Ratings board attacked in scattershot documentary
Friday January 27 3:45 PM ET
In "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," veteran documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick lets the Motion Picture Assn. of America's much-maligned film ratings board have it from both barrels.
So incendiary is the attack on the Classification and Ratings Administration (CARA) that it's doubtful if any company other than IFC would finance such a film because nearly all film companies are linked through corporate parents to the studios.
Granted, CARA is an inviting target. The board is a secret, unregulated organization whose members have no apparent qualifications other than being parents yet have the power to prevent films from reaching certain audiences and, according to one interviewee, by its very existence prevent some films from being made. But by employing Michael Moore techniques with entertaining graphics, mocking cartoons, unrelated footage from Columbine and Buchenwald and an ambush-style investigation into board members' identities, Dick risks evoking sympathy for board members who, after all, are only going along with a system put in place by others.
The film, screened here in the premieres section, has an airdate in the fall but could turn up at other festivals in the meantime. Any controversy it provokes is a good thing, as few filmmakers don't believe the current system needs reform.
The ratings system created by longtime MPAA president Jack Valenti in 1968 with its letter grades to gauge content and themes for parents was designed to counteract a multitude of local censorship boards across the country -- the most notorious was in Dallas -- whose conflicting and contradictory standards bedeviled national distribution of many films. The ratings system's great success was to eliminate this local censorship and ward off federal moves toward regulating film content. Yet this context is not clear in Dick's film, which seems unwilling to give CARA any credit for creating a sane, manageable system for labeling movies with adult content.
That said, the points the film makes against the board are well taken. The MPAA insists on keeping its rating board members anonymous, to protect them from undue pressure and influence supposedly, but most filmmakers and many moviegoers, too, would like to know who is rating their films.
What are their qualifications? Well, the way Valenti set it up there are none. These are "average parents," according to the party line. In the film, Newsweek critic David Ansen dismisses this mythological American parent as a "convenient fiction." A handful of people meeting in the San Fernando Valley can hardly represent parents across the nation. Later investigation reveals that contrary to MPAA assertions, the children of many of these raters are well past the age when movie ratings apply to them.
The major complaint from the indie sector is, as October Films co-founder Bingham Ray puts it, "The system is set up to favor the studios." "South Park" producer Matt Stone notes the differences he experienced coming before the board as an indie and then as a studio filmmaker. As a studio filmmaker, he received detailed instructions how to change an NC-17 film into an R, while as an indie he was left to guess.
Board decisions in recent years reveal a strong middle-class, male, heterosexual bias. The board has declared that female orgasms in certain films go on "too long," and it comes down hard on shots of female pubic hair. Gay sex receives harsher treatment than straight sex. Graphic violence, even against women, skates free of the dreaded NC-17 rating.
One key revelation is that two members of the clergy, one Catholic and one Protestant, sit in on appeals board hearings that convene when filmmakers appeal ratings.
What will make many viewers uneasy, though, is Dick's central quest. He hires female detectives to figure out the identities of members of both the ratings and appeals board. They succeed, but the image of a detective and one of our best documentarians sifting through a garbage can on a nighttime street makes you squirm. The "Candid Camera" gotcha shots of members shopping or eating lunch belong in a movie about a stalker, one that should be rated R.
Dick also drags in archival footage of the House Un-American Activities Committee and a brief mention of the infamous Hollywood blacklist and the MPAA's role in that sorry episode to further discredit the lobbying organization. This seems unfair because today's MPAA is hardly the same organization of right-wing nut cases.
Dick's strongest points are that these raters receive no training and are given no standards by which to judge movies. Experts in child psychology or media or social studies are not consulted. Nor are they allowed on the board.
The days of counting F-words or pelvic thrusts need to end, and in the film's quieter moments, Dick makes this case compellingly.
Director: Kirby Dick; Producer: Eddie Schmidt; Executive producers: Alison Palmer Bourke, Evan Shapiro; Directors of photography: Shana Hagan, Kirsten Johnson, Amy Vincent; Music supervisor: Dondi Bastone; Editor: Matthew Clarke; Animated graphics: Ka-Chew!
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
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