MPAA to Indy 4 Trailer-Makers: "Please to be thinking of the children."

[connielane]

From AICN, courtesy of Moriarty.

It seems like the US version of the trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was Edited For Content. Look at the differences in one of the first new shots shown here. The machine guns in the foreground have been CGI'ed out of the picture and some weird, freaky magic pants have been pasted onto Ray Winstone's body (like he didn't have enough of that done to him in Beowulf).

Is this the kind of culture we're living in now? Where we can't be trusted to handle seeing close-ups of guns? I say close-ups, because the shot just before the one I linked to very obviously shows the guns that are so conspicuously absent in the next shot.

And I just have to laugh at being protected from seeing guns in a series where one of the main character's most famous and iconic moments is shooting a man who is wielding a sword against him.

Comments

[mrs-bombadil.livejournal.com]

Uh...so if they're so concerned, why don't they do anything about the commercials that air during sporting events or the 8:00 p.m. TV time slot?

I often turn away from them because they are often ultra-violent, IMO. The Indy trailer? Not so much. Again, IMO.

[peachespig.livejournal.com]

Well, we are dealing with Steven Spielberg, who removed a gun from E.T. because Drew Barrymore thought it was too traumatic, and George Lucas, who tried to make Greedo shoot first. It is kind of perplexing to me that they make action movies in the first place if they're just going to try to whitewash them, but that seems to be the pattern.

where one of the main character's most famous and iconic moments is shooting a man who is wielding a sword against him.

Which was not in the script, right? Harrison Ford was tired and didn't want to do the extravagant sequence they'd planned for him so he asked to just shoot the guy instead. Brilliance!

[connielane.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't think they're removed from the movie. But the MPAA is incredibly stupid about protecting people from seeing more than they can handle in advertisements. They made Trey Parker and Matt Stone change the name of their movie, which was originally called South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose, claiming that titles of movies had to be G-rated, no matter what the movie was rated. Of course, no one said a word about Hellboy and many other movies with "hell" in the title, but that's the MPAA for you.

But then Parker and Stone got the last laugh by renaming the movie with a much more suggestive title. :P

[chickadilly.livejournal.com]

No, it wasn't in the script - that scene was totally ad-libbed. They originally had a rather lengthy scene scripted out where that guy chases Indy but Harrison Ford was sick that day and didn't want to do it. He asked Spielberg if he could just shoot the guy instead and he agreed.

I never knew that about Drew Barrymore - I always figured he did it because he thought it was too traumatic for kids in general. (Though now that I think of it I think he sort of sees Barrymore as a daughter type figure to him ... )

[chickadilly.livejournal.com]

I guess the MPAA thinks if they edit it out of the trailer it will just magically be edited out of the entire movie too?