Directorial Dilemma Is Rated Catch-22

In her new movie, “crazy/beautiful,” Kirsten Dunst plays an unhappy rich girl who rebels against her parents by boozing, smoking reefer and having a fling with Jay Hernandez, a handsome high school football player bused in from East L.A. who’s such a straight arrow that he stops at traffic lights before they turn red. For John Stockwell, the movie’s director, one of the best scenes showed Hernandez casually resisting Dunst’s efforts to get him drunk.

“I loved the scene because Jay handles it with such aplomb that he’s obviously not a nerd or a loser,” Stockwell says. “It would be great for kids to see the hero of the movie stay sober and continue to be cool.”

Sounds like the kind of message Motion Picture Assn. of America chief Jack Valenti, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and all the other Washington do-gooders say they want to see, right?

Wrong. The scene’s not even in the Disney Studios-made movie. And we have Washington politicians and Valenti’s you’ll-have-to-pry-it-from-my-cold-dead-hands backing of the R rating to blame. Because to show Hernandez refusing to drink, Stockwell had to show Dunst drinking in the first place, and if Disney wanted any chance at all of marketing the film to teenagers, the film had to have a PG-13 rating--and the MPAA wouldn’t give it a PG-13 if Stockwell showed even a hint of Dunst drinking or doing drugs. It’s the Hollywood equivalent of a Catch-22.

“For a teen drama, the R rating has become the scarlet letter,” Stockwell says. “There’s so much pressure on the MPAA and the studios because of the new marketing restrictions that the R rating is a nonstarter.”

Studio marketers say an R-rated teen film probably does 30% less business than a PG-13 one. From the start, teen movie king Neal Moritz made sure his current hit, “The Fast and the Furious,” got a PG-13 rating. The producer says that if his 1999 hit, “Cruel Intentions,” were released today, the R-rated film would’ve done significantly less business. It’s harder for under-17 kids to get into R-rated films now. And studios have adopted self-imposed restrictions that prevent them from advertising R-rated films on young teen-dominated shows like MTV’s “Total Request Live.”

“crazy/beautiful,” which did $4.7 million in its opening weekend, isn’t the only film to feel the heat. Just ask the filmmakers behind “O,” a sex-and-violence-punctuated high school drama (loosely based on “Othello”) that sat on the shelf for nearly two years because Miramax refused to release the R-rated film, despite the presence of teen idols Josh Hartnett and Julia Stiles. The filmmakers sued Miramax earlier this year for failing to release it. The suit was settled in late May not long after Miramax gave the movie to Lions Gate Films, which is opening it Aug. 24.

The two films’ directors say Disney and Miramax supported them creatively. What bothers them--and they’ve made me a convert--is an especially egregious double standard that speaks volumes about the vacuous state of pop culture in today’s Hollywood. In the aftermath of last fall’s Federal Trade Commission report, which bashed Hollywood for marketing violence to teenagers, it’s perfectly OK for studios to make crude, R-rated teen movies with cartoonish sex and violence, but the same studios suddenly get squeamish about political fallout when it comes to marketing R-rated teen movies that deal with sex and violence as serious subjects.

So why did a provocative morality tale like “O” sit on the shelf while Miramax releases “Scary Movie 2” this weekend? And why did Disney soften “crazy/beautiful’s” hard-edged realism when 20th Century Fox had no problem marketing the R-rated gross-out comedy “Freddy Got Fingered” or Sony Pictures had no problem marketing the R-rated, sex-driven “Tomcats”?

“It’s all about money,” says Tim Blake Nelson, director of “O.” “The high-minded moralizing on the part of the studios is probably just a smoke screen, because who wants to say to a filmmaker: ‘I don’t think your film is going to make a nickel?’ The studios believe that films for younger audiences that fetishize violence in a cartoonish way are going to make a lot of money. I understand that these places are businesses. But when a company sees the opportunity to make $100 million at the box office, it’s a lot easier to abandon or rewrite your principles.”

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Nelson has every right to be chagrined. No one has said his movie stinks. In fact, Miramax chiefs Bob and Harvey Weinstein, though they wouldn’t comment for this story, have repeatedly lavished praise on Nelson’s film and asked him to work with the studio again. But because “O” grapples with disturbing real-life issues, the film was treated as more of a marketing liability than movies filled with penis jokes and “cartoon violence,” an expression now used to inoculate movies from any serious scrutiny.

“It’s an easy way to defend movies against media or political assault--’Oh, it’s not real, it’s just a scary movie or a thrill ride,’ ” Nelson says. “When people say ‘O’ is dangerous because it’s real, I say go see ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer.’ It’s the opposite of a cartoon. The most effective horror movies are the ones that are as real and scary as possible.”

Stockwell frequently came up against this “realness” issue during “crazy/beautiful’s” ratings debates with the MPAA, the industry-run parents group that gave the same rating--R--to “Hannibal” and “Almost Famous,” even though one was a gory thriller, the other a valentine to ‘70s rock.

“When we were going through our process with the MPAA, they kept saying, ‘But this movie feels real,’ ” Stockwell recalls. “So you can get away with all sorts of things in a raunchy teen comedy, but when you make a movie about reality, you’re held to a different standard.”

Stockwell began shooting the film last August, a month before the FTC hit Hollywood. To get a PG-13 rating, movies can only have one use of the F-word; Stockwell’s “crazy/beautiful” script had dozens of F-words, plus scenes of his troubled high school heroine doing bong hits on her bed, scoring weed and traipsing through her house naked, looking for a condom before she has sex with her boyfriend.

The week before shooting began, Stockwell went to a Disney marketing meeting where the ratings issue was discussed at length. Disney’s marketers lobbied for a PG-13 but didn’t insist on it. “We actually had trouble coming up with successful PG-13 teen films,” Stockwell recalls. “The hits, like ‘American Pie,’ ‘Scary Movie’ and ‘Varsity Blues,’ were all R-rated movies.”

Everything changed after the FTC flap. Word came down from the top: The movie had to be PG-13. As soon as filming ended, Stockwell met with then-Disney studio chief Peter Schneider; Stockwell recalls Schneider telling him “please give me a movie I can give to the MPAA with only one use of the F-word.” Dunst’s drinking scenes also disappeared. In the movie, she is seen carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag, but never drinking from it.

The MPAA even asked that Stockwell cut out the scene in which, at her boyfriend’s insistence, Dunst finds a condom before having sex. “I had to argue that here’s a guy who’s insisting on having safe sex,” Stockwell recalls. “I kept saying, isn’t it important that we show that?” After much debate, he got to keep the scene.

Stockwell insists Disney has been supportive of the film. What bothers him, he says, is that “we made a movie about a girl whose life is off the tracks, but we weren’t able to show how lost and troubled she really was. At least when the studio decided to turn ‘Remember the Titans’ into a PG film, it was all done up front, with the filmmaker knowing what he’d agreed to. This happened after the fact, and it certainly reduced the movie’s impact as a cautionary tale.”

But here’s the real cautionary tale: for filmmakers brave enough to make a teen drama with a serious theme, the R rating has now become the equivalent of an NC-17--the kiss of death. Either you sanitize the film enough to get a PG-13 or you run the risk of being left on the shelf like “O.” But if you’re an outrageous R-rated comedy, like “Scary Movie 2,” you’re considered prime blockbuster material. It speaks volumes about our culture’s attitude toward teenagers that the system Washington and Hollywood have designed to protect our children now makes it far easier for them to experience tawdry fantasies than reality.

Just ask Stockwell, who has two new projects: one a serious “Graduate”-style drama, the other an escapist romp called “Surf Girls.” Guess which one is on the fast track?

Bomb’s Away: Maybe Harry Knowles hasn’t been co-opted after all. Over the past year, online movie fans have complained that the objectivity of the creator of Ain’t It Cool News has been spoiled by too many free trips and too much film director flattery.

It seemed like the fix was in again when John McTiernan, director of “Rollerball,” MGM’s big action remake, picked up Knowles in Austin and gave him a ride to New York in a private jet to see an early “Rollerball” test screening several weeks ago. No way! Knowles posted a review several days later trashing the unfinished film, calling it “literally one of the worst conceived series of nonsensical action I’ve ever seen.” He went on to say: “There’s not a single moment in the entire film that begins to compare to the original. The action is amateurish. The dramatics are childishly ill-conceived. Chris Klein’s character is a complete loser. This film is a complete embarrassment.”

MGM executives insist the ill-fated trip wasn’t their idea, saying they had no idea McTiernan had invited Knowles until the chubby cinema buff showed up (with his father) at the screening. Apparently the film does need some work. The studio announced Monday that it’s pulling the film from its Aug. 17 release date and is holding it until early 2002.

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“The Big Picture” runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.