Laundering the Sheets

The New York Times recently ran a movie ad for The Libertine showing the back of a girl, bare except for panties. The Daily News ran the same ad for one edition -- but then sloppily sketched in a bra strap. Apparently, even the notion that the girl might be bare-chested was too much for the News censor.

The ad mat for The Killing of Sister George features the face of a woman into whose leonine hairdo is woven a nude female figure. Some papers ran the ad intact; some performed surgery on the figure's silhouetted breast. In Chicago, the Tribune, Daily News and Sun-Times all added lines of camouflage to comb out the hanger-on.

As loin films multiply, newspapers must endlessly ask themselves: What is an acceptable movie ad? In the absence of legal storm-fencing (obscenity is largely determined by "contemporary community standards"), there are as many qualifications for acceptability as there are papers. In movie-ad censorship, every sheet is self-laundering.

Shotguns Approved. Many papers go along with the businesslike rationale of the Detroit Free Press. "We're a family newspaper," says Bill O'Flaherty, the national ad manager, "and there's no point in losing our readership by giving them what they don't want." His yardstick:

"When a guy my age looks twice at an ad, it's time for retouch or rewrite."

The more extreme the policy, the more inconsistent the practice. The Los Angeles Times occasionally refuses to run titles (such as Succubus, The Toilet) in ads for entertainment that it freely identifies in its reviews. Navels are airbrushed out of its film ads but are front and center on its fashion pages. The Times okayed an ad it had rejected as too violent after shotguns replaced machine guns in illustration. "Virgin" was barred from ad copy for Rachel, Rachel; it was approved for Goodbye, Columbus. As do some other papers, the Times has distributed a "screening code," but, says one studio publicist, "you just never know what they'll print."

Publisher Charles Gould of the San Francisco Examiner says he has turned away "tens of thousands of dollars" in advertising that he found overly offensive. Still, the Examiner went ahead and ran the Sister George ad unretouched. Another display ad showed a motorcycle gang from Naked Angels closing in on a near-nude girl. The copy read, "Mad dogs from hell! Hunting down their prey with a quarter-ton of hot steel between their legs!"

Strict constructionists agree with Russell Young of the Seattle Times: "People who submit amusement ads know that we have a strict code, and they know the rules." John Coughlin states his paper's policy bluntly: "You can't sell sex in the Hartford Courant." Loren Osborn, ad manager of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor, takes a different stand. "I will allow just about anything in a movie ad. If the movie might offend anyone, let's show it like it is in the ad so they can find out beforehand and not be rudely surprised once they've taken a seat in the theater."

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