Beyond the Multiplex

An interview with "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" director Kirby Dick. Plus: The "real" Warhol and the Clint Eastwood of Japan.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Andy Warhol, Reviews, Zhang Yimou, Beyond the Multiplex

Kirby Dick, director of "This Film Is Not Yet Rated"

Aug. 31, 2006 | Most adult filmgoers never think about the Motion Picture Association of America's movie ratings. I mean, who really cares? We live in a country with constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression and no state censorship, so adults can pretty much see whatever they want.

Almost all grown-up-oriented flicks you're likely to see at the big shopping-center theaters are rated R. You might take the kids to something that's PG-13. Cartoons and Disney flicks are rated PG. If you're one of those people who reads this column and goes to see deviant foreign-language films at that funky quasi-bohemian theater with couches, good coffee and yeast-flavored popcorn, well, those movies don't even bother getting rated in the first place. (After all, it's a voluntary system.) So there's no problem, right?

Not so fast, bub. As documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick is here to tell us, there's a big problem. Dick's intriguing and often hilarious exploration of the MPAA's super-secret ratings board, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," makes the dimensions of that problem clear. As industry insiders have observed for decades, the ratings system distorts the film landscape, maybe subtly and maybe not so subtly. It privileges certain kinds of content over other kinds, ensuring a steady flow of hyperviolent but strangely puritanical entertainment into the nation's megaplexes and living rooms.

For any movie with hopes of finding a mass audience, the R rating is critical. Many newspapers won't carry ads for adult-oriented films with an NC-17 rating, many theater chains won't show them and Blockbuster and Wal-Mart won't carry them. Films made by the six major studios are carefully crafted for the R rating, and as Dick's film demonstrates, the supposedly anonymous parents on the MPAA ratings board often work closely with studio executives during postproduction to guarantee the right result. As I mentioned earlier, foreign films and small-scale American indie pictures bypass the entire process, thereby exiling themselves to the art-house circuit (which, delightful and important as it is, accounts for less than 5 percent of the movie screens in the country).

So who's penalized by the ratings board? Almost every artistically ambitious director who wants to work both inside and outside the Hollywood system, who wants to tackle challenging material without giving up wide distribution and the possibility of reaching a large popular audience. From Stanley Kubrick to Martin Scorsese to Pedro Almodóvar to Mary Harron to Darren Aronofsky, from "Midnight Cowboy" to "Scarface" to "Pulp Fiction" to "Kids" to "Boys Don't Cry," it's hard to find a director or a film who created a culture-shifting moment and didn't fall afoul of the MPAA ratings system.

Dick's film is already notorious for its "gotcha" factor -- with the aid of a private eye, he outs almost all the current members of the MPAA's ratings board -- and controversial for its snarky, goofy manner. (You can also read Stephanie Zacharek's review today.) But he's fundamentally a serious filmmaker with bedrock indie credentials -- his work includes the 2005 "Twist of Faith," about a clerical sexual-abuse case, and the 2002 biopic "Derrida" -- and when I caught up with him on the phone the other day, while he was waiting to board a plane in Los Angeles, he sounded like a man with a mission.

"You know, most Western European countries have film ratings boards too," he tells me, "and they have people with training in child development issues, training in psychology. Their principal concern is the effect of violence in media -- that is, the effect it may have on young people.

"The MPAA's approach is just the opposite. These people, these supposed 10 Los Angeles-area parents" -- as we learn in Dick's film, the raters are not all the parents of young children the MPAA claims they are -- "have no training, no background in any relevant fields. It's a secret system and a completely non-transparent system. So you have to ask yourself, what are they hiding? There's no way to evaluate this ratings process, but I think it's interesting that the type of films the studios make get less restrictive ratings than the films that independent producers, who are their competitors, make.

"The reason that the ratings board goes easier on violent content than on sexual content, in my opinion, is that violent films are what the studios make, and what they market to adolescents. Independent and foreign films are more focused on adult relationships, which includes adult sexuality."

Next page: "It might not be an accident that the way the ratings board comes down on gay sex happens to help the MPAA in Washington"