#tiff09

Cleanflix (Directors: Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi): The Mormon reli­gion for­bids its adher­ents from watching R-rated movies, but Mormons des­per­ately want to see the films that everyone else is talking about. This moral quandary cre­ated what looked like a golden busi­ness oppor­tunity for a group of Utah entre­pren­eurs. Beginning in 2000, Ray Lines began using com­puter soft­ware to digit­ally remove offending scenes from DVDs. His edited ver­sions of the movies were a hot seller and soon his busi­ness, Clean Flicks, was growing wildly. At its height, he owned 10 video stores and sup­plied another 70. He even moved the busi­ness online, selling off the stores to a number of dif­ferent people. Daniel Thompson bought sev­eral of the stores and seemed to be the most suc­cessful. But after the Directors’ Guild of America filed suit against Clean Flicks and its oper­ators, these busi­nesses were living on bor­rowed time. When the case was finally settled in 2006, they were forced to close down.

But quite a few car­ried on. They simply found other com­panies to do the editing and bought their movies from them. Among these out­laws was Thompson. He simply felt that the market demand was over­whelming, and busi­ness was too good. He con­tinued oper­ating under what he saw as a legal loop­hole, which allowed edu­ca­tional use of copy­righted material. But his pen­chant for seeking the spot­light only brought unwanted atten­tion to Flick’s Club, the editing com­pany he was using, and they were soon ordered to shutter their oper­a­tion. To make things worse, within a few months of his own busi­ness closing down, Thompson was charged with paying a minor for sex. The irony of someone oper­ating a busi­ness which offered san­it­ized movies to a reli­gious cli­en­tele being involved in such scan­dalous beha­viour was not lost on the local media, whose atten­tion Thompson no longer wanted.

The dir­ectors of Cleanflix faced the not-uncommon documentarian’s dilemma of having to deal with a chan­ging story. Unfortunately, it’s led to the frac­turing of their film into two pieces. The first half is an engrossing film about issues of cen­sor­ship, intel­lec­tual prop­erty, and an exam­in­a­tion of Mormon cul­tural mores. The second half is a voyeur­istic look into one man’s moral fail­ings. In my opinion, the effort to meld them into a coherent film is only par­tially suc­cessful. It’s unfor­tu­nate that Thompson’s down­fall seemed to be greeted with such glee by the smugly lib­eral audi­ence. I don’t think the film­makers’ inten­tion was self-righteous, and the “comeup­pance” angle blunted the impact of sev­eral inter­esting issues, which remained unresolved.

For instance, I’m curious how the “fair use” copy­right act­iv­ists who advocate for the freedom to “mash up” intel­lec­tual prop­erty feel about editing Hollywood movies to remove objec­tion­able con­tent. I was also fas­cin­ated by the cul­tural phe­nomenon of reli­gious people trying to get around the letter of the law so they can say they’re watching the same films as the rest of America, even when they’re not. I can appre­ciate how Thompson’s fail­ures as a human being illus­trate the futility of trying to pro­tect people from bad external influ­ences, but by let­ting the audi­ence see him as the vil­lain, Cleanflix shouts when it might have whispered.

Official site of the film

Here is the Q&A with dir­ectors Andew James and Joshua Ligairi from after the screening:

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Duration: 16:14

(7/10)

Tagged as: #tiff09, censorship, mormon, mormonism

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