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_________________N O_. O N E_. E S C A P E S_. T H E
The film industry's "voluntary" ratings board is a secretive, Kafkaesque tribunal -- as "Two Girls and a Guy" director James Toback found out.
BY CHARLES TAYLOR That's what director James Toback found out when he submitted his new film, "Two Girls and a Guy," to the MPAA ratings board no fewer than 14 times before they changed the NC-17 rating to an R. The film includes a lengthy sex scene between Robert Downey Jr. and Heather Graham, in the course of which Downey performs the aforementioned act on Graham. When Richard Mosk, the co-chairman of the Classification and Rating Administration, appeared before the MPAA appeals board to argue that the ratings board decision should not be overturned, he, according to Toback, "actually used the phrase, 'There is a groundbreaking and unprecedented act depicted in the sex scene.'" Toback was lucky. Deciding that he would merely trim the length of existing shots instead of removing any of them outright, he gambled that Twentieth Century Fox (which is releasing the movie through its Searchlight division) would support him until he obtained the R rating he was contractually obligated to deliver. They did, delaying the release of the movie seven months, but ensuring that the R-rated version of the film is almost indistinguishable from the NC-17 cut. (I've seen both and couldn't tell the difference.) Despite this relatively happy ending, Toback's experience with the MPAA over "Two Girls and a Guy" feels like the best argument yet for abolishing the ratings system, because it reveals the arbitrariness, the vagueness, the cronyism and the lack of logic that make up the ratings process. The argument long used to justify movie ratings is that they are the only thing standing between filmmakers and government regulation. But there's no getting around the conclusion that for many years the ratings system itself, not any actual or threatened government censorship, is what has forced filmmakers to alter their films. Because there are movie chains that will not book an NC-17 film, because there are newspapers and networks that refuse to run advertisements for them and, most pertinent, because Blockbuster (the largest video chain in the country and therefore a lucrative source of a film's revenue) will not carry them, most movie studios contractually obligate directors to bring films in at nothing above an R rating. But filmmakers often find themselves in a twilight zone, because the MPAA has never shown the slightest inclination to clarify what leads to certain ratings, and the organization has no regard for consistency. The clichés are certainly true: The MPAA proscribes sex much more than violence, and gay sex much more than straight sex; independent and smaller films ("Two Girls" was made for the pittance of $1 million) are dealt with much more harshly than big-budget studio efforts. None of this, though, explains all the caprices of the ratings board. "The truth is, you're rated in relation not just to other movies but to what the climate for the board is at that moment," Toback says. He believes that the "Two Girls" rating was based, at least in part, on heat the ratings board had taken after classifying "Boogie Nights" as an R. "As a result," he says, "I think, they were almost reflexively going to give an NC-17 to anything that was even mildly in the area of a potential NC-17." It's almost impossible, though, for a filmmaker to find out why his or her film received the rating it did. It's not just that the identities of the ratings board members are kept secret but that, as Toback points out, "they're not allowed ever to say to you, 'Get rid of that, and you'll get that,' because then it's censorship, which, of course, they're not involved in. They're saying, 'It really is this, but we're not going to say it.' They give you general ideas. Maybe." If the filmmaker decides, instead of re-cutting, to go before the MPAA appeals board, a two-thirds majority is needed to overturn a ratings board decision. "The appeals process," Toback says flatly, "is a sham. When you appeal, you're not allowed to refer to any other movie -- you're interrupted if you do. Ostensibly, the suggestion is you're rated in a vacuum." In other words, not only is the ratings board free to do whatever it sees fit, but a filmmaker appealing their decision is not allowed to point out inconsistencies in their decisions. And though the appeals board is supposed to be composed of industry people and exhibitors inclined to check the ratings board's excesses, Toback sees it as a much cozier relationship. "The [appeals board members] who are chosen from the 30 people available are chosen by the MPAA. So any time they want to stack the deck in their favor, they can. All you ever really need are five people you can count on and it doesn't matter about the other seven, because you need two-thirds. And there's an ongoing relationship. You come in, those people don't know who the fuck you are. The ratings board comes in and basically, they're on the same side of the table." According to Toback, that's the relationship that Richard Mosk, a man he calls "temperamentally, intellectually, psychologically and in every other way unsuited to the job," played on when he appeared before the appeals board to defend the decision to give "Two Girls" an NC-17. Toback says that Mosk told the board that never before had a movie been as clear-cut an NC-17 as this one, and that Mosk went on to intimate that a contrary decision would suggest that the ratings board was so stupid as to be no longer worthy of their jobs. "There's no banana republic where this would have held up as a legitimate appeal," says Toback. The irony of all this is that when, on the 14th submission, the ratings board passed "Two Girls" as an R, they were approving a version that differed only in the duration of certain shots. "Even if you could intellectually justify giving it an NC-17," Toback says, "there is no way you could justify changing the rating based on the changes that were made." One of the things that has bothered Toback most about the whole experience -- the ratings board's claim that they are acting as they believe the average American parent would want them to act -- points up another irony of the movie ratings system, or any ratings system: Namely, far from empowering parents, a ratings system encourages parents to cede power. If, Toback points out, ratings are supposed to be a parents' guide, then it's not possible to justify an NC-17, which "is not advice, it's prohibition. What it's really saying is that, you, the average American parent, are such a baby, and you know that about yourself, that you don't want to have the power to decide for yourselves whether or not you should be allowed to take your children, your teenagers, to see this movie." Whenever the ratings system has been attacked in its nearly 30-year history, the MPAA has always pointed out that the system is voluntary (a ludicrous assertion, considering that nearly every major American distributor and exhibitor is an MPAA member). Perhaps that "voluntary" status is what's kept the Supreme Court from hearing cases disputing the constitutionality of the ratings system. In conservative times, there are always going to be attempts at censorship. And despite the way the MPAA and even some critics and filmmakers invoke the bogeyman of government interference, perhaps filmmakers would be better off with a system that was instituted as law. Some films would certainly run into the thicket of outraged "community standards," the Supreme Court's current definition of obscenity. But a government-operated rating system would also offer aggrieved filmmakers a valid legal means of appealing the decision, instead of putting them at the mercy of a ratings and appeals board whose behavior mocks the notions of due process and established precedent. Since the Supreme Court has consistently held that it is unconstitutional to require speech intended for adults to be made acceptable for children (this was one of the things that doomed the Communications Decency Act), it would be next to impossible to uphold the constitutionality of requiring that any film be cut to earn an R rating. Toback would be willing to see the ratings system abolished and take his chances. "I think that you can't be in a system any more arbitrary than this one is. You can't be in a system where you are any more at the mercy of people with no sensitivity to film."
Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon. |
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