Honolulu Lite
"YOU flipping acetone, I'll rip your froogy head off and chuck it into the funny street. You fat duck, you wanna fuss with me? I'll kick your scrawny mop act. I'll eat your fuzzy eyes out of your funky face, you flapping kite." Stunt words trip up
TV moviesWhy do they bother to put a movie like "Casino" on television? "Casino," with Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci, is one of the best gangster movies -- or at least, one of the most graphic -- ever made. How many movies would actually show a guy's head being squeezed in a vice until his eyeballs pop out?
But when "Casino" is run on television, it becomes the most heavily dubbed movie in the history of Hollywood. They just showed it again last week. That first paragraph is sort of typical of how they have to dub every other word that comes out of the mouth of Joe Pesci's character. The number of obscenities in the original movie is so prodigious that, after the movie is dubbed for television, only about three of the original words of the script remain: "Tangier's," "casino" and "bathrobe." And I'm not sure about "bathrobe."
This is sort of ironic considering how far television has gone in the the other direction. In an episode of "Chicago Hope" last week, new obscenity ground was broken when one of the characters used a graphic four-letter word meaning "excrement" that I can't even print here. (I'll give you a hint -- it wasn't "poop.")
In Hollywood, skit happens (further hint, nudge, nudge, wink, wink) and each skit gets more and more raunchy. We've come a long way from the uproar when Clark Gable in "Gone With the Wind" uttered the immortal line: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
I can't imagine what current movie dubbers would have done with that line considering the creative way they find to camouflage current gutterances. I suspect the line would have come out something like, "Blankly, my peer, I don't give out Spam."
What the dubbers try to do when they come across a nasty word is replace it with another word that sounds like the nasty word but isn't. The idea is that everyone but the dumbest potato on the couch will understand what the word was supposed to be. But sometimes, like in the movie "Body Heat," the censors are so stumped that they change the line completely and actually make it more offensive.
In one scene in "Body Heat," a detective tells the William Hurt character that a kid saw a naked man with the movie's femme fatale, Kathleen Turner. It turns out the kid saw only a certain body part, which he described as "bald." Censors thought this too graphic for television and dubbed the line so that the offending organ became "Italian," thereby offending an entire large segment of the viewing population. In a later version for TV, they cut out that part, so to speak, completely. It didn't matter that it was rather important to the plot.
But "Casino" is the king of all overly dubbed movies. The dialogue in the original movie is extremely realistic, which means harsh enough to strip paint off a prison cell wall. In the TV version, you need a code book to figure out what is actually being said. There are long segments of yelling between De Niro and Pesci where the only true thing coming out of their mouths is spittle.
It ruins the movie. And makes me want to grab the shucking censor by the testimonials and kick his Bass-o-matic through the kumquat, if you know what I mean.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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