‘Scandal’ to Make New Bid for R Rating

After narrowly losing an appeal to lift an X rating, the producers of “Scandal” said Friday that they would re-edit an orgy scene and resubmit the film Monday in hopes of being granted a more commercially viable R rating from the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

Producer Steve Woolley, who flew from London to New York Thursday, said he does not intend to shorten the orgy scene but will construct a less explicit version this weekend with previously unused footage.

An association appeals board voted 8-7 Thursday to retain the X rating issued to the film last month. Apparently, the panel objected primarily to that scene in the film, which chronicles the 1960s sex scandal that rocked the British government. The vote followed a heated debate between prominent First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus and ratings board chairman Richard Heffner.

“I thought I was at the Scopes trial yesterday,” said Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, which is distributing the film. “I saw Garbus playing Clarence Darrow and Heffner playing William Jennings Bryan. Only in this case, Bryan won.”

The issue was whether the film rating system constitutes film censorship, Weinstein said. Although film distributors are under no legal obligation to offer films for ratings review, they do so because most theater chains do not accept unrated movies.

However, an X rating, which requires viewers to be 18 or older, also spells box-office doom. Large theater chains won’t play X-rated films and most newspapers and television stations won’t run advertisements for them, since X ratings are generally associated with pornographic films. This gives distributors little recourse but to submit their films to the ratings board.

“We don’t label a film obscene, offensive, wrongful, pornographic or anything else,” Heffner said Friday. “X is nothing more than a box-office definition. We look at a film and make an educated guess at what parents would think of that film for their children to see--that’s what the system is all about. It’s really for children.”

Heffner said the ratings board assigned R ratings to 63% of the films submitted last year and that R has become a mainstream rating.

In “Scandal,” Joanne Whaley-Kilmer and Bridget Fonda portray teen-age girls whose sexual affairs in 1963 England included John Profumo (played by Ian McKellen), the British defense minister. Disclosure of the affair toppled the British government. John Hurt plays Steven Ward, a London socialite who was made the scapegoat by Parliament.

“The film is about sexual hypocrisy; it’s not voyeuristic,” Woolley said Friday.