It’s not R town

If 17-year-old Michelle Rodriguez wants to see Hollywood’s latest buddy-cop action movie, “Bad Boys II,” she’ll have to drive 60 miles through prairie fields on a two-lane highway.

It’s not that her hometown lacks a movie house. In fact, the Grand Theater shows films every weekend in this once-bustling farming town, population 4,000.

But the Grand is one of a handful of independent movie houses scattered across America’s West, Southwest and Midwest that make it a policy not to play R-rated movies, such as the Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay crash-fest now playing at 3,000 or so theaters near you.

While these R-free theaters might seem to exist off the nation’s pop culture grid, their proprietors say they’re in touch with the values that matter to their customers -- and with what most people actually like to watch.

“We are in this just to keep it open as a public service,” says the Grand’s co-manager, Frances Miller, who at 60 has been running the theater for nearly 10 years. Miller’s husband is the projectionist and her 85-year-old mother takes tickets at the door.

Some of the theaters, like the Grand, are nonprofit enterprises owned by local arts commissions and run by volunteers. Others are for-profit ventures, toughing it out as independent operators in a world increasingly dominated by chains and multiplexes.

Movie booker Brad Bills, a liaison between the movie studios and 180 theaters in the Midwest, says it’s rare to find a theater with a policy against R-rated fare; the National Assn. of Theater Owners does not keep track of them.

“These are small-town situations that we are talking about,” Bills says. “I think it’s that slice of Americana holding on to small-town values.”

‘No business with the R’

Even though they are unusual in their stand against R-rated movies, these theaters are by no means out of step with Hollywood, at least in box office terms. Last year, according to the theater owners group, none of the 10 top-grossing movies was rated R, the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s shorthand for “Restricted: Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.” And this year’s highest-grossing movie to date has been the G-rated “Finding Nemo,” which has brought in an estimated $312.7 million.

“There was just no business with the R,” says Mike Bonds, co-owner of the Carthage Twin Cinemas in Carthage, Texas, 40 miles west of Shreveport, La., which stopped playing R movies three years ago.

Personal taste enters into the equation as well. “They could’ve made a ‘Bad Boys’ with all the action in it and not have all that language in it,” says Bonds, who liked the original movie but not its dialogue, and won’t be showing the sequel. “I still feel uncomfortable when every other word is” is a vulgarity.

Some theaters are stricter than others at enforcing their policy.

“Anything Tom Hanks is in, we have to play,” says Mike Shima, co-manager of Rocky Ford’s Grand and also the town’s movie reviewer. In addition to the Tom Hanks loophole, the Grand Theater makes exceptions for R movies when they are “historically oriented” films like “The Patriot,” “The Green Mile” and “Black Hawk Down,” he says.

But sometimes theater owners regret bending their self-imposed rule. Christi Bullock found that out in 1995, when she showed “Erin Brockovich,” a well-recommended R picture starring Julia Roberts, no less, at her Pioneer Theater in Overton, Nev.

“That was a big mistake,” she says. “The language was deplorable.”

Customers walked out, and Bullock says she “takes it personally” when that happens.

“I cater to my customers,” she says. “They are the ones that are going to come back to the next movie. They appreciate that. They don’t appreciate me charging them to go in and have them leave 15 minutes into the movie because they have seen something that is offensive to them.”

Complaints about movies’ content tend to come from older moviegoers. Along with families, they make up the clientele at these theaters -- not the 14- to 17-year-olds who drive the business in the rest of the country.

Just because they’re far from Hollywood doesn’t mean the theaters are insulated from big-league pressures.

The SCERA Theater in Orem, Utah -- named for the Sharon Cultural Education and Recreation Assn. that runs it -- has been struggling against the megaplexes that surround it, especially since it lost a deal giving it exclusive rights to show Disney fare locally.

Daryl Berlin, chief executive of the nonprofit SCERA Corp., says the growing competition likely means aggressive fund-raising and higher prices. Yet when board members met recently and discussed the possibility of playing R movies, they decided against it.

“We decided that we would stay true to our own values,” Berlin says. “If that means we are not going to be successful and we have to close, so be it. We are not going to play R shows.”

Meanwhile, the megaplexes beckon, especially to teens.

Competing for teens

In Rocky Ford, Rodriguez and her friends drive west to Pueblo, Colo., where they can do a little boy-watching and catch any movie on opening weekend in an air-conditioned, 16-screen multiplex theater called Tinseltown USA.

Aside from the range of movies it must turn away, the Grand seems hard-pressed to compete for the teen audience.

As Rodriguez sits on the parched lawn of a local park clad in a white and red school-issued workout uniform, perspiration dotting her nose from cheerleading practice, she checks off the litany of problems with the theater: no air-conditioning, the movies arrive two weeks after they open everywhere else, the seats are hard and the cushions sliced up, the kids are rowdy and noisy. And it’s just plain ugly.

“You can’t make a piece of [junk] beautiful,” she says, referring to the Art Deco building, which was built in 1935 and looks its age. It is the last occupied structure on a corner of Main Street in this once-thriving farming town that to this day prides itself on its watermelon crop. Fires and vacancies have destroyed all the buildings that once surrounded the Grand. “It’s not that it’s dirty. It’s just old.”

Her friend and fellow cheerleader Renae Aragon, 15, adds: “It’s so boring in this town you just want to get away.”

For Miller, the Grand’s co-manager, that’s dispiriting. She stops her gold Oldsmobile at the tiny town’s only stoplight and sighs, “I see things that are of value to us that are not of value to the kids. They slit the seats, they throw things at the screen. This town is their heritage and they just don’t seem to have a sense of that.”