Are these videos rated C for clean or compromised?

Mesa, Ariz.

Marva Sonntag drives to a modest strip mall to browse the local CleanFlicks video store, a place where the clock has been turned back; practically nobody swears in movies here.

They don’t swear because the 400-plus titles on the shelves have been shipped back to CleanFlicks’ corporate headquarters in Utah and clipped of profanity, sexual scenes and some violent episodes. Much of the time it’s a matter of removing the “damns.” Other times, the surgery is extensive. In CleanFlicks’ version of “Saving Private Ryan,” men still die and scream during the invasion of Normandy, but most of the suffering and blood have been eliminated, changing director Steven Spielberg’s nightmarish frankness to mere unpleasantness.

Sonntag, a mother of four who believes “most crimes start with pornography,” loves CleanFlicks, which opened in her neighborhood nine months ago. She’s practically giddy as she talks about finally getting to know Tom Cruise.

“I have loved him forever but I’d only seen one of his movies,” she says, explaining that her family stopped going to R-rated films, then PG-13s because “PG-13 was halfway to R and it was offensive. Now I’m really enjoying it. I didn’t realize how good his movies were.”

A week later, this anecdote is briefly relayed to director Michael Apted (“Enigma,” “The World Is Not Enough”), who is horrified. The British-born Apted is a party in the Directors Guild of America’s month-old lawsuit against CleanFlicks and a dozen other video-rental and software companies that sanitize hit films. But the description of Sonntag’s gratitude pushes him to a new level of outrage.

“The terrifying implication of what you’re saying is that any small interested parties are entitled to change anything to suit their own particular will. Where does that leave you? That leaves you in anarchy and chaos,” he says. “It’s fascism to me.”

This is an exchange of fire in America’s latest culture war, headed for a showdown in federal court because each side holds a different definition of sacrilege: Directors like Apted are consumed by the need to protect the sanctity of their films. CleanFlicks customers like Sonntag are consumed by the need to protect the sanctity of their homes.

Differences over commerce, art and morality have dug an ideological chasm that dwarfs the 385 miles between Mesa, a fast-growing city of 425,000 just outside Phoenix, and Bel-Air, where Apted has gathered in a hotel suite with two other leading directors, Michael Mann (“The Insider,” “Ali”) and Jon Turteltaub (“Phenomenon,” “Disney’s ‘The Kid’ ”) to talk to a Times reporter about the threat of unlicensed editing.

“The idea that somebody else ... can arbitrarily take our works apart and destroy them in any manner they want and represent it as still being that film ... is a breach,” Mann says in a resentful staccato. “There’s no polite word for it -- it’s stealing. It’s stealing from the consumers ... from the copyright holders [the studios] and it’s certainly stealing from us. That’s not the film that I made.”

“It’s the tip of a very dangerous iceberg” of digitizing, adds Apted. “This would appear to be a benign issue -- making a family version -- which could easily go a thousand other ways: making pornographic versions of films, political versions of films, any way you wanted to.”

The directors’ outrage is lost on Richard Ray, a chiropractor and father of seven who, on the day a reporter visited the Mesa CleanFlicks, was returning an edited copy of “We Were Soldiers.”

“They may talk about artistry and all that other stuff, but when it comes down to it, they made the movie and then some editor came and cut it, and the reason they cut it was to make it a marketable movie,” Ray says. “They cut out scenes they thought may have been great. And then it goes to the airlines. They OK that. It goes to TV, they edit that. And they’re making money all along the way and nobody hears anything about their artistry being cut down.”

The directors respond that such editing is permitted only because it is licensed by the studios. But this is a technicality that does not engage most Mesa CleanFlicks customers. One by one on this afternoon, they tick off the movies that had made them uncomfortable -- for themselves or their children -- and drove them inside this store: the bedroom moments in “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” the sex scene in “Dances With Wolves,” the language in “My Cousin Vinny” and “Good Will Hunting.” The store’s manager, Karen Huggans, a mother of six children who invested in the business as a way to raise the family’s income, still remembers the cursing in “White Men Can’t Jump,” a comedy she had looked forward to seeing. “The next day I was speaking to a youth group of kids about doing good things and I could still hear those words ringing in my head.”

To Hollywood’s creative community, the movement is at once hugely ominous and a minuscule blip. About 550 families have bought memberships at Huggans’ dealership. There are 75 other CleanFlicks stores in 14 states, half in Utah (none yet in California or New York). In addition, there are several other, smaller chains offering edited videos. There are also software companies selling programs that tell your computer or DVD to eliminate certain words or scenes from hundreds of movies.

Almost all of these enterprises have sprung up in the past two years, triggering legal threats from the Directors Guild. In August, a CleanFlicks operator in Colorado preemptively sued the DGA and 16 high-profile members, asking for a court’s endorsement of CleanFlicks’ practices. The DGA responded last month with a countersuit against CleanFlicks’ corporate office and 12 other companies, asking the court to effectively shut them down. The DGA contends the unlicensed video and software editing violates federal copyright law. CleanFlicks contends that each store operates as a co-op, meaning members “own” all the videos, which makes the editing as legal as buying a book and tearing out a page at home.

Experts sometimes offer conflicting impressions. Michael Marsden, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who edits a journal on film and television, decries edited videos as “almost vigilantism.” Jeremy Hunsinger, who directs a center for “digital discourse” at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, describes it as merely the latest example of the way digitizing dilutes reality -- an extension, for example, of the way TV superimposes ads on stadium fences or the yellow first-down line on football fields. Ernest Miller, a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, says directors have overreached by trying to outlaw home software that masks content of a DVD: “The issue is whether Hollywood can dictate how a viewer experiences a movie in the privacy of his or her own home.”

You can hear a dialogue in the two sides’ exhortations, but it promises no compromise.

Look, says director Turteltaub, you can’t treat the work we spend years on as though it were a cookie-cutter project. We put our emotions and anxiety into our films. People like Marva Sonntag are fooling themselves if they think they’re watching a Tom Cruise movie. They’re simply watching clips from a Tom Cruise movie. Look, says another CleanFlicks customer, Keena Baker, “there are some really good stories out there that don’t need the stuff they put in.” You rent the edited “Thomas Crown Affair” and you don’t miss the sex scene they clipped out.

Look, says Apted, you do miss these things. Look at what happened when they snipped the sex scene out of “Shakespeare in Love” -- they obliterated the crucial link between art and life.

Look, says another CleanFlicks customer, Lisa Lengstorf, “if that’s what it takes to make the story good, then whoever made the movie didn’t do a very good job of writing the story.”

Look, says Mann, you’re crossing a line. “If we were manufacturing a game we’d call it a game. But this isn’t a game, it’s a motion picture, and it has a narrative.” The parts of a film “bear complex relationships that, in architecture, without that kind of engineering, the building falls down.... The experience is degraded.”

Look, says another CleanFlicks customer, grandfather Lynn Mullenaux, what’s degrading is having to watch a film with even a single lewd moment.

“We can say, ‘Oh, it was a great movie and there was only one scene where we saw her naked from the top up, and I closed my eyes. Or I put my hands over my kid’s eyes. But aren’t we living a double standard when we do that? If I allow the violence and the filth and the sex to enter into my home, what am I teaching my grandchildren?”

Like most of the customers who come into the Mesa store, Mullenaux is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which plays a key role in this dispute.

Since the 1970s, the church, which has 5 million American members, including 70% of Utah’s population, has counseled Mormons to avoid R-rated movies. CleanFlicks’ creator, Ray Lines, a church member with a video background, stumbled into the business when his friends began asking him to edit a nude scene out of their copies of “Titanic.” He opened his first stores in 2000. CleanFlicks charges new dealers a $5,000 fee plus $14,000 for an initial inventory of videos.

Many CleanFlicks customers, and some conservative commentators, characterize the chain as the first shot in a rebellion against Hollywood’s casual use of sex and profanity. The DGA dismisses CleanFlicks and other companies as an extremist fringe movement concerned more with profits than principles. Advocates of sanitized videos say the marketplace supports them -- that while two-thirds of U.S. films last year were rated R, all but two of the top 10 grossers were PG-13 or milder. These supporters say they want nothing more than to rent the same kind of edited movies that appear on TV networks and airplanes. Their target in that demand is not the directors but the studios, which -- aware that a strong stand either way could offend potential consumers -- have yet to join the litigation, leaving the directors to lead the battle.

Unless the two sides reach a settlement, the court will have to decide whether the editing companies are illegally making “derivative” works, or whether the changes are so minor that they comply with a “fair use” exemption. Another key question is whether software that allows a viewer to block content on an unedited DVD violates a director’s “artistic rights,” as the DGA claims, or is as harmless as hitting the fast-forward button on your remote.

Directors say they realize their absolutism may be a hard sell in a culture where, as Turteltaub says, “people have the right to have things the way they want it.... I don’t think it’s surprising we don’t have a lot of money for art in our schools when we have a society that feels when a piece of art is done, it’s OK to cross things out that you personally don’t like or edit it yourself or maybe put a black line through something that looks offensive to your group.”

Hours before that reflection, 385 miles away from Bel-Air, a less thoughtful but similarly minded person takes a lipstick tube and writes a rhetorical question on the glass window of Karen Huggans’ store: “Would you defile Van Gogh?”