Now on DVD: The Sanitizer's Cut

[MountainLaurel]

Ray Lines is one of the most prolific film editors working today. Thousands of movie fans have seen his handiwork on some of Hollywood's most successful films, from big-budget blockbusters like "Saving Private Ryan" to smaller works like "Sideways." By his count, Lines has edited more than 800 films in just the past five years.

But Lines is unlikely to win any Academy Awards. In fact, the directors whose work he edits haven't authorized him to touch their films, and often have no idea that he's cutting dialogue and sometimes whole scenes.

Lines is a film "sanitizer," one of a new kind of independent and self-proclaimed "family-friendly" editors who delete scenes containing sexuality, violence or crude language -- and sometimes more -- from the DVD releases of Hollywood movies. The edited DVDs are resold or rented to parents and others who want a "clean" version of the movie.

Fans of such movies can, for example, find copies of "Titanic" with Kate Winslet's nude scene snipped out, or versions of "Traffic" without a sequence in which a prominent politician's teenage daughter prostitutes herself for drug money. Scrubbed copies of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" delete depictions of the title character's extramarital affairs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61565-2005Apr17.html

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