Film Reviews	Sex, Violence, and the American Way: This Film Is Not Yet Rated by M. Faust

Kirby Dick and Atom Egoyan in "This Film Is Not Yet Rated"

I don’t know why it is that you don’t see the rating for a film onscreen until the end of the movie, as the very last thing on the end credits before the house lights come up, the canned music resumes and the high schoolers start sweeping up the popcorn and candy boxes those slobs in back of you couldn’t be bothered to take to the trash can. Wouldn’t you think that a better place would be at the beginning of the movie, just to give you one last chance to drag the wee ones away before their eyes are accidentally exposed to the acid burn of an R-rated film?

I only know that the ratings card is at the end because, as someone who sees no reason to walk when he could be sitting, I tend to stay in my seat until those sweepers chase me out. And often as not, I’m mystified at the conclusion of the MPAA ratings board. Many is the night I’ve trudged back to my car puzzling over why something that struck me as a fine movie to take the kids to got an R, or why a sniggering, sex-drenched, adolescent comedy got a PG-13, or (most often) how the excruciating violence of modern horror movies can get anything less restrictive than an NC-17.

Documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick (Twist of Faith, Derrida, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist) wonders about these things as well, and has gone so far as to do something about it. This Film Is Not Yet Rated explores the workings of the MPAA ratings board, which was formed in 1968 as a self-policing mechanism of the movie industry to ward off government censorship at a time when movies were becoming more adult by leaps and bounds.

Under the aegis of Jack Valenti, the MPAA (essentially an organization that exists to publicize the major film studios) has always held that their rating system is voluntary and exists to give guidance to viewers, not to censor the work of artists.

But it’s de facto censorship nonetheless. You and I, educated and objective adults that we are, go to see a film on its merits, regardless of its rating. But that’s because we’re lucky enough to live in a city with independent theaters that will run NC-17 movies and a newspaper that will accept advertising for them. That’s not true in a lot of places. If you are a filmmaker whose film has been rated NC-17, you can forget about it playing anywhere but a few large cities. You can’t even hope to recoup your investment on home video: Wal-Mart and Blockbuster, along with other of the nations largest retailers, won’t sell anything with an NC-17 (or anything that is unrated), and if they don’t stock your movie you may as well not bothered to have made it. Inevitably, the film gets cut to what the industry calls a “Blockbuster edit.”

There are also economic ramifications arising from whether a film gets an R or PG-13 rating, all having to do with advertising and booking. You and I may not take the ratings seriously, but a lot of Hollywood does.

It’s a juicy topic, and pretty much everyone in the film business has an opinion about it. While Dick claims that many filmmakers who had been burned by the ratings board were unwilling to voice their complaints to his camera, lest they run afoul of the raters in the future, he still managed to get funny interviews and provocative interviews from a number of filmmakers, including John Waters, Kevin Smith, Atom Egoyan and Matt Stone. They discourse on how the ratings board operates under a cloak of secrecy, refusing to say what factors can push a film form one rating to another. And they offer plentiful evidence that the raters, supposedly all “average parents,” are tolerant of the most gruesome violence but horrified at the most mild displays of gay desire or female pleasure. The criteria for R vs. NC-17 hetero sex is demonstrated in a montage that proves that it’s the pelvic thrust that really drives them insane.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated should have been a slam dunk, but Dick has trouble keeping it focused in any direction long enough to exhaust the topic. For every interesting issue he brings up (like military censorship; you can’t make a realistic film about war without the cooperation of the Pentagon, which is extremely picky about who gets to borrow its props), he seems to overlook two others.

Worst of all, Dick wastes far too much time on a quest to “out” the current members of the ratings board, going so far as hiring a private investigator to uncover their identities. It’s a poor substitute for the impossible goal of getting into the heads of these people to figure out why they rate films the way they do.

Despite this failing, This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a documentary that will appeal to every serious film buff, as well as raise questions in the mind of any parents who think that the MPAA raters are concerned with public standards rather than their own personal prejudices.