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Worst SF Movies/censorship technique (repost) [message #117686] Mon, 23 September 2013 18:31
Wmartin[1][2][3][4] is currently offline  Wmartin[1][2][3][4]
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Message-ID: <8724@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 27-Feb-85 11:34:26 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.8724
Posted: Wed Feb 27 11:34:26 1985
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Xref: watmath net.sf-lovers:6491 net.movies:5814 net.tv:2537

(I am reposting this because I fear it did not ever get off this host;
it was posted during a period when netnews feeds seemed erratic. Also,
I never saw any responses or evidence it reached the SF-Lovers Digest feed.)

"Battle Beyond the Stars" was recently nominated in the "Worst SF Movie"
discussion. This reminded me of something that was done to this movie when I
saw it on broadcast TV, and which I recall seeing in only one other
broadcast movie. [A couple other short postings have alluded to this,
since this was originally written, but haven't gone into the subject in
any depth.]

This was a technique of "bluring" or obscuring portions of the image
to hide nudity or something the network censors didn't like without
clipping out the scene(s) from the movie.

In Battle Beyond The Stars, every time the scene was the inside of
the warrior-girl's ship, the view of her, lying in her accelleration
couch (or whatever it was), was blurred by a grey, fuzzy blotch in
the foreground that hid her cleaveage. I saw the same technique in
the broadcast of the movie "The Shining" (with Jack Nicholson, based
on the Stephen King book). In that, there was a scene of him observing an
apparition of a woman taking a bath and stepping out of the bathtub.
This would have been full-frontal nudity, and, instead of excising the
scene for broadcast, the few seconds when the woman's body would have been
visible were blocked by one of these fuzzy grey patches, just over her
torso; the rest of the image was clear.

I can understand the use of this in "The Shining"; it was a major and
probably expensive-to-buy-the-rights picture, and it was better to
show as much of it as possible and use this technique to allow that
scene to be broadcast without violating the network's code or standards.
However, in BBtS, it seems silly. There was no nudity being blocked;
just cleaveage shots no racier than what is seen in an average episode
of "Love Boat" or dozens of other shows.

My questions: What is this technique called, and can anyone provide
any technical details as to how it is done, and under what circumstances,
and if it is cheap or expensive to do?  Can anyone name other movies 
broadcast on TV in which this technique is or was used?

It all seems rather childish; at least one local independent TV station
(KPLR, Ch. 11, St. Louis, MO) has been showing movies and reruns of
the cable version of the "Bizarre" program which have brief amounts of
female nudity, without cutting or obscuring them. It seems a healthy
trend to not worry so much about this sort of thing.

Will Martin

USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin     or   ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA
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