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Why Movie Ratings Don't Work

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In June, the board gave Oliver Stone's superviolent Natural Born Killers an R rating — but only after Stone made several cuts, including a scene in which Tommy Lee Jones gets decapitated. A few months earlier, the board had apparently had no qualms about a scene in Speed in which Dennis Hopper loses his head over Keanu Reeves. To filmmakers, these sorts of ratings oddities are more than mere postproduction nuisances. As directors and producers continue to push the limits of sex and violence on the screen-see Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, or this week's box office smash, Interview With the Vampire — the stakes grow ever higher, with hundreds of millions of dollars riding on which letters get hung under a film's title. In theory, the ratings system is supposed to be an innocuous guide to help parents choose movies for their kids. In reality, it's grown into a formidable Hollywood institution, influencing virtually every aspect of a movie's life span, from distribution to advertising, from which theaters show it to which video stores rent it, from which scenes end up in the final cut to who ends up sitting in the audience. The last thing anyone in Hollywood wants is a ratings board that's full of surprises.

The man who invented the current ratings system is Jack Valenti, or "Boom Boom," as Robin Williams dubbed him during the 1986 Academy Awards. A former Lyndon Johnson aide, Valenti, 73, was appointed head of Hollywood's largest political lobby, the Motion Picture Association of America, in 1966 — at a time when movies were still being rated by dozens of local community and religious councils. In 1968, Valenti met with the major studios and theater owners and sketched out a blueprint for today's unified, national ratings system (see time line) — and has spent much of the rest of his career revising and defending it.

"Contrary to what most writers and directors think," says Valenti from behind the aircraft- carrier-size desk in his plush Washington, D.C., office, "New York and Los Angeles are not the total United States. We're rating movies for the parents of America who live in hamlets and villages all over this country. Many of them are what I call religious people. They become outraged over language that is considered de rigueur around Beverly Hills. They see things on the screen with teenagers mucking around with sensuality, and it drives them up the wall. It's an affront to their very nature."

To guard against such affronts, Valenti constructed a ratings process that's become so draped in secrecy and byzantine bylaws over the years that most people, even in Hollywood, haven't a clue as to how it works. Here are the basics: The ratings board is made up of 11 members, chosen to serve two- to five-year terms by Valenti and the board's chairman (also chosen by Valenti). The members' names are kept top secret, supposedly in order to insulate them from outside lobbying (Valenti, who oversees the ratings board but does not vote, does all the speaking for the board). Still, a few details have leaked out. All of the board's current members are between the ages of 35 and 74, all are parents, and all live in California. One is a cabinetmaker, another a hairdresser, another a preschool teacher. None work in the entertainment industry.

Being a member of the ratings board is not an entirely enviable job — even if you do get to watch some 600 movies and videos a year. The instructions members are given to rate movies are both highly precise and maddeningly vague. In part, it's an almost impressionistic process, with each member guessing at what an appropriate rating should be. But raters must also follow some extremely specific guidelines — like the corkscrew complexities of the infamous language rule.

"There's a big difference between saying, 'Oh f---!' and saying, 'I want to f---you,'" explains Richard Heffner, who retired last July after 20 years chairing the ratings board (he was replaced by attorney Richard Mosk, who's already getting the hang of the job — he's refusing interviews). "The language rule is that one word used nonsexually as an expletive will automatically get a movie a PG. More than one word used as an expletive will automatically get it an R. One word used sexually will automatically get a movie an R — except if the rating board votes by an extraordinary majority of two thirds or three fourths to overturn that rule." Don't worry — none of this will be on the final.

A producer or director who is unhappy with a rating can make cuts and resubmit the film for another try. But figuring out what the board wants snipped from your movie isn't always a snap. "They won't tell you exactly what's wrong with the film," says Oliver Stone. "They'll consult, but it's nothing specific. They always talk in generalities." Color of Night's Rush concurs: "When you say, 'Gee, I just saw that on television, why would that be a problem?' — the answer they give you is a kind of rolling, floating morality." Often directors go back a dozen or more times before hitting on the magic combination that turns an initial NC-17 into an R. If all else fails, or if a director just can't bear to cut a single frame, he or she can request an appeals panel — a special committee made up of industry professionals — to review the board's decision.

The entire process, of course, is supposed to be voluntary — although circumventing a system that most major studios and theater owners support becomes an unlikely proposition. Theoretically, a director could simply ignore the ratings board and release the film with a homemade rating-or no rating at all. In fact, it almost never happens.

"The system has its flaws and vagaries," says Valenti. "But I have only one goal in mind. I am determined above all else to protect the system's integrity. I am going to protect it with the zeal of a pit bull. The only way this system has survived is that nobody believes it lacks integrity."

"I feel the system lacks integrity," says director Doug McHenry. This summer, when the ratings board dangled an NC-17 over his inner-city romance, Jason's Lyric, McHenry reluctantly agreed to make cuts in his love scenes. But then the film's poster hit a snag with Bethlyn Hand, chief of the board's ad wing, a separate office that has veto power over all movie advertising and trailers. Apparently a woman of deeply conservative tastes-she once banned a trailer for Six Degrees of Separation because it showed Michelangelo's full — frontal Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — She told McHenry that his poster revealed too much female thigh to be released. The director disagreed — and declared war.

"In this country, you can kill 50,000 people in a film, but you can't have a tasteful, romantic love scene," he said in a 60-second radio spot that played in 25 of the nation's biggest markets. (His studio, Gramercy, picked up the cost — after all, it was cheap publicity.) "If you have two black people making love, somehow it's steamier than other people."

If nothing else, the ad succeeded in raising Valenti's blood pressure. "I have no patience with fraudulent blatherings about racism," he says, still steaming. "While (McHenry) was peeing in his diapers, I was by the side of Lyndon Johnson, enacting the greatest revolution in civil rights and human justice this country has ever seen. There's nothing racial about it. If two people are f---ing in a goddamn scene, it doesn't make a difference what color they are."

McHenry doesn't buy it. "I would not level charges of racism," he says, before leveling implicit charges of racism, "but I would say there appears to be a certain cultural insensitivity. In our movie, we had to cut scenes of African-American male buttocks going up and down. But Basic Instinct and Exit + to Eden — those movies have male buttocks going up and down. The difference is that they have white buttocks."

Eventually, the director toned down the poster and Lyric was released with an R rating. But other controversies continued to buzz around the board through the summer. That business with Bruce Willis' penis in Color of Night raised questions about sexual double standards: Why was that scene deemed more hardcore than, say, Sharon Stone's famous full-frontal assault in Basic Instinct? For that matter, why was Arnold Schwarzenegger's gore-laden, R-rated True Lies deemed less of a problem than The Advocate, a small foreign film about a 15th-century lawyer that was given an initial NC-17 in July because of too much sex and nudity.

"You can have as much violence as you want — maim, torture, kill, whatever," says Silverlight Entertainment chief Mark Lipsky, who tangled with the board while at Miramax in the early 1990s. "But as soon as you start to show a breast or some part of the human anatomy, look out!" He has a point: Unspooling in R-rated films right now are such wildly violent scenes as an extended S&M rape in Pulp Fiction and the blood-sucking deaths of small children in Interview With the Vampire.

Valenti himself recognizes the inconsistency — though it doesn't appear to bother him very much. "Violence is harder to catalog than sensuality," he says. "There either is copulation or there isn't. There is writhing or there isn't. But it's hard to measure gradations of violence. John Wayne hitting the beaches at Iwo Jima and mowing down 2,000 people-how do you equate that with a fellow being fellated? It's pretty difficult."

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