"The French Connection" censored and re-edited for "modern sensitivities"
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This bleeds over into the making of The French Connection itself. The train/car chase was shot in traffic, not on a closed road; they almost maimed/killed others/themselves. It was incredibly reckless and "wrong" by modern standards. All of this is discussed in the full-length director commentary.
She said they would joke that there's probably some secret room in the Vatican with all the severed statue penises.
Years -- decades -- later, when I returned to some of these on disk or unedited streaming, I was surprised to discover how much I'd missed. Not just nuance, but entire cultural portrayals and statements that had been "washed away" by the banality of commercial television.
I was both pleased to discover these "new" (to me) pieces of interest and more thorough reflections of culture, and rather disappointed to observe how -- for me at least -- the cultural conversation had been quasi-lobotomized in the interests of some externally imposed lowest common denominator.
A part of public, commercial copyright should be that the covered work, as provided to and subsequently incorporated into the public culture and dialogue, cannot be removed from public access (if still for a "reasonable" fee).
There are TV shows I cannot meaningfully discuss with others who did not see the original broadcasts, because the music that played an essential and culturally relevant / connected role -- as important as the role of a principal character -- has been swapped out due to "rights" issues.
Sorry, nope. You contribute to such a cultural icon, and your contribution lives on in perpetuity. Let whatever contracts be negotiated within that context.
Sound trivial? We are talking about shows that would affect observable traffic -- on roads, in public establishments, etc. -- because "everybody" was home watching the show. (And who knows how much productivity was "lost" to water cooler conversation, the following morning?)
You don't get to just "disappear" culture...
The only show I know of that suffered such a fate is Clone High. Any examples of other such shows?
From Wikipedia:
> The show's use of Blondie's "Heart of Glass" was widely credited with helping the song become a major U.S. hit, and the band's record label Chrysalis Records presented the producers with a gold record award for the song's album Parallel Lines. The gold record can be seen hanging on the wall in the "bullpen" set in many episodes.
> The songs were often tied into episode plots, and some pieces of music were even used as running gags. For example, the doorbell at Jennifer's penthouse apartment played "Fly Me to the Moon" (which was later replaced by "Beautiful Dreamer" for copyright reasons).
> Wilson has commented that WKRP was videotaped rather than filmed because at the time, music-licensing fees were lower for videotaped programs, a loophole that was intended to accommodate variety shows. Music licensing deals that were cut at the time of production covered only a limited number of years, but when the show entered syndication shortly after its 1982 cancellation, most of the original music remained intact because the licensing deals were still active. After the licenses had expired, later syndicated versions of the show did not feature the music as first broadcast, with stock production music inserted in place of the original songs to avoid paying additional royalties. In some cases (such as during scenes with dialogue over background music), some of the characters' lines were dubbed by soundalike actors, a practice evident in all prints of the show issued since the early 1990s, including those used for its late-1990s run on Nick at Nite.
> The expense of procuring licenses for the original music delayed release of a DVD set for years.[44] When a Season 1 set was finally released, much of the music was again replaced and the soundalike vocal dubs were present. Some scenes were shortened or cut entirely, but some deleted scenes that had not been included in the original broadcast were added.
It's decisions about market fit by executives, not a moral crusade (as we have seen, Hollywood execs aren't really the type for that). Sometimes the whole film is affected, as in Blade Runner, Brazil, Once Upon a Time in America, or Kingdom of Heaven. Those movies were "butchered" (to use the language of the histrionic Forbes article). Yet in Leon (The Professional) the director supposedly intended the titular character to sleep with his underage protege. I'm glad someone overrode the sacred "artist's intent" there, and I wish someone had done the same for George Lucas's ill-advised Star Wars editions.
Here someone probably looks at a report and says, OK here are the movies in our pile with more than 20 slurs in them. Let's try to get that number below 10 so we don't have to add a "the language in this film represents the time in which it was made..." warning, that turns a lot of people off.
These decisions get made to maximize shareholder value, and the original film is not lost (except in the case of Star Wars), it's just one of a dozen variant cuts — you think they show the same exact movie everywhere in the world? Ever been to China? Believe it or not art is flexible and resilient. A film can survive a temporary blip while some VPs try to minimize complaints from sensitive viewers. If you disagree with those viewers that is another issue in my opinion.
Sounds like a pretty goddamn good reason to lose my mind.
> the original film is not lost (except in the case of Star Wars)
This is Disney we're talking about. When they want to disappear a movie, they disappear a movie. You can pirate the old version, or buy extant DVDs, but I don't expect them to release a "French Connection Full Slur Version" Bluray or make it an option on streaming ("click here for the slurs version, you RACIST")
> It's decisions about market fit by executives, not a moral crusade (as we have seen, Hollywood execs aren't really the type for that).
As a Criterion Channel subscriber, I take them at their word when they say in their mission statement [1]--
> No matter the medium... Criterion has maintained its pioneering commitment to presenting each film as its maker would want it seen...
Which leads me to ask, did the maker of The French Connection want those slurs removed from his film? (William Friedkin is, after all, still with us.) He certainly seems to have left those slurs in when he and his distributor released the film to audiences in the 70's.
Which makes me curious--just how tough were those previous audiences to be able to withstand the onslaught of slurs that today wilts the average modern viewer? Those moderns could probably use a bit of that stern stuff when looking at the past...
Apparently, yes:
> response i got from criterion: “THE FRENCH CONNECTION is a 20th Century Fox film title that we have under license from Disney, its current owners. This is the only version that has ever been available to us for streaming. The question you raise has come up when we have played the film in the past, and according to our licensor, this is a “Director's Edit” of the film.”
https://old.reddit.com/r/criterion/comments/1422hx0/criterio...
It wouldn't be the first controversial change he's made to the movie. Here he is talking about color correction he did on the Bluray release:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6le-ginceM
Some reviews of that decision:
https://bluray.highdefdigest.com/1916/frenchconnection.html
https://bluray.highdefdigest.com/6665/french_connection_rema...
The art belongs, in a moral sense, to its makers and its audience as much as its owners when it enters common culture. Warts and all. We pay for it with the rent it owes from living inside our heads; all that free IP and raw capability that gets pumped into the fandom.
I had the same identical problems with Lucas when he "destroyed"[1] the original 1977 theatrical releases in favor of the "Special Edition" or whatever it was called.
[1] Which of course no one believes he did, they're still in Skywalker Ranch somewhere. Leaving "Harmy's De-Specialized Editions" to become the definitive release of that art.
4K77/80/83. Scanned at 4K resolution from 35mm prints, cleaned, and color restoration applied based on non-faded references. Even closer to the original experience than owning a 35mm copy (because it'll be badly faded and probably have quite a bit of damage). Much better than the official versions of the "originals" on DVD and blu-ray, which retain some later modifications, and which look much worse—for some reason they keep releasing them way too dark.
So to me it's less about the social score censorship and more the whitewashing the character in an inauthentic way. Pretending they wouldn't say such things in 1970 when every NYC cop said the N word 10 times a week ...
There's basically identical language in The Godfather, The Taking of Pelham 123, The Shining, The Last Detail (100s more I'm sure)... serving the same "authenticity", staying true to the characters, the time and place, and the story being told.
Even in its ugliness.
I believe, one reason to pay, is to see un-edited versions.
I think many of us can probably come up with personal equivalents; I know after losing children many parents aren't able to watch movies where children die, and I've got similar feelings about personal trauma. As long as this isn't some orwellian government-driven replacement I don't think there's much to worry about, film can at times be far too pretentious about this kind of thing.
When the film is copyrighted (as The French Connection is for the next 45 years), it is effectively replacing the originals.
So far this change only seems to have been made to streamed copies. Physical copies are unaffected so far, but the next physical release may well be censored too, meaning the original out‐of‐print edition will only be legally available through deteriorating secondhand copies. Refer to theatrical Star Wars for another example of that kind of erasure (by the original creator, no less).
https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-t...
From West's "Roald Dahl" at https://archive.org/details/roalddahl00mark_0/page/70/mode/2... :
> The controversy started when Lois Kalb Bouchard and some other critics charged that the book was racist. In 1970 Bouchard published an article entitled “A New Look at Old Favorites: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which was reprinted a few years later in a book called The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism.
That 1972 reprint is available at https://archive.org/details/blackamericaninb0000macc/page/11... .
West continues:
> Bouchard did not accuse Dahl of “being deliberately racist,” but she argued that he perpetuated racist stereotypes through his portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas. She criticized these characters’ “childishness and dependency upon whites.”12 She also disliked the relationship between Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas. “As workers in the factory,” Bouchard wrote, “the Black characters are exploited. The owner clicks his fingers sharply when he wants a worker to appear. The Oompa-Loompas are made to test various kinds of candies, sometimes with unfortunate effects” (Bouchard, 113).
After the 1971 announcement about the movie, the NAACP threatened to boycott the movie. Dahl "found the NAACP to be unreasonable, telling Knopf editor Bob Bernstein he was unable to understand why the perceived his story as a ‘terrible dastardly anti-negro book,’ and described their attitude as ‘real Nazi stuff.’” - https://daily.jstor.org/roald-dahls-anti-black-racism/
The NAACP protest is why the Oompa-Loompas in the movie are orange - https://screenrant.com/gene-wilder-willy-wonka-and-the-choco... .
Only after Cameron's "wide-ranging attack" in 1973 did Dahl agree to change the book, in 1974, several years after the movie came out.
"Sensitivity readings" is hardly a recent concept. The Hardy Boy's were updated to remove the original depictions of racial stereotypes. Was that censorship? Or a desire to make more money?
The 1981 revised edition of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" were edited with edits for "modern sensibilities", including reducing sexist language [1]. Was that censorship?
When is the copyright owner and/or licensee morally obliged to not make legally allowed changes?
Only when the change can be seen as "politically correct"?
[1] For examples, "insurance man" was replaced with "insurance agent", and "leadership gravitates to the man who can talk" changed to "leadership gravitates to the person who can talk". It also dropped the section on marriage. ("Never get married until you have kissed the Blarney Stone. Praising a woman before marriage is a matter of inclination. But praising one after you marry her is a matter of necessity — and personal safety.")
Here’s how Spielberg himself describes it (https://allthingsfangirl.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-scene-raide...):
“Speaking for myself, you know, I tried [modifying a film] once and I lived to regret it. Not because of fan outrage, but simply because I was disappointed in myself. I was overly sensitive to some of the criticism ET got from parent groups when it was first released in '82 having to do with Eliot saying "Penis Breath" or the guns...and then there were certain brilliant, but rough around the edges close ups of ET that I always felt, if technology ever evolves to the point where I can do some facial enhancement for ET, I'd like to. So I did an ET pass for like the third release of the movie and it was okay for a while, but then I realized that what I had done was I had robbed the people who loved ET of their memories of ET. And I regretted that.”
I'm glad that no one can censor ancient works that are now under public domain. No one can force us to only read less-scandalous versions of Greek mythology or Shakespeare. But most works made over the last century are unfortunately held hostage to excessively long copyright terms, making them vulnerable to extinction when there is a cultural generational change and the new generation decides to disfigure them or wipe them out. In this way we lose access to cultural artifacts that show us what people thought at the time, for better or worse. Sometimes we even lose access to certain ideas that were better that current ones. Societal progress is not necessarily monotonic.
I'm not saying that I approve of all the values present in old works of art. But I nonetheless want to be able to see, hear, or read such works in their original, unvarnished form. I don't want condescending, contemporary censors to look down on me and assume I won't be able to tell what's problematic in old works or will absorb and embrace values that have turned out to be wrong.
The concept of primary source is orthogonal to fact/fiction.
Even to the point of having an entire genre of "Horror" movies with a general theme of murder defining the genre.
We properly view those scenes though as complete fiction.
Rights holders have never been trustable in maintaining the best copy of media, and it's even worse now the pipes from the rights holders to us also have a say in what parts of it are shown or if to cut off 20% of the frame to appease people scared of black bars.
The only people who can be trusted are those archiving for passion of the media.
> This appearance of an unedited version of The French Connection on Disney+ casts doubt on the assumption by some that Disney - which now ‘owns’ the film following its purchase of 20th Century Fox - is to blame for the unannounced cut.
Except -- good luck finding it (and in a form easily accessible, e.g. streamable).
I get the fact that this is their right and at the end of the day, we can't put a gun to their head and make them not do this. Still, I don't need to pretend that I'm "fine" with it or that it isn't fundamentally stupid.
Oh, and guess which version teachers/professors will be allowed to show in class -- on penalty of career death and public humiliation.
The pearl clutching in the comments here is ridiculous. It's as if these monkey-fighting commenters have never seen a Monday to Friday TV edit.
Say what you will about the sensibilities of the Bowlders, but they didn’t have control over anyone’s access to the original unedited Shakespeare. Ditto for VidAngel, and so on.
Otherwise how can consumers know they won't like it before they buy it?
Example: https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2020/07/dd-netflix-and-hulu-...
All of this erodes your actual freedom to "look elsewhere" as the places you have to look become fewer and harder to find, and are sometimes actively shut out by other platforms like EBay and Amazon.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2023/06/06/apple-tv-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2023/06/06/apple-tv-...:
> In the version of the film being shown on the Criterion Channel and Apple TV, around four seconds of the film have been cut during a scene where Hackman heads out of the Narcotics Division office pursued by Scheider. The original scene, which starts at around 9mins and 42 seconds into the film, sees Scheider and Hackman’s characters having a conversation by the door during which two racial slurs are used. In the edited version, all but the last couple of ‘innocent’ exchanges of this conversation have been cut out - clearly to remove the slurs.
I just checked the unedited version. One of the slurs is one I'd never heard before for an Italian (had to look it up), and the other is the N-word.
https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/french-connection-refresher/
It's no different than with free software. Yes, anyone can fork the original, but it's still up to the public to decide whether than fork succeeds or fails. Meanwhile George Lucas can just force "Greedo shot first" on us whether we like it or not.
2. Most people do care about respecting the dead. Otherwise there wouldn't be laws against desecrating graves
You want to ensure you have no legacy? put it all in a vault and demand no one alters it.
"The Cloud" is the perfected version of the memory hole. If everything's streamed, they'll be nothing to compare the edited version to, and these kinds of edits are always done sneakily. The only thing that could tell you something is wrong is a gas-lit memory.
This is a debatable statement. Personally I want to see the original artist's intent, warts and all. It gives insight into the cultural sensitivities, or lack thereof, of an era before I was born.