Directors cut

Kirby Dick, director of the documentary film This Film Is Not Yet Rated. (Mongrel Media)

What if a group of anonymous, qualification-free people got together in a room to read stacks of new fiction, then offered assessments that essentially forced Cormac McCarthy to tone down the violence (or Candace Bushnell to cut the sex, or Armistead Maupin to take out the gay) in order to get the books in stores? Would those absent pages amount to a form of censorship? The dark conclusion of the scrappy, deceptively cheery documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated is yes. Those sliced pieces of film lost to the world due to the not-so-gentle rating recommendations of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) mean that audiences are not only being told what movies to watch, but filmmakers are being told what movies to make.

Of course, censorship is usually a concern of artists, not corporations. But to many, movies are product, not art, and profit-minded tinkering is a no-brainer. With humour and an agitator’s urgency, director Kirby Dick (who made the documentaries Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist and the Oscar-nominated Twist of Faith) calls this waddling, quacking casual censorship a duck. This Film Is Not Yet Rated unbuttons the cloak of secrecy around the ratings board at the MPAA, arbiters of the G through NC-17 rating system. Filmmakers like Kevin Smith (Jersey Girl), Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) and Matt Stone (South Park) walk us through the humiliating process of watching their beloved films judged by a panel of unknown “raters.” The MPAA’s absurd private method – a verdict with no explanation followed by a kangaroo court appeals process with no transparency – would be laughable if it didn’t result in a true attack on artistic expression.

Dick places the current debate in historical context by including still-chilling footage of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1947, where filmmakers accused of communist sympathies were blacklisted; a reminder that Hollywood has always been under suspicion. And so it is that Jack Valenti, a pug-faced Washington insider with Zen-like certainty of his righteousness, came to California to head the MPAA and spearhead the ratings system in the late 1960s. Valenti claims the board is made of “average American parents” whose identities need to be protected so they won’t be swayed by outside influences. Of course, the MPAA is owned by several major movie studios; inside influences, apparently, aren’t a concern.

Little has changed in the nearly four decades since the birth of the ratings system, except that X has been replaced with the dreaded NC-17. An NC-17 rating cripples a film’s advertising potential, and most big theatre chains won’t carry “dirty” movies. But a director who wants to recut for a gentler, more commercially viable rating is playing pinata in the dark. The MPAA will rarely say exactly why they rate the way they do because “we’re not censors,” according to a spokesperson. Director Mary Harron received an NC-17 for the “tone” of American Psycho, her slasher satire of ’80s avarice. A few cuts revealed that it wasn’t the protagonist’s constant bludgeoning and dismemberment of his dates that bothered the board, but a relatively tame three-way sex scene. Extreme violence and gore alone rarely warrant the board’s animus; any filmgoer knows it’s easier to see a woman get raped than it is to see her pubic hair. Female pleasure, gay sex, male genitalia – verboten. This zone of discomfort has a whiff of moral judgment that turns to a stench when Atom Egoyan discovers a startling fact while appealing an NC-17 rating for his film Where the Truth Lies: two members of the clergy get to vote on the film’s rating. With the church in the house, needless to say, Egoyan’s film – including another threesome and a gay love theme – didn’t get its NC-17 overturned.

Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, left, speaks with director Kirby Dick. (Shana Hag/Mongrel Media)

Dick couches the alarming facts in a comic detective movie, hiring a kindly private investigator named Becky to uncover the identities of the board members. Becky, who looks like Tyne Daly from Cagney & Lacey, is a different kind of “average American parent” – a gay step-mom – and as she finds out how the ratings board works, her “Gosh!”-es and “No!”-s come to represent the viewer’s indignation. Becky cheerfully stalks the raters from her car with Dick in the back seat. When the two close in on one rater, Joann Yatabe (61, with fully grown children), her sour, humourless expression – captured on Dick’s videocamera – is every avant-garde filmmaker’s worst nightmare. She doesn’t look like a watchdog, she looks like a bully.

Rifling through the garbage of a board member, Becky uncovers a ratings sheet for Memoirs of a Geisha that lists the number of “f---s” and “pelvic thrusts” in the film (there’s something so disturbing about the idea of a person who would choose to do this for a living; get a therapist and work it out elsewhere, dude). But the final version of Geisha looked much tamer than these notes would suggest, and that may have something to do with its studio lineage. The MPAA system absolutely punishes independent films, those most devoted to pulling movies away from commerce toward art. And even the non-arty indies get hit: when Matt Stone and Trey Parker, of TV’s South Park fame, faced the board in 1997 as unknowns with the raunchy independent film Orgazmo, they received a NC-17 rating with no explanation. Stone tells Dick that seven years later, after submitting the big budget-film Team America: World Police, a Paramount (one of MPAA’s owners) production, the board issued an NC-17 and an explicit list of cuts that would earn the film a lower rating. But the joke was on the MPAA: Stone and Parker included much longer scenes of dolls fornicating than they had ever intended to include, just to give the board a smug sense of purpose when it got its suggested cuts.

Like most countries other than the U.S., Canada’s movie ratings are a public government endeavour, with slightly different classifications province to province. But the MPAA ratings do affect what we see: by the time they get here, most films have been cut to the MPAA’s rating standards. Our own classifications can seem just as arbitrary, as in 2003, when the Ontario Film Review Board banned the French film Fat Girl for explicit sexual content (they later overturned that ruling and the film was released). In Ontario, the board consists of “community members,” an MPAA-ish phrase, though their identities are known. Still, as one psychologist points out in This Film Is Not Yet Rated, how are average people equipped to assess the impact of sex and violence on the children, or anyone, they are allegedly protecting? Why not call in some – gasp – experts? In a way, the MPAA ratings system, almost 40 years old, seems somehow ahead of its time: a structure that venerates the opinions of the average, the uninformed and the intuitive. The longevity of the covert institution is a testament to what Stephen Colbert calls “the gut,” the present-day privileging of instinct over intellect that may be the legacy of the Bush administration.

When Dick submits his own film to the ratings board, all thrusts and swearwords intact, the film completes itself in a funny, horrible Ouroboros. In case you hadn’t guessed, this is a movie about a movie that someone, somewhere, for some reason, thinks deserves an NC-17.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated opens in Toronto on Jan. 19.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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