Andy Smetanka » 02.11.10 »
A DIFFERENT LENS
Big Sky continues to change the way we look at documentary filmmaking. Welcome to the fascinating world of "clean" movies, and the clean-movie empire that flourished in predominantly Mormon Utah for roughly a decade. Ray Lines heard the call for grown-up movies with "the crap cut out" and went into business selling DVD copies of PG-13 and R-rated titles he edited himself. And made a crap-ton of money at it.
Cleanflix starts with Lines as its main personality but gradually shifts its focus to the engaging and infuriating person of Orem businessman Daniel Thompson. Thompson's flawless entrepreneurial timing (he bought up brick-and-mortar Cleanflix franchises up and down the Utah Valley as Lines and partner Allan Erb concentrated more on online sales and rental) helped him corner the Utah market in a matter of months, but with questionable long-term security. With no clear legal foundation, the clean-movie business was always on the verge of court-ordered extinction.
Clean-movie stores and distributors, as we learn in the movie, justified their after-market movie existence by buying one copy of a feature DVD for every copy they altered and sold, the rationale being that Hollywood would keep looking the other way as long as it wasn't actually losing money. Directors and producers minded, of course: The Hollywood interviews here are a gallery of snarling condemnations. What finally put Hollywood on the attack was Thompson's endless media grandstanding. A shameless and skilled self-promoter, his TV antics and skyrocketing fame eventually brought certain unsavory extracurriculars to light, to the ruin of his business and the horror of the original Cleanflix partners, Lines and Erb.I had sort of hoped going into Cleanflix that it would take a pan-century view of movie sanitizing. Not censoring, but sanitizing commercial product to open new markets and hence make more money. It's interesting that Steven Soderbergh and Curtis Hanson have so much bile reserved for the Mormons when you never hear of directors complaining about how their artistic vision has been compromised for, say, in-flight viewing. Why has no one explored the issue before? Of course, clean-movie editors are outraging someone else's art. But so are the people who edit movies for television. Or who used to, anyway.
Not surprisingly, the Mormon moguls of Cleanflix reveal no great love of film, except as unchallenging family entertainment. They care not a fig about what their actions mean for the creators involved; even among the clean-movie editors, appreciation of film art seems limited to a grudging admiration for how cleverly a movie thwarts the Mormon filter—as though it were "constructed" that way for no other reason.
There's also a shocking double standard for clean-movie violence compared with sex and unacceptable language, as before-and-after clips of Saving Private Ryan and Fargo demonstrate. In the latter case, the notorious wood-chipper scene goes untouched, but an interview with prostitutes is scrubbed for scant mention of a circumcision.
But they do make a point, these clean-movie people. There is clearly a huge market for cleaned-up PG-13 and R movies, and you can't otherwise buy or rent them anywhere. That's fascinating when you think about it, not least because it pits law-abidingness against family entertainment in the moral balance of pious Mormons. Really, though, why should you have to starve on an airplane just to see an inferior version of an already inferior movie when you could just as easily rent a copy online?
Showing: Tuesday, Feb. 16, 7:45 p.m. Cleanflix is a finalist in the feature competition.
Direct link to the review at Missoula Independent. Link to Big Sky.
