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The underbelly of the movie ratings business as run by the big studios September 27, 2007

Kirby Dick delves into ‘unofficial censorship’ controlled by the MPAA in a new documentary > Director Kirby Dick even hired two private investigators to sniff out the identities of the ratings board members

The documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” currently playing at Athen’s Andora cinema in Ambelokipi, presents a behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood with a mocking expose of the movie ratings board. Following the footsteps of Michael Moore, director Kirby Dick tries to reveal the identities of the secret committee in charge of rating the industry’s productions, the people behind what is, essentially, unofficial censorship. His arguments are based on nothing more than common sense, but his sense of humor is, to say the least, hilarious as he delves into the underbelly of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), rating the ratings board’s ratings.

“This Film is Not Yet Rated” conveys in a simple yet disarming manner the way in which a handful of experts, assigned by the president of the MPAA, decide behind closed doors what is fit for public consumption, what is moral and correct, often showing bias for particular movies they deem suitable.

The ratings system imposed in 1968 by Jack Valenti, who served as President of the MPAA for 38 years and had close ties to the US Senate and the White House, led to a type of neo-puritanism dominating the system. Sex was reviled by mainstream pictures, while extreme violence gained considerable ground over the years and has become an integral part of every successful movie, despite what the MPAA likes to think. The industry’s reaction to calls for a violence ban on television and in movies following the September 11 bombings in the US and the loss of profits this would entail says it all. Hollywood had, in the long term, to face the music over last-minute premiere cancellations of extremely violent movies, as well as the charges leveled at the industry that is responsible for creating a young audience of consumers drawn to violence.

Extremely violent movies, however, continued to be churned out, despite the measures taken to “protect” the average viewer from anything damaging to his moral code. New ground was also gained by extreme Protestant elements, which introduced moralistic bounds in the lexicon of the movie executives and endowed Hollywood with an informal puritanical code in the style of the notorious Hayes Censorship Act, aimed mostly at sexual content. Throughout the course of all this, no one in Hollywood really cared about getting an R rating, for minors with adult supervision. The majority of movies aimed at the young audiences of multiplex cinemas and DVDs are violent action adventures of the splatter variety, such as “Saw.” What does frighten the execs is the possibility of a NC-17 rating, for adults only, which essentially excludes movies with strong erotic content and limits broad distribution.

At one point in “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” one of the people being interviewed, a famous personality behind the scenes of the industry, claims that the prevailing view at the MPAA is that a natural depiction of sex poses a greater threat to family and social values than violence. Last year’s blockbuster “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” confirms this: The story is set during the Vietnam War period and begins with two love scenes in which the female figure is cleverly veiled to hide all contentious parts. The sexual act is represented by a banal eroticism that, more than anything else, cultivates a sense of voyeurism. After this brief appetizer comes the main course: massacres and maimings, realistically imprinted on celluloid, even going as far as allusions to cannibalism.

Meanwhile, it is common knowledge that young people have never had as much access to pornography as they have today, because of the Internet. In mainstream movies though, the human body, sexuality and erotic pleasure are viewed either in a self-censoring mood or as a cliche: The nude is either there or entirely absent, as a provocation that nourishes teenage fantasies, while over-the-top sexist dialogues transform movie scenes into shocking one-liners, “The 40 Year Old Virgin”. Two recent comedies, “Georgia Rule” and “Knocked Up”, are perfect examples of this.

The moralistic “Georgia Rule” is like a Bible study class with Jane Fonda playing the grandmother who acts as a link between her daughter, a shipwreck of sexual liberation, and her disoriented young granddaughter. Sex is there just at the core of dramaturgy in most scenes, dramatic and comic, but wholly absent in practice. It is there in words only, which are, at times, rather bold.

In “Knocked Up,” a film which is supposed to be one step ahead of the usual teen comedy fare, sex is like an ink stain in the dark. Two diametrically opposed characters learn about the importance of marriage and companionship when the woman accidentally becomes pregnant. Their encounter is of little interest. They meet at a club, get drunk and sleep together. The movie has constant references to sex in the dialogue, such as a group of young men looking at porn on the Internet, while there is a complete absence of the sexual tension from the encounter that works in such a catalytic manner on the lives of the otherwise just drunk lovers.

Andora Theater, 117 Sevastoupoleos Street, Ambelokipi, Athens, tel 210 6998631.