Nolte: Woke Gestapo at HBO Max Erase Cigarettes from Iconic Movie Posters

By way of HBO Max, Warner Bros. Discovery is desecrating iconic art by removing cigarettes from classic movie posters.

On HBO Max’s streaming menu, classic movie posters are frequently used to identify the title available to the subscriber. Per this report, in some cases, the same streaming service that offers scenes of rape, sodomy, and torture porn is photoshopping out tobacco use.

The most egregious example is McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s 1971 masterpiece. In the iconic poster, star Warren Beatty holds a lit cigarillo. Can’t have that. So the anti-art Nazis at HBO Max have apparently used photoshop to erase the cigarillo and the smoke. What remains is bizarre: Beatty awkwardly  holding up two fingers for no reason.

The fascists at HBO Max also erased the cigar Paul Newman holds in the poster for John Milius’s terrific The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. So now Newman looks like he’s about to flash the “okay” sign, which I’m told is racist.

HBO Max photoshops cigarettes out of iconic Hollywood movie posters https://t.co/Ojc5dy8iv7 pic.twitter.com/roM9hjG6Z7

— New York Post (@nypost) September 16, 2022

To hide a cigar held by Kirk Douglas in Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s There Was a Crooked Man (1970), HBO Max bizarrely covered it up.

As if that’s not un-American enough, HBO Max erased a cigarette from an actual photograph, a still photo used to promote Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels (1995).

Had you told me even ten years ago that HBO  — HBO! — the network that served as the vanguard in pushing television into adult entertainment, would someday engage in this kind of petty and profane censorship, I would never have believed it.

You know, I’m old enough to remember the good old days when artists and movie studios would have been outraged by the censorship and desecration of art. Good heavens, McCabe and Crooked Man are both Warner Bros. pictures! But now, instead of fighting the puritans to protect their art, Warner Bros. is censoring its own classics.

This is not only censorship; it’s an unnecessary from of censorship and, therefore, a grotesque act of virtue signaling and moral exhibitionism. There’s no reason HBO Max had to go to the extremes of photoshopping to protect the world from the evils of tobacco use. All HBO had to do was choose the McCabe poster without the cigar. Like, say, this one. If no poster exists that meets your lofty moral standards, you don’t need a poster for the streaming menu. Instead, you can use an unoffending still from the movie.

Believe it or not, America was once a country where the following took place…

A mere 16 years ago, a video store chain called CleanFlicks purchased copies of movies and removed stuff like the sex, violence, and vulgar language. So all CleanFlicks did was edit copies it legally owned. Once that was one, those censored copies were rented to Mormon customers who would not have watched the unedited versions.

Hollywood sued CleanFlicks right out of business.

Well, look at Hollywood now: censoring, disappearing, and purging its own art. Hollywood used to ridicule the Moral Majority, to decry McCarthyism and censorship. Now the industry is either so scared or so warped and broken; they’re doing all these un-American things to their very own product.

 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.