This dad demands final cut

If you were looking for a knee-jerk defender of artists’ rights, you’d find me first in line. So when I started hearing about CleanFlicks, ClearPlay and the other Utah companies that have developed technology to edit out profanity, sex and violence from home videos, I was appalled by the idea of people chopping up movies simply to fit their moral sensitivities. As director Michael Mann recently told a Times reporter: “The idea that somebody else can arbitrarily take our works apart and destroy them ... there’s no polite word for it -- it’s stealing.”

Right on, Michael. When it comes to attacks on artistic freedom by a bunch of philistines, I’m on your side. And then I had an unsettling little epiphany.

When it came to watching movies with my 4-year-old son, Luke, I was -- ahem -- something of a philistine myself. One of Luke’s (and my) favorite movies is “The Lion King.” But the film has one scene, in which Mufasa dies trying to save his son in a stampede, that was simply too intense for him to watch. “Dada!” he would shriek, holding his ears. “Skip! Skip!” At first, we’d simply fast-forward to the next scene. Then I had a friend dub a copy of the video with the scene edited out.

Since then, Luke has watched “The Lion King” about 900 times without incident. But what about me? Have I painted a mustache on a masterpiece? The Directors Guild of America firmly believes I have. Joined by a group of prominent Hollywood directors that includes Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, the DGA has taken legal action to shut down a host of companies they say are illegally altering movies. The DGA suit casts a broad net, going after such companies as CleanFlicks, which sells reedited versions of Hollywood films, as well as firms such as ClearPlay and Principle Solutions, which sell software that operates more like a remote-control clicker, giving parents the option of sanitizing otherwise unaltered DVDs and videos.

According to DGA consultant Lon Sobel, who teaches entertainment law at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, my “Lion King” analogy is imprecise. Copyright law, he says, allows individuals to fast-forward, skip or mute scenes, but companies can’t sell software that does it for us. But, I asked, doesn’t Sony sell clickers that fast-forward and mute for us? Yes, Sobel says, “but it’s still the consumer who’s doing the fast-forwarding, not Sony doing it for us.”

He adds that according to a federal trademark statute known as the Lanham Act, an outside company can’t edit or create new versions of someone’s work without permission. “These companies are either editing or creating software that reflects the editing made by the company, not by an individual,” Sobel says. “So when you see one of their videos, the editing is so seamless that if you don’t understand [the narrative logic of the film], you have no idea whether the editing was done by their program or by the original filmmaker.”

The DGA believes it has legal precedent on its side. But with nearly every advance in entertainment technology geared to consumer choice, it becomes more of a struggle to put the genie back into the bottle.

And when it comes to an intellectual debate over artistic integrity, the entertainment business, having made so many craven concessions to self-censorship and commerce in recent years, has a weak case. Parents are tired of being played for suckers. The more I talked to my friends, especially parents who’ve spent years diving for the clicker to fast-forward through a scary scene in a movie or a repellent commercial on a kids’ TV show, the easier it was for me to side with consumer rights over copyright protection.

When a studio buys a popular novel, as Universal did with Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon,” it’s entitled to create or eliminate as many scenes as it sees fit. Yet if I buy a copy of the same movie and use a program to fast-forward through the scene in which a serial killer tortures Philip Seymour Hoffman, rips out his tongue and set his corpse on fire, it’s suddenly a heinous trampling of artists’ rights.

Pleasing the ratings board

I might be more sympathetic to the DGA’s case if someone were willing to acknowledge the vast abandonment of artistic principles that occurs daily in the movie business. Michael Apted, one of the many distinguished directors who has joined the DGA’s suit, recently told The Times that if “any small interested parties are entitled to change anything to suit their own particular will ... that leaves you in anarchy and chaos. It’s fascism to me.”

With all due respect to Apted, if he wants to point fingers at small interested parties that change film content to suit their own particular will, why not start with the 13 anonymous parents who make up the Motion Picture Assn. of America ratings board? Thanks to the failure of studios or filmmakers to challenge their judgments, the ratings board enjoys the absolute power to arbitrarily force filmmakers to mutilate delicate works of art by cutting out scenes that somehow offended the rating board’s sensibilities.

As far as I can tell, the filters designed by companies such as ClearPlay simply deputize parents to be ratings board surrogates. With a flick of a switch, they can jettison sex or profane language, instantly transforming an R-rated movie into a PG-13 film, or a PG-13 film into a PG. Here’s the DGA voicing outrage over a digital tool that gives parents the ability to cut out dirty words, and yet most of these same filmmakers meekly kowtow to the capricious judgments of a roomful of anonymous overseers, slicing and dicing their beloved works of art to earn a PG-13 rating, giving their film infinitely more profit potential.

It’s hard to sympathize with the DGA’s efforts to prevent parents from cleaning up movies when it allows studios to do it every day. As long as there’s a buck in it down the line, filmmakers allow studios to reedit their films for TV and airplane broadcast. If studio research numbers come in low, filmmakers willingly change endings, reshoot scenes, tone down sex and violence, cut out entire characters and subplots, and even change the whole tone of a film to make it more commercially salable.

Filmmakers aren’t the only ones who’ve ceded their right to the moral high ground by placating moralists or grandstanding politicians with self-censorship. When family-values activists attacked smutty lyrics in the 1980s, the music business began labeling potentially offensive CDs with parental warning stickers. And when Wal-Mart and other retailers told record companies they wouldn’t carry stickered CDs, the record companies agreed to make “clean” CDs that had been laundered of enough foul language to be sold without a warning sticker. Nearly every artist has agreed to sanitize records, even though it’s Wal-Mart that sets the rules, not the artists -- no doubt because Wal-Mart accounts for roughly 10% of CD sales.

Interestingly, you can find plenty of “uncensored” versions of popular films in video stores, meaning that studios have discovered the value of offering dirtier edits. If studios, backed by filmmakers, also provided “clean” versions of their big movie hits, they might not be faced with such a grass-roots parental rebellion. In today’s culture, everything is about choice -- our national motto should be “Have it your way.” It comes as no surprise that ClearPlay chief Bill Aho used to be a brand manager at Procter & Gamble; he recognizes the power of a consumer-friendly product.

“If anyone thinks Americans are going to allow film directors to rip the remote control out of their hand, you’re underestimating the desire people in this country have for personal choice,” Aho says. “Technology enables lots of things that people don’t like. I’m sure directors would love to outlaw the mute button and the fast-forward button if they could. But in the living room, it’s Mom and Dad’s call, not the film director.”

In fact, this skirmish between the DGA and parent-friendly filtering devices represents only the latest salvo in a much bigger war -- the ongoing battle between media companies and the technology industry. Whether the war is over Internet file-sharing, MP3s or CD burning, the fight essentially boils down to people who profit from copyright (media conglomerates, filmmakers and recording artists) versus people who profit from serving consumers (electronics firms and Internet mavens). For the past several decades, the most popular new technologies -- from the VCR, the CD and the Sony Walkman to the DVD, MP3, iPod and TiVo -- have been designed to give consumers more control and convenience in experiencing entertainment.

When I play music on a CD or computer or MP3, I can reconfigure it any way I want, adding or skipping tracks, mixing and matching music from different artists. Thanks to DVDs, I can watch a movie in an entirely different order than the artist intended, skip scenes I don’t like or listen to the director’s commentary instead of the original dialogue.

If ClearPlay had a program letting you skip all the Jar Jar Binks scenes in “Star Wars,” wouldn’t you jump at the chance to try it?

For years, MPAA czar Jack Valenti and his counterparts in the record business have provided ratings information and warning stickers, but insisted that it’s ultimately parents’ responsibility to monitor what their kids are watching. But now that someone has come up with a way to make that unenviable task a little easier, filmmakers are crying foul.

They argue that if parents are given any control over the process, their artistry will be threatened by chaos and fascism.

My advice to the DGA: Watch your step. Whoever thought I’d be paraphrasing Charlton Heston? But if you tell parents they’re lawbreakers when they try to do right by their kids, you’re going to find a lot of people daring you to rip those family-friendly filters out of their cold, dead hands.

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.