No longer a scarlet letter

When New Line had its first research screening of “Wedding Crashers” in Pasadena last fall, the studio knew it had a potential hit on its hands. The madcap romantic comedy, which stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as a pair of lovable rogues who get their kicks from partying at strangers’ weddings, got a resoundingly enthusiastic reception from a theater full of young moviegoers.

One of the studio’s only concerns about the film, which arrives July 15, was its rating. The film’s director, David Dobkin, was contractually obligated to deliver a PG-13 movie, largely because R-rated comedies today rarely perform as well as PG-13 films. But when the audience filled out a research survey after the screening, most of the scenes they checked off as their favorites -- including one featuring a furtive sexual act performed under the table at a formal family dinner -- clearly put the movie into R-rated territory.

According to Dobkin, when members of an audience focus group were asked what rating they thought the movie should have, it was not a hung jury. “Twenty out of 20 people said they wanted the film to be rated R,” Dobkin recalls. “After that, New Line never raised the issue again. The scenes people liked the best were the R-rated ones.”

New Line’s decision to release a potential summer comedy blockbuster with an R rating has raised eyebrows at rival studios -- and with good reason. In recent years, thanks to political and demographic pressures, the R rating has been in a precipitous decline. Since 1999, when R-rated movies made up 41% of all box office, the R-rated business has dropped 30%, while PG and PG-13 films have risen considerably. The drop in R-rated movies has been especially dramatic since Hollywood chieftains were hauled before Congress in September 2000 following the release of a scathing Federal Trade Commission report accusing entertainment companies of cynically marketing R-rated movies to children.

This being Hollywood, the decision to pull back is rooted more in marketing concerns than in moral ones. Even though Congress has moved on to more pressing issues, like trying to pass bills against flag burning, many of the studios’ self-imposed marketing restrictions remain, notably that R-rated movies can’t be advertised on TV before 9 p.m. “Wedding Crashers,” for example, was able to advertise on “The MTV Movie Awards” only in a segment of the show that aired after 9.

The numbers speak for themselves. According to data compiled by Exhibitor Relations Co., since the 2000 congressional hearings, 15 comedies have made more than $115 million at the box office. Only one, “American Pie 2,” had an R rating. 2004 was an especially miserable year for R-rated comedies. “Eurotrip,” “The Girl Next Door,” “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” and “Team America: World Police” were all box-office disappointments, with only “Team America” making more than $20 million in its theatrical release.

Studio marketers say the R rating puts them at a clear disadvantage. Many exhibitors are reluctant to play trailers for an R-rated movie in front of a PG-13 film. Even worse, R-rated humor is verboten in TV commercials, so it’s impossible to show a film’s raunchiest scenes on TV. Despite these restrictions, the R-rated comedy is beginning to make a comeback. “Wedding Crashers” will be followed in August by “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo,” with Rob Schneider, and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” starring Steve Carell. More R-rated comedies are due early next year.

The reasons for this mini-comeback are simple. In recent years, the real action in the movie business has shifted from theatrical box-office to DVD sales, which now make up more than 60% of studio revenues. One of the hottest profit centers is a new genre devoted to raunchy “unrated” DVD versions of R-rated films. As The Times’ Elaine Dutka reported recently, the unrated versions of such R-rated comedies as “Bad Santa,” “Harold & Kumar” and the “American Pie” series accounted for nearly 90% of their video sales.

This trend speaks volumes about the tendency in America to say one thing but do another. People claim they want wholesome family entertainment, but the big money on the Internet and in pay TV comes from pornography. In the rare instances when a studio puts out a feel-good valentine, like “Because of Winn-Dixie” or “My Dog Skip,” the movie dies on the vine. For all the talk of our country’s obsession with moral values, nothing succeeds with the American people like the salacious promise of a little extra nudity or hanky-panky in their DVD packages.

No subtlety is required -- in fact, the video stores are lined with DVDs with the cheesy-cake look of a “Girls Gone Wild” assemblage. When New Line released its unrated “Harold & Kumar” DVD earlier this year, the package showed the film’s stars superimposed on a naked female body, the woman’s breasts coyly obscured by an “extreme unrated” sign. 20th Century Fox’s unrated version of “The Girl Next Door” has Elisha Cuthbert, who plays a porn star in the film, seemingly naked, her torso covered by brown paper wrap. Disney’s unrated version of “Bad Santa,” which came with a racy hot tub scene that didn’t make the original film, is called “Badder Santa,” as if it were a porn knockoff made in someone’s living room in Chatsworth.

This unlikely boom in raunchy videos has been made possible by the fact that the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which rigorously regulates the ratings of theatrical films (and, just as important, their trailers and TV spots), has taken a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach to the video marketplace. Former MPAA chief Jack Valenti, who still oversees the ratings board, told Dutka that as long as the packaging is honest, he has no problem with unrated movies. Apparently the same goes with Wal-Mart, which has long refused to carry hip-hop CDs with parental advisory warnings but now happily stocks unrated DVDs, at least as long as they are assured by studios that the videos would be rated R if they had received a rating.

It’s quite a flimflam. The retailers display unrated videos, saying that they’ve been told they would be rated R if they’d actually gone through a ratings process. But the video packages project an entirely different message. “The Girl Next Door,” for example, is adorned with the come-on: “What they couldn’t show in the theatres!”

As you might suspect, this boom in unrated videos is quietly playing a role in the studios’ renewed interest in R-rated comedies. Whatever a studio loses in theatrical business could easily be made up for on the home-video end. As Universal Studios Home Entertainment chief Craig Kornblau told me, when his studio was debating whether to greenlight “40-Year-Old Virgin,” “I was jumping up and down, going on about how well it could perform. I’m telling our theatrical [production executives], ‘Whatever your box-office results are, we’ll outperform it on our end.’ ”

In fact, all of those R-rated comedies that underperformed at the box-office last year were big hits in their DVD release. Kornblau says the “American Pie” DVDs, largely on the strength of sales from unrated videos, are the biggest-selling home-video franchise in the studio’s history. “American Wedding,” the third installment in the series, had a 20-minute “bachelor party sequence” that was scripted specifically for the unrated DVD. It’s a no-brainer to imagine that, as this becomes standard practice at every studio, R-rated films will enjoy a renaissance. As Kornblau puts it: “It’s really hard to have an unrated [version of a] PG-13 film. In home video, it’s a huge marketing advantage to have an R-rated movie.”

It’s always possible that some moralist like James Dobson may someday try to put the kibosh on this new pot of gold, shocked by the presence of a naked girl in a shower or a puppet sex scene (one of the additions to the unrated “Team America” DVD). But the studios now have a great card to play. In order to get Congress to stiffen penalties against piracy, they agreed to legislation that allows businesses to market family-friendly censorship devices like ClearPlay, which allow skittish parents to edit sex, violence or bad language out of their DVDs. Having embraced ClearPlay, studios can spiritedly defend this new generation of unrated videos, saying that if some parents have the right to defang saucy movies, why can’t others enjoy a little extra sex or violence in an unrated version?

In the long run, thanks to the arrival of an assortment of new technology, most of these ratings issues will probably lose most of their relevance. The studios have already quietly found ways to disseminate R-rated marketing material across the Internet. Soon kids will be watching hi-def movie trailers on their 3G cellphones. It won’t be long before they’ll be seeing the movies themselves on some kind of hand-held video device. Unless the studios feel heat from Washington, most of these areas will remain outside the enforcement capabilities of the MPAA’s ratings board.

Despite New Line’s jitters about marketing “Wedding Crashers,” you can bet the studio will make its money back selling an unrated DVD of the movie. In America, if something is forbidden fruit, you’ll always find plenty of people eager to take a bite out of the apple.

The Big Picture appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Comments can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.