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From: Wlt4@aol.com
Date: Sat, 28 Jun 1997 00:00:51 -0400 (EDT)
To: eleven@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu
Subject: How many of you perverts have seen this film?

Friday June 27 4:33 PM EDT

"The Tin Drum" Film Banned In Oklahoma

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - An Oklahoma judge's ruling that the 1979 Oscar-winning German film "The Tin Drum" has scenes of child pornography and is obscene under state law sparked a bitter dispute over censorship after police seized the movie from video shops and homes. State District Court Judge Richard Freeman issued his ruling Wednesday, prompting Oklahoma police to confiscate copies of the movie from a local library and six video stores. They also went to the homes of three people who had rented the film and asked them to hand over the tapes.

"These are Gestapo-type tactics," Joann Bell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Oklahoma, said Friday. "Those individuals and the movie itself were not given due process."

The ACLU's development director, Michael Camfield, was one of the three people asked to surrender the rented video Wednesday night, and he said he was given little choice by police. Camfield said he rented the video to review its content because of the controversy. Maj. Bill Citty of the Oklahoma City Police Department said all the individuals and video stores voluntarily agreed to hand in the videos. "It was not a situation where we were going to go out and kick in any doors and forcibly take tapes away from somebody," Citty said. He said police would have been forced to obtain a warrant if anyone had refused to give up the video.

"The Tin Drum," which won an Oscar for best foreign film, is an adaption of a Gunter Grass novel about a young boy who stops growing to protest the rise of Nazism in Germany. It includes a scene that depicts the boy performing oral sex on a teen-age girl.The case was brought after an anti-pornography group, Oklahomans for Children and Families, complained because the film was available at a public library in the city.

The ACLU plans to fight the ruling. "The film definitely has artistic and literary value," Bell said. "It is a classic, award-winning film that at the very least deserves its day in court."

Reuters/Variety

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