wooloohoo Review of Paint Drying

Paint Drying (2016)

UK Filmmaker Forces The Censorship Board To Watch Paint Dry For 10 Hours

[10/10 · 1 November 2016]

Here in the land of the free and the home of "sex is worse than violence," the MPAA reviews and rates every single movie that gets a wide release, thereby ensuring that little Timmy will never be subjected to the unimaginable horror of seeing a single female nipple floating amidst a sea of simulated carnage. Across the pond, they have a similarly draconian organization called the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), whose review process costs filmmakers the equivalent of $9 per minute of footage. This is a particular problem for independent filmmakers like Charlie Lyne, who doesn't just have $1,300 to toss around when he has to pay his staff in whatever the fancy British equivalent of Monopoly money is. Britty Bucks? To stand up to this tyranny, Lyne took to Kickstarter. Now, you're probably thinking that he did so in order to raise the funds to get one of his films rated, and in a way you'd be right... but this was not just any film. See, Lyne promised that for every nine dollars and change he raised, he'd submit footage of another minute of paint drying to the BBFC. He raised enough to force the stuffy British censorship authority to dutifully sit through around 10 hours of white paint drying on a brick wall. The board assigned the imaginatively titled Paint Drying a U rating (the equivalent of a G here in the United States) before notifying Peter Jackson that his record had been broken.