Judge Asked to Overturn Film Rating System : Lawsuit: He takes the request under advisement. He’ll also rule whether ‘Tie Me Up!’ was rated fairly.

A New York Supreme Court judge took under consideration Thursday a request that the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s 22-year-old movie rating system be overturned.

In doing so Judge Charles Ramos will also consider whether the MPAA’s ratings board treated Pedro Almovodar’s “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down” fairly when it assigned the film an X-rating last March.

Acknowledging the “tremendous economic power” of the MPAA ratings in Hollywood, Ramos said, “I just want to be comfortable that the system that exists is a fair one.”

Ramos, mindful of the First Amendment considerations raised by the case and the sensitivities of the two lawyers arguing before him, said he did not want to be put in the position of designating a rating for “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!”

“I don’t think you want a judge rating films,” he told William Kunstler, the well-known civil liberties lawyer who represented Almovodar, and Floyd Abrams, the renowned First Amendment specialist who argued on behalf of the MPAA.

Almovodar, a Spanish director, and Miramax Films Corp., a movie distributor, are seeking to have the X rating given “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!” rescinded under a New York statute prohibiting administrative bodies from applying standards “arbitrarily and capriciously.”

Seven members of the ratings board voted unanimously in March to give the film an X. That decision was upheld on a 6-6 vote by the Ratings Appeals Board (a two-thirds majority is needed to overturn a rating) so the film was released in May unrated.

Kunstler said Thursday that the sexual content of “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!” is no more graphic--and in many cases even less so--than sex scenes in other recent films that were assigned the less-restrictive rating of R.

A nine-minute tape of sexual scenes from the movies “Blue Velvet,” “Fatal Attraction,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “The Accused” and “9 1/2 Weeks” was entered as evidence by Kunstler Thursday. Although the videotape was not shown in court, it became the subject of many humorous asides during the 45-minute hearing in Judge Ramos’ packed courtroom.

“He’s going to protect my delicate libido,” said Ramos, in anticipation of objections from Abrams who argued that such scenes cannot be taken out of the context of a film.

“Movies aren’t rated by scenes, they are rated as movies by content as a whole,” said Abrams. In the case of “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!,” for instance, Abrams said ratings board members also expressed concern about bondage scenes, drug use by the film’s characters, and a beating that took place in the film.

However, it was the film’s sexual matter that earned it the X, according to copies of the original ratings sheets the MPAA board members used when they viewed the film.

“Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!” is the story of a young woman who is kidnaped by a former mental patient. She eventually falls in love with her captor and takes him home to meet her family.

Also submitted as evidence was a 10-page memo from Richard Heffner, chairman of the MPAA Classifications and Ratings Administration, to ratings board members entitled “How to Do What We Do.”

In it, Heffner, who was in court Thursday, states “We don’t permit children to be abused physically . . . Or adults to abuse them so. We shouldn’t psychologically either. That’s the sole rationale for our X rating, and we can’t let others’ self-serving protestations undermine our sense of its appropriateness.”

Kunstler argued however that for filmmakers and studios, the X rating means a certain death or near-death for films. He says the rating has been co-opted by pornographers as a badge of salaciousness and that legitimate films suffer for it and he echoed calls for a new rating, between R and X, that has been made by film critics and some filmmakers.