Guidance to Parents, Not Profits, Governs Movie Rating System

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Sean Mitchell’s article on the film rating system (“The X Rating Gets Its Day in Court,” June 21) does a thorough job of rounding up all the usual suspects from among disappointed and disgruntled rating applicants who insist that their failure to get the ratings they seek must, by definition, be attributable to meanness of spirit on the part of the rating board chairman, rather than to the harshness of their films’ content.

Ignore the fact that ratings are assigned only by majority vote of the intelligent, thoughtful, independent parents from different parts of our nation, from different walks of life and with different levels of education who compose the rating board, and what Mitchell gives currency to as its chairman’s “vague and arbitrary judgments based on his own taste and whims” could legitimately be targeted.

Ignore the fact that the board votes its own mind, not its chairman’s (with a great many crucial and healthy disagreements among them, but with the majority will always prevailing) and the ad hominem attacks on the chairman reported in such painstaking detail they could take on significance they don’t otherwise merit.

Ignore the rating board’s early unanimous X votes for William Friedkin’s “Cruising,” as well as the board’s unanimous petition for a hearing to revoke his film’s R rating, and that gentleman’s scurrilous attacks, reported by Mitchell, could make some sense.

Ignore the board’s singular obligation first and foremost to reflect the ratings that most parents will want us to assign films voluntarily submitted to the rating board, and director Alan Parker’s reported plaints, too, could assume more than their present fantasy life.

When as chairman I pay sympathetic attention to Parker’s or any other rating applicant’s eagerness to maximize a particular film’s marketing potential with one rating or another, it must indeed seem duplicitous that then at rating appeals I vigorously define and defend the board’s parent-based (rather than profit-based) rating conclusions. But that’s my job.

I do feel for Parker and the others in terms of their constant objective: namely, ever larger grosses and, of course, the realization of their creative visions. But they are the ones who sign away their creative autonomy with those damn “must-deliver-an-R-rated-film” contracts they keep telling us about.

The rating board’s objective is far different. It is first and foremost to meet parents’ needs in terms of their youngsters’ movie-going. Though it does its work every day deep in the land of hyperbole, hysteria and hectoring, the rating board would shame itself--and the task the industry has assigned it--if it were to succumb to these understandably anguished outcries and violate its obligations by trading off parents’ needs for filmmakers’ profits.

Whatever, I don’t want to ignore the personal potshots taken at me in Mitchell’s story. I’m the rating system’s visible target and I can take the heat. However, I have been watching closely and thus far can report that my lips don’t curl when I’m talking on the telephone, as reported. But I will see that the letter drawn up by our lawyers (not by me) to protect rating applicants by defining our procedures is re-done to address Parker’s further plaintive cry that “the letter you get which goes with your submission for rating . . . the wording is so arrogant.”

On the other hand, I am constrained to note that director Wes Craven’s assumption, according to Mitchell, that the chairman “has problems with pictures that depict a certain level of rage” really relates to “problems” rating board majorities feel American parents have with such rage. So, there’s not much we can, or should, do about these “problems,” other than to reflect them fully in our ratings.

More important right now, however, is that we all look more carefully at what is really at stake here. And that has less to do with personalities and much more to do with my and my rating board colleagues’ thoughtfully formulated opposition to the suggestion of a new not-for-children A rating alongside an equally not-for-children X. This is a position from which we know better than to retreat, for we fear that otherwise the industry’s present age-of-the-viewer-based rating system would be transformed into a totally unacceptable quality-of-the-film-based system.

Roger Ebert and Jack Mathews and a lot of other distinguished writers and critics, including the National Society of Film Critics, have insisted that such an additional rating between R and X will solve our very real rating problems. We appreciate and share many of their concerns. But we think they’re dead wrong. We think two not-for-children ratings will instead profoundly exacerbate those problems.

The proposed new rating is usually designated A, though it puzzles me just why they would pick a symbol at once so reminiscent of Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter and, like X, again so evocative of “adult” (read: dirty) movies and books. As with X, it would bar children under 17, making the rating board choose--for the toughest pictures--between a presumably “serious” A and a presumably “pornographic” X film, thrusting the rating system headlong into that strictly adult film area where it has no expertise and no damn business being.

After all, once my colleagues and I have made our educated estimate that most American parents will believe that particular films should simply not be available to children under 17, it would be totally gratuitous for us further to signal adults anything at all. That’s the critics province, not ours.

In all of this, of course, it is CARA’s ruling policy review committee--not my rating board colleagues and I--that will make any and all decisions concerning rating categories. The committee is made up equally of representatives from the National Assn. of Theater Owners and the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

Board members, however, continue to feel strongly that film raters must not be empowered with two ratings that signal parents whenever films are patently out of bounds for youngsters under 17--one presumably for “good” films (A), and the other for “bad” films (X). Whatever letter or number or symbol is used for the purpose, only one rating should legitimately signal “not for kids” and it mustn’t be denied to people or films we disdain. Then let others do the rest. The rating board must not become the critics’ corner.

My colleagues and I are convinced that the real value of using a voluntary film classification system as a barrier to compulsory state censorship would be tragically compromised if we were assigned the task of judging films’ quality.

And, if we were, we’re sure that these same proponents of an A between R and X would be among the first to do us in, and with justification. Can you imagine: a rating system purely and simply related to the film-viewing habits of children under 17 gratuitously passing critical judgments on clearly adult films? Wow!

On the rating board, our job is to speak for parents in the context of this intensely creative and profit-centered community. If we don’t, who will? While if we do, we’re bound to be kicked around quite mercilessly by some angry members of the industry. After all, we’re damaging their grosses! That they are also short-sighted doesn’t make their slings and arrows any easier to bear, particularly since the press so often reports their charges as if reality-based. And even while they attack CARA so vociferously, it would seem that the industry’s voluntary rating system is quite successfully heading off government censorship and protecting their long-term interests.

I continue to think that the real tribute to the motion picture industry is that it has had the wisdom voluntarily to structure a rating system that enables us to identify strong film content for American parents without censoring it. Thanks to film classification, parents can be alerted to that content and then make their own decisions about whether young children shall experience it or not, without infringing upon the rights of others.

In a responsibly open democracy such as our own, not only must the rights of the creative individual be respected, but also the rights of the majority, the majority of parents whose primary concern is to expose their youngsters to more mature content only as they individually mature.

This parental majority does not ask the industry to proscribe that which may be anathema today, but acceptable tomorrow, but only appropriately to classify film content--not for grown-ups, for adults who can protect themselves--but rather for the sake of our children. For discrimination--not against our children, but rather between them and ourselves--is surely the beginning of wisdom.

A doctrinaire carelessness, callousness or insensitivity might induce us to ignore this keenly felt parental need. On the other hand, wisdom, empathy, a decent regard for the opinions of most parents--and a balanced concern for self-preservation--all lead us to heed it instead. Change is a function of all institutions. It will continue to occur here. It should. Essentially, however, the rating system works.

The real and continuing problem is not just what the industry finally may do by way of excising the X with its pejorative overtones of sexual pornography (as too easily separated from the equally significant pornography of violence).

It is what the media, and particularly the community of critics, would then do to clarify or to obfuscate the meaning of whatever symbol might be made to stand simply for “not for children” or “adults only.”

Would the media misuse or distort a new rating symbol to reward those admired for their “artistry” or “creativity” or to punish those disdained for whatever reason? No matter what the industry might do to remedy the present situation, we’ll not be much better off if the media won’t point out again and again that “no one under 17 admitted” means just that, and nothing more.