Problems With Movie Ratings Go Beyond Categories

The article “Do Movie Ratings Need New Categories?” (by Amy Wallace, Aug. 10) brought on a flood of memories.

In 1968, having just completed our work

on “Midnight Cowboy,” my director, John Schlesinger, and I were instructed to make a print available for screening by a newly installed Jack Valenti and his ratings board at the Motion Picture Assn. of America. That screening was arranged.

Shortly afterward, John and I were informed that, under the new system’s guidelines, “Midnight Cowboy” was to receive an X rating (previously associated only with sleaze and porn), in spite of its “artistic merit.” Apparently, no other, more appropriate category existed.

Despite the limitations this rating would impose on our freedom to advertise our film, seek play dates in certain parts of the country or hope for network television revenue, we determined not to alter “Cowboy” in any way. Happily, this decision had the full support of Arthur Krim and his associates at United Artists, which had committed to finance and distribute our picture.

And so “Midnight Cowboy” was released as an X and went on, like the filmic equivalent of a “Scarlet Woman,” to become the first X-rated film in history to win a best picture Oscar, which it did in 1969.

Imagine our surprise when, after the Oscar, the same ratings board proposed to re-rate the picture as an R if we would cut a single frame so that it could be presented as a “re-cut version.”

This we emphatically refused to do, once again with the full support of our allies at UA.

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At that juncture, the MPAA decided to re-rate our film as an R without any changes whatsoever, and all doors, previously closed, opened to us! Nothing could be done, of course, about the damage inflicted by its earlier decision on the first critical year of “Cowboy’s” theatrical release.

I point this out now, 31 years later, to illustrate that the present labyrinthine, confusing, inconsistent and irresponsible nature of the system is nothing new. The problems were present at the time of Jack Valenti’s appointment to head the MPAA and his drafting of the “guidelines,” when it became immediately apparent that no mechanism existed to deal in any but the most simplistic terms in assigning ratings to films.

This inadequacy, and the increasing pressure on studio executives to pay attention to the “bottom line” at the expense of all other considerations, will continue to haunt serious filmmakers until new “guidelines,” designed for audiences of the 21st century, replace the old.