How Mick Jagger's ‘Performance’ Film Got Banned, Cut, and Delayed for Two Years

The 1968 movie Performance paired Mick Jagger with director Donald Cammell and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, and it was so raw that Warner Bros. sat on it for two years before releasing a hacked-up version. Jagger plays Turner, a reclusive rock star living in a London townhouse with two women, diving into sexual experiments, cocaine, and violence. The studio was horrified: they’d expected a gangster film but got a hallucinogenic, sexually explicit, and morally messy art piece that made Easy Rider look like a church picnic.

The MPAA hit it with an X rating, which was box-office poison in 1970, so Warner Bros. cut nearly ten minutes—mostly the ménage à trois sequences, a scene of Jagger with a gun, and some of the more graphic drug use. Even then, it only played in a handful of cities before being pulled again. The scandal wasn’t just the content; it was Jagger, the world’s biggest rock star, playing a decadent version of himself onscreen, blurring the line between actor and reality in a way that made both fans and censors deeply uncomfortable. The cuts weren’t restored until a 1992 re-release.