Epic prank forces film censors to watch paint dry for 10 hours.

• Author: Butcher, Anne
• Position: Artifact - Charlie Lyne's movie "Paint Drying" - Brief article

The subversive British filmmaker Charlie Lyne was looking for a way to express his displeasure with the U.K.'s film censorship bureaucracy. So he decided to use the website Kickstarter to crowdsource funding for the dullest movie imaginable.

Like the Motion Picture Association of America, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) rates and classifies movies. But unlike in the U.S., in the U.K. it's actually illegal to screen unrated movies or sell them on DVD. The BBFC can also ban a movie altogether unless the filmmaker cuts the parts the Board finds offensive.

What's more, the BBFC requires filmmakers to pay for this mandatory exercise in classification. There's an initial fee of (1O1) pounds ($147) with another...