Just $7.95 a Month and You’re Free to Turn Movies Into Pablum

Not this Sunday, and not at next year’s Academy Awards, but one of these days you’ll be watching the Oscars and not even recognize that actor strolling the red carpet to the strobe bursts of the paparazzi. You rented the film he’s nominated for -- but you didn’t see him in it.

His entire role will have been “masked” -- removed by software that snips away any remotely offensive bits, sanitizing movies into sterility and puerility. And the Oscar for that dubious achievement in film will go to ... Congress.

Congress has mixed up a poison pill of a bill, and Hollywood could wind up having to swallow it. For some time now, the movie business has demanded protection against the bootleg DVDs that pick its pockets for millions. Not long ago I had lunch with Dan Glickman, the new chief of the Motion Picture Academy of America, and when he was done bragging about the movie his son had produced, “Mr. 3000,” he said he was shocked that a few days after it was released bootleg copies were already being peddled not far from his office -- which is like selling heroin in front of the DEA.

Like any offer of protection, this one comes with a high price. The bill the Senate sent to the House this month would imprison pirates who furtively Camcorder new films and sell the copies. Yet the same bill protects screener software that can steal not just a crummy copy of a movie but the essence of the movie itself. The software comes in many varieties; ClearPlay, out of Utah, the best known, is prepared to Lysol out the icky bits in more than 1,000 films.

Whose idea of icky? Your grandmother’s, probably. For $7.95 a month, ClearPlay’s “staff of movie professionals” will put its virtual hands over your eyes to block morally depraved elements like drinking or teen partying or -- get this, Dan Glickman -- “smoking/some suggestive dancing” and other naughty conduct in your son’s gutter-dwelling “Mr. 3000.” “Movie professionals” at other screener software companies have already filtered out the kidnapping that’s at the core of “Proof of Life” by “Ray” director Taylor Hackford, who testified in Congress against just this sort of thing last summer. They skipped past a plot-critical kiss -- a kiss -- in Robert Redford’s “The Horse Whisperer.” They spared subscribers a 75-second scene of naked, shivering victims in “Schindler’s List.” Keep “masking” and someone might think Auschwitz was a tough-love spa.

So far, screeners cannot legally change scenes and sounds, only cut them, so whoever Photoshopped a corset onto Kate Winslet’s naked body in “Titanic” crossed the line.

Today it’s “smoking/ threatening dialogue/murder topic” -- all ClearPlay red flags -- but tomorrow’s “objectionable content” could be elasticized to cover American politicians behaving badly. What would be left after the “movie professionals” have a go at “Fahrenheit 9/11”? There have been longer Super Bowl commercials.

This is a techno-version of storming into a library and tearing out pages you don’t approve of, or rewriting them to your liking. China, a country striving for capitalism without democracy, altered or cut politically sensitive bits -- like references to human rights dissident Harry Wu -- from Hillary Clinton’s autobiography. Hillary’s Chinese publisher said the changes “do not hurt the integrity of the book.” Listen for the same cant from the politicians tub-thumping for the ClearPlay crowd.

ClearPlay refers to itself as “simply a tool that parents can use to help reduce content they might find objectionable.” In my house we called that the off button. What’s the point of filtering films such as “The Crying Game,” as ClearPlay has? It is not a kids’ movie, and trying to censor it into one is like putting martini recipes in My Weekly Reader and then blacking out “gin” and “vermouth.” American parents and pols are infantilizing the culture, turning every movie into day care for their kids.

Let’s consider how the year’s Best Picture nominees might play after ClearPlay’s “movie professionals” get to them.

* “The Aviator”: Speed past the cussin,’ carousin’, T and A, and the pure crazy, and you have an idiosyncratic history of domestic aviation and a commercial message: Got milk?

* “Finding Neverland”: Dead dad, dying mom, no problem -- Disney would be broke without orphans. But a married man hanging out with four little boys and their widowed mother? What’s left? Stage magic and a fat man in a dog suit.

* “Sideways”: Pinot noir, premarital sex, man getting the cheese beaten out of him with a motorcycle helmet, dope-smoking, Romanee-Conti, violent golf. Without that, you’ve got a wine-country travelogue that wouldn’t make a splash at an AA meeting.

* “Million Dollar Baby”: Women in boxing shorts, women whaling on other women, and -- don’t read this if you haven’t seen it, because the entire ending has to go -- assisted suicide. What’s left? “The Champ” on estrogen.

* “Ray” : Why bother? Heroin, adultery, racism, boozing -- absent that, we’ve got a talented blind guy who gets rich and famous. Without screening software, total running time two hours, 32 minutes. With screening software: 27 minutes.