Pollack: It's Art vs. Money

Director Stanley Kubrick's final film Eyes Wide Shut carried enough controversy - mostly involving steamy sex scenes - to make a veteran movie producer squirm in his seat.

During editing, Kubrick realized he'd have to cover sex acts in an orgy scene using computer-generated images, even though the R rating he had to deliver was at odds with his artistic vision.

Director Sydney Pollack, a Kubrick friend who plays a small role in Eyes Wide Shot, tells CBS This Morning Co-Anchor Mark McEwen that a decision to alter a movie for a more accessible rating is a complicated one.

"You can look at it ethically, and you can look at it practically," says Pollack. "It's a horrible thing if you talk about aesthetic principles. And you say, 'This is a picture that's not going to be seen by a lot of people the way it was intended to be seen by the author of this movie.'"

"If the picture had gone out with an NC-17 rating, there are newspapers that wouldn't advertise it. There are theaters that wouldn't play it. It would run the risk of earning less money [than] with an R rating," he observes.

Actually executive producer and long-time Kubrick collaborator Jan Harlan is the one who made the final decision to put computerized characters in front of 65 seconds of a sex scene, leading to a change to an R rating.

Harlan is quick to defend the move, saying he and Kubrick had discussed the matter before the director's death in March, and they knew that if the movie ratings board objected, characters could be added using computers.

"He had a contract to deliver a movie with an R rating," Harlan said. "[But] he made a mistake by not quite probing early what would give him an R because he was focused on this view into hell, this 'abyss of decadence' as he called it."

Eyes Wide Shut is Kubrick's exploration of sexual affairs, marriage and fidelity. Like his other movies - 1962's Lolita, 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1971's A Clockwork Orange and 1987's Full Metal Jacket - audiences and critics will likely either love it or hate it.

[For more information, see CBS News Has 'Eyes' Covered]

[To see the official Web site for Eyes Wide Shut, click here.]