Director Paul Roland, whose award-winning feature film EXEMPLUM began streaming earlier this year, recently appeared on Timcast’s Pop Culture Crisis where he discussed Hollywood’s censorship of classic movies.
The discussion centered on the recent censorship of director William Friedkin’s Oscar-winning thriller The French Connection wherein Roland warned that Hollywood could do the same type of nip/tuck procedure to other movies that might contain scenes out of sync with modern sensitivities.
“It could just become a point where we’re so sensitive, we have such a high sensitive population that they just start removing these scenes,” Roland said. “I was thinking about a couple of classic movies where they could remove scenes. The scene in The Godfather when the mobster stands up and he says, ‘We’ll distribute drugs amongst the colored people, they’re animals anyway, let them lose their minds.’ They could easily remove that scene.”
Roland also noted how certain scenes from a comedy like Mrs. Doubtfire could be censored because it features two scenes wherein the characters express disgust over someone potentially being transgender.
As Breitbart News reported last week, the Criterion Channel, a streaming platform that prides itself on the preservation of classic cinema, was discovered to have been airing a censored version of The French Connection that inexplicably removed the line in which Gene Hackman’s character, Popeye Doyle, utters the N-word and an anti-Italian slur. The scene, as John Nolte explained, established Doyle as a flawed anti-hero:
Doyle is no hero. He is a classic anti-hero from this era—a complicated, deeply flawed, frequently unlikable, and unsympathetic narcotics detective. Yes, Doyle is fascinating, one of the most fascinating characters in American movies, but even in the end, he is not the hero. The French drug dealer he pursues escapes, and the obsessed Doyle shoots down a fellow cop during that pursuit.
Watch below:
Also during his interview on the show, Paul Roland discussed the trials and tribulations of mico-budget filmmaking, being that he produced his film, EXEMPLUM, for a price tag of just $9,500 dollars.
“You have to construct the entire story around what you can get for free or relatively cheap,” he told the hosts. “I knew I could get a few Catholic churches for free, I knew I could get a restaurant or a bar for free, and I could shoot guerilla-style on sidewalks and in people’s apartments or houses.”
Watch below:
In her review of the film, Breitbart News editor Rebecca Mansour said “I found Exemplum entertaining and thought-provoking, and I’ve only scratched the surface of its plot twists in this review. But I have a feeling that the long-term significance of Exemplum will be its historic value as the first film of a very gifted filmmaker.”
“If Paul Roland can do this with just $10,000, imagine what he can do with an actual film budget.”
The film also received a “Fresh” rating from Rotten Tomatoes Top Critic James Berardinelli and an enthusiastic endorsement from Justified actor Nick Searcy.
My friends:
Please watch this fine film made by @Prolandfilms, Exemplum.
It’s a remarkable piece of work, done on a shoestring, and it EXEMPLIFIES everything I have been preaching since 2020: Make your OWN films. Forget Hollywood. Go AROUND them.https://t.co/sXqaZY6mUo
— Nick Searcy, INSURRECTIONAL FILM & TELEVISION STAR (@yesnicksearcy) April 6, 2023
EXEMPLUM combines classic Film Noir with Medieval morality tales and plunges the two genres into a paranoid technological thriller that centers on a young, media-savvy Catholic priest who teams up with a mysterious hacker to blackmail a wealthy parishioner with secret recordings of his confessions. It can be viewed for free and with ads on the streaming platform Tubi or can be rented ad-free on Google Play, YouTube Movies, or Vimeo on Demand.
Watch below: