Post by talk2santosh on Jan 14, 2005 0:50:57 GMT -5
The Great Indian Vanishing Act
Snip, Cut, Chop: What You Don’t Get To See At The Cinema
By Praveen Dass/TNN
New Delhi: Unknown to you and to the country’s cinema-going public, a number of Hollywood releases are being arbitrarily chopped and changed, often resulting in plots that don’t make sense. For instance, if you recently found yourself confused while watching Oliver Stone’s Alexander—how did the Greek conqueror die in India when you’ve read history books saying he died in Babylon?—don’t blame the director for messing up facts.
Stone is not to blame. He probably doesn’t know that Hollywood films are cut here by local distributors to shorten movies for fitting in more number of shows in a day, as an industry executive reluctantly admitted. The smash hit Pirates of the Caribbean was also so badly cut that it left viewers puzzled about similar plot inconsistencies. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy was also subject to scandalous snips as were King Arthur and Troy. And these are only the noticeable ones.
Sarabjit Singh of Paramount Pictures states emphatically that such cuts are illegal and in total violation of copyright, which normally rests with the studios. But set aside the legalities, and there is a far more serious consumer rights issue here. In the case of Alexander, either greed or misplaced aesthetics has resulted in it shrinking from an original length of 2 hours and 55 minutes to 2 hours and 25 minutes. Pointedly, a half-hour cut—from various parts of the movie—across four shows a day translates into an additional two hours for a multiplex.
Distributors and exhibitors either deny all of this or profess absolute ignorance. When pressed, they either blame each other or point to the censor board as did Atul Goel, the distributor of Alexander.
The explanation doesn’t wash—the censors may cut five or ten minutes of sex and graphic violence, but how does it account for the 30-minute cut? And what about family entertainers like Pirates and LOTR? Other executives say the high cost of prints and the need to send copies to several centres might have led to these arbitrary cuts, although heads of major Indian studios denied this possibility.
Snip, Cut, Chop: What You Don’t Get To See At The Cinema
By Praveen Dass/TNN
New Delhi: Unknown to you and to the country’s cinema-going public, a number of Hollywood releases are being arbitrarily chopped and changed, often resulting in plots that don’t make sense. For instance, if you recently found yourself confused while watching Oliver Stone’s Alexander—how did the Greek conqueror die in India when you’ve read history books saying he died in Babylon?—don’t blame the director for messing up facts.
Stone is not to blame. He probably doesn’t know that Hollywood films are cut here by local distributors to shorten movies for fitting in more number of shows in a day, as an industry executive reluctantly admitted. The smash hit Pirates of the Caribbean was also so badly cut that it left viewers puzzled about similar plot inconsistencies. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy was also subject to scandalous snips as were King Arthur and Troy. And these are only the noticeable ones.
Sarabjit Singh of Paramount Pictures states emphatically that such cuts are illegal and in total violation of copyright, which normally rests with the studios. But set aside the legalities, and there is a far more serious consumer rights issue here. In the case of Alexander, either greed or misplaced aesthetics has resulted in it shrinking from an original length of 2 hours and 55 minutes to 2 hours and 25 minutes. Pointedly, a half-hour cut—from various parts of the movie—across four shows a day translates into an additional two hours for a multiplex.
Distributors and exhibitors either deny all of this or profess absolute ignorance. When pressed, they either blame each other or point to the censor board as did Atul Goel, the distributor of Alexander.
The explanation doesn’t wash—the censors may cut five or ten minutes of sex and graphic violence, but how does it account for the 30-minute cut? And what about family entertainers like Pirates and LOTR? Other executives say the high cost of prints and the need to send copies to several centres might have led to these arbitrary cuts, although heads of major Indian studios denied this possibility.