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The rating board has been drawing lines since 1968, when the present classification system was set up. Movies are submitted to a seven-member review board, all of them parents, selected for two-or three-year terms. The board assigns each movie one of four ratings: G (for all audiences), PG (parental guidance suggested), R (restricted: under 17 not admitted unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian), and X (no one under 17 admitted). The rating can be overturned by a 22-member appeals board made up of theater owners, independent distributors and studio representatives.
Except for the so-called automatic language rule, which mandates an R for movies using certain sexually explicit words, the board has no fixed criteria for its ratings. "The rule of reason prevails here, not a bunch of rules," says Richard Heffner, 58, a Rutgers University professor of communications and public policy who has been chairman of the rating board for the past ten years. "Our function is not to impose ideologies, morality, psychology or aesthetics, but to make an educated estimation of what most parents would think a movie should be rated."
As audience standards of what is permissible in movies have changed, so have the ratings. For one thing, the X rating has fallen into virtual disuse. Of the 342 films submitted to the board between November 1982 and October 1983, none were released with an X. Since an X rating can have a disastrous effect on the box office, producers almost always prefer to re-edit a movie to gain an R, or release it unrated. Bo and John Derek's erotic adventure film Bolero, for example, was originally rated X, but will be distributed later this summer without a rating. Unrated films, however, cannot be advertised on TV stations or in many newspapers, and some theater chains refuse to show them.
Heffner and the board have begun taking a harder line on film violence.
They gave an X last fall to Brian De Palma's bloody gangster epic Scarface, but it was changed to R by the appeals board. Last week that board upheld an X rating given to Terror in the Aisles, a compilation of scenes from past horror films scheduled for release by Universal later this year.
The G rating, which to many viewers implies blandly wholesome family fare, has become nearly as much of a box-office stigma as an X. In the twelve-month period ending in October 1983, only twelve films were rated G. The four-rating system has thus been reduced, for all practical purposes, to two. G is out, and so is X. Indeed, for any movie seeking the widest possible audience, that number is effectively cut to one: even an R can tarnish a film's commercial prospects.
The PG-13 seems to offer a promising alternative. Says Guy McElwaine, president of Columbia Pictures: "PG-13 would take away the pain of getting an R on a movie that doesn't deserve one." It would also recognize, very belatedly, that there is a big difference between what a twelve-year-old should be allowed to see and what a 16-year-old should be permitted to see. As Heffner puts it, "Parents generally don't treat pre-teen-agers as they do older brothers and sisters, and the rating system shouldn't either."
—By RichardZoglin.
Reported by Meg Grant/Los Angeles and Timothy Loughran/New York