wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (02/27/85)
(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