MPAA May Adopt New Rating by End of Week

The Motion Picture Assn. of America, whose X movie rating category has been the subject of ongoing critical debate and two lawsuits this year, is expected to announce an adjustment in its voluntary rating system this week.

Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA, was in Los Angeles Monday for meetings with studio heads and others and acknowledged that one purpose of his trip was to resolve the ratings issue.

Valenti would not reveal changes he is proposing in the 22-year-old system, but he said there will definitely not be a new adults-only category, which has been suggested by film critics and such film directors as Sydney Pollack, Barry Levinson and Francis Coppola.

“I have always been opposed to (creating a new adults-only rating),” Valenti said. “It’s not even being considered.”

According to other sources, the impending change will likely involve a new category between the R and the X, but one that will not be restrictive, meaning that children under 17 will be allowed in when accompanied by parents or guardians.

The new category--the designation RR has been mentioned--would bear a stronger parental advisory than the current R and presumably expand the range of films that could be made and marketed within the current system.

Since pornographers co-opted the X in the early ‘70s, that designation has been synonymous with hard-core sex films. Because many newspapers and television stations refuse advertising for X-rated movies and because many theater chains refuse to book them, filmmakers have been in the position of having to either edit their films for R’s or fight the ratings in the hope that publicity would generate box-office interest.

The new rating, which likely would have accommodated such recent X-rated films as “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” and “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & and Her Lover,” would be copyrighted by the MPAA, according to sources, while the non-copyrighted X would continue to exist as an open-ended category.

If the new rating is formally announced this week, as expected, Universal Pictures’ “Henry & June” will probably be the first major studio movie to bear it.

“Henry & June,” the story of author Anais Nin’s sexual obsession with writer Henry Miller and his wife in 1931 Paris, was rated X by the MPAA. The studio has appealed the X rating and a hearing is scheduled for Oct. 3 in New York, two days before the film opens. The new rating may save them all the trouble.