Not Suitable in Dallas : Movies: Dentist Fred Aurbach presides over the only big-city film ratings board in the country--a thorn in distributors’ sides.

Don’t misunderstand Fred E. Aurbach DDS: “Sex in movies, neatly done, is a neat thing.”

He sits, backed by a row of Bibles and Bible study books in his downtown Dallas office, dental drills whirring away in the next room.

“It’s part of life,” he says.

Aurbach, however, finds himself appalled at much he sees at the movies, the excessive sex and bad language and pointless nudity and extreme violence. Especially in PG and PG-13 films. He is appalled, and he is doing what he can about it, as chairman of the Dallas Motion Picture Classification Board--along with nearby Tyler, Tex., the only remaining municipal ratings boards in America.

The classification board has been hailed as a crucial community service, a handy guide for concerned parents. It’s also been called a waste of tax money in a city that can barely keep its pools and library doors open, as well as a needless footnote to the voluntary film industry rating system.

These days, most L.A. and New York distributors are simply calling it “that thing they have in Dallas.” Given the crisis of confidence over the current Motion Picture Assn. of America ratings designations, that “thing” may prove once again to be a role model, just as it was in 1966.

Jack Valenti, MPAA president, wrote in reply to the recent film directors’ petition regarding the current ratings: “If you crush the current ratings system, strip it from (the) self-regulating hands of the industry itself, you will surely be confronting new ratings boards armed with the might of the law, governmentally constituted ratings board politically populated by those who find what we create to be staining and soiling the values of the neighborhood.”

John Trickett, southern division manager for New Line Cinema, sees the board as part of a larger, discouraging Dallas phenomenon. He points to the recent furor surrounding the Dallas appearances of 2 Live Crew and Andrew Dice Clay up against the threat of obscenity charges. Both acts were eventually canceled.

“There’s a very unfriendly atmosphere toward entertainment in this city,” he says.

The Supreme Court ruled the Dallas movie ordinance unconstitutional in 1968, two years after its inception; the ruling wiped out a dozen other municipal regulatory bodies around the country patterned after Dallas. By then the MPAA had effectively superseded the need for municipal jurisdiction. Only Dallas and Memphis chose to rewrite their ordinances under Supreme Court instruction.

Since 1976, when the Memphis board was again ruled unconstitutional, Dallas has gone it alone, upholding “contemporary community standards” and protecting “young persons under the age of 16 from viewing material which may tend to corrupt their morals, cause emotional disturbances, or lead to imitative violence.”

The volunteer Dallas board members, currently numbering 20--mostly white, mostly female--are appointed by members of the city council. The board takes in anywhere from one to six movies a week. Film distributors foot the bill for the screening.

The board’s designations go three ways. It can label a film “Suitable for Young Persons”; “Suitable With Exceptions,” the exceptions being (S) for sex, (V) for violence, (L) for obscene language, (D) for drug use, (N) for nudity, and (P) for perverse or aberrant sexual behavior; or “Not Suitable,” in effect an automatic R rating, younger than 16 not admitted without parent or guardian, MPAA rating be damned.

Aurbach and company screen only PG and PG-13 films, or those not yet rated by the MPAA. Distributors of R films request an automatic Not Suitable tag, which like all board pronouncements must be displayed in all film print advertising and at all box-office windows. For now, the board gives G-rated fare an automatic Suitable.

Aurbach, a “very active” member of First Baptist Church, joined the board in 1987. He did so because he thought the MPAA ratings, and even the Dallas board, had gone soft.

“I’d go to a movie with my family and think, ‘This is suitable? This is a suitable movie? Who said this is suitable?’ So I made the comment to my wife: ‘I’ll get on that board. Then we’ll see what’s suitable.’ ”

Aurbach and company aren’t dabbling in censorship. More than one Dallas attorney has likened it to prior restraint or restraint of trade, but Aurbach insists he has no power to prevent exhibition. The board is merely reacting to the MPAA guidelines, which “don’t tell you anything,” according to Aurbach. “What makes something PG-13? What makes it PG? Our whole point is to give the parent information.”

And they’re doing it on the cheap, Aurbach insists. The current $8,300 budget, however, excludes legal fees when the city attorney’s office gets involved--that is if the board sues a distributor for non-compliance of a Not Suitable. Out-of-court settlements, of which there have been many, cost plenty, too.

Throughout its history, at an undetermined loss of revenue to distributors, the Dallas board has slapped a Not Suitable tag on such PG-rated films as “Paper Moon,” “The Front Page” and “Death on the Nile.” In 1979, Paramount was the first to successfully challenge a Not Suitable for “Prophecy”; a jury trial ultimately overturned the board’s classification. Since then, United Artists’ “Caveman” forced an out-of-court settlement and reclassification to Suitable With Exceptions. Ditto for “The Elephant Man,” “Poltergeist” and “Conan, the Destroyer.”

More recently, Paramount’s “The Naked Gun” received an initial Not Suitable--for violence, the board claimed at the time, though Chairman Aurbach now implies it was because of “crudity,” and crudity didn’t fit any of the existing categories. Paramount rejected the Not Suitable, and the board backed off. Ditto for “Ghost,” another Paramount hit. Aurbach insists he’d have taken that one to the mat, if the board’s 7-6 vote hadn’t been as close as it was.

Ironically, for all the fuss, the typical Dallas moviegoer “basically ignores” these classifications of S, N and the like, according to Bob Berney, former co-owner and film buyer for the Inwood Theatre in Dallas and current Shapiro Glickenhaus Entertainment national sales director.

Berney doesn’t mind “the informational thing; that’s legitimate. But you get into Suitable and Not Suitable . . . it just seems like there’s better ways to spend city funds.”

Berney almost spent some of his own funds, at the board’s request. During the Inwood’s run of “A Room With a View,” perhaps the most suitable Not Suitable ever to play Dallas, the N.S. tag got left off the newspaper ads. A policeman issued a citation the next day. Berney ignored it and the board hauled him into court, sort of. “When the case came up,” says Berney, “the board had conveniently lost its paperwork.” The suit was dropped.

“We can argue about the MPAA--that’s a separate discussion,” offers Richard Abramowitz, Cinecom executive vice president, sales and marketing. “But the MPAA standards are accepted around the country in literally every area except Dallas. Is it some peculiar pocket of Puritanism, or are these guys just cronies of the city council who like to watch free movies? Or are they just nice, upstanding citizens who want to protect their children from the scourge of motion pictures? I don’t know.

“It’s preposterous.”

Jack Valenti calls the Dallas board “a thorn in the side of the voluntary rating system” and said Monday that it is the last of 42 community censorship bodies that existed when he installed the MPAA ratings in 1968.

“We’ve tried through the years to persuade them to desist but we’ve been unable to,” Valenti said, adding that people critical of the MPAA ratings would find the Dallas model a shock. “If filmmakers look at some of the ratings they’ve slapped on films (in Dallas), they would fall into a dead faint.”

New Line’s Trickett attributes some of the board’s longevity to Nora Fraser, the Movie Mom on ABC-TV’s “Home Show.” Fraser sat in on Dallas movie board meetings three times, according to Chairman Aurbach, and sent televised waves of love their way. TV coverage never hurt anyone, especially when the city is looking for programs to whack.

Also, reminds Trickett, current Dallas Mayor Annette Strauss is herself a former board chairman.

What galls Trickett is that “the city of Dallas has never tried to exhibit films only with the MPAA rating, so how do they know it doesn’t work? How do they know the public is demanding it?”

Demand aside, board administrator Kathy Toler says she fields “a few” calls yearly from other cities about setting up their own municipal rating board. If Aurbach has his way, it’ll start happening. A dentist friend of his, Dr. Paul Swinney, now sits on the Tyler, Tex., board, smaller in scale but nonetheless active. Aurbach has talked up the idea to various Dallas-area suburbs. Privately, local and national film exhibitors, distributors and even MPAA officials acknowledge their fear of municipal-level boards catching on and multiplying.

Meantime, the Dallas board goes about its business, sometimes testing the patience of local distributors and publicists. Julie Glass, a former film publicist, tells of a 1988 critics’ screening, scheduled to follow a classification board screening. The board went overtime in its letter-grade discussion, refusing to vacate.

“I had paid for the room, so I got the security guard for the building--that didn’t even faze them,” she recalls. “When I called the police, they finally left.”

“I think people would suffer them more gladly,” says Dallas Times Herald movie critic David Kronke, “if they didn’t have such a bloated sense of self-importance.”

They do have a sense of when to tinker, though, according to Aurbach. He has appointed an ordinance review subcommittee to assess the need for new categories, in addition to S, V, L, D, N and P. The board may try to craft language differentiating implicit and explicit sex. They may add an A category--for adult situations.

Also, Aurbach doesn’t like the word suitable . He thinks accepted or acceptable would be better--less of a tacit endorsement. “And we still haven’t come up with a designation for urination, defecation and vomiting,” he adds.

But don’t misunderstand him. He’ll concede that “sometimes, vomiting . . . well, that’s part of life.”

THE DALLAS GUIDE TO FILMS Four films rated PG by the Motion Picture Assn. of America but given a Not Suitable label by the Dallas Motion Picture Classification Board: