Posted on 08/08/2003 7:48:11 PM PDT by weegee
The death of the director John Schlesinger was a reminder that the adult-rated studio film also seems to have died. But it perished long ago.
Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy of 1969 became the only X-rated film to win an Academy Award for best picture. (And Schlesinger won for best director.) Four years later Bernardo Bertolucci was the last director to be nominated for an X-rated film, Last Tango in Paris, which also got Marlon Brando a best-actor nomination.
Both films were made by directors betting their hearts to bring their art to the screen and delivering material that didn't sink to the sordid, superficial level of sex movies on Cinemax at 4 a.m. And both were released by a major studio, the filmmaker-friendly United Artists.
Warner Brothers, the home of the Matrix franchise, proudly unleashed Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange into U.S. theaters in 1971. But 28 years later it sheepishly made changes in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut because no one wanted the film to go out with an NC-17 rating, the current equivalent of the X. (The version of the film released in Europe was left unchanged, a common practice that leads aficionados to seek the European DVDs of American films.)
NC-17 ("No one under 17 admitted") is a corporate embarrassment. It exiles teenagers, the audience that ensures the success of something like The Matrix. That film was rated R ("Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian"), but younger people still found a way into theaters to see it.
Is there a fear of dealing with grown-up sexuality in movies? Absolutely. Movies are intentionally sexy without being sexual, because puerile teasing is a kind of salesmanship. The sad corollary is the preponderance of violence in American films. A foreigner judging the United States by its films would think Americans spend more time running from exploding fireballs than having sex.
The reluctance to depict explicit sexuality in mainstream films might be attributed to the times, but major directors quietly acknowledge their interest in making films about sex and its consequences. And some filmmakers don't shy away from explicit sexuality, like Paul Thomas Anderson with his Boogie Nights and Magnolia. A key part of those films is the emotional wreckage left by the thoughtless pursuit of sex.
Sexually explicit film material led to the remarks of a prudish Ted Turner, which may still echo in Time Warner hallways. He was infuriated by what he felt was a synergistic betrayal when the Time Warner subsidiary New Line released David Cronenberg's Crash with an NC-17, which alone might have been one of the best reasons to make it.
Films that deal with adult sexuality have not been rebuked by the academy, either. Y Tu Mama Tambien, Alfonso Cuaron's bawdy and delirious tweaking of spoiled, hormonally addled teenage boys, went out unrated because it was given an NC-17 by the Motion Picture Association of America, the industry's self-regulation and lobbying organization. When it played film festivals, there was not only unanimous appreciation of Cuaron's effects but also a buzz of excitement and generous praise.
But some distributors made the muted comment that a film about sex so often produces: "We won't be able to release an NC-17." Smaller art-house companies like IFC Films, which handled the release of Tambien in the United States, have no trouble with material that's intended for what used to be called mature audiences. It's the studios that flinch when the subject comes up.
The X rating wasn't initially viewed as the scarlet letter but as a reaction to self-imposed studio censorship so intrusive and baffling that movies existed in the Bizarro Universe, a place remarkably similar to our own but with freakish differences, including having married couples sleep in twin beds.
After 1968, the year the ratings were created, the freedoms they offered were celebrated by filmmakers. Still, it was the subject matter of Midnight Cowboy -- a male prostitute and his manager -- that got the X rating; the film received an R when it was rereleased in the 1970s.
The rise of the X rating as the equivalent of a biohazard logo came about for two reasons. One was that the combination of violence and sex in A Clockwork Orange so incensed some newspapers, then the primary form of promotion for movies, that they stopped carrying advertising for X-rated films. (Some newspapers do not accept advertising for NC-17 films.)
The other reason was that the Motion Picture Association did not copyright the X-rating. Companies seeking a rating submit their films to the association and pay a fee, and the ratings board bestows its G, PG or R in return, all of which have been copyrighted. The X was not, which created a laughable concept in sleazy promotion for pornographic movies: a proliferation of X's stamped across the poster. The unspoken thought was that these movies were so hot that one X was not enough for their lust, sex and bad acting.
A result was that the X rating was abandoned and became the province of pornographers and scalawags. When the association devised the NC-17 rating in 1990, it was thought that the "adult" film could be reclaimed from the grunge purveyors. But by this time an industry indifferent to adult material had arisen.
With Tie Me Up, Tie me Down (1990), the first film to get an NC-17 rating, Pedro Almodovar straddled melodrama and comedy in his typically atypical way, but the damage had been done. Philip Kaufman's Henry & June was released in 1990 and examined the fleshy mosaic of the lives of Henry Miller; his wife, June; and Anais Nin. It was the first major studio film to get an NC-17 rating and it was a brave gesture, but the box office returns didn't materialize for Universal Studios.
And Showgirls, the floridly declasse 1995 romp by the director Paul Verhoeven and the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas that went bad almost immediately, was the last NC-17 film by a major studio. It is the example that comes up whenever the topic surfaces in conversation. The failure of Showgirls is treated as the rule of adult studio films, rather than the exception. The picture also happened to be released by United Artists, which set the standard with Midnight Cowboy. There's still something to be learned from John Schlesinger's example.
Is there a fear of dealing with grown-up sexuality in movies?
The sex scene in A Clockwork Orange that got it an X was a rape scene. Is this "grown-up sexuality"? Oh brother.
which created a laughable concept in sleazy promotion for pornographic movies: a proliferation of X's stamped across the poster. The unspoken thought was that these movies were so hot that one X was not enough for their lust, sex and bad acting.
Actually it was a spoken thought. The whole notion of XXX was an ad campaign gimmick from David Friedman (a film explotiation man who had been in Hollywood since WWII). He put the banner on a poster "Too much sex for just one X".
This article overlooked Roger Ebert's own X rated soap opera sex tale of Hollywood "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls". Showgirls was nothing but a remake of this "star is born" story. And it received an NC-17 when it was resubmitted for a rating by 20th Century Fox. Roger's other movies were rated X too (self-imposed by director/co-writer Russ Meyer, although Up! and Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens would never have received an R).
Midnight Cowboy would barely pull an "R" rating with today's standard
I have sometimes seen films which had nothing objectionable except for an F-bomb or two, but whose advertising suggested that they contained steamy material (even though they didn't). I have a sneaking suspicion the language may have been written in purely to get the tougher rating so that people would see the movie expecting steamy material that wasn't there.
G doesn't mean "just for kids" it means acceptable for general audiences (like tv broadcasts used to be).
Planet Of The Apes had nudity, violence, and damns and hells and still got a G. The Monkees movie Head had drug references and the news footage of the man being executed on the street and it got a G rating.
The ratings from one year to the next are not consistant.
Heh heh, yeah right. The porn film industry is a billion dollar industry.
Unfaithful.
I would actually love to see a well done "adult" movie. The problem is, that nobody would see it, because many papers, radio stations, tv stations wouldn't air ads for it, even if the ads themselves are tame.
I am not talking about "porn" here. I am talking about a major budget picture, that is kinda a date movie. Something like Ghost, or Sleepless in Seattle, but with explicit sex, but just barely, and tastefully done. Maybe 3 minutes out of a 120 minute movie. This would be something couples could choose to watch on the DVD in the bedroom, on a Friday night, or choose not to watch.
How many husbands would get lucky that night if they rented a Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anaston romantic thriller, where they weren't really acting in the bedroom scene in the movie?
We do have weird values here where you can simulate chests being ripped out, arms being blown off, with blood dripping off the gaping wound, but we have to be shielded from sexual explicitness. No, this shouldn't be for kids, but adults should make their own decisions.
Hollywood is crap though lately no matter what they produce typically. Some of the kids movies are still decent though. The last movie my wife and I went together to see was Finding Nemo. Enjoyed it, but it is depressing that nothing else has really drawn us into the theaters.
You are living in a dream world, dude.
It's still embargoed there. It cannot be legally rented, bought, or publicly shown in Britain even today.
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