit the sensibilities of the niche market he was targeting. A good idea, on the face of it. There was only one problem: Thompson and his staff were the ones doing the editing. They didn’t have permission from the Hollywood studios that owned the films, and they didn’t have any kind of input from the writers and directors who created those movies.
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