X DOESN’T MARK THE SPOT

Outtakes may dish the dirt at times--but do we deserve an X rating? No way. We’re 99 and 44/100ths percent pure PG.

In case anyone’s confused, that was the new movie titled “Outtakes” (no relation, though it boasts that it’s “raucous, raunchy and offends everybody”) that just lost its appeal to the MPAA for an R rating instead of its original X.

Producer-director Jack Sell said from his home base of Chicago that his “Groove Tube”/”Kentucky Fried Movie”-type movie got an X because, as MPAA Chairman Richard D. Heffner wrote in a letter to Sell, “Most parents will consider your film’s sexual content much too strong for youngsters.”

Sell, 32, who makes TV commercials and industrial films, professes shock: “The most sex you see is a bare breast. There’s no pornography, no soft-core pornography.” There’s no below-the-waist nudity and all the actors wear underwear.

Shot in Chicago for $700,000 and featuring the late Forrest Tucker as host, “Outtakes” premiered Thursday in the city of Siskel & Ebert. It opens Sept. 1 in L.A., said Sell, whose first feature was the critically disembowled 1980 “Psychotronic Man,” a $175,000 sci-fi pic about a murderous barber with supernatural powers.

Meanwhile, in other barely related news, the Outtakes bar/restaurant sounded like it was doing a good business when we called owner Ken Smith to find out if maybe, just maybe, he’d named his downtown Chicago eaterie after us. Fat chance.

Smith had never heard of Outtakes, the page. He said he named his place Outtakes--which features seafood, a CD juke box and a bar made out of a huge aquarium--because it also serves as a gallery for the hanging of uncommercial but favorite photos of local photogs.