Edited for Television

TV's appetite for Hollywood movies is so insatiable that studio backlogs of old films are almost used up. And thanks to the film industry's 1968 rating system, the recent crop of pictures available to television is laced with more explicit scenes of sex and violence. As a result, TV censors have felt compelled to work overtime. "We look for three things," says NBC's Herminio Traviesas, vice president in charge of broadcast standards. "Violence, sex and language. Knowing the value of TV sales, I wish producers would find more suitable scripts in the future."

Rather than do that, film studios have begun to do some creative editing of their own. Universal even has a special department for reshaping films for the tube. So far this department has produced major distortion in at least three recent films.

Director Hubert Cornfield's Night of the Following Day was a surrealistic, purposely ambiguous thriller--at least it was when it was shown in movie theaters in 1969. Originally, the plot revolved round the adolescent daughter of a European millionaire who was apparently kidnaped by a gang of kinky criminals (including Rita Moreno, Richard Boone and Marlon Brando) and carried off to a deserted beach house, where she was held for ransom, threatened sexually and tortured by members of the gang. Cornfield's last scene, however, implied that perhaps the girl's whole story was just the momentary, erotic fantasy of a troubled teenager. Universal trimmed the sex, cut out the sadism and obliterated the ending. Instead, they added several scenes involving the kidnaped girl's brother (a character who never existed in the original film) and a police chief, who did little but sit at a desk and attempt to tie up what the studio must have thought were loose ends of the plot. "Universal treated me like the enemy," says Cornfield. "All they had to do was contact me and tell me they had a problem." They never tried. Cornfield heard about the changes at the last minute, and was contractually powerless to prevent them.

Happy Ending. Secret Ceremony, Director Joseph Losey's baroque story of psychosis and interchange of identity, was given an entirely new introductory scene and thereby converted into a trite tale of domestic friction. And British Director Peter Hall, after a similar experience with Three Into Two Won't Go, is still smarting. The film, he says, "was about the breakup of a marriage so dishonest it needed breaking up. The crisis was provoked by the husband's affair with a young hitchhiker. Universal's new picture is about a probation officer's search for a girl who has broken her parole. They even added a happy ending."

"I don't enjoy doing what I have to do sometimes," commented Harry Tatelman, the Universal producer who supervised the new version of Three Into Two Won't Go, "but there are business decisions." Josef Laytes, the man who directed the remaking of both the Hall and Cornfield films, admits that "when I first got the job I was a little unsure about what I was doing." Then he became interested. "I didn't really think about whether it was ethical or unethical. It was a creative challenge."

Both Losey and Hall have requested--with success--that their names be removed from their films. Now Losey has started agitating with the Directors Guild for protection against future alteration. Tighter contracts are obviously called for. "This is a frightening precedent," he says. "Once they begin on this kind of thing, where will it end?"

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