Censuring the Movie Censors

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NO STANDARDS, NO PRECEDENTS

The film is strongest in exposing the capriciousness of the standards for judging movies. "There was no rater-training process," Jay Landers, a former member, tells Dick. "People were hired, they were put into the screening room, put into the rating chair and started rating films." Further, those who challenge the MPAA rating for a particular film are not allowed to cite movies with similar scenes that got a milder rating. "It's not like a legal proceeding where you can quote precedent," says Wayne Kramer, director of The Cooler. The legal equivalent to this strange rule would be that every plaintiff in a racial prejudice case before the Supreme Court was obliged to argue Brown v. Education all over again.

Dick — who made the terrific (NC-17) study Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist in 1977, and earned an Oscar nomination for the predatory-priest doc Twist of Faith — asks pertinent, pointed questions about the secrecy of the process. Filmmakers are not told the identity of their judges, either on the nine-person ratings committee or on the larger appeals board. Part of the movie's fun is in Dick's hiring of a detective who tracks down the names of the members on these two star chambers. (The sleuthing is amusing but ultimately irrelevant. The raters are the middle-class folks you'd expect them to be; the appeals board is stacked with exhibitors. So what?)

The film's most substantial charge is that the ratings system has two chronic biases: toward films from the big studios and against indie movies; and toward violence and against sex. On the first count, Dick takes a deposition from Matt Stone, who created South Park with Trey Parker. Stone says that when their indie comedy Orgazmo was slapped with an NC-17, they were given no hints in cutting the film to get a less proscriptive rating. Yet two years later, when Paramount was behind their movie South Park: Bigger, Longer Uncut, the board, according to Stone, offered explicit help in which scenes might be softened or removed to achieve an R.

The matter of sex in films, as raised by Maria Bello's comments about The Cooler and Scary Movie, is clear enough. And it is especially notable in films that treat gay sex. This Film Is Not Yet Rated splits its screen to show similar sexual scenes, with gay ones on the left side, straight on the right. A girl masturbating about a girl she's met (in But I'm a Cheerleader), a boy masturbating into pastry (American Pie); a gay orgasm (Boys Don't Cry), a straight orgasm (Single White Female); a guy on top, with a guy (Mysterious Skin), a guy on top, with a woman (Unfaithful); two women (Henry and June), a man and a woman (Sideways). Each time, the gay scenes received an NC-17 rating while the straight scenes got an R. And in most cases, the NC-17 films were independent productions, the R films from major studios.

On the sex and violence issue, the ratings people might say — and since they never explain their rationale, we have to guess at it — that kids are programmed from their earliest days to believe that sex is for real, where as violence is pretend. It's the difference between watching a video game in the basement and making an untimely visit to your parents' bedroom. For most American children, sex education begins just before puberty, but violence they can get from infancy in Tom and Jerry pain-fests on the Cartoon Network. Whatever the MPAA's argument, their raters must believe that kiss-kiss is more toxic than bang-bang, since four times as many films are rated NC17 for sex as for violence.

But I wonder: are American kids so different from Europeans? In Europe, scenes of sexuality that would be proscribed in the U.S. often get a pass. Leos Carax's 1999 Pola X contained a love scene with a somberly lighted but unmistakable view of an erect penis, yet it received a U in France, the equivalent of our G. (The film had a limited, unrated release in the States.) Y tu mama tambien, Alfonso Cuaron's Mexican comedy-drama about two teenage boys and the slightly older woman they take on a jaunt, could be seen by 12-year-olds in France but was forbidden to under-18s by the MPAA.

Conversely, foreign ratings boards are tougher on the most extravagant forms of movie violence, to which the MPAA board is so famously indulgent. In Britain, Germany, Ireland, Finland, Hong Kong, the Philippines and most of Canada, someone under 18 couldn't see, say, Saw, the grisly horror film that was rated R in the U.S. There are dozen of similar examples. The foreign boards obviously think they're protecting kids from traumatic images. But if you were to ask Hollywood distributors not to show splatter movies to kids, they'd probably squawk, "But that's our main audience!"

Occasionally, a film goes into the marketplace unrated and finds a welcoming adult audience. Y tu mama tambien earned $13.8 million at the North American box office, along with lots of critics' awards, and $19.8 million abroad. That cume, $33.6 million, is pretty good for a sexy little art film with a budget (according to the Internet Movie Database) of about $5 million. But it's less than, say, Saw II, the horror-film sequel that cost only $4 million to make, earned in just its first weekend in the U.S., Canada and Britain.

GREED IS THE CREED

Dick discovered many of the MPAA system's anomalies when he submitted This Film Is Not Yet Rated to the board. I would love to have been a bug (or a hidden camera) on the wall of the screening room as the members watched this expose of their methods and themselves. To no one's surprise, including Dick's, the film received an NC-17 rating. When he questioned board chair Joan Graves about her group's decision, she deflected matters of political embarrassment and simply told him the film got its rating for images of extreme sexuality — his brief clips from NC-17 films. And when he asked about the qualifications for board membership, adding that he might be a good candidate because he's a parent with an interest in film, Graves drolly drawled, "I don't think you'd be a very good rater."

Maybe not, but he's a very good polemicist. And if his film never clarifies his own notion of an ideal ratings system, he did offer some clues in an Associated Press interview during this year's Sundance Film Festival. "I would prefer an open system with standards, and if they're going to have guidelines, have the guidelines so that filmmakers know what they're working with and against, and there's something there to publicly advocate for and against. That's the democratic system."

Democracy within an autocracy. Art within an industry. Those are the variables a filmmaker faces in getting his work to a large audience. As for the movie studios, the only thing pure about them is their devotion to earning a buck. They see an NC-17 rating as restraint of trade, so they're unlikely to change the system in order to indulge a few artist-directors.

Six years ago, when the Federal Trade Commission accused movie studios of peddling adult entertainment to kids, I wrote something for TIME.com that, I think, applies today to the MPAA debate:

The distributors of entertainment are not creators; they are vendors. Their job is to sell things to people — sell anything to anybody. In an unguarded moment, they'd probably tell you that that is their corporate responsibility. They know that you increase the potential profitability of any product by increasing its potential audience. If a 12-year-old will and can buy their violent movie or CD or video game, they will sell it to him. If the kid wanted beer and could buy it, they'd sell him that too.

Once upon a time, in the late '60s and early '70s, there was something that deserved the term adult entertainment. It delved responsibly into mature themes for a wide, grown-up audience. Midnight Cowboy, which won the Oscar as best picture of 1969, was rated X; if you weren't at least 18, you couldn't see it. Same with such excellent films as Medium Cool and The Devils. I don't remember mass complaints that kids couldn't see these films. The idea then was that some things — intelligent films and, for that matter, the profits that came from them — were worth waiting for.

We now live in an age of instant gratification. The kids can't wait for their adrenaline fix, and the moguls can't wait to peddle it to them. What this gives us is violent entertainment for the young. What it deprives us of is mature entertainment for the mature.

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