Ratings Board, Studios Need Separate Beds

Roger Avary, the 37-year-old director of the upcoming film “The Rules of Attraction,” has spent a lot of time in the editing room lately, thanks to the Motion Picture Assn. of America ratings board. Avary, best known as the co-writer of “Pulp Fiction,” has submitted his film four times to the board. Each time it has come back rated NC-17--the kiss of death for a major release.

Avary sees “Rules,” which is based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel and features such hot young actors as James Van Der Beek and Shannyn Sossamon, as a scabrous social satire about upper-crust college students who indulge in a veritable orgy of sex, drugs, drinking, suicide attempts and--did we mention sex already? In one deadpan sequence, one of the characters, played by Kip Pardue, narrates a home-video-style account of his summer vacation in Europe, where he recounts his sexual encounters with the same blase intonation that he uses to describe his visits to various fabled art museums.

Avary says the MPAA board was not amused. “They objected to his tone about sex being just as mundane as it was about the art museums. They’ve been trying to get me to cut out more and more of the sex, saying it was demeaning to women. It’s gotten to the point where I would prefer outright censorship. It would be more fair than what I’m going through now.”

With the MPAA, sex is always Topic A. On the surface, the MPAA’s ratings system seems easy to understand, with its clearly marked R, PG-13, PG and G ratings for movies. But in reality, the MPAA operates a shadow rating system that can only be decoded by knowing Hollywood insiders. If your movie is full of gross-out jokes about flatulence and penis size--and is made by a major studio with scores of promotional partners--it can get a PG-13 rating. If your movie deals with sex from the point of view of smirky teenagers or sultry movie stars--and is made by a powerful studio with big marketing dollars--it can get an R rating.

But if your movie deals with sex in a frank or unsettling manner, as if it were actually close to reality--and it’s being released by a tiny independent distributor--it is almost guaranteed to get an NC-17 rating, a rating that virtually kills any hope of your film being accepted by major theater chains and advertising buyers. That’s what has happened to “The Rules of Attraction,” which is distributed by Lions Gate, the company known for both its prestige films “Monster’s Ball” and “Amores Perros” and such controversial pictures as “American Psycho” and “Dogma.”

Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Films Releasing, says the company plans to release “Rules” in October on as many as 1,500 screens. But to reach that many screens, the film will need an R rating. Movies that go out unrated, as “Y Tu Mama Tambien” did earlier this year, have difficulty being booked in more than about 400 theaters.

What rankles the indie film companies isn’t just the MPAA ratings board’s inscrutable judgment calls about sex, but what they see as a double standard in dealing with major studios and independents. The MPAA is an entity created and controlled by the major movie studios. The independent companies are not members; they pay a fee to participate in CARA, the MPAA-affiliated Classification and Ratings Administration organization that rates films and advertising material. When a company disputes a ruling by the ratings board, it goes before an appeals board made up almost exclusively of representatives from the major studios and theater chains.

“The MPAA is clearly stacked against us,” says Ortenberg. “It’s just laughable what they put us through. There’s a wholly subjective set of rules and they are not equally applied.”

Historically, studios have used their clout to get their way. In 1966, in the waning days of the Production Code, Warner Bros. avoided censorship of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” by arguing that the studio had “a lot of money invested” in the picture.

In 1970, two years after MPAA chief Jack Valenti essentially created the current ratings system, the steamy “Ryan’s Daughter” got a PG after MGM chief James Aubrey argued that the studio needed the more lenient rating to survive. Testifying in 1977 before a congressional subcommittee (holding hearings on--surprise--the disparity in movie ratings between studios and independents), Valenti called the “Ryan’s Daughter” ruling “one of the tarnishing marks of the rating system.”

The MPAA is always under intense pressure from member studios to give films a PG-13 rating, which can mean untold millions in extra box-office revenues; the PG-13 rating itself came about as a way to deal with the violence in Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” without giving the movie a more restrictive R rating. The system’s inherent inconsistency can be infuriating. Many parents were appalled that this summer’s “Austin Powers” sequel had been rated PG-13, despite a nonstop barrage of toilet humor. Time magazine critic Richard Corliss described the rating as “sleazy,” excoriating Hollywood for its “infectious greed,” saying “the only thing dirtier than the gags in ‘Goldmember’ is the money that’s made from them.”

Valenti adamantly denies the charges that the ratings board favors studio releases. “That’s patently a canard,” he said phoning Friday from the Venice Film Festival.

“We’ve heard complaints from the independents for nearly 34 years, but everyone complains equally. It all depends on whose ox is gored. When it comes to the rating of movies, Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch and Michael Eisner have no more power than the lowest intern at Lions Gate.”

Valenti insists that CARA operates independently from the MPAA, although he acts as spokesman for both entities and was responsible for hiring Joan Graves, who heads the board. He also says that independents are welcome to join the MPAA and have been members in the past, though he acknowledged that member dues, which can run in the millions, could limit membership to deep-pocketed studio conglomerates

The rating system was started to fend off church-related organizations from rating films themselves, which often led to community bans. But the ratings board has become the worst kind of censor itself, exercising its own subjective, often maddeningly capricious opinions. This is especially true of the board’s decisions involving sexual content.

“Femme Fatale,” a stylish Brian De Palma thriller that’s being released in November by Warners, has received an R rating, despite the presence of female frontal nudity and an explicit sex scene between stars Antonio Banderas and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. Yet when tiny IFC Films took “Y Tu Mama Tambien” before the ratings board, it got an NC-17 because of a similarly explicit sex scene. Because its masturbation scene was played for laughs, “American Pie” got an R, while “Rules” got an NC-17 for a more realistic masturbation scene.

“The MPAA absolutely has different standards for comic sexual suggestiveness and realistic sexuality,” says Bob Berney, who headed IFC’s distribution wing when the company released “Y Tu Mama Tambien.” “It’s always about the tone. With ‘Y Tu Mama,’ they basically said, ‘You can have sex in the movie, but we don’t like you having it for a long time.’ ”

Avary’s biggest beef with the ratings board isn’t just its inconsistency but the way its demands for trims distort the theme of his film. “This is a film about moral decadence, but if you take out the bad behavior, you rob the film of its message,” he says. “I made the film because Hollywood teen movies lie about what it’s like to be a teenager. What really disturbs the MPAA is that this film shows the truth.”

The MPAA will never come out and say it, especially since their deliberations are as closely guarded as Dick Cheney’s meetings with energy company lobbyists, but my guess is the ratings board (who are all parents) found many of the kids in “Rules” creepy and repellent. The horny boys in “American Pie” were so much more ... likable.

I guess it shouldn’t come as a shock that members of the ratings board, like many Americans, are squeamish about sex unless it’s played for laughs, as in “American Pie,” or given a sleek, titillating sheen, as in thrillers like “Unfaithful” or “Femme Fatale.” But it’s time the board stopped punishing filmmakers for thinking seriously about sex.

If we can celebrate movies that deal frankly--and often graphically--with the horror of war or slavery or mental illness, then we should provide the same respect to artists who grapple with sex. If not, then the board should be honest enough to admit they’d really be happier if American movies were all as infantile as a Mike Myers or Adam Sandler comedy. At least then we’d have a refreshing dose of candor, not the corrosive kind of hypocrisy that has given today’s rating system the moral heft of a feather boa.

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