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THE DEFUCKER

by Rogier van Bakel

Film editor is his official title, but Kenneth Locke (50) doesn't take offense if someone calls him a defucker. In fact, the once ironic undertone of the monicker has almost evaporated. His colleagues at the BBC now either call him "our Ken" or ‹ without so much as a second thought ‹ 'our defucker.' It may not be the sort of title you'd print on your business card. But nobody can contend that it is not an appropriate job description for what Ken Locke has been doing for the past ten years.

WELL FUCK ME

With the aid of an old-fashioned Steenbeck editing machine, Locke deletes offensive scenes and 'bad language' from films. Nonetheless, he's a film buff, he says with a genuine enthusiasm that makes his bespectacled eyes sparkle. His great pride and joy lies in restoring fiIms, not mutilating them. But here the John Wayne credo applies: "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." Censoring films is what Locke's employer, the British Broadcasting Corporation, requires, because it's what the public wants. Or is it?

Says Locke: "The decisions we make at the BBC are based on a feedback of criticism and complaints. You quickly develop a feel for what the general public gets upset about. Everybody here [at the BBC] tends to talk to neighbors and friends to find out how they feel about the issue, and bring that information to our meetings. Plus, the BBC has viewer panels alI over the country. So we're getting opinions from what we think is a cross-section of the population."

He adds that if the BBC gets hundreds of complaints about a movie, "then that film wilI be looked at again, and we may make a note that it has to be adapted for possible future broadcasts."

But why would Auntie Beeb take a few hundred complainants more seriously than the millions of viewers who apparently see no reason to fly into a tantrum over a four-letter word, or over a scene with a little violence or nudity? Patiently, Locke explains that a few hundred letters and phone calls are "probably" representative of a multitude of distressed viewers. And he once again refers to the panels. "It really is the fairest way to do it."

Like all TV stations, the BBC has always had standards about what can and cannot be aired, and is therefore no stranger to censorship. But those standards, Locke points out, are looser today than ever before. Only recently, the BBC showed unabridged versions of "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" (previously censored because of explicit language) and "Don't Look Now" (from which, for an earlier BBC showing, Locke aborted the classic love scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie).

"We don't want to get too far ahead of the public, but we do try to push the boundaries a bit," explains Locke. Does that also mean that the list of proscribed words is getting shorter? No, he says. For one thing, there is no such list, no equivalent of the Seven Dirty Words that American TV stations can't put on the air. "BBC guidelines suggest that we 'take great care' when confronted with potentially offensive scenes," Locke confides, "and that we use 'judgement and discretion'." Vague terms, and rightly so. After all, a possibly controversial sequence in one film wil be found less offensive than a similar one in another, "Simply because of how well the film was made."

FLIPPING HECK The same savvy applies to words. With the subtlest hint of a smile, Locke muses about how "some actors, like Harry Dean Stanton, can say 'fuck' so well. It comes out so naturally that you a most forget to replace it. "

Replace?

"Yes. What I usually do when an actor says 'fuck,' I look for him saying 'screw' somewhere else, so I can slice out the fuck and drop in the screw." Oh. And how about ‹ pardon my French ‹ cunt? "Ah. I'l drop in a 'shit' instead. If I can't find a good 'shit,' I'll cut the 'cunt' into four little pieces: k-ur-n-ta. Then I'll rearrange them, so that it comes out ike n-ur ta, or 'Nut."'

Locke notices my heroic effort not to lose my composure and smiles most accommodatingly. "Oh yes, it's a weird and wonderful way to make a living. I suppose I could have gotten a job in the KGB's confessions department, skilfully twisting people's recorded statements to the point where you can clearly hear them saying: 'Yes, I did it!"'

If an actor's bold expletives cannot simply be replaced by a less offensive bit of the sound tape, Locke hires a professional voice imitator who helps him clean up Mickey Rourke's or Jack Nicholson's language. At all times, however, he tries to steer clear of verbal adaptations that have a ludicrous ring to them. "In the American TV version of Alex Cox's 'Repo Man',"Locke says, clearly amused, "somebody replaced the word 'motherfucker' with 'melonfarmer,' which is an insulting street term for Hispanics, I've been told. In the same film, some punk says 'fuck you' to a police officer, but the American censor changed that to 'flip you'. And then the cop works himself into a frenzy and bellows: 'Don't you say flip you to me, punk!' Quite surreal, actually."

Ken Locke is the last person on earth to expect gratitude from viewers. He knows there will always be a minority of biblepounders who fear that a talk show guest exclaiming 'Good God!', or a shot of a granny in a Victorian nightgown, wil catapult the nation into new depths of depravity. At the other end of the spectrum, Locke sighs, there are the film fanatics who accuse him of having singlehandedly destroyed a cinematographic masterpiece. "Every movie I've worked on, there's somebody who's treasured it since childhood, and they get terribly indignant and write:'What you've done to Curse of the Mummy is beyond belief'!"

NOT IN FRONT OF THE WIFE, OLD BOY

The Australian-born former projectionist came to England in 1962, at the age of 23, "because I wanted to do serious work in the film business, and there was nothing back there that even resembled a movie industry." The BBC hired him as an assistant film editor in 1964.

It took Locke a considerable number of years to figure out exactly how British social mores work. Such knowledge is, of course, indispensable in the day-to-day business of a professional filth extractor. Locke especially had to get accustomed to the difference in perception between private and pub language. "I know lots of people who start swearing the moment they set foot in a pub. They're drinking with the boys and they brag, 'So I says to this fucking bloke, I says, fuck off!' You know? That's pub language. Then they go home, watch a film and appear to be genuinely shocked when they hear a four-letter word: 'I don't like that sort of talk in front of women.' There's apparently a time and a place for everything."

Locke would like to mould public sensitivity to the point where virtually any film could go on the air uncensored. Hang on ‹ wouldn't that make him unemployed? "Not quite. I could then dedicate most of my time to restoring old films, like the Eisenstein ones I recently did." Will he Iive to see the day? "I have my doubts. For one thing, the connotations of words change over the years. Nowadays, for example, 'piss' isn't the perfectly acceptable Anglo-Saxon word it once was." New taboos, both large and small, keep popping up, the defucker finds. "I think total freedom only comes when people are truly grown up." He pauses for effect, then strikes a friendly tone that contrasts nicely with the content of his remark: "Considering the feedback we get from the British public, I don't think they're quite ready for it yet."

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