You've heard a lot about these new X-rated movies, and you want to know what all the rumpus is about. So you go to The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover and find that it's mostly about unpleasant people arguing at the dinner table. You figure you can get that at home for free, so you check out Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and wait for the big sex scene. Sorry. The lovers are fond and tender, and they don't even get slaughtered at the end. You visit The Killer, a Hong Kong melodrama rated X for violence. Lots of gunplay but, darn the luck, no explicit maiming. Well, Frankenhooker sounds promising. But it doesn't deliver: the movie's big scene, of prostitutes' bodies exploding, is done on so meager a special-effects budget that the victims look like Barbie dolls on a test range.
What ever happened to prurient interest? Who took the sex out of X? All the films recently rated X are either low-budget thrillers (Hardware, In the Cold of the Night) or art-house dramas (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Life Is Cheap...but Toilet Paper Is Expensive). They are not porno or slasher films. You can find kinkier sex in Wild at Heart and grosser violence in Total Recall. In contrast, the new X-rated films look far too tepid or obscure to be at the center of Hollywood's hottest controversy.
They are, though. The movie industry is enduring one of its rare crises of conscience, when a filmmaker's rights are measured against box-office mandates. Since 1968 the rating system of the Motion Picture Association of America -- which designates films G for tots, PG and PG-13 for older children and adolescents, R for children in an adult's company and X for adults only -- has functioned as a guide for parents seeking suitable movies for their children and, not coincidentally, as a bulwark against state censorship of films. Now critics and directors are posing crucial questions about commercial films. Who gets to make a movie -- the artist or the industry censor? And who gets to see it -- everyone, adults only or just about nobody?
Hugh Hefner used to set the standards for American permissiveness. Now Richard Heffner does. The chairman of the M.P.A.A.'s ratings board is deemed one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He is known to negotiate personally with directors, urging them to remove, say, a beheading from this film, an orgasmic groan from that. Lately Heffner hasn't liked a lot of what he sees. When he emerged from a screening of Frankenhooker, the story goes, he told a representative of the film that it "should be rated S for s - - -."
In the M.P.A.A.'s New York City office, Heffner and six other solons, whose main qualification is that they are parents, rate each picture. The director may contest their decision, but he is unlikely to win. First, he needs a two- thirds majority of the appeal board to overturn the original verdict. Second, if the film is still rated X, and if his studio is a member of the M.P.A.A. (as all the major studios are), he is contractually obligated to recut the film for an R rating.