New NC-17 Rating May Give Some Films More Exposure : Home video: Policies against carrying X-rated movies may relax under new guidelines, industry observers say.

The change in the motion-picture industry’s rating system, eliminating the infamous X rating in favor of NC-17, may lead to some films receiving wider exposure in the home-video market.

Home video executives contacted this week said that it was too early to know how their industry will react to the NC-17 rating (meaning not for children under 17), but many guessed that some films will benefit. Stores that have policies against carrying X-rated movies may respond differently to NC-17 movies, and stores that keep their X-rated titles in a separate section may be willing to display NC-17 titles with their main stock.

“Some films were in the porn sections that didn’t belong there,” said John Thrasher, product manager of Tower Video, speaking of stores outside his chain. “They were there because there was nowhere else to put them. So people who wanted these titles would have to go to the X sections to find them, which many people didn’t want to do. But that may change with this new rating, which may bring respectability to some of the serious movies that have an X rating.”

“Some retailers who carry X-rated product may have to rethink how they handle films in this category,” agreed Paul Culberg, executive vice president and chief operating officer of RCA/Columbia. “The new rating gives them some options that weren’t there before.”

The new rating may help Miramax’s “Tie Me up, Tie Me Down”--distributed by RCA/Columbia--which was released theatrically without a rating to avoid the promotional restrictions placed on X-rated movies. It’s tentatively scheduled to be released on home video by the end of the year and would have faced problems because stores that don’t carry X-rated films often don’t carry unrated films either, recognizing that they might have gotten an X if submitted for classification.

“Now it can be resubmitted for an NC-17 rating,” Culberg said. “This will be a good test to see if more retailers will carry it with the new rating.”

Blockbuster Video, the nation’s largest chain, with 1,435 stores, has not yet decided how it will handle NC-17 films. Blockbuster doesn’t carry X-rated titles.

“Nothing is certain yet,” Blockbuster vice president Allan Caplan said Friday, “but we’ll probably look at this on a case-by-case basis, as we always have. We’re not going to say we’re automatically going to carry all NC-17 titles. The rating may be different, but that doesn’t change the content of the movie. There are still titles that we won’t carry.”

How about special NC-17 sections in video stores?

“I don’t think that will happen,” Caplan said. “There are maybe six to 12 films a year that will get this NC-17 rating. That’s not enough to warrant a special section.”

Some retailers expressed concern that porn-film producers may choose to submit their movies to the Motion Picture Assn. of America for the NC-17 rating.

“If it’s possible for something like ‘Debbie Does Dallas’ to get an NC-17, then something is wrong,” declared Peter Margo, executive vice president of the Palmer Video chain, which has 30 stores. “There’s an obvious difference between a serious, mature movie and a porn movie. This NC-17 doesn’t make that distinction. So we still may have a problem--new rating or not.”