The man who forced the U.K. film board to watch 10 hours of paint drying

Thanks to MrMild, we’ve learned that filmmaker Charlie Lyne made a 10 hour film of paint drying, then raised money on Kickstarter to pay the British Board of Film Classification to watch the damn thing.

Apparently, any movie shown in the UK must be rated by the Board, and getting rated costs about $10 per minute. Once a film is submitted with the proper fee, two examiners sit and watch it while taking notes. They then use those notes to decide on a rating.

You can imagine that Lynn doesn’t like the system, but he’s now forced a pair of those civil servants to sit in a dark screening room in Soho Square and watch 607 minutes of paint drying.

Let’s hoist a pint of warm beer to Charlie Lyne.

PS: The film was rated “U,” meaning “no material likely to offend or harm.”

Source: We talked to the man who forced the U.K. film board to watch 10 hours of paint drying

One thought on “The man who forced the U.K. film board to watch 10 hours of paint drying

  1. I assume this is meant as a protest of the rating system. There was a documentary a few years back called “This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated” basically making the point that the decisions of the ratings board in the US are arbitrary and that there is no cultural consensus about what reasonable parents would consider inappropriate material for children. I honestly think we were better off before the rating system came about, when there were essentially only private (and unenforced) systems like that created by the Catholic Church.

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