Tuesday, January 29, 2008

DVD SANITIZER ACCUSED OF X-RATED BEHAVIOR

BY ERIQ GARDNER / Jan 29, 2008
The Hollywood Reporter

Remember Clean Flix? It's the Utah-based DVD business that was a favorite of conservative politicians and an anathema to the studios because it edited feature films to remove or alter content deemed inappropriate.

The company's activities sparked a number of lawsuits, including one huge one filed by 16 prominent directors, including Steven Spielberg and Robert Redford, and entertainment studios such as Disney, Sony, Universal, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox. In 2006, Hollywood won its copyright claims against Clean Flix and the company recently shut down, supposedly due to the industry's legal force.

Well, cover your eyes for this story. Clean Flix founder Daniel Thompson has just been arrested and is accused of having sex with underaged girls. And according to the Salt Lake Tribune, the "booking documents state Thompson told the 14-year-olds that his film sanitizing business was a cover for a pornography studio." Police found a "large quantity" of porno movies inside the business, "along with a keg of beer, painkillers and two cameras hooked up to a television." Thompson has been released after posting $30,000 bail.

We wish we could edit that story out of our heads.

THE LATEST IN DOUCHEBAGGERY: DANIEL DEAN THOMPSON


Jan 29, 2008
Playgirl Magazine

Back story: In response to conservative cries of inappropriate/pornographic content in movies, companies creating “clean” versions of movies provide folks with boring—I mean, more tasteful—versions of our favorite flicks; allowing “concerned moms and dads to take one more lazy step back from the parenting process.” This supposedly injects American culture with a little more decency.

Which brings us to the latest in douchebaggery, Daniel Dean Thompson. He’s the owner of Flix Club, a company in Utah selling clean versions of movies to people. He’s also the guy arrested last week for sexually abusing children. Can you say, irony?

Yeah, total bummer. Thompson, 31, and Issac Lifferth, 24, allegedly traded sex with a couple 14-year-old girls, who claimed to need money so they could move out of their homes. Thompson and Lifferth were booked at the Utah County jail on charges of sexual abuse and unlawful sexual activity.

Dirty dudes operating under the guise of decency for the sake of a more wholesome America are the worst.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

EDITORS OF MOVIES NOW BRANDED HYPOCRITES

BY MICHAEL DOSSIER / Jan 25, 2008
The DVD Dossier

From the Department of You Can't Make This Stuff Up comes this little nugget of joy:

Daniel Thompson and Issac Lifferth - owners of the now defunct "Flix Club," a video store that rented edited movies from which all the sex, violence, objectionable and blasphemous content had been removed - were arrested following the disclosure that they had paid for oral sex with two teenage girls for $20 each.

In addition to charges of sexual abuse and unlawful sexual activity with a minor, Lifferth was also charged with patronizing a prostitute and the possession of a prescription drug medication without a prescription.

Police who searched the Orem, Utah store said they found pornographic videos, with as many as twenty copies of each title.

The men came under suspicion when the mother of a 14-year-old girl found a twenty dollar bill and asked her daughter where it came from. The girl admitted that she and another girl had traded sexual favors with the two men.

Flix Club was apparently a franchise operator for Clean Flicks. Hollywood studios and the Director's Guild of America brought a successful copyright infringement suit against that company in 2006 and Flix Club was finally shut down last month.

Bail was set at $30,000 for the former purveyors of family-friendly films.

(No word on any late fees that may have been charged.)

Thursday, January 3, 2008

CLEAN MEDIA UNITED LAUNCHES NEW WEBSITE

An extremely passionate and ambitious activist group called Clean Media United has relaunched their website and their mission.

Their motto?

"The choices we make in media reflect the choices we make in life."

Their mission statement?

"To unite and promote those persons and entities dedicated to promulgating clean media and to educate the general public of the harmful effects of pornography (in all of it’s forms); to maintain records and a history of the persons and entities that promote clean media: and to apply for educational grants to encourage and to further clean arts. When a million whispers unite, the world will have to comply to our scream for change!"

The Clean Media United website is now active. Available on the site are video interviews with public figures from professional snowboarders to business leaders, all of whom support "Clean Media." Among the video clips that can be found on the site are interviews with Clean Flicks founder Ray Lines and Clean Flicks CEO Allan Erb. Ads for Clear Play, TV Guardian, and Family Safe can be found under the heading "Buy Clean."

The following message was part of a recent Clean Media United press release:

"One of our first goals was to provide a list of Clean Organizations, which is constantly growing. Search for an organization that is involved in the same fight you are, and unite with them to make a greater impact. You can create your own group, invite your friends, and collaborate ideas and information together, send email updates to everyone through the new site, and lots of other stuff. Imagine a Google-type search engine that is family friendly! "GOOGLE-FAMILY". You can research pornography, without seeing any pornography! Everything that comes up is a family-friendly site! You go on vacation and want to support family friendly hotels, so you find hotels in our Clean Book that refuse to offer adult entertainment to their guests. You vote with your dollar, so support those businesses who support Clean! Think of it as an online phone book, search for any business, local or national, that has pledged to support Clean!"

Find more information at CleanMediaUnited.org