Comments from another thread:
If you’re referring to Mulholland Drive, the DVD was censored for the reason he stated.
It wasn’t until the Criterion Blu-ray that the movie was finally restored and left uncut/uncensored so Laura Harring didn’t look like a Barbie doll.
There was a big discussion when it happened then finally when Lynch changed his mind and allowed it to be unaltered in the later release.
The Criterion Blu-Ray didn’t censor Laura’s nudity, but it was really dark. Both of the 4K scenes are shown below.
I brightened the captures from the dark Laura Harring scene, and shrank it down to 1080hd to reduce the pixilation. She was indeed fully naked.
The other scene is brighter, but the only exposure is breasts:
Laura Harring
Naomi Watts
What Lynch did still stuns me. This is his best film, a masterpiece or near to it, and he chose to blur out the pubic hair of a not-particularly well-known actress whose career even back when the DVD came out was going downhill fast. I couldn’t name you any other film she did other than Silent Night, Deadly Night 3 (back she had her natural small tits), and I doubt most people could either. The blur was poorly done and very obvious.
I’m amazed he’d choose to do that to “protect” her from… what, screen shots in Celebrity Sleuth? Really? What exactly would that do to her career – ruin it? What career? And such a great scene too, incredibly sexy. But it was apparently more important to Lynch that we don’t see an actress’s bush for half a second.
Makes me wonder if Laura begged him to do that. Some on-set footage and interviews reveal they were pretty close, as all Lynch’s female leads seemed to be. Maybe he just caved in to her. It just seems like a very weird, semi-destructive thing for a great director to do within his masterpiece.
They didn’t even blur Streep’s tit shot in Silkwood, her only nipple shot. And she’s a lot more powerful in Hollywood than Harring.
Per his commentary track, he did it for the reason stated, he didn’t want it being all over the internet. Simple as that.
Whether you believe what he’s publicly stated on record is up to you, but Lynch always seemed to be a straight shooter when it came to if he did something or not.
He didn’t have any qualms about topless nudity for any of his leading actresses, so I don’t understand taking the stance on full frontal here, but he did.
Probably he was okay with it in a movie buit not about the internet which was then just raring up. She signed onto this when it was a tv show, so showing her push wasn’t even a possibility. So she might have ta’ked about her concerns to him and this is what they figured out.
I agree, if Lynch said it I’d buy his explanation because he doesn’t really have a big filter for what he says.
You gotta remember, originally when they signed onto this it was a tv show. So there was not going to be the possibility of being nude at all. Lynch I’m sure had to work with the actresses and what they’d be comfortable with as this stuff is not something they originally expected.
Scorsese did the same thing. I don’t have a principled opinion about the practice. But I’m totally against it. Whether it’s a business or ethical decision. All I want from a media distribution is to be as close as possible to the theater version, just without the big screen. If there are great outtakes like Nico Mastorakis’s DVD extras, that’s icing on the cake. This censorship crap is highway robbery.