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Phillip Taylor When writer-director James Toback took his movie "Two Girls and a Guy" before the Motion Picture Association of America last winter, the group's rating board slapped it with an NC-17, the adults-only mark. Specifically, the board objected to an oral sex scene between two characters. Ten times Toback trimmed the scene in an effort to secure a more audience-friendly R-rating, but MPAA appeals board members turned down every edit. Eventually, Toback relented and cut the entire scene from the film. "They say they're not censors, but they are," Toback said in published reports. "They say, 'You can go out with an NC-17,' but no studio is going to go out with an NC-17 rating." Syndicated film critic Michael Medved says blame shouldn't rest on the rating board, adding that Toback should have released his movie as an NC-17 film if he was truly worried about his vision. "The problem is, whenever filmmakers try to release NC-17 films, no one goes to see them," Medved said. "The complaints shouldn't be with the people doing the ratings as much as with the audience. The audience doesn't seem to welcome NC-17 films." Nearly 30 years in existence — the MPAA introduced the ratings on Nov. 1, 1968 — the leading code denoting movie content continues to generate debate. While free-speech advocates, filmmakers, critics and rating supporters disagree on the effectiveness and constitutionality of the system, they all agree: The MPAA ratings serve as the standard against which all other rating programs are measured. At its inception, the rating system raised concerns that such an effort violates the First Amendment. Some worried that the MPAA found itself forced to enact the ratings to stave off censorship efforts from state and local officials. Supporters of the MPAA system say it's by far the best system yet developed for an industry that has faced rating systems almost since its inception. Soon after the first nickelodeons opened at the turn of the century, state and local officials formed censorship boards to monitor film content. In response, a group of film producers formed the National Board of Censorship in 1909 to screen their own films and to pre-emptively delete those scenes that might be deemed unsuitable by public officials. The Supreme Court didn't help stave off censorship. In 1915, the court ruled in Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that movies were "a business pure and simple" and, thus, not due the kind of constitutional protections books and newspapers enjoy. In 1921, the industry formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America) and named former postmaster general Will Hays as its director. The organization, better known as the Hays Office, drafted a list of 11 "Don'ts" and 25 "Be Carefuls." Even stricter censorship surfaced in the 1930s when a group of Roman Catholic bishops formed the National Legion of Decency to rate movies on their own. Movies deemed to be immoral faced Catholic boycotts. Not to be outdone, Hays reconstructed his office and drafted the even stricter Production Code. Code violations brought fines as high as $25,000 per film. A Supreme Court decision in 1952 in the case of Burstyn v. Wilson — called the "Miracle" case after the Roberto Rossellini film — reversed the court's 1915 ruling. The court ruled that the motion picture was, in fact, an important communication medium and worthy of First Amendment protection. But the code remained in effect through the 1960s. Jack Valenti says on the MPAA Web site that when he became the group's president in 1966 the "stern, forbidding catalogue of 'Dos and Don'ts' [bore] the odious smell of censorship." At the same time, he says, a new kind of movie, "frank and open," was beginning to surface. Worried that states and cities would form censorship boards, Valenti says the MPAA worked with other film industry groups to come up with a voluntary, but consistent, system to rate the content of films. In his 1972 book The Movie Rating Game, Stephen Farber wrote that the MPAA rating system was designed to give filmmakers "unprecedented creative freedom, while at the same time maintaining a system of 'self-regulation' that would ease the pressures for some forms of government classification." More than 25 years later, Farber says that the system quickly degenerated into a censoring tool. Although the rating system is a voluntary one, Farber says studios are forced to get the ratings because most theater owners won't show unrated or NC-17 films, claiming that many patrons refuse to see such movies. "In theory, it's not supposed to be censorship," says Farber, now a columnist for Movieline magazine. "It's just supposed to be advising people of the content. I don't see anything wrong with that. It all sounds very inoffensive." Farber contends problems with the ratings began to develop as studios pushed filmmakers to keep their work within a certain rating category. "Once you give it a rating category, there is a lot of pressure to move it into a less restrictive category" particularly from an NC-17 to an R, he says. "That's when the censorship pressures come." Medved disagrees, saying Valenti reworked the ratings in 1968 in response to a new wave of filmmaking, sparked by the sexuality of "Blow Up" and the frank language in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" "If you take a look at what's happened since the new rating system
was instituted, there is a great deal more flexibility than with
the old Production Code," Medved said. "For better or worse."
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