MPAA Ratings: A Crisis of Confidence, a System in Disarray : Film: The watchdog panel may be sued out of existence or take on a purely advisory role. Whatever happens, the consequences will be unpredictable.

The demonstration Tuesday by filmmakers against the ratings system as presently constituted and a judge’s scathing commentary on that system in a ruling last Thursday leave no doubt that the 22-year-old G-to-X notations are in serious disarray both inside and outside the industry.

Renaming the X, as Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, was evidently prepared to do, might have forestalled the crisis. But during recent meetings with his major constituents, the big Hollywood studios, the notion was rejected. It is tempting to remember what ensued when the horse lost one nail from its shoe.

The latter-day moguls seem to have rejected the dumping of X on the grounds that it was a weapon to keep unruly filmmakers in line. The real-enough economic consequences of an X rating--limitations on cinemas and on advertising--give force to the contracts with filmmakers that demand no stiffer rating than R.

A rating by any other name than X (A or NC for No Children or 17) would let the firebrands run amok, was presumably the thinking. This does raise questions about who the decision-makers at the studios are these days.

As it stands, with X now having an extended lease on life, there is certain to be more appeals of X ratings, more films released with no ratings and more lawsuits against the system. The suits may be filed largely for their publicity value, as New York State Supreme Court Judge Charles E. Ramos said of the Miramax suit, but they nevertheless have to be defended, at high cost. The ratings may yet be sued out of existence by being unable or unwilling to pay the legal bills.

It could be true that the ratings have outlived their usefulness. It may be, as producer Robert Radnitz argued in Monday’s Calendar, that they never had any real usefulness.

What is clear is that a crisis of confidence exists, and that Jack Valenti and his constituents in production and exhibition have got to reason together, as Valenti’s old boss Lyndon Johnson liked to say, and figure out how to meet it.

It may well be that if the system is to survive it will have to become purely advisory, defining the intensity of films as best it can for the guidance of parents especially, but abandoning the last pretenses of policing the box office. The X must surely go, but its successor would still alert the exhibitors that a given film might, under present law, be actionable if shown to those younger than 17 or 18.

This is the only sensible alternative to the suggestions--implicit if not stated in some of the commentaries on the system--that would have the raters making essentially aesthetic or critical judgments. The notion of a “clean” rating between R and X would have the raters deciding which was safe sex and which dirty, which violence was allowable, which intolerable, which motivations pure, which exploitive.

The judge’s call for a ratings board that would include psychiatrists and other experts rather than just parents is, when thought about at all, a nightmare of intrusion in the creative process that would dwarf any of the present cries that the ratings constitute censorship.

There are several basic truths about the picture business, but the truth that underlies all the others, the foundation upon which the bottom line rests, is that the movies (and television) are marketplace commodities. They are subject to the iron laws of supply and demand, approval and rejection, the mercurial whims of public taste.

What works is repeated; what fails is dropped. When violence stops selling, the studios and the networks will try something else. But violence hasn’t stopped selling and neither has sex, as a look at the movie ads makes clear enough.

The besieged raters are in effect messengers, presently suffering the fate of most messengers who carry grim news. The body counts rise, the intensity of the couplings grows, the revelations about the deformed and degenerated human spirit are grimmer. The raters are saying what’s up there, and maybe nobody wants to hear it any more.

But that is a question. The judge, in his vividly expressed contempt for the movies he sees these days, may be speaking for a much wider public disaffection with current movies than the industry cares to admit. The grosses look big, but so are the costs of both production and distribution. The vast number of screens on which the big pictures play effectively reduces the choices filmgoers have. Even the grosses may reflect a skewed idea of the customer’s real preferences.

This may or may not be a boom time for movies. Where we are on the curve of history is not certain.

What the effect of the demolition of the ratings system would be no one can say for sure. The perilous political pressures against the National Endowment for the Arts are an ironic counterpart to the attacks on the ratings. Who can confidently say that comparable censorious forces do not lie in wait for the movies? Who would confidently say how Hollywood’s product might change if the mild enough cautions posed by the ratings were no more? More to the point, who would say how the audiences would respond to more of everything except compassion?

All that is certain is that the questions won’t go away. Jack Valenti, who performed a political miracle in 1968 to get the present system OK’d by the industry, has a new miracle cut out for him.