A couple of weeks ago, I watched a DVD supposedly based on one of my favorite Victorian novels, “Vanity Fair” by William Makepeace Thackeray. The movie ends with Becky Sharp and Joseph Sedley, obviously enamored with each other, merrily riding atop an elephant through a vibrant celebration in India. The book ends with Joseph dead after Becky poisons him for his life insurance.
To say the least, Thackeray’s “artistic vision” was compromised by film director Mira Nair and the others involved in its production. He wrote a witty and satirical attack on a gilded superficial society, where you cheer for scheming Becky because she ruins people who have it coming; they turned it into a fluffy costume romance.
Productions like “Vanity Fair” are why I had a hard time keeping a straight face when I read about a court ruling handed down earlier this month by federal Judge Richard Matsch in Denver.
At issue were several video-sanitizing services, mostly based in Utah, with names like CleanFlix and Play It Clean. The companies purchase an official DVD and then make an edited copy, eliminating profanity, nudity, gore and other stuff they deem unsuitable. If you buy or rent from one of these companies, you get both versions.
So there isn’t any financial damage to the studios; indeed they might even sell more DVDs on account of these services. The people who buy or rent these DVDs know what they’re getting and why. There’s no deception involved. And there’s no First Amendment censorship issue, either, since the editing is done by private parties, not the government. Even so, the sanitizers were sued for copyright infringement in December 2002, by various Hollywood studios and directors, as well as the Directors Guild of America. Hollywood won. Matsch held that the sanitizers’ “business is illegitimate. The right to control the content of the copyrighted work … is the essence of the law of copyright.”
Let me be clear that I think sanitizing is silly, and I like my indulgences served neat: unfiltered hand-rolled smokes, straight rye, rare steak, bash-shell Linux, black coffee, loud and dirty rock ‘n’ roll, etc. We had several volumes of Shakespeare around when we had small children at home, but we never felt the need of an 1818 work from Thomas Bowdler, who issued the “Family Shakespeare,” wherein “nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”
But I also believe I have the right to watch as much or as little of a movie as suits me, and other people have that same right.
Where does this “creative control” end? Thanks to the lobbyists of Hollywood, it is illegal for me to play a DVD that I own on a computer I own. They rig the DVDs so that you can’t skip their promotional tracks – just how is that part of an “artistic vision”?
Do you violate copyright law by going to the restroom during the playback, because you’re missing part of what the director wanted you to see? If you pause it for that duration, are you violating copyright because you’re interrupting the continuous flow that the director desired?
That day may be coming, thanks to rulings like this one. It was cheered by Michael Apted, president of the Directors Guild of America. “We have great passion about protecting our work, which is our signature and brand identification.”
I’d take him a lot more seriously if Hollywood had shown some respect for William Thackeray’s “signature and brand identification” when his “Vanity Fair” was made into a movie in 2004. But Thackeray died in 1863, his works have gone into the public domain, and there’s no one to protect his artistic vision from money-grubbing hacks who expect us to respect their “artistic visions.”
Hollywood has repeatedly altered works by Jane Austen and Mark Twain and scores of other great writers whose work now belongs to the public, as in “public domain.” So perhaps we, the public, ought to sue Hollywood for misrepresenting those artistic visions for its own selfish purposes.
But I don’t believe in controlling art, even if Hollywood does.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
