PRESS: Missoula Red Tape's Cleanflix-Related Column

Cleanflix is just the jumping off point to talk about human rights in this short column, but they gave us a nice little pull-quote. Direct link to the original here.


Keila Szpaller » 02.17.10 »

WHERE REALITY PLAYS ITSELF

That’s what happens at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Tonight, one of the films on tap is Sweetgrass. Last night, Cleanflix was one of the offerings. The film showed that one community’s desire to censor violent and sexual content in film doesn’t mean R-rated content is dead in their actual lives.

The setting was the Mormon community in the Salt Lake City area, and it reminded me of another interesting bit on the non-discrimination ordinance coming soon to a (political) theater near you.

A Montana Human Rights Network organizer said Salt Lake City adopted last fall an ordinance similar to the one heading Missoula’s way, and with support from the Mormon church. One reason? It didn’t touch marriage. Here’s a transcript on the Deseret News site from a Latter-day Saint spokesman.

Salt Lake City adopted its ordinance unanimously. The documentary festival runs through Thursday. OMG. That’s tomorrow. Schedule here.

Direct link to the column at Missoula Red Tape.

PRESS: BSDFF Cleanflix Interview

An interview with Cleanflix co-director Joshua Ligairi by Sarah Truckey of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Direct link to the original blog post of this interview here.
Sarah Truckey » 02.16.10 »

MORMONS CUT IT OUT IN CLEANFLIX

Cleanflix is a documentary about the phenomenon started by the Mormons in Utah who edit violence, sex and profanity from certain films so they are "clean" enough for their people to watch. Is this sanitization process acceptable? What about the artists whose films are being censored?

Joshua Ligairi of Cleanflix, screening as a U.S. Premiere Tuesday night at 7.45pm, talks with Big Sky Documentary Film Festival about his connections to the Mormon culture, his struggle with objectivity, and the relationships he fostered with his subjects.


BS: How did you hear about this subject matter of censored videos?

JL: We both lived in Utah when we decided to make the film, and edited movies were kind of in their hayday. You couldn't miss them. Andrew had a lot of experiences with them in college; his roommates watched them all the time. I think seeing Steven Soderbergh's Traffic edited, which is one of his favorite films, was a pretty traumatic experience. I had never actually seen one before we started the film, but it was a subject that interested me a great deal. For me, the most interesting aspect when we began was the notion of self-censorship.


BS: Are you Mormon? Did you grow up around Mormons?

JL: We both grew up Mormon, but not in Utah. We both moved around a lot growing up, Andrew in places like Georgia and Michigan, me in places like California and Idaho. We both eventually made it to Utah.


BS: What drove you to make a film about this topic? Was there a personal connection?

JL: Neither of us were supporters of edited movies. We both had Mormon heritage and we were both filmmakers (not to mention huge cinephiles), so all of that played into it. However, I'm not sure either of us felt any specific personal connection. For me, I just saw a story and it was a story that I knew I could tell. Still, I do think our experience with Mormon culture was a huge help when making the film.

First, we understood the mindset of the people who were editing the movies, even though we didn't necessarily agree with their point of view. I think it would be really easy to paint this issue black and white, but I feel like being able to empathize with the culture made for a much stronger, much more nuanced film. For some people that is a problem with the film. They want to feel superior to these people whose actions they disagree with. We didn't want it to be that simple.

The other advantage is that we had access. I think these guys would have been a lot more suspicious of outsiders than they were of us. That familiarity with the culture gave us a lot of freedom and opened up a lot of doors that a complete outsider could have never opened.


BS: Why do you feel this topic is an important one to show the public?

JL: There are so may issues at play here. First, again, it is just an interesting story. It is entertaining. It is real human drama. If you wrote it, nobody would believe it.

Second, the film deals with questions for which there are no easy answers. Should corporations be able to tell us how to use their products if we have purchased them? Is it different if those products are also art? What if censorship comes into play? These are really grey areas that I struggled with for three years while we made the movie and I want the audience to struggle with them, too, because they are not going away once our film is over. As we become immersed in the digital age, people are going to be re-mixing and re-mashing their media in ways that we haven't yet imagined. How will artists respond? How will copyright holders respond? Cleanflix could be seen as a little test case of things to come.


BS: Where is most of the film shot?

JL: Well, 90% of the film was shot in Utah Valley, commonly known as "Happy Valley." We also went to California, Idaho, New York, and Washington DC during our journey, but we kept coming back to Utah. There were edited movies in other places, and there are certainly similar attitudes in other places, but, as I've said a lot when talking about the film, we focused on Mormons in Utah because it took that culture to create edited movies.


BS: What do the subjects think of your film? Have they seen it?

JL: Unfortunately, we haven't yet been able to show the film to many of our subjects. Robert Perry, one of the store owners went to Toronto for the World Premiere and he wrote about his experience on his personal blog. He was the exception to the rule. We have contacted Daniel Thompson, who kind of emerges as the main character in the second half of the film about showing it to him. Hopefully that will happen this week. Ray Lines and Allan Erb, the main guys behind CleanFlicks, don't watch R-rated movies, so we plan on getting them a toned-down version as soon as we have time to create it.

BS: Do you feel as if you shot the film objectively?

JL: When telling a story there is no such thing as complete objectivity, but we really made an honest effort to tell it like it was. Which was hard because you start to form relationships with your subjects when you spend two years filming them, you become friends and you feel bad including footage that you know may hurt them, but we always approached Cleanflix with strict journalistic integrity, and I hope they will all appreciate that as much as Robert did.


BS: Did many of your subjects comply immediately or did they resist your interviews?

JL: It was really hard to get some of these interviews and even harder to find out the truth behind what they were telling us. A lot of these guys were operating illegally and we were trying to figure out how the whole operation worked. Sometimes I am a little sad that we present the information so matter-of-factly because, until the film came out, we were literally the only people that knew most of this stuff. In the end, we made the choice to keep ourselves out of the film, and I am glad that we did.


BS: Why documentary?

JL: I love being transported to a part of the world that I have never been to and I appreciate a filmmaker who is willing to stay back behind the camera and let the subjects speak for themselves. Cleanflix shines a light on a very specific segment of the culture and I think there is a lot to be gleaned from that. The more specific it is, the more universal it becomes.

You can find more information and view the Cleanflix teaser trailer at cleanflixthemovie.com

Direct link to the interview at Big Sky Doc Blog or follow Sarah Truckey's BSDFF coverage on Twitter @BigSkyDoc.

PRESS: Missoula Independent's Cleanflix review

A review of our film, Cleanflix, by Missoula Independent writer Andy Smetanka (warning, spoilers abound). Direct link to the original post at Missoula Independent's site here.


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.

NEWS: Best of fest

Joshua Ligairi » 1.14.10 »

After a hugely successful World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Cleanflix is launching into the New Year. We'll be playing film festivals all over the world from Sweden to San Jose. Stay tuned for more info to see when we will be coming to a town near you. The first three festivals we are announcing are Gothenberg, Big Sky, and Cinequest. These are all well-respected venues. Göteborg International Film Festival is in a corner of the world that I haven't made it to yet, so I am thrilled to be sending the film there. Big Sky has a special emphasis on documentary and Cinequest focuses on ground-breaking films outside the norm. That makes both fests very appealing to us. There are a lot of festivals out there and it takes awhile to separate the wheat from the chaff, but we are really excited about our selections so far. All good things. More to come! Visit the blog often (or just follow us on Twitter) for updates.