Word: mpaa
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...Cooler contretemps (which ended with the scene "substantially intact," in Roger Ebert's tantalizing phrase) is among the titanic Hollywood battles itemized in Kirby Dick's very entertaining documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated. The movie is a broadside against the MPAA on behalf of indie filmmakers, and is sponsored by the Independent Film Channel. It's a jazzy jeremiad that dances around the whole dilemma of ratings. Should children be kept from seeing adult films? Can a child's movie maturity be determined by his or her chronological age? If there's a ratings system - by any other...
...system, founded in the mid-'60s, is controlled not by a government agency but by the very industry that manufactures the product - to be precise, by the six major studios that constitute the MPAA. In a way, it's an earlier, more overt form notion of regulation popular in the Bush Administration, where lobbyists frequently write the legislation that cover the industry they works for. The MPAA is basically the big studios' lobbying organization, pressuring Congress to pass certain laws (like the ones against movie piracy) and to hold off on others (like, heaven forfend, a federal ratings system...
...MPAA format might seem the most liberal of any major country, since on its face it's advisory, not proscriptive. Anyone can see any film rated G (general audiences), PG (parental guidance) or PG-13 (not recommended for kids under 13). Only the R and NC-17 ratings can theoretically keep kids out of a movie. The rest is up to parents. Indeed, the MPAA's professed purpose is to suggest to parents which films would be suitable to children of varying ages (and to insist that exhibitors enforce these suggestions). So instead of a committee staffed by psychiatrists, film...
...works, at least in sustaining itself and suppressing any challenges to its monopoly. Led for 37 years by Jack Valenti, the former Lyndon Johnson aide who maintained many friends in Washington, the MPAA is one of America's most effective lobbies. Consider this: With all the agitation from conservative Christian groups about the perilous state of popular culture, there have been few concrete attacks on the way the movie industry polices its content, and no consistent demand to hand the ratings job over to the federal government. The MPAA's success since the mid-'60s, when it established its ratings...
...MPAA boasts that the ratings system is a "voluntary" process. Voluntary to the studios, that is. Mandatory to filmmakers, who must fashion their films to fit the contours of an R rating, or suffer the consequences...