Posted on 01/20/2006 7:42:53 PM PST by lowbridge
Kirby Dick was steamed. Somebody would have to pay.
It was sometime in 2004, and he had run out of patience. Too many independent filmmakers, people just like him, he said, were being made offers they couldn't refuse: cut cherished scenes from their movies or get smacked with an NC-17 and disappear into commercial oblivion.
Director pals told him what he suspected already: the secretive, too-powerful Motion Picture Association of America was hammering independent filmmakers with tough ratings while letting the major studios off easy. You couldn't reason with the ratings board, the indies bleated; it wouldn't even let you argue, on appeal, that your new movie was tamer than a film that got an R or a PG-13 rating the year before.
The ratings board's anonymous members had few clear standards for evaluating movies, his indie friends whispered. Small wonder, they griped, that movies with gay sex scenes, or even lingering female orgasms - like scenes cut from Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry" and "The Cooler" by Wayne Kramer - were verboten, while gore fests and straight-sex scenes seldom got as much of a reaction out of the board.
Mr. Dick had heard enough. The board was asking for a beat-down. And he was the man for the job.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I never bought that complaint, not until Stanley Kubrick got slapped by the board. That really annoyed me, seeing a genius put down by complete bozos.
Has anyone let this guy know that the ratings system is actually voluntary?
So if you consider choosing between your movie getting an actual release and showing it in five theaters then, yeah, it's voluntary.
The ratings board is a joke. In this internet age we can see for ourselves if a movie has objectionable content. As a Republican I resent a board invented by Jack Valenti determining the moral content of a film as much as I would a government board.
Books aren't rated, and it would be outrageous if they were. Movies don't need to be, either.
The theaters and the studios follow it.
The film makers are allowed to go and find outside financing or start their own distribution.
Also, there is no law saying theaters have to use the system, they chose to.
If someone doesn't like it, they can form their own theater chain.
Course, I sure as hell wouldn't go there.
Books aren't rated, but if a publishing company decided to create its own rating system and voluntarly follow it, fine, if a bunch of them do it, fine with me, its their money, their choice, if they think it makes sense (I sure as hell don't), they are free to do so.
Barnes and Nobles could, if it felt like it, chose not to sell books they don't like akin to the way wal-mart picks and chooses what it will sell.
I can complain about the board and whine that a private sector has chosen a non governmental voluntary system to rate its products and distributors have voluntarily chosen to only show them.
That all said...the board doesn't bother me much, simply because I think the board is getting played by alot of the studios.
The new thing with DVDs is "The directors cut". Movies get released without some scenes, get their rating, then when its released on DVD, they add in everything that was cut, often maintaing their original rating, and when they release it as unrated, no one has a problem carrying it.
I'm seeing a big surge in these "directors cuts" that makes me think, they know what won't get into the movie, and use it to make more money on the DVD market.
Sidenote: The movie "Assault on precient 13" (original version) was told to drop one scene to get the R rating, and if it didn't, it would get the X rating.
The director agreed. Then, after getting his rating, re-inserted the scene again. The board was not amused, but it took them time to find out about it.
It depends on how you see "voluntary"--no major studio will release a studio film without a rating; the huge majority of theaters won't show an NC-17 or unrated movie. So if you consider choosing between your movie getting an actual release and showing it in five theaters then, yeah, it's voluntary.
Is the filmmaker's objective art for art's sake or commercial success? The true artist should remain pure and ignore the profit motive. Of course, he may then have trouble getting the money needed to make films, but that's life...
The ratings board is a joke. In this internet age we can see for ourselves if a movie has objectionable content. As a Republican I resent a board invented by Jack Valenti determining the moral content of a film as much as I would a government board.
Good point, but you have to know where you can get good information. If you just look at the commercials, Brokeback Mountain looks like a family film, with the guys and their sheep and their families. I would argue that someone should provide clear information for parents regarding a movie's content.
Books aren't rated, and it would be outrageous if they were. Movies don't need to be, either.
It is against the law to sell pornographic books, magazines, or other materials to minors, so there IS someone "rating" books and magazines.
Easier said than done. A filmmaker who has struggled to raise a small amount of money to make a movie, hardly has the resources to distribute his own movie (to distribute a film,. one musr also advertise the film. A full page one day ad in the New York Times can cost more than the budget of a small independent film), much less form his own theater chain.
You are correct in that the theaters voluntarily choose to use the ratings system. But there is nothing the filmmaker can do about it.
Really? Says who--Shakespeare? Michelangelo? That's the kind of thinking people who don't make art have, and is the result of silly fantasy by Hallmark card mentalities.
Art is about communication. "Pure art" or 20th century theorists can spout that twaddle all they want, but it has no relationship to genuine, working artists. It's a comforting fiction for those who want to play at art, though.
Of course, he may then have trouble getting the money needed to make films, but that's life...
If I told you that what you do for a living now, specifically, were to vanish tomorrow and you couldn't make money at it anymore, would you say "That's life"? Or would you be like Shakespeare--an artist--who communicated to his contemporary audiences, made adjustments and rewrites, and was a man OF his public, so he could write things that had meaning for them?
Living in an ivory tower is fine for "Artistes" who say commerce has zilch to do with their work. That's fine--they get funding. True artists are also the people who write FOR and OF the people.
Good point, but you have to know where you can get good information. If you just look at the commercials, Brokeback Mountain looks like a family film, with the guys and their sheep and their families. I would argue that someone should provide clear information for parents regarding a movie's content.
Who goes to see movies based on commercials? We have free speech in this country--anyone can call BBM a family film in an ad, and anyone who pays to see a movie based on an ad deserves what they get--that's life.
Yet somehow you know how to learn the info about the truth about BBM. Why would eliminating the ratings board change that? I would wager that within days the "Ratings Board for People Like Us" would spring up. Hundreds of 'em would--for hundreds of versions of "Us". I'd wager our movie choices would be MORE satisfying in the end because we'd each have our OWN "clearing house" for movies, which would be a lot better than the one we've got.
You made a point about BBM's ads; what exactly has the ratings board done to prevent that from happening? Zilch. So you bringing up those ads kinda makes my point for me.
Books aren't rated, and it would be outrageous if they were. Movies don't need to be, either. It is against the law to sell pornographic books, magazines, or other materials to minors, so there IS someone "rating" books and magazines.
That's twisting the meaning of what I said. You've taken one segment of one kind of material and said that means there are ratings for books, but there aren't ratings for books in the shelves at your bookstore the way there are for books at your theater; books aren't submitted to a Big Brother board to be labelled.
The vast majority of pornographic movies aren't "rated", either--bet you didn't know that. They're not; they just write "XXX" or "Xcitingly X!" on their ads. Those are put on by the movie makers themselves; they don't even bother submitting them to the ratings board for the most part; in fact, there is no such rating as "XXX" for example. Yet, the theater operators don't let little kids in, or get in trouble if they do.
The system is voluntary unless you have the millions of dollars it takes to make a movie, and sell it to someone else who has the millions to create his own theater chain. (You can't do it yourself, that's a violation of anti-trust laws.)
So okay, by your measure, it's voluntary...as long as you have access to tens of millions of dollars, and access to the theater chain of someone else who has tens of millions of dollars to waste, because he will go broke releasing just your movie. But yeah, I can see how that's voluntary. For millionaires; the rest of the people--who don't have access to Hollywood millions, and of course all those Hollywood millionaires are open to funding conservative movies--well, who cares about their movies.
Depends on how badly you want to make a movie. For those who really want to make a movie, there is always money.
I think this is the real point of the whole article.
That's simply false. Obviously you've never been involved in funding a movie. I have. (Not my own; not interested.) But dream on if you like. Reality's a lot different.
Unless you're seriously saying that only liberals want to make movies.
I think as long as there are general guidelines that is a good thing.
If a movie is PG-13 I know that I need to see it, or at least take the word of trusted friends, before I allow my 10 year old to see it.
All it is is a guideline.
My point is that on the one hand we have posters here saying that anyone who wants to can make an independent film, and yet the ratings are rigged against those same indie directors.
If someone can look at the violence, sex and swears in MOST PG-13 films--I'm not even talking about a few exceptions, but the majority--and tell me they're acceptable for young audiences, I just laugh. The brutal violence in these movies is not for little kids. And I LOVE action flicks. But this ratings system is a scam, and there've been enough cases of movies getting R ratings and then getting the same movie a PG-13 because the studio needed to make back its investment to prove that point.
I think better guidelines would be set up by independent groups we could check out--not shadowy organizations we should just trust because "they" say we should.
I've known many people who have been involved in funding movies and in the movie business. For credible people willing to make sacrifices, making a movie is not that difficult. Of course, whether the movie will be any good is a different matter entirely.
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