Originally published at: "Romeo and Juliet" actors sue Paramount over nude scenes filmed in 1968 when they were minors | Boing Boing
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How is the film still in distribution today? Was it grandfathered in based on the absence of laws and measures that now exist today, or was this waived by their parents like the scene in American Beauty?
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We saw this in school and on tv. I’m sure the nudity was edited out on those versions. I wonder how many people have really seen the uncut version? (not discounting the ethics and poor judgement of putting nude minors on film)
IMO, this is the best film version of Romeo and Juliet…
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Hmmm … What does this mean for Walkabout? We were shown that in middle school unedited with the underage nude scenes
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I saw an uncut version in high school in the mid-90s. It was a surprise and, as I recall, the teacher kind of pretended not to notice the scene.
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I hope these actors can cash in on bring exploited and abused. This is child pornography on a large, public scale. It’s unredeemable and unforgivable.
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i saw it in HS film class as well, but i am pretty sure it was lightly edited. we did have to let our parents know we were watching it, and have permission. i agree that it is the definitive version for me. it’s just so, so good – and part of it is that they are playing characters of their same ages.
but more to the topic, i get that the lawsuit is more about them feeling manipulated by the studio at the time, not the nudity itself, but this just seems like it’s happening too late for them to have anything done about it.
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Our high school English teacher held a notebook over the middle of the screen for it (early 90s) so we heard the dialogue but the visuals were creatively “edited”.
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An interesting way of dealing with it…
Welcome to the BBS!
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Thanks! Been lurking for years 
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Also saw in HS in the mid 80s, split across multiple days. Our teacher simply stopped the tape before any skin was shown and resumed the next day past that scene. I have great empathy for the actors now, but I recall a great feeling of being ripped off back then. (We had read the play already, and knew a scene was missing.)
I don’t think any of us realized they were underage – our age – at the time. I think it could have been a teaching moment it to explain the edit to us instead of silently pretended away the next day. We were all pretty self-conscious of our bodies at 15.
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We watched it in school too - which is weird because I have no memory of us reading the play. And just to conform to stereotypes, it was uncensored.
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Good luck to them on their lawsuit. Going to be tough for them to win it given how both have spoken positively over the years about that scene, similarly to how the Nirvana “naked baby on cover” guy spoke about that photo. And it’s interesting how part of their suit wants to note that the role “didn’t help them in their careers.”
This is just a money grab for two aging actors who didn’t get as famous as they’d hoped. Or at least that’s my opinion for what it’s worth.
EDIT: and I am being more cynical than I usually am about these things. If they were really forced into something they didn’t want and the nudity requirement were misrepresented to them, and their parents/agents didn’t protect them, then I hope they find the justice they are seeking.
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I know we read one Shakespeare per year, but do I remember them? Nope.
But I promise that my puerile teen brain would have remembered seeing you know what in English class. Hell, I still vividly remember not seeing it, despite the decades since.
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My 8th grade English teacher just steered into the skid with that scene.
“OK we got to see a little bit of nudity in school. We all have cable, right?”
I kinda feel bad for millenials. They likely get stuck with the DiCaprio/Danes version in their classes.
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It was a British/Italian independent production so there probably wasn’t a waiver in place. That sort of thing was a lot more common by the early 80’s with the emergence of the home video market.
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In the theater, on a school field trip. The teachers prefaced it by warning us that there was nudity, and that we should handle it like the young adults we were supposed to be (all of us under 17, with permission slips from our parents).
ETA: Just to clarify, it was in production around the time I was born so this had to have been a re-release when we saw it.
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We only read one of the plays properly and that was Macbeth.
Now that I think about it, I have very dim memories of some discussion of the characters and plot. That would mean that we didn’t simply watch the movie because the teacher was phoning it in.
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I just missed this being the version of Romeo and Juliet we saw. I wound up covering the play twice thanks to the fact I switched schools. The first time we saw the Zeffirelli version. The second time we didn’t watch a movie version, though the Leo version would have been in the theaters at the time. I’ve still never seen it.
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