Film ratings board takes more heat
No one can hawk a movie like Harvey Weinstein. But when it comes to facing off against the Motion Picture Association of America, one of the most brash studio chiefs in Hollywood can get a little sheepish.
Which is why Weinstein decided to let one of the directors of his recent film “Grindhouse” be the frontman before the Motion Picture Association of America and its ratings board.
After all, millions were at stake. Weinstein knew that the movie, whose graphic violence brought it perilously close to an NC-17 rating, would not be shown in many theaters or be rented or sold in some stores if it received the prohibitive rating.
So he let fast-talking Quentin Tarantino pitch the movie as mainstream art.
“They don’t care for me,” Weinstein says of the ratings board. “When I go, they make me take chunks out of my movies. Quentin, they love.”
The strategy paid off – in part. The board asked for only minor trims to “Grindhouse,” a horror exploitation double-feature directed by Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
Though the film took in a disappointing $11.6 million for its opening weekend, Weinstein knows an NC-17 would have made the movie virtually unsellable.
He’s still not sure how some scenes got through.
“We were almost expecting a fight. They’re hard to read,” he says of the ratings board.
That unpredictability is at the crux of mounting criticism of the board, which has been accused of being secretive, inconsistent and out of touch with American mores.
In response, the board, which rates more than 900 films a year, is pledging to make the system more transparent for parents and filmmakers, who say they aren’t sure what levels of violence and sex merit a particular rating.
Already the MPAA appears to be flexing more muscle. In early April, it took the unprecedented step of punishing a film for advertisements it deemed offensive.
The ads for the horror film “Captivity” showed a woman being kidnapped and tortured under the headlines “Capture, Confinement, Torture, Termination.”
The ads, which ran on 30 Los Angeles-area billboards and 1,400 New York taxi tops, were yanked after parents flooded the movie company, After Dark Films, with complaints. The MPAA followed by ruling that the movie would not be rated for at least 30 days, jeopardizing the film’s planned May 18 release date.
After Dark executives say that though the ads were in bad taste, the studio was made an example of.
“They needed a whipping boy,” company co-founder Courtney Solomon says. “They’re not about protecting parents or kids. They’re about keeping their power in Hollywood.”
It’s hardly the first such accusation aimed at the ratings board since its formation in 1968. Made up of executives from the six major studios – Disney, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. – the MPAA has drawn the increasing ire of some filmmakers and smaller studio chiefs over what guidelines govern movie ratings.
Last year’s documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” leveled a number of charges at the board, from working at the behest of big studios to being outright prudes.
Joan Graves, head of the MPAA’s Classification and Ratings Administration, counters that the board’s primary mission is to warn parents about content, not dictate it.
“The whole idea is to give information to parents,” she says. “When this system was started, that’s all it was meant to do.”
Graves conceded, however, that the MPAA has become a sounding board for complaints about the industry, from directors who hate the board’s rating appeals process to moviegoers displeased with parents who bring their toddlers to graphic movies such as “Saw.”
To that end, the MPAA has announced several plans that it hopes will quell complaints:
“Improve the reputation of the NC-17 rating. Since it was unveiled in 1990, NC-17 has been considered the arena for big-studio soft-core porn. And although the National Association of Theatre Owners say there is no written policy on banning NC-17 films, it acknowledges that some exhibitors won’t show the movies.
“It’s not an effort to have more NC-17 (films) necessarily,” Graves says. “It’s an effort to discard the myths around that rating. An NC-17 doesn’t mean the movie is a bad movie, and it doesn’t mean it’s pornographic. It simply means that there are elements in it that we believe most American parents think are out of bounds for children.”
“Revise the R-rating parental guide. After complaints that young children were being brought to graphically violent films, the MPAA changed its R-rating advisory earlier this year to read: “Generally, it is not appropriate for parents to bring their young children with them to R-rated motion pictures.”
Whether the new caveat will keep young children out of R-rated movies, Graves acknowledged, is uncertain.
“Change the rating appeals process. In the past, a filmmaker who was unhappy with a rating could appeal the board’s decision but not cite other movies as part of that appeal. “Showgirls” director Paul Verhoeven, for instance, could not appeal his movie’s NC-17 rating by citing the sexuality in R-rated Basic Instinct. Now, filmmakers can cite precedent.