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Photo by Jim Craven Leo Wine watches as Curse Free TV zaps the profanity from a Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau movie. The black box, center, reads closed captioning to edit out objectionable words. Box censors TV cusswords Ex-minister invented gizmo after being jolted by videotape profanity By BILL VARBLE Leo Wine thought "My Cousin Vinny" was a great movie when he saw it on the airliner coming back from the Philippines. He rented a copy at the video shop and invited some people over. Yeow! Where did Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei suddenly get ... all ... those ... cusswords? "I was so embarrassed," the retired minister says. "They all started laughing." Wine laughs telling the story. He knows now those airline movies have been edited for content. The experience got Wine interested in a gadget that censors what people see on television. It's called Curse Free TV, and he's selling it. He figures the market is there, with million of children growing up in a permissive society and picking up bad words. "I never picked up any swear words," he says. "Back when I was a kid, parents had authority. My parents backed the teachers up, and I got a whuppin."' Wine founded Faith Tabernacle in Ashland in 1944 and ran it 50 years. He founded KDOV radio in 1960 and sold it to political power broker Perry Atkinson in 1984. Curse Free TV is an electronic language cop that bleeps dirty words and offensive language out of videos and TV shows, working through the closed captioning. "There's a lot of swear words that have been injected into the videos you get," Wine says. "This takes the fear out of what your kids watch." According to Abundant Life, a religious organization in New Orleans, La., that markets the device, vulgar language on TV "jumped'' from .62 words per hour in 1995 to .88 words per hour in 1997. Wine says profanity turns up everywhere. "E.T." has 13 offensive words, "Kindergarten Cop" 32 and "Volcano" 58. Curse Free TV cuts those counts to one, two and zero, respectively. Not everybody is concerned, apparently. The manager of a Medford video store says complaints about language are rare. "We haven't had a lot at all," says Shannon McMahan at Hollywood. "It's more the content." Curse Free TV is a small plastic box that goes between your TV set and VCR. There's an internal no-no list of 100 words and phrases that spur it into action. It has three settings: off, tolerant and strict. It has three closed-caption modes: off, display text during mute only, and full closed-captioning. The strict setting filters out expressions like, "Oh, my God," but a religious setting lets "God" pass. Wine demonstrates with video footage from "The Odd Couple II," the 1998 Paramount Pictures release with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. With the unit off, Matthau says to Lemmon in one scene, "He called me a sh--head." In another scene, Matthau says, "We just used so many metaphors I forgot what the hell we were talking about." With Curse Free TV, Matthau's "sh--head" line is zapped, and the audio interrupted. The captioning reads, "He called me a clown." Wine expects to have more demo tapes soon. Some will showcase Curse Free TV's ability to delete the f-word and other adult language. Curse Free TV isn't sold in stores, but Wine says the marketing program isn't a pyramid. He can recruit distributors, but he gets only $1 for each unit his distributors sell. The device retails for $199. Wine sells it for $169. He says it costs $120. He hasn't sold any yet. Wine says Faith Tabernacle, where his son, Curt, is now pastor, probably won't sell the product. "But there may be somebody in the church who wants to sell them." He says he has no problem with changing writers' or directors' work. "They're putting words in where there's no need," he says. "The words is the thing you want to get out." Wine says the product may not be for everybody. As McMahan says,"You never know what's going to offend somebody." And Wine admits Curse Free TV is not the answer to every problem. "My son said, `Does this fix nudity?"' Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA