If you’ve gone to a movie since 1968, you’ve dealt with the MPAA’s rating system. Established to “prevent censorship,” the rating system devised by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is supposed to provide parents with information so that they can make informed decisions about what movies they let their children see. What has happened, by and large, is that the MPAA has been given carte blanche to impose their own form of censorship on films through their “voluntary” ratings system.
Filmmaker Kirby Dick decided to take a look into the MPAA and their unusual practice of keeping secret the names of those who actually rate the movies. The result is This Film is Not Yet Rated, an eye-opening documentary about the MPAA’s inconsistencies.
Using interviews with filmmakers who’ve had to deal with the MPAA giving them the dreaded “NC17” rating, like John Waters (A Dirty Shame), Kevin Smith (Clerks), Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), Wayne Kramer (The Cooler), Matt Stone (Team America: World Police) and Atom Egoyan (Where the Truth Lies), Dick examines how the MPAA does their work behind closed doors with little to no accountability.
As one example, despite their claims to the contrary, the MPAA penalizes films depicting sex but does not do the same for those that show violence. In an interview, actress Maria Bello, who starred in The Cooler, recounts how she saw a horror movie where a woman’s breast implant was cut out with a knife. That movie received an “R” rating. The Cooler originally received an “NC17” rating because of a love scene that briefly showed Bello’s pubic hair.
The MPAA will not allow previous ratings decisions to be used by filmmakers to appeal the MPAA’s decisions on their film. So, you can have a situation where one movie — American Pie — gets an “R” rating for showing a man masturbating with a pie, but a movie with a similar scene involving a female (and no pie) can, and did, receive an “NC17” rating. That movie was called But I’m a Cheerleader and wasn’t made by a large studio. American Pie, however, was made by Universal.
Dick employs Becky Altringer, a private investigator, to find out the names of those who actually rate the films for the MPAA. Using various electronic equipment and tried-and-true methods — like digging through garbage cans and following people — she attempts to “out” the members of the ratings board. The sequences documenting the investigation aren’t nearly as informative as the interviews with the filmmakers but they do provide some interesting insight into who is actually behind the ratings. For example, all of the raters have children but none seem to have children between the ages of 5 and 17 — the audience the ratings are intended to protect — as the MPAA has stated.
In the latter part of the film, Dick submits his own movie to the MPAA for a rating. Unsurprisingly, it is deemed worth of an “NC17,” mainly due to the fact that it shows the scenes that caused other films to receive “NC17” ratings. So, Dick documents the appeal process which reveals even more unusual business practices including, but not limited to, the fact that clergymen are part of the process.
If you’re at all interested in the film business, This Film is Not Yet Rated is at once eye-opening and frustrating. The movie documents the fact that independent filmmakers — like Kirby Dick — are subjected to heavier scrutiny than large studios and their films because the studios actually have their hand in the entire process.
A lot of what This Film is Not Yet Rated has to say isn’t really new information. All it takes is a look at your own DVD library to see that most films — regardless of the rating — tend to contain a fair amount of violence and that violence is usually directed at women. The fact that the MPAA and their secretive ratings board finds that type of content acceptable but frowns upon sexual content isn’t an earth-shattering revelation. What the documentary succeeds at doing is revealing the utter hypocrisy of the MPAA and their methods. For that, I say, “It’s about time.”
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
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