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Rumpus Book ClubTony Comstock on the MPAA Ratings Board
Tony Comstock is the founder of Comstock Films (likely NSFW), which produces films that I can’t bring myself to call pornography, even though their central subject, depicted in explicit detail, is the sex that ordinary couples have in private.
The best term for his films is probably “documentary erotica,” since in addition to the sex happening on the screen, they also document the loving relationship underlying it, and — perhaps most importantly — the sex is not performative per se, but is a private act that happens to be photographed.
But that’s not the point of this post.
Here’s the point: recently, Comstock started a website, The Intent to Arouse, where he investigates the legal background and business realities that shape the explicit depiction of sex in the cinema. His most provocative post to date (for me, anyway) is from July 4th, in which he defends the MPAA ratings board as being not quite so bad as censorship boards in other “free” countries, such as Australia and Britain.
His argument is mostly directed against Kirby Dick’s powerful critique of the MPAA, This Film is Not Yet Rated, which contends that the MPAA keeps worthy films from audiences because the NC-17 rating — which is disproportionately applied to films that depict non-hetero sex, or hetero sex from the waist down, as opposed to extreme violence — guarantees limited distribution for the films thus rated. Comstock points out that “limited distribution” is nowhere near the same as “no distribution,” and he highlights the way that small-budget filmmakers use the MPAA rating as a marketing tool — as in, “this is the uncut version!”, a tactic that Trey Parker and Matt Stone famously parodied with the title of 1999′s South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.
The comment stream is particularly revealing in this case, bringing up as an example one of Kirby Dick’s earlier films, Sick, from which he had to cut an important (if stomach-churning) scene in order to secure approval from the British censors — without cutting that scene, his film would have been denied distribution in the UK.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:38 am
Hello and thanks for the shout out!
It’s funny. Under obscenity laws, we’ve recently seen people sent to jail for fooling around with video cameras, owning comic books, and sending/posting text. No accusation of underlying crimes; no rape, no contact with children, no exposing of themselves or even their ideas to another party without their consent. In each the of these cases, the crime was expressing an idea or own the expression of any idea that was in and of it’s self a crime to express.
Yet I know that among the indie film community my simple recitation of the facts of what the MPAA does as the practices in other countries is going to be the most controversial aspect of TheIntentToArouse..com
I am appalled by this county’s attitudes towards sex as compared to violence, but I’m not clear what Kirby Dick and other critics of the MPAA want changed. Are Dick and other suggesting that the uncut version of Sick (NR) or the uncut version of my own Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story (NC-17) receive R-ratings? To give films like mine and Dick’s an R-rating would fly in the face of the laws about exposing minors to explicit sexual imagery. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Several years ago I had a long conversation with the MPAA’s Tony Hey about their decision to give Saving Private Ryan (the most shockingly violent movie I’ve ever seen) an R-rating, and he told me this was a controversial decsiion within the board, but that ultimately it was felt that parent would want the option to take their teenage children to see the film.
Whether or not you or I agree with this desision or the values it represents, the fact remains that the MPAA did not receive one letter of complaint about Saving Private Ryan, but they receive a steady stream of complaints that their rating system is generally too lax, especially around sexuality.
What I would like to see is no rating system. Especially in a searchable database age, ratings and other meta deta make it to easy to simply “turn off” movies, books, whatever; as we saw in the #AmazonFAIL last April. I’ll be getting to that in another couple of sections. This new meta data world is extremely hostile to dissenting ideas.
But what I want is immaterial. People want ratings, most especially theater owners want them so the can select films that are age appropriate for their customers. The PG-13 rating was born in the tears of 11 year old children terrified by Temple of Doom
But if the MPAA went away tomorrow something else would spring up in its place, and in fact there are other ratings systems already in existence, which like the MPAA, have no force of law.
If we’re going to have a rating system (which, despite my personal objections, I regard as inevitable, I would like it to be voluntary and I would like it to have a thriving, non-pejorative Adults Only rating.
The sum and total of the complaints offered in TFNYR seem to boil down to “Yes, I think their should be an adults only rating, just not for my movie,” and when I hear that and compare it to how NR films are marketed, or edited for other countries, I can’t help but feel like these filmmakers are talking out of their mouths.
July 8th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
I actually think it’s perfectly clear what Dick is agitating for in This Film is Not Yet Rated, and as I take it, he’s not arguing for its abolition so much as arguing that the rating process should be fair and transparent.
Dick makes a strong case that the ratings board gives preferential treatment to the major studios, and is singularly unhelpful towards independent filmmakers who are seeking to change a rating from NC-17 to R, in order to secure wider distribution for the affected film. The best way of righting this imbalance, the argument goes, is to make accessible — to the affected filmmakers if not as a matter of public record — the process whereby the raters arrived at the rating they did for a given film.
Of course he argues for a lot more in there, including some probably-unwarranted stuff (for example, I doubt that we really need to know the identities of the raters) but it seems to me that those are the central arguments of Dick’s film.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I dunno. A friend of mine submitted a film. It got an NC-17 rating. He asked what he needed to do to get an R-rating and they told him “Take the part out where the prostitute kneels before her john and he urinates in her mouth.” He took it out and the film got an R-rating. My recollection is they went with the NR version for theatrical and R for DVD. This was in 2006, so maybe Dick’s film had the effect of making the MPAA more solicitous. Or maybe Dick played fast and loose to make the point he wanted to make. Or maybe a little of both.