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Rating the Rating System
Back in 1997 I became aware most people don’t pay much attention to film ratings. I went to see the R rated comedy American Pie in the theater. In front of me sat a woman with a child that could not have been older than eight. American Pie is not a movie for kids. I was so angry that this parent used such poor judgment. I remember thinking to myself that there was something terribly wrong with the movie rating system for this to happen. Up until this point I knew that movies were rated, but I never paid a whole lot of attention to how it all worked. So I started reading more, and I began to notice some trends over the years. First, the rating system is biased in favor of the seven big film studios—Disney, Sony Pictures, MGM, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers. Second, the system is outdated and unreliable. Finally, it forces directors to make movies that fit the rating system, causing many independent filmmakers to just release their films without an MPAA rating. Works Cited Atchison,
Doug. “Separate and Unequal?” Movie Maker. Issue #41. Winter 2001. Breznican,
Anthony. “More Indies Avoid Film Ratings.” Yahoo! News. 2 May 2001. 8 Nov. 2003. http://www.nc17film.com/unratedmovies.html. Judy,
Jim. E-mail interview. 23 Nov. 2003 Levy,
Emanuel. Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film. New York: New York UP, 1999. ---.
Oscar Fever: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards. New York: Continuum,
2001. “Movie
Ratings: How It Works.” Motion Picture Association. 30 Oct. 2003. http://www.mpaa.org. Scrutchin,
Michael B. Rev. of Storytelling. 23 Nov. 2003.
http://www.flipsidemovies.com/storytelling.html. Stephens,
R. Presley. Rev. of Kill Bill Volume 1. 24 Nov. 2003. http://www.tampabaylive.com/entertainment/moviereviews/killbill.shtml. Wallace,
Amy. “MPAA’s Dozen Judge Movies For Millions.” Los Angeles Times. Home ed.: A1+
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is the trade association of the American film industry. Jack Valenti took over as the president of the MPAA in May of 1966. According to the MPAA’s website, the first thing he did as the new president was to get rid of the outdated Hays production code which up until this point forced movies to cut anything that was thought to be inappropriate for all viewing audiences. Valenti created the voluntary movie rating system, the one we still use today, in November of 1968. Over the years a few changes have been made. In 1984, the PG-13 rating was created to bridge the gap between PG and R. In 1990, NC-17 was created to replace tthe X rating which had pretty much been taken over by the adult film industry, creating a negative stigma in the minds of most viewers.
In the section of the MPAA’s website that deals with how the ratings work, we learn a little about the Ratings Board: “There are 8-13 members on the board who serve for [periods] of varying length … there are no special qualifications … except the members must have a shared parenthood experience.” The ratings are handed out by a majority vote of the Board, who judges each film on how they feel American parents would respond.
Even though PG-13 was created to bridge a gap between PG and R, there is still a gap. For instance, Whale Rider and School of Rock are great family films. However, both may be denied their family audiences because of the PG-13 rating that was slapped upon each of them because of minor drug references. These movies are not glorifying drugs, but merely acknowledging them. To shelter kids from these movies based purely on these references is like saying that drugs don’t exist. I think that the MPAA needs to ease up a little on this. Otherwise they need to get rid of the PG-13 rating and replace it with two ratings: PG-10 and PG-14. This way parents can better judge the movies that fall between PG and R.
When the NC-17 replaced the X rating it worked for a while. The film studios felt better about the rating as compared to the X rating, and so did the general public for the most part. However, the hype behind the release and marketing campaign for the NC-17 movie “Showgirls” was a factor in the tainting of the rating. People got the idea that the NC-17 rating implied that the movie was of the soft core pornography genre. Now NC-17 is as taboo as the X rating. So should a new rating take the place of NC-17? Or would it work for a little while until it got tainted too? I don’t know, but at the same time I don’t like the idea that most movie theaters won’t show NC-17 films and that most video stores won’t stock them either. I want to have the chance to make up my own mind about a film. I am not a kid anymore and I don’t like not being able to see appropriately rated movies just for grownups at the local theaters. Maybe they won’t make as much money as the new family film, but maybe a lot of that has to do with the promotion behind them. I don’t know if there is an answer to the NC-17 problem, but I do feel that it is something that needs consideration.
The perfect example of the influence that a major studio can have on the MPAA is Kevin Smith’s film Clerks. Clerks had originally been given an NC-17 rating for its profanity. Smith took the film to the Sundance Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival where it was well received. Miramax (which is owned by Disney) picked it up and hired well-known attorney Alan Dershowitz, who successfully appealed the NC-17 rating (Levy, Cinema 210). This is the only instance where a film that originally had an NC-17 rating won an appeal for an R rating. Without Miramax’s resources, Smith could have never afforded Dershowitz and would have had to either accept the unmarketable NC-17 rating or release Clerks unrated.
Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan portrays World War II in a very realistic way, and shows a tremendously chaotic and graphically violent battle in its opening sequences (Levy, Oscar 163-164). The violence in Saving Private Ryan, and the fact that it only got an R rating causes many people to wonder if the MPAA is more lenient when it comes to violence than it is to sex. At the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Spike Lee said that even though he enjoys Saving Private Ryan, he does not understand why it didn’t get an NC-17 rating (Wallace). Jack Valenti admits that Saving Private Ryan is a violent movie, but he also feels it is important and that thirteen year old kids should be allowed to see it even though it is rated R (Wallace). Valenti denies that the MPAA is more lenient when it comes to violence. However, if you go to the MPAA’s website and look at the list of NC-17 movies, most of them are rated NC-17 for sexual reasons and not violence. The question remains, if Saving Private Ryan had been made by someone other than Spielberg and had been released by an independent studio, would it have gotten an NC-17 rating? I would have to say that it probably would have.
The story of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut is an interesting one. Matt Stone and Trey Parker fought the MPAA unsuccessfully when their first movie, Orgazmo, got an NC-17 rating. Orgazmo was released by an independent movie studio who did not have the money needed to fight for an R rating, but with their animated feature, South Park, released by Paramount Studios, the money was available to fight until the R was granted (Atchison). Parker and Stone do not support the MPAA and even go out of their way to thumb their noses at the MPAA in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. In the film, the group of South Park kids sneak into an R rated movie and one of them says, “Remember what the MPAA says: horrific, deplorable violence is OK, as long as people don’t say any naughty words” (Wallace). The MPAA doesn’t really have any set guidelines, so Matt Stone said that they would try to see how much they could get away with every time the resubmitted the film to be rated. The MPAA would say to remove something in South Park, they would “make it ten times worse and five times as long. And [the MPAA would] come back and say, ‘Ok, that’s better’” (Atchison).
In Quentin Tarantino’s newest film, Kill Bill Volume 1, there are many brutal fighting scenes. Tarantino chose to film a very bloody portion of the movie in black-and-white specifically to avoid getting an NC-17 rating (Stephens). At another point in the movie, Tarantino also uses animated sequences to keep an R rating. Stylistically, these choices didn’t damage Tarantino’s finished film. Other filmmakers aren’t as lucky.
Todd Solondz is the very daring writer-director responsible for the movie Storytelling. In the first part of the movie there is a very brutal sex scene. The MPAA made Solondz change it so it wouldn’t get an NC-17 rating because he was in contract with Fine Line to deliver an R rated film, but instead of cutting the scene he “chose to put a big red box over the action, pointing a finger at censorship” (Scrutchin).
Darren Aronofsky’s evocative “Requiem For A Dream” was released unrated, and it not only got great reviews from some of the country’s top movie critics, but Ellen Burstyn was even nominated for an Oscar for her performance (Breznican). “Requiem For A Dream” is a movie that should only be viewed by adults. Its portrayal of the effects of drug addiction is stark, unsettling and even at times brutal. However, “Requiem For A Dream” is not pornographic. It was originally rated NC-17 for an unerotic, depressing sex scene near the end of the film. Had Aronofsky cut this scene, he would have lost the pivotal moment in the development of a main character. Without knowing how this character ends up, the movie would lose a lot of its impact and anti-drug message. By opting for no rating, Aronofsky was able to avoid the stigma of the NC-17 rating. Had his movie been rated NC-17, even fewer theaters would have shown it and Burstyn’s performance may have gone unnoticed.
The current voluntary movie rating system is becoming less and less reliable for parents when it comes to deciding if movies are suitable for their children. Jim Judy runs a website called Screen It that evaluates movies into categories such as alcohol/drugs, blood/gore, jump scenes, imitative behavior, sex/nudity and so on. Then he itemizes a movie’s contents by those categories. Therefore parents can read his reviews and know exactly what they can expect when they take their children to the theater to see a movie. I e-mailed Mr. Judy and asked him a few questions. When I asked him how he felt about the current rating system, he said, “They’re a rough guideline for parents, but otherwise provide next to no usable information.” With more and more parents being unsatisfied with the current movie rating system, websites like www.screenit.com, www.moviemom.com, www.kids-in-mind.com, and www.family.org are going to slowly replace the current system in the minds of parents when it comes to choosing movies for kids. The ratings are so vague and these types of sites give so much information that parents do want to know.
At most the MPAA rating system is a vague guideline for parents. But the ratings are getting more and more random every year. It is hard not to wonder if parents even know what kinds of movies their kids are watching. Also, it is hard not to wonder if those same parents know how many quality adult-oriented films that they are missing out on because of the rating system. “Jack Valenti likes to cite studies that show a 74 percent approval rating amongst American parents as evidence that the system doesn’t need fixing” (Atchison), but what about filmmakers who don’t have the big studio influence to manipulate the MPAA? Shouldn’t the system be fixed to include them as well? I think it should be, and so does writer-director John Sayles who says, “It’s a form of self-censorship. It’s the way the film industry feels it keeps outsiders from telling them what they can put on the screen” (Wallace).