July 2007

Talking about movies: Film Ratings—praise and criticism

By Frank Beaver

Jack Valenti's autobiography "This Time, This Place" (published posthumously after his death in April) devotes a third of the memoir to his tenure as chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The MPAA is the successor to the Motion Picture Producers and Distribution Association, created in the 1920s to bolster Hollywood's image after a series of scandals. In 1926, Will Hays, a former Postmaster General under Warren Harding, was selected to oversee the original organization—first serving as a "goodwill ambassador" for the film industry. Later, in the 1930s, he developed the "Hays Code," which granted a seal of approval to movies that abided by certain moral guidelines. Essentially the Code functioned around a concept of "morally compensating values" with regard to film content. By film's end the sinner was to be punished and the good rewarded. Candid treatment of sex and racy dialogue were taboo as were script plots that depicted "methods of crime."

The Hays Code began to lose significance in the 1950s, after the US Supreme Court in 1952 awarded first amendment protection to the motion picture. Increasingly, court test cases involving film with "bold" content (e.g., "Anatomy of a Murder" 1959) were resolved in favor of the filmmakers.

By the time Jack Valenti took over as head of the MPAA in 1966 it was clear that another system of internal regulation was needed—one that would continue to show concern about film content and at the same time help avert statutory censorship. By the late 60s the candid treatment on screen of language, sex and violence was in full force, in mainstream films such as "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), "The Graduate" (1967), and "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967), to cite just a few.

In his autobiography, Valenti writes: "We had to fill the movie vacuum now that the Hays Code was colder than dog meat, and good riddance to it."

The result was the MPAA Rating System that went into effect November 1, 1968. Valenti writes that the idea of the system was a very simple one: to "give advance warning to parents with regard to language, violence, sex and the depiction of illegal substances, so they could make their decisions about the moviegoing of their children." The rating system would operate with four categories of age-related classifications: G, M (content for mature audiences), R and X.

In his 38 years at MPAA, Valenti continued to extol the value of the rating system and does so in his memoir, citing a 2006 poll which showed that a majority of the public still had a "favorable" attitude toward the system. While this may be so, researchers at Harvard University in 2004 concluded that the rating system provided the public with often confusing, imprecise ratings with regard to film content.  

As a film teacher and critic, I have followed the ratings of films since the system's inception, and what I have observed is a complicated process of self-regulation that has been plagued by uncertainty and inconsistency.  In its early years the rating board tended to be more lenient on films with violent blood and gore, while coming down hard on important motion pictures with even brief glimpses of nudity and sex. Lindsay Anderson's "If..." (1968), a study of a British "public" boys school, was given an X rating because of a brief shower scene. A similar fate befell Haskell Wexler's intellectually provocative docudrama study of television journalism, "Medium Cool" (1969)—given an X rating because of a shot in which a nude couple playfully chase one another around a room. In 1971 Stanley Kubrick shocked critics and First Amendment advocates by deleting a satirical sex scene from "A Clockwork Orange" so as to win an R rating rather than accept the Board's initial X. Kubrick's decision (later reversed) was based on the fact that an X rating spelled doom for any film seeking wide theatrical release. Increasingly, theater owners refused to book X-rated films, and newspapers began rejecting ads for them.

Over the course of Valenti's supervision the various classifications were given new letter designations, and another age-related category added. The M rating was changed to PG, suggesting parental guidance for the film. In 1984 a PG-13 category was added, hinting at film content inappropriate for children under 13 years of age.  In 1990, the X rating was replaced with an NC-17 designation (no children 17 and under admitted). The X rating over the years had been exploited by adult film producers with their own XXX rating which indicated sexually explicit material intended for pornographic outlets.

The rating system to me has always seemed a kind of muddied alphabet soup. And too, and perhaps most significantly, there have been the persistent complaints by film producers that pressures to alter or delete (and sometimes even add) content to win a particular rating have encroached on artistic freedom and served as a form of internal censorship, a claim which Valenti always denied.

After finishing Valenti's memoir, I decided to re-watch last year's documentary expose of the MPAA rating system, "This Film is Not Yet Rated," now on DVD. The documentary, directed by Kirby Dick, offers a candid illustration of the dilemmas faced by various filmmakers (John Waters, Kimberly Pierce, Kevin Smith, Atom Egoyan, et al) because of the MPAA rating system and its anonymous rating board. The film raises questions about the Board's apparent rating responses toward independent films and those made by Hollywood producers, and also rating responses that seem to differ for the candid treatment of gay versus heterosexual subject matter. "This Film is Not Yet Rated" is full of lively discussion about the frustrations of the rating system, but it also has many of the lively mocumentary qualities of films like Michael Moore's "Roger and Me." A cat-and-mouse game occurs as private investigators are called on to track down and expose the secretive members of the rating board. The film is an eye-opener with regard to how our movies get tailored for us by the MPAA and it's also a lot of fun. I heartily recommend it.

Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.