Rated S for Scathing
Kirby Dick's documentary gets under the MPAA's skin
By Andy Klein
The addition of one to five letters and/or punctuation marks to a film sounds like a trivial matter, but millions of dollars in potential box office can be lost if you get an R instead of a PG-13 or, worse yet, an NC-17 instead of an R - which gives the anonymous members of the ratings board immense cultural power. Filmmakers, both before and during the ratings process, have to tailor their art to the board's whims.
What filmmaker in his right mind would antagonize these people, assuming he ever wants to work again? Unless he's counting on the board bending over backward next time, to prove that it's not being retaliatory?
"That's what I told the other directors that I managed to get on camera," Dick explains to me during a recent interview. "And that's what I told myself. My argument was that, if you're in this film, maybe you're inoculated a bit."
Indeed, Kevin Smith, who appears in Dick's movie, thought that Clerks II was definitely going to get an NC-17, and was surprised when it got an R. "Who knows?" Dick says. "It would have been a real boost to the publicity of our film if Kevin Smith had gotten in a battle with the ratings board."
The ratings board is like a mysterious black box: a film goes in ... something happens ... a rating pops out. The names of the board members (excluding the head, who is currently Joan Graves) are guarded like state secrets; we have only the MPAA's word as to who these people are, even in general terms. Jack Valenti, who retired two years ago after four decades running the organization, always claimed that they were an ethnic cross-section, with only one common prerequisite: They were all parents of children between the ages of five and 17.
Except they're not: Dick discovered that roughly half of the members (at the time of his research) didn't meet Valenti's requirements. It's not surprising when you consider that being on the board is a full-time job that pays $30,000 a year, not much if you need child care.
Valenti invented the system back at the beginning of his tenure, to replace the outmoded Production Code that had been enforced since 1934. The idea was supposedly to head off government censorship, even though, in fact, court decisions had made such censorship less and less likely. "That gets repeated over and over again - 'Oh, my God! No government censorship!' - but it's pretty bogus," says Dick. "Personally, I believe corporate censorship is much scarier than government censorship in this country, because at least then you'd have some means of redress."
The worst sticking point is the CARA's secrecy, which was both a lure and a hurdle. "I've been wanting to make a film on them for more than a decade," he says. "But because they're so secretive, I didn't see how I could make anything more than just a clip film. And I didn't want to do that. Then my producer Eddie Schmidt and I hit upon the idea of hiring a private investigator. I knew that would do two things for me: It would give me an arc to follow, but also it would take a real shot at piercing that secrecy. The film seemed to coalesce around that."
Though Dick himself frequently appears on screen, his intrusiveness as a character never reaches the Michael Moore level. The really great onscreen presence here is Becky Altringer, the private eye he employs. "I chose Becky partly because I knew she'd be great onscreen, and partly because I knew it was going to take a long time" - about nine months, as it turned out - "and this was something she was really excited about doing. Between the first and the second interviews, she had gone out and cased the place already. I thought: OK, that's a good sign. But we had no idea if this plan was ever going to work. For a long time, I thought, 'It's fun to shoot her, it's fun to watch it, but are we actually going to find stuff out?'"
Becky and her team come through, and even viewers who don't care much about the ratings system will enjoy seeing how these real private eyes do their jobs. Much of their time is spent simply sitting and waiting in a van outside the MPAA's Encino office; Becky will be chatting away about her army years, suddenly dictate "green Toyota, license number 4XLU5346," and then return to her story, all without a break in rhythm.
There's also some realistic "cloak-and-dagger" stuff, for which Becky's unremarkable appearance - she could be any one of a million middle-aged, working-class moms - is a great asset. She tails a lot of vehicles, and in one scene, wearing a hidden camera and mike, follows two "suspects" into a restaurant to eavesdrop. When Dick clumsily enters carrying his camera, he nearly queers the whole operation, but Becky deftly improvises a way of disassociating herself from him.
Toward the end, the film doubles back on itself: Dick submits his movie about the ratings board to the ratings board. "Not only was there a delicious irony to that, but it really was the best way to show that system - to follow my own film in the process."
The movie's title turns out to be sort of true and sort of false. The board gave This Film Is Not Yet Rated an NC-17, supposedly for the content of some of the clips from earlier NC-17 films. Of course, since Dick includes his experiences with the ratings board (and the separate appeals board), the film we see is obviously different from the film they saw.
"Joan called me up after she had heard the film had changed," Dick says, "to tell me that, because it had changed, I can no longer use the NC-17 rating. Well, I was heartbroken, you could imagine. We had already decided to go out unrated, which, strangely, is easier. An NC-17 rating restricts you more, and there's a stigma attached to it, of being sensationalistic, even among indie audiences.
"When Joan told me I was welcome to resubmit, I thought, 'What wonderful masochists!' We didn't do it, because we weren't trying to play games with them. Somebody could. It would make a very interesting performance film, but that wasn't what this film was."
Published: 08/31/2006
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