On movies and TV, we face long-distance censorship

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday January 15, 2015

In the old days of the Hays Office, Hollywood movies were tightly restricted on what sex could be shown. Remember the old I Love Lucy and Bewitched sitcoms? Ever noticed that the parents always had twin beds in their rooms? I wondered about my parents sharing a double bed when no-one on TV or in the movies seemed to do so. But that was censorship maintaining rigid boundaries between couples and coupling.

Sex on screen has come a long way in our liberated age. But the Hays Office may be raising its head again - this time through economic muscle. 2013 saw the film business turn over $44 billion world-wide. And a substantial percentage of these receipts were from China, with an industry now bigger than America's.

Add the movie-devouring of India and the Middle East, and you are talking very big bikkies. Enough to make a blockbuster movie financially feasible or dead in the pending tray.

So if the Chinese censors demand less cleavage; or the Indian distributors are unhappy with the blatant sex...well it can be solved with a simple cut-away shot.

Currently in China the hot topic on social media is a very lush and expensive serial drama The Empress of China, about history's only female Chinese ruler. After the first episode played - to a record audience - the series mysteriously went off-air. Four weeks later it returned. All the decolletage shots (the fashion was popular at the time) had been re-edited to head-only framing. The court ladies lost their boobs.

Late last year the board that administers censorship issued a string of prohibitions. And funny enough they are very like the list issued by Will H. Hays in 1930 - you know, the usual: nudity, partner-swapping, rape, incest, prostitution - even flirtation. So now everybody is wondering how a show like Game of Thrones, which features all of the above, is going to fare. The pilot having just been shown on CCTV, an experienced fan reported: "I guess it's okay if all you want to watch is a medieval European castle documentary.” The Chinese version has lost 11 minutes.

But of actually greater importance in China is the political message. In 1984 a movie called Red Dawn was released to poor reviews and moderate multiplex success. It featured Russians and Cubans invading the US. Then in 2009 it was remade with invading Chinese. But wait a minute... it was not released till four years later, and the Chinese had changed to North Koreans. All done through editing and computer graphics in post-production. I mean, the Chinese audience would not want to see themselves as the villains, would they?

The Chinese giggle, online, at an obvious piece of product placement in the new Transformers:
The Age of Extinction movie. As a robot tears its way through Hong Kong there is an unexplained cut to a Communist official who sternly declares: "The central government will protect Hong Kong at all costs!" That's called "And now a word from our sponsor..."

Even the North Koreans have clout, as when they hacked Sony's computers last year and forced the re-scheduling of The Interview, the comedy about an assassination attempt on Kim Jong-un.

Perhaps we'll end up making two versions of every film. As it is, they shoot several endings, don't they? And then choose the one that most appeals to the test market audience. Well here that test market is a small committee in far away Beijing.