Unkind cuts or necessary sanitization?

Part of the argument’s missing in “Bleep! Censoring Hollywood,” an hourlong news special that examines the rise of companies like CleanFlicks and CleanFilms, so-called “sanitizers” who airbrush violence, profanity and sexual content out of DVD rentals, then make them available to consumers for “family friendly” viewing, mostly through Web orders.

The special, produced by AMC and ABC News, calls it a “small but controversial” practice whose pioneer is Ray Lines of the Utah-based CleanFlicks.com. His company, according to “Bleep!,” has sanitized more than 750 films since he first edited the sex scene out of “Titanic” so a neighbor could watch the movie with his family; today, the special says, more than 100 video stores carry rentals bearing Lines’ CleanFlicks label. And there are others, including ClearPlay Inc., which market software and electronics that, in essence, enable parents to turn an R-rated rental into a PG by skipping over objectionable material.

On the other side of this equation, which is now tangled in lawsuits, are Hollywood filmmakers, including Steven Soderbergh, Taylor Hackford and Michael Apted, all of whom argue forcefully in “Bleep!” that what these companies are doing amounts to a clear case of copyright infringement, to say nothing of the artistic violation that the trend involves.

Producer Marshall Herskovitz (“The Last Samurai”) takes the debate up a notch when he says: “It’s easy to see a time when you could go into a store and say, ‘Well, I’d like to have movies with no Jews in them. Let’s take movies with no black people. Movies with no abortion. Movies with no smoking. Movies with no sex. Movies with no violence’ -- there’s a whole range of things you could take out of movies based on your personal preference.”

It’s an alarmist thought, conjuring a Digital Age in which Christian conservatives use technology as a countervailing force against Hollywood’s most sacred art.

Filmmaking is still a sacred art form, right? The debate “Bleep!” outlines wants to go there, but the show remains frustratingly unencumbered by it. Never does it question, for instance, whether the projectile vomiting scene in the Adam Sandler vehicle “Fifty First Dates” is “art,” or whether Breck Eisner, son of Disney titan Michael Eisner and the first-time director of the current release “Sahara,” is most accurately described as “the creative author of the work.”

That’s how Soderbergh casts him and his colleagues, as artists whose visions are being corrupted and then presented to the public falsely, as their own work. But he’s also speaking for the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay. They’re the elephants in the room in “Bleep!,” never on camera. If conservative folk in the heartland have begun to take matters into their own hands, it’s got to be partly because the product being foisted on them by studios is just that -- product, cynically made and cynically marketed.

You don’t have to be Sandy Teraci, of the Arizona-based Family Flix, who describes how the “moral fabric of society ... is going downhill,” to feel manipulated and under-served by Hollywood. You just have to take your family to the local multiplex. And so, while “Bleep!” features interviews with aggrieved, upstanding directors like Soderbergh (“Traffic”), Hackford (“Ray”) and Apted (“Coal Miner’s Daughter”), it fails to deliver an interview with a schlockmeister or a studio head -- the ones responsible for the devaluation of the movie-making art to such a degree that a fringe industry has grown that treats content as shabbily after the fact as it was treated before lensing began.

Of course, it’s dangerous to argue that pablum deserves less protection than genuine stabs at artistic expression. The sanitizer who hacks away at Hollywood trash is then emboldened to take on the well-defended gore in “Saving Private Ryan.”

It’s a bit chilling when Lines of CleanFlicks talks about his post-”Titanic” sanitizing success. “And that just evolved into doing ‘Jerry Maguire,’ ‘Braveheart,’ ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ ” he says, sitting at his computer, “and the next thing I know, I’m in the editing movie business.”

Among the top rentals on his CleanFlicks website are “Troy,” “Man on Fire” and two “Matrix” movies, raising the obvious thought: If they might offend you, watch something else -- the worst that can happen is that you’ll miss “Man on Fire.” The sanitizers argue that they aren’t hurting Hollywood’s bottom line because for every DVD they alter, they buy another copy of the movie. In Washington, meanwhile, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) has sponsored the Family Movie Act, which would make it legal for companies like ClearPlay to stay in business. The situation has echoes of the decency debates that have reverberated out from the FCC since Janet Jackson; with movie sanitizing, here is yet another pocket of the culture war in which conservative politicians and entrepreneurs sense an opportunity to make political and economic hay by taking on Hollywood.

A Hollywood that keeps chipping away at its dignity with each succeeding blockbuster.

“Bleep!” begins with a battle scene from “Troy,” Brad Pitt as Achilles thrusting his sword into the heart of Hector. We then see the scene after it’s been sanitized, without that final sword thrust. It doesn’t exactly conjure the image of Nabokov’s “Lolita” being thrown onto a bonfire. It’s instead just a little less of Brad Pitt, in a revealing Roman outfit, demonstrating what it might look like to see someone stabbed in the heart.

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‘Bleep! Censoring Hollywood’

Where: AMC

When: 10 tonight

Rating: TV-14-SV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with an advisory for sex and violence)

Jay Schadler...Narrator

Executive producers Jessica Shreeve and Lisa Zeff.