A footnote to Rodger Shanahan's
piece about cinema in Saudi Arabia. A few years ago I was lucky enough to visit Tehran. Iran, I believe, has flourishing film industry and has made some internationally acclaimed pictures, but very few American films are shown in Iran. That's not only for political reasons; many American films would fail to meet Iranian officialdom's standards of modesty and morality as well.
So you can imagine it was quite a surprise to hear from a local that a Tehran cinema had recently screened the Michael Douglas-Sharon Stone sex thriller,
Basic Instinct. How on earth did they get away with that, I wondered aloud. 'The censors cut the film to thirty minutes and changed the plot', the local explained. 'In the dubbed Iranian version, Stone and Douglas were brother and sister!'
