Lifting the veil from Hollywood movie ratings
Mercury News
The first question people always ask about the documentary ``This Film Is Not Yet Rated'' is, well . . . duh: What is it rated?
The answer is more complicated than you might imagine. Following its story about the picture, one newspaper was forced to run the following clarification on that subject, certainly one of the most humbling corrections ever published: ``A Washington Post article incorrectly indicated that the movie `This Film Is Not Yet Rated' is rated NC-17. It is unrated.''
Oh.
The documentary, which opened here Friday, originally did receive the most restrictive NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, the very ratings organization whose work the movie examines. The MPAA has been giving its letter-grade ratings of G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17 (formerly X) since 1968.
But because IFC Films, which is releasing the documentary, is not a member of the MPAA, it has the option of rejecting the judgment of the secretive ratings board. And that's what director Kirby Dick knew he would do all along. But in this case, getting the dreaded NC-17 rating -- which means newspapers won't carry ads for the film -- was half the fun.
Dick wasn't interested in examining the long history of Hollywood censorship -- particularly as it was practiced under the restrictive Hays Code from 1930 to 1967 -- feeling that the MPAA already used comparisons to that system as a way to make its own ratings program look less draconian. The MPAA devised the current system as a form of self-regulation, but the only reason the ratings have any teeth is that the studios -- which formed the MPAA as their lobbying operation -- are one of the few remaining monoliths in the business world.
``It's certainly a cartel when six studios control 95 percent of the film business, and they run the rating system without any kind of openness, or recourse if you feel you've been aggrieved,'' Dick says. ``I think it's an open question whether it's unconstitutional, but nobody's willing to sue the MPAA because you'd have to be an injured party, which means you're in the film business. And it wouldn't stand you in good stead to sue 95 percent of the business you're in.''
That proved to be an obstacle as he and the film's producers were lining up industry people to talk about their experiences with the ratings board. ``I thought when I started that I would have no trouble getting filmmakers for interviews,'' Dick says, ``because so many people had had their films unfairly rated. I quickly found out people were afraid that if they spoke to me, they would be branded as troublemakers, and treated more harshly in the future.''
Using outtakes from ``Team America,'' a comedy starring puppets, ``This Film Is Not Yet Rated'' demonstrates just how ludicrous the process can become. The movie depicts two marionettes having sex, which the ratings board judged to be too explicit until the filmmakers cut several shots -- of wooden dolls, remember -- and got an R. Dick says he also was told that one of the ``Scary Movie'' sequels was threatened with an NC-17 rating because of a scene in which the Invisible Man was receiving an act of oral gratification. Never mind that it was impossible to actually see anything because he was, um, invisible.
The documentary also suggests that the ratings board punishes gay sex more severely than straight sex. ``The homophobia was very extreme,'' Dick says. He illustrates this by showing two identical encounters side by side. One involves a man and a woman having sex, and is rated R; the other shows two men going through exactly the same exertions, and gets an NC-17 rating.
And sex of any kind is far likelier to receive a restrictive rating than a film that contains violence. Because the ratings are controlled by an industry that gears most of its films toward an adolescent audience, Dick believes the system is skewed in favor of the sort of violence that teenage boys enjoy.
``This is a system that helps the studios' bottom line, and hurts the bottom line of their competitors, the independent and foreign films that tend to deal more with adult sexuality,'' he says. ``It's not really about morality, it's about how to make the most money.''
He is as unopposed to the profit motive as any big studio, and unabashedly promotes the idea that Americans can register their opposition to the ratings system by plunking down serious cash to see his movie. ``Hollywood listens to money, and if this film does well at the box office, they're going to know that a lot of people are very angry,'' Dick says. ``That is probably the best way that people can contribute to pressuring Hollywood on this.'' (In limited release since Sept. 1, the picture so far has grossed less than $200,000, a figure unlikely to bring the studios to their knees.)
The documentary is unconventional in several ways, the most obvious of which is that Dick hires a private investigator -- on camera -- and then follows her as she stakes out the MPAA offices, attempting to uncover the secret identities of the ratings board members. Dick and his gumshoes spent months figuring out which cars emerging from the MPAA's garage belonged to raters, then following them to lunches or to their homes.
The trick was conducting their cloak-and-dagger operation in secret, so that when the ratings board saw ``This Film Is Not Yet Rated'' for the first time, it also would be the first time they realized they'd been outed. ``When that film went in'' to determine its rating, Dick says, ``I think they were 100 percent caught off guard. There was a certain pleasure in that.''
All Dick's previous films have been released without a rating, an option that would be unavailable to him if he wanted to work for 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, Sony, Disney or any of their divisions. (All studio pictures are required to be submitted to the ratings board, and the initial decision can be appealed, or the film can be re-edited and submitted again for a less restrictive rating.) ``I came up with the idea of submitting the film to get a rating because I knew I could then follow myself through the system,'' he says. ``But I didn't have any idea the appeals board was going to end up being as surreal as it was.''
Unable to record his phone conversations with members of the appeals board without their permission, Dick re-enacts them in the film, using recordings of his voice and animated figures as stand-ins for the raters. All of which certainly heightens the surreal effect.
The film contends that members of the ratings board have no training for the job; that there are no child psychologists present, but there is a member of the clergy on the board; that the MPAA's claims that the board is made up of parents with children between the ages of 5 and 17 were untrue; and that there are few minorities among the raters.
``If the whole system's secret, then no one can really know who's making these judgments,'' Dick says. ``The MPAA claims this rating system is for the public. Well, if it's for the public, it should be public.''
One of the questions raised by ``This Film Is Not Yet Rated'' is whether Dick's guerrilla style -- some might even call it vigilante filmmaking -- is any better than the methods used by the MPAA that he deplores.
``I think it's my obligation as an investigative filmmaker to get as much information to the public as possible,'' he says. ``I had no qualms about it being the right thing to do. We didn't harass those people, we didn't stalk them, we just got a short video clip of them. This is information that there is no reason for them to be hiding, unless they have something to hide. And as we found out, they do.''
`This Film Is Not Yet Rated'
***
Opened Friday.
Rated No MPAA rating (could be R for violence and sexuality in movie clips)
Director Kirby Dick
Running time 1 hour, 37 minutes
