Censoring Hollywood, One Filter at a Time?

On April 27, 2005, President Bush signed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, legislation aimed at helping parents keep their children from seeing sex scenes, violence and curse words in DVDs. The bill gives legal protection to the fledgling filtering technology that helps parents automatically skip or mute sections of commercial movie DVDs. The act also contains crackdowns on copyright infringement by providing no legal protection for those companies that actually sell copies of the edited movies.

On April 26, the AMC television network aired a special in collaboration with ABC News on this issue called "Bleep! Censoring Hollywood." The special showed the people on both sides of the story, the highly-religious people who sell copies of edited/filtered movies and the members of the Directors' Guild of America (DGA) who are in protest of what the other side's doing. The members of the DGA interviewed for the special included "Ray" director Taylor Hackford and "Traffic" director Steven Soderbergh. One random woman interviewed for the special said she took her 10-year-old daughter to a PG-13 movie and felt uncomfortable having her daughter there. PG-13 means that a 10-year-old probably shouldn't be watching the movie! That's the parent's fault, not Hollywood's, thank you very much. Kids are not meant to see PG-13 and R-rated movies, that's why they have those ratings!

Stopping the sale of edited DVDs is a good thing, and the filters would have also been good to stop too. Editing out anything considered vulgar in PG-13 and R movies could just ruin them. Imagine "Bridget Jones's Diary" without the f*** drawn out in a subtitle on the screen. Or "The Godfather" without the infamous horse head scene. No "yippie kay-yay mother f***er" from Bruce Willis in "Die Hard." Anything from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's non-family movies would be ridiculous if edited. I couldn't imagine watching or even enjoying edited versions of "Kill Bill," "Pulp Fiction" or "Sin City." That's just plain crazy, and these examples are just a start. If you're worried about what is said or what happens in a PG-13 or R rated movie, don't watch it. You won't get the full effect of the movie with all the violence, sex and foul language edited out.

Movies are an artistic form of expression, and limiting any form of art is downright wrong. It is not the government's job to stop parents from allowing their kids to see PG-13 and R-rated movies or help the parents edit out vulgarities. That responsibility is solely in the hands of parents and guardians. PG-13 and R movies are rated that way for a reason: KIDS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO WATCH THEM!