Banned or unreleased movies

I recently watched Going Clear, the movie on Scientology. It hasn’t been released here, but has been shown in the 'States on HBO.

The Guardian did an article on it awhile back.

What banned or unreleased-due-to-potential-lawsuit movies have you seen, and in your view, did they deserve to be kept under wraps?

What did you actually think of the movie Pap, is it worth tracking down and watching? The last time I went to a Sunday morning market in Eastleigh there was a ‘dianetics and wellness’ tent offering to audit people so if the film supplies ammo to launch at the loonies then I might find a torrent and watch it.

The only thing I’ve watched semi-recently that had been banned is the first and second Human Centipede movies. The first wasn’t too bad as far as cheesy horror movies go but the second is just a truly awful film, any success it had was purely down to the fact people love watching banned horror movies.

Like Dante said to Randall, *never* go ass to mouth.

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I thought it was very interesting, and definitely worth seeking out if you’re curious about the organisation. It focuses a lot on the effort to get Scientology recognised as a religion and some of those that have emerged from belief with something to say about their experiences.

The pitch that one person claimed got them into it was interesting; “if you give them all your money, they’ll make you a star”.

I had a VHS copy of Natural Born Killers that I picked up from Camden market in 1995 when it was still banned. I watched it so many times that I was shocked when I finally saw it in the cinema and realised that the fuzzy blue and yellow scenes were actually crisp black and white.

I had just completed a Media Studies A-level and was about to start a Media degree at Southampton Institute, so I was obsessed with the film. Still one of the finest editing jobs I’ve ever seen, it was criminal that it wasn’t even nominated for an editing oscar…

Now own the DVD but still think the screwed up VHS suits the crazy movie just as well as the actual gorgeous cinematography.

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It was never going to win an Oscar for editing, though. Perhaps the very reasons you liked it were the reasons the Hollywood bauble-givers disowned it.

The editing is a throwback to New Wave styles - disruptive, deconstructing the narrative, breaking continuity. Hollwood conventions of smoothed-out continuity and seamless match-cutting are subverted. Every cut calls attention to itself - which is why students tended to like it (I say ‘students’ past tense, because today’s film students have a memory block for anything older than Avatar). It’s actually been called the utlimate student film because of this showy-ness, but the effect of such disruption is to make the violence more visceral and immediate.

Hence the controversy. And hence no Oscar.

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I hear you, Furball. But some of the cuts were sublime, seriously incredible stuff. Again, not Oscar-worthy in any traditional way, but once you get past the more showy parts, some of the work was absolutely breathtaking. And I’m now double the age I was when I bought the VHS. Ughhh…

Oh, I agree, and think it’s quite possibly Stone’s best film. Have you heard the soundtrack recently? Odd how Leonard Cohen fits it like a glove.

It’s just all good. The soundtrack still stands up.

Cohen fits it like a glove and some of the best moments (like the editing) are the quieter, more haunting ones…

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Not to worry you or anything Cascadia, but Natural Born Killers was also a favourite film of the Columbine massacre perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. They both made what today we’d call martyr videos and referenced the day of the forthcoming killing spree as ‘NBK’.

I hope not to see papsweb riddled with bullet holes.

Haha! I have no mass-murdering fuckhead intentions in my future, so I am quite intent in enjoying my favourite things… :wink:

Probably worth mentioning some of the ridiculous changes we’ve had to endure over the years.

Anyone remember “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles?”

So titled here because the Conservative government of the day was worried that all of our kids might become fucking ninjas or something*.

*Mind you, I don’t see many ninjas out and about, so perhaps the policy was correct :laughing:

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That change in the title always fascinated me too. It’s funny how different cultures will censor different stuff. Britain is heavy handed on violence, and bans guns. USA is heavy handed on sex and focuses censorship on that.

In the end, it all gets out anyway.

Originally posted by @pap

I recently watched Going Clear, the movie on Scientology. It hasn’t been released here, but has been shown in the 'States on HBO.

The Guardian did an article on it awhile back.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/28/going-clear-the-film-scientologists-dont-want-you-to-see

What banned or unreleased-due-to-potential-lawsuit movies have you seen, and in your view, did they deserve to be kept under wraps?

Actually, you could have an entire thread on the films of Alex Gibney (director of Going Clear) that have been banned or censored or buried in some way. In 2013 he made a film called Park Avenue, about the street running north to south in Manhattan, through the poorest and richest neighbourhoods on the island. It turned out that one of the inhabitants of Park Evenue was one of the notorious Koch brothers, who’d managed to get a place on the board of WNET, the local affiliate of PBS (a kind of down-at-heel version of the BBC).

This New Yorker article details the enormous pressures that were brought to bear on the film and on the companies making and financing it:

But perhaps the most egregious example is Gibney’s Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, a devastating account of the murder by US army personnel of an innocent Afghan taxi driver. The television rights were acquired by Discovery, who promised to give it a prominent broadcast. Then they suddenly announced that the film was ‘too controversial’ and declared that it would not be shown at all. Gibney only reacquired the TV rights after a law suit.

Discovery’s behaviour on ‘controversy’ is something I’ve encountered myself. Two films I made for them in 2004 were banned, one on AA Flight 11 (the first plane into the Twin Towers) and the other on the Columbine high school massacre. In conversations with an executive, it turned out that there existed a secretive committee that vetted ‘controversial’ films, and they refused to allow my films to be broadcast. Fortunately, both my films were acquired by the History Channel, and both have had a long life (or lives - they’ve been taken down several times) on YouTube.

But in my view by far the most significant banning in recent history was of Peter Watkin’s War Game in 1965. Made for the BBC, the drama documentary imagined how Britain would fare in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear attack. It was - and still is - a powerful take-down of the British government’s ridiculous pretence of ‘civil defence’ - that it was possible to survive a nuclear attack - and made at the time of a popular upsurge in support for theCampaign for Nuclear disarmament (CND). The film was banned by the BBC and remained banned for 20 years; it was only screened again in 1985.

http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/warGame.htm

Ireland has been the other favourite subject for government censors. In 1985, Paul Hamann’s film Real Lives, featuring interviews with Martin McGuiness of Sinn Fein and Gregory Campbell of the Democratic Unionists, was banned by the BBC after enormous pressure from Thatcher’s then Home Secretary Leon Brittan. It was eventually shown months later after a public outcry over censorship.

Britain’s largest ITV company at the time, Thames Television, actually lost its licence to broadcast after it infuriated the British government over the documentary in 1988 about an alleged ‘shoot to kil’ policy and the murder of IRA members by the SAS in Gibralter.

And international pressure of another kind was brought to bear successfully on another ITV film - this time a drama-documentary - called Death of a Princess, about the beheading of a member of the Saudi royal family. After Saudi threats, the film, made in 1977, has never been shown again in the UK, and was removed from the scehdule in parts of the US and several European countries.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/princess/reflect/harvard.html

Just a few snippets from a long, sad history…

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wait, do you rly make films f-ball?

Only when I’m not posting on here. This is far more important.

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oh gr8 i will send you some pitches! i have a lot of gr8 idea for films that could be banned or unreleased!

Can i watch one of ur films pls?

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Thanks Brian, I’ll call you. Don’t tell me the number - I’ll guess it.

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