Rated C for Confusing

Producer Neil Moritz wonders where the line is.

One of the most prolific producers of teen-oriented movies, Moritz has made PG-13-rated raunchy comedies such as the recent “Saving Silverman” and grisly R-rated thrillers such as 1997’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” He’s been on both sides of the R/PG-13 line and has become an expert on “covering myself by shooting certain scenes a couple of different ways--more explicit [and] less explicit.”

If the Motion Picture Assn. of America threatens an R because of a certain scene, Moritz will then be ready to substitute the less graphic version. “Silverman” had frequent references to masturbation, oral sex and even a necrophilia joke, and it was more than a kissing cousin to such R-rated fare as “There’s Something About Mary” and “Me, Myself & Irene.” But “Silverman” steered clear of nudity and foul language, and was able to secure the PG-13 by making enough edits to placate the MPAA, according to Moritz. Although the strategy worked with “Silverman,” Moritz expresses consternation about the MPAA’s guidelines.

“I think we’re all a bit puzzled by the PG-13,” he says. “There are some specific language and nudity issues, but beyond that, it’s not specific enough. It’s a gray area. The PG-13 is very ambiguous. You can see something in one movie that’s PG-13, and submit another movie with the same thing and they won’t give you a PG-13. My grudge is that there’s no consistency.”

Critic Michael Medved wonders where the line is.

A conservative film writer and radio personality, Medved is among many who feel that filmmakers and studios manage to get PG-13 ratings for films by adhering to the letter of the MPAA code but not the spirit.

“That’s the real difficulty,” says Medved. “I hear from parents who are not just concerned with counting the F-words in a film or exposed nipples. They’re concerned with an overall theme. There are some movies that are thematically problematic.”

Even studio executives such as Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group Chairman Richard Cook wonder where the line is.

The Disney film “Coyote Ugly,” took some heat last summer for its PG-13 rating; some felt the subject matter--young women dancing suggestively at a raucous bar--was not suitable for under-17 audiences. Cook defends the PG-13 for “Coyote Ugly,” saying it falls within the MPAA’s guidelines, but he notes, “Once you start talking about subject matter, it all becomes very subjective. What you may think is offensive may not be offensive to the next person.”

That subjective line between a PG-13 and R rating has become increasingly important in Hollywood for political and economic reasons. R-rated films are under scrutiny in Washington and a major hurdle for box office success, since it limits the number of moviegoers--at least in theory--who are Hollywood’s most reliable customers; in 1999, nearly half of teens 12 to 17 attended at least one movie a month, compared with 28% of adults 18 and older, according to the National Assn. of Theater Owners.

An R rating is widely thought to have hurt the box office success of the historical action film “The Patriot,” for example, and the studios are now pushing filmmakers to make sure future action fare such as “The Mummy Returns” get a PG-13 rating, as the first one did.

After last year’s Federal Trade Commission report attacking the entertainment industry for marketing R-rated material to teenagers, the motion picture industry has been engaged in a concerted campaign to more frequently secure PG-13 ratings, giving them a wider berth to market and promote films to general audiences. The PG-13 warns of “inappropriate” material but imposes no restrictions.

In the process, studios and filmmakers are pushing the PG-13 envelope, especially with sexual content. Critics say that in some cases, these films are barely distinguishable from R-rated films. Instead of deflecting the attention of politicians, they say, this may only serve to bring the industry under further scrutiny.

“The PG-13 has become the Holy Grail of ratings,” says Terry Press, who heads marketing for DreamWorks. And in the mad scramble to secure that rating and thus the freedom to market movies more widely, she says, “the PG-13 is getting harder rather than softer because the MPAA is focusing on quantity [the amount of foul language, nudity, violence] and not overall content.”

Such PG-13 rated films as “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,” “Nutty Professor II,” “Gone in 60 Seconds,” “Coyote Ugly,” “Saving Silverman” and “Head Over Heels” were cited by various film critics and media watchdogs as examples of PG-13 films that could easily have been rated R. Each conformed to the MPAA’s ratings guidelines--avoiding specific language, nudity and graphic violence. But the movies’ content was questionable for younger audiences, they contend.

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In many ways, the push toward PG-13 mirrors what happened when the NC-17 rating (formerly the X rating) was created in the early 1990s to distinguish films with serious adult subject matter from hard-core sexual fare.

Almost immediately, many multiplex exhibitors refused to book NC-17 movies, in part because it was too difficult to guarantee that patrons younger than 17 would not sneak into the auditoriums. Newspapers in major cities said they would not accept advertising for NC-17 movies. With the new rating largely proscribed, the film industry worked closely with the MPAA at the time to establish guidelines to secure an R.

The same thing is happening again with the PG-13, since the major networks will no longer permit commercials for R-rated movies before 9 p.m., and many exhibitors will not show trailers for upcoming R-rated movies unless they’re attached to an R-rated film. A majority of the films rated by the MPAA get an R rating. Last year, the MPAA rated 528 films R and 146 PG-13. This year, through February, 86 films were given an R rating, 28 a PG-13. (The numbers are somewhat skewed, however, because straight-to-video releases also get ratings and many are violent action or sexually suggestive films that usually get an R rating.)

The PG-13 was introduced in 1984 partly in response to industry complaints that there was no middle ground between a PG (suitable for all audiences) and R (under 17 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian). The first film to be rated PG-13 was Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” which contained such elements as child slavery and the ripping of a human heart from a man’s chest.

The harsh reality of the ratings system, says Tom Pollock, former Universal studio chief-turned-producer (“Road Trip”), is precisely that “it’s not about content. It never has been. You can talk about drugs and have a movie that’s G-rated or R-rated. Merely having people killed is not what gives you a particular rating.”

Language is another subject of controversy. For example, last year’s “Billy Elliot” got an R rating for frequent use of expletives in an otherwise mild film about a young boy trying to achieve his ambition to be a professional dancer. But the repeated use of the blatant sexual euphemism “shag” in “Austin Powers” only merited a PG-13 for both the original and the sequel.

Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan cites many of the raunchier scenes in “Nutty Professor II” as “not exactly PG-13 material.” Yet a film that Turan thought was more suitable for teens, 1999’s “Election,” a satire that pointedly lampooned high school politics, was rated R for language and sexual situations.

“It seems that the ratings system is trying to be all things to all people, and the byproduct is that it engages in point-shaving or horse trading,” Turan says. “They don’t see the forest for the trees.”

Nationally televised reviewer Roger Ebert complains that “ ‘Coyote Ugly’ gets a PG-13 and promotes the theory that the way to get ahead for young women is to shake your booty and pour tequila down the throats of drunken guys. ‘Almost Famous,’ which got an R, is about a teenage journalist practicing his craft in a world where drugs and sex are a reality but finding he can survive without compromising his principles. That’s the movie a 15-year-old should be going to.”

Jack Valenti, who instituted the current ratings system 32 years ago and is its most ferocious booster, argues that the carping comes mostly from film critics and people in the industry. The MPAA’s surveys of parents, he contends, conveys overwhelming support for the system as it is.

“We’re dealing with subjectivity here, not Euclidean geometry,” he says. “It’s a subjective decision and it’s not always perfect, and people don’t always agree.”

But it’s precisely the MPAA’s subjective approach in granting the PG-13 that most confounds and frustrates people in and out of the industry.

“The difference between PG-13 and R is mostly academic,” says Martin Kaplan, associate dean for USC’s Annenberg School of Communications. “I’m not sure PG-13 has been such a guarantor of family values all along. It’s a pretty porous membrane. Putting these things under a microscope inevitably reveals the contradictions and tensions in the system.”

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In its efforts to make an end run around the R-rating, the industry may actually be inviting more scrutiny, not less. Vice presidential nominee and Connecticut Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman has been a vocal opponent of the entertainment industry’s graphic content. His communications director, Dan Gerstein, says the industry’s attempts to solve this problem are meritorious but may be counterproductive.

“One the one hand, Sen. Lieberman appreciates the commitment the MPAA has made to provide further information to accompany the ratings,” says Gerstein (see accompanying story). “It should never have come to that. But at least they were willing to confront the problem with more explicit warnings to parents.

“On the other hand, we’re seeing increased anecdotal evidence that there’s been a kind of watering down of the ratings, and movies that most parents would think are R or NC-17 are not being rated appropriately. It is a cause of concern and if it’s not addressed could become a bigger problem.”

The major studios and film distributors are trying to deflect this kind of criticism starting at the script stage. “We try to do our work at the beginning of the process,” says New Line Cinema marketing head Joseph Nimziki. “We sit down with the script and discuss who the audience is and what kind of execution the film requires, otherwise everyone is left in the terrible position of having to sacrifice the quality of the film for a particular rating.”

Early in the process, Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairman Tom Rothman made a crucial change in the premise for the recent teen comedy “Dude, Where’s My Car?” to make it more suitable for a PG-13 audience. Originally, the two young men who misplace the auto had been doing drugs. The final film, released in December, portrayed them not as substance abusers, but as goofballs, says Rothman. “That actually worked to the film’s advantage and made them more accessible to a wider audience.”

Similarly, producers are reevaluating the kinds of movies they make for teenagers. Asked whether he would make a sequel to last year’s R-rated Tom Greene comedy “Road Trip,” Pollock responded that the more appropriate question is whether he would have made “Road Trip” at all in the current climate.

There are some obvious lines of demarcation between the R and the PG-13 ratings. One four-letter expletive used in a nonsexual way merits a PG-13, two uses or more puts a film in R territory. Frontal nudity is R, as is the graphic depiction of violence and blood. Beyond that, the lines start to blur.

And that’s what drives studio executives up the wall. Pam Rodi, former vice president of creative advertising at Sony Pictures, frequently found the studio being second-guessed in trying to obtain for last year’s teen comedy “Whatever It Takes,” a movie that focused on teens’ first sexual experience but in a manner that was less detailed than most shows on the WB network, according to Rodi.

Though there was no nudity or foul language, the movie was threatened with an R. One scene the MPAA objected to involves a boy who thinks his girlfriend has invited him to take a shower with her. A second was about a girl who offers to model her thong underwear for her boyfriend. The problem: “The girls portrayed in the movie [not the actresses who played them] might be under 18, and that wasn’t acceptable,” says Rodi, though she says the characters’ ages are never mentioned.

“In the shower scene, we only see her face, and the real joke was that she was startled because she had hair removal cream on her upper lip.” A snip here and a snip there, and the film was finally rated PG-13. But Rodi wasn’t out of the woods yet. The MPAA objected to the advertising. The film’s very subject matter--losing one’s virginity--had to be circumvented in the advertising materials, “which leads to a problem of truth in advertising,” says Rodi.

A Sony executive who asked that his name not be used ran up against another confounding assessment by the MPAA with the 1999 summer comedy “Big Daddy,” starring Adam Sandler. The star and the young boy he adopts are seen urinating against a wall. Both the film and its advertising, which used that sequence, originally included the sound of urination until the MPAA threatened the film with an R. Minus the sound, the film and the trailer were rated PG-13.

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When it comes to violent content, the issue is even thornier. Producer Moritz says he will probably make fewer horror films or thrillers in the immediate future, since the blood and gore factor that horror enthusiasts demand usually makes the R rating difficult to avoid. If Moritz goes ahead with an R-rated teen thriller, he says, it will have to cost less, since his available audience is now smaller.

Still, the major studios are releasing several fairly intense action films this summer and are working to secure the PG-13 to maximize their audience. They include the third in the “Jurassic Park” series, “Pearl Harbor” and “The Mummy Returns.” Stephen Sommers, director of the “Mummy” movies, says he’ll deliver a PG-13 rated film. At the same time, he promises the sequel will be scarier than original.

“I will just be more creative about how I do it,” he says. “The R rating comes down to blood. If you avoid blood, you can really scare people. The moment the blood starts splattering, you’re dead.” Another red flag is whether the violence is disturbing, he says. “It’s really a question of tone. ‘Hannibal’ had to be R because it’s disturbing.” Sommers is confident, however, that by leavening the action with humor and romance, “The Mummy Returns” will avoid the same fate.

But, even here, the standards can be elusive. Sommers points out that Steven Spielberg’s memorable 1975 film “Jaws” contained several disturbing sequences, including a blood-drenched scene in which a young boy on a raft is partially dismembered by the killer shark. Yet it was rated PG (there was no PG-13 at the time). Sommers wondered if the film could be rated anything but R today.

Last year, the Directors Guild of America’s task force on violence and social responsibility complained about the content contradictions in the ratings system, offering a solution that involved a more general rating for adult content. “We’re not looking to relax the ratings. We just want to reclassify and clarify them,” says television producer Mark Tinker, a member of the DGA task force. The DGA prefers an adult rating that would include some films that currently get either a PG-13 or R rating, along with more complete explanations about the ratings for parents.

Tinker points to a movie like the R-rated “Erin Brockovich,” which he thinks is suitable for young teens but was “tarred with the same brush as hard R films” because of its frank language. The DGA proposal has received strong support from filmmakers, Tinker says, but so far the MPAA has been unresponsive, with Valenti very much favoring the status quo.

However, the real problem with the current MPAA ratings system is not with the studios, filmmakers or even lawmakers, according to USC’s Kaplan.

“It’s us, the consumers. As long as we reward both television shows and movies that deliver violence or sexually themed entertainment, Hollywood knows nothing but to deliver what the market wants,” Kaplan says. “Despite all our protestations about wanting the culture to be cleaner, our dollars are what speaks loudest.”

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All PG-13, According to the MPAA Code

“Saving Silverman”

The story: Dim-witted guys (including Jack Black, above right) try to save their pal from marrying the world’s nastiest girlfriend (Amanda Peet, left).

Too naughty? References to every kind of sexual activity, including necrophilia.

How about . . . Salty-tongued nuns.

Final question: Did the MPAA miss the similarities to the R-rated “Me, Myself & Irene” and “There’s Something About Mary”?

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“Coyote Ugly”

The story: Local girl makes good by getting a job at a raucous New York City bar.

Too naughty? Beautiful young women bartenders fond of dancing that’s not quite stripping but a long way from Martha Graham.

How about . . . No nudity but a lot of suggestiveness and body-adhering attire.

Final question: Is lewd dancing the way a girl should get ahead in the world?

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“Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”

The story: The further adventures of the ‘60s British mod man of mystery (Mike Myers, above right, with Heather Graham).

Too naughty? The use of a British euphemism for sex in the title--and constantly in the film.

How about . . . A wardrobe that leaves little to the imagination, and some very foul eating habits.

Final question: What’s the line between naughty and nasty?

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“Nutty Professor II: The Klumps”

The story: Absent-minded professor gets large again--and uncouth family (all played by Eddie Murphy) gets more uncouth.

Too naughty? Endless bowel movement and emission jokes.

How about . . . A hamster going where a hamster ought not go.

Final question: How crude do you have to be for an R?

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“Big Daddy”

The story: A slacker (Adam Sandler, above right) adopts a kid.

Too naughty? He teaches the kid to urinate in public and scope out women.

How about . . . Teaching a kid how to maim perfect strangers.

Final question: What kind of guide to single parenting is this?

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“Gone in 60 Seconds”

The story: Ex-car thief (Nicolas Cage, above right) needs to steal a lot of cars in a little time.

Too naughty? Stealing and smashing up cars for fun and profit.

How about . . . Plenty of auto eroticism.

Final question: So what’s the difference between the good guys and the bad guys here?

MPAA Voluntary Movie Rating System

G: General Audiences. All ages admitted.

PG: Parental Guidance Suggested. Some material may not be suitable for children.

PG-13: Parents Strongly Cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

NC-17: No one 17 and under admitted.

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Source: Motion Picture Assn. of America