With politicians openly threatening studio executives with sanctions over the marketing of violent movies, and a growing number of television stations electing to banish ads for R-rated pictures to the fringes of prime time — Hollywood is laying low, waiting to see if this particular storm over movie ratings will blow over any time soon.
Politics aside, it’s entirely possible the only immediate casualties in the war of words over ratings will turn out to be a pre-pubescent ballet dancer from the north of England and a tap troupe from Australia. Although they’re innocent bystanders, it’s the stars, distributors and producers of “Billy Elliot” and “Bootmen,” (which is scheduled to open sometime this fall) who may suffer most from the heat generated by the Federal Trade Commission’s 15-month study on violence in the media.
Neither of these genuinely inspirational films was directly targeted in a recent hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee. Still, it’s entirely possible that they could be the babies who get thrown out with the bath water.
By branding “Bootmen” and “Billy Elliot” with a scarlet “R,” an anonymous panel of professional moviegoers may have inadvertently restricted where, when and how these good-hearted, low-budget independent pictures — and other films that are intended to initially find a teen audience before finding a broader demographic — would be marketed.They have been tossed into the same sack reserved by the MPAA for such legitimately adult fare as “The Way of the Gun,” “Get Carter,” “The Patriot,” “American Psycho,” “Fight Club,” the American version of “Eyes Wide Shut,” and teen-bait raunch such as “American Pie,” “Scary Movie” and “The Cell.”
The cinematic sin of “Bootmen” and “Billy Elliot”: straying beyond the allowed quota — one — of a word commonly used to describe a sex act.
“It’s ludicrous, and so depressing,” said “Bootmen” producer and co-writer Hilary Linstead, in a trans-Pacific phone call. “The thing I was most concerned about — although I knew that, in America, you were tough on language — was the violence in our film. Newcastle’s a tough town, so I didn’t want to compromise [writer-director] Dein Perry’s idea and background, but we certainly didn’t give Dein the level of violence he probably experienced in his youth.
“Nobody would have believed the picture, at all, if there hadn’t been some rough language, though. It would have been laughed at by every young person in Australia.”
“Bootmen” describes how a rebellious young Aussie steelworker defies his father by rolling the dice on a career in tap. After he manages to offend traditionalists in Sydney, he returns to his roots to find inspiration for a new industrial-strength form of dance — and, at the same time, the troupe becomes the target of some local thugs.
In the entirely beguiling “Billy Elliot,” the son of a striking coal miner bucks family tradition by trading his boxing gloves for ballet slippers. His wild, free-form style of dance would seem to work against him, but he finds encouragement not only from a chain-smoking instructor (wonderfully played by Julie Walters), but the ghost of his late mother.
“Any boy growing up in a working-class environment — any environment, really — is going to have a struggle dancing,” said Stephen Daldry, director of “Billy Elliot,” during an interview in Beverly Hills. “In a movie like this, where the pattern of the language is organic to the film, and it’s just the way people speak, it’s a shame the MPAA couldn’t find it in themselves to make an exception. But I knew the rules going in and made the decision not to reduce the film or diminish the authenticity of the characters by pretending they don’t speak that way.”
Daldry said there was no pressure on him to produce a film that would win a PG-13 rating when it crossed the pond to America. Other directors, however, haven’t been as fortunate.
For example, an early reading of Amy Heckerling’s screenplay for “Loser” read very much like a solid “R” — the rating given her directorial debut, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” — which meant she had to do a lot of cutting to deliver the PG-13 she promised Sony. Whether these excisions diminished the final product enough to warrant the critical and commercial drubbing it ultimately received is impossible to determine, but they obviously didn’t help matters.
In response to the controversy over ratings, the Motion Picture Association of America has proposed a 12-point package of voluntary reforms, including a guideline suggesting that no violent R-rated movies be marketed to kids. Of course, the edict could be extended to include trailers, ads, junkets and Web sites for films such as “Billy Elliot” and “Bootmen.”
“There could be a tremendous chilling effect,” Linstead said. “Outside of England, where he appeared in the stage version of `Saturday Night Fever,’ Adam Garcia is practically unknown. One of the key marketing issues was to do a great many long-lead interviews in magazines for young women, and give him a high visibility.
“And that strategy worked, because there’s a much greater awareness of Adam now than there was just six months ago.”
In Australia and England, “Bootmen” and “Billy Elliot” both were deemed appropriate for viewers 15 and older. This two-year ratings gap between overseas and American audiences represents one of the key concerns voiced by artists here.
The Senate hearings were in response to reports by the FTC that accuse the motion picture, recording and video game industries of targeting advertising and marketing products with high violence content at young teens and children in violation of their own ratings codes.
In wake of all this, many critics and filmmakers have called on MPAA president Jack Valenti to revise the ratings code and narrow the chasm into which many R-rated films fall. At the same time, a panel of noted directors stressed that some of their pictures are, indeed, intended for adults and studios shouldn’t market them to teens, or force them to cut NC-17 material to get an “R” rating.
But few seem to care about those tame few movies that receive an “R.” In these cases, the stigma of an “R” means teens dying to see Garcia or Jamie Bell (“Billy Elliot”) have to persuade a parent or guardian to join them at the local megaplex.
Nonetheless, Valenti continues to vehemently defend the ratings system against all comers, refusing to budge when he’s asked to provide some flexibility in the form of adding a PG-15 or PG-17 to the existing code and leaving the R for harder material.”In the latest of annual surveys conducted by Opinion Research Corp., the rating system received an all-time high in parental endorsement … 81 percent of all parents with children under 13 found the rating system to be `very useful’ to `fairly useful’ in helping to choose the films they want there children to see,” he told the Senate panel, also noting that an FTC poll came up with the same 81 percent approval number. “Nothing lasts 32 years in this unfaithful, volatile marketplace unless it is providing a benefit to the people it aims to serve, in this case, parents.”
In a phone conversation last week, Valenti addressed the question of R-rated language by pointing out that rough dialogue “drives parents crazy, particularly in the South,” and, along with the content of preview trailers, is the most frequent complaint heard by the MPAA.
“Only a parent can judge the maturity level of their child,” he said. “The people who want change are the producers, directors and critics. But we designed the ratings system for parents, and they like what we’re doing.”
Neither does Valenti bow to evidence that suggests how devastating it can be when a movie is awarded a NC-17, which bars anyone from viewing that picture, even in the company of an adult.
In March, during a breakfast with reporters at the ShoWest convention, Valenti stood fast in his defense, repeatedly insisting that the MPAA wasn’t responsible for any difficulty faced by filmmakers who hit roadblocks when it came to distributing and advertising their pictures. Thus, he saw no reason to add a new rating — for example, “A” for adult — that would help producers of independent and foreign-language films exhibit their movies outside of festivals and art houses.
The fact is that many mall-based exhibitors are contractually bound from showing NC-17 pictures, newspapers might refuse to accept their ads, and large video chains won’t stock the titles. Thus, few studios even consider distributing a NC-17 picture, no matter how worthy of praise.
Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel, “Requiem for a Dream,” is an extremely well-sculpted, if harrowing, depiction of the horrors of drug addiction, and it probably deserves the NC-17 it received. It also is likely to produce several Oscar nominations.
Rather than accept the NC-17 and cower before the financial implications of such a stamp, the distributors of “Requiem for a Dream” have elected to go out without a rating. The de facto censorship encouraged by such a stigma — however unintended by the MPAA — is just too great an obstacle to overcome.
Of course, male dancers aren’t the only characters made to suffer the indignity of an undeserved “R.” The Jason Alexander-directed coming-of-age comedy “Just Looking,” which is scheduled to open Nov. 10, received a “R” for language and sexual situations.
Alexander pointed to the premium-cable industry’s insistence on full disclosure as way of solving the problem.
“What the ratings really do, I think, is protect against stupidity, even if you can’t convince an adult not to bring their 6-year-old to `The Cell’ … because they’re going to do it, anyway,” said Alexander. “As a parent, I want to know what’s in the film. Before a movie on HBO or Showtime, it might say there’s nudity, sexual situations, graphic violence, extreme violence … so, now I have all the information I need to make my decision.”
The ratings sticker on ads now advise parents to go to the MPAA’s Web site (www.mpaa.org/movieratings/ or www.filmratings.com) to get this kind of information. It’s a fact that far too many filmmakers use gratuitous sex, violence and raw language to jumpstart movies.
“The MPAA rules — other than one concerning language — are almost impossible to ascertain. They’re so subjective, and the way it rates movies is so secretive, and so Byzantine, and ultimately it’s all about power and negotiation … with the major studios having much more clout than the independents,” said Dale Pollock, dean of the school of filmmaking at North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.
“What’s interesting is that North Carolina is one of two states where, by law, you have to be 18 to see R-rated movies, without a parent or guardian. My students have had to deal with very detailed statutes concerning nudity, and, because of that, it’s made them more creative … they don’t opt for the easy sex scene, because they have to work harder at it.
“They might see this as infringing on their artistic freedom, but I’ve been impressed by how they’ve managed to work around these restrictions. It’s made their films more clever, more interesting and less sexual, which I don’t think is a bad thing.”
Pollock said that his students have demonstrated an eagerness to confront tough questions about their chosen artistic discipline, and the school is sponsoring an ethics conference, starting Nov. 9, at which representatives of the nation’s top 20 film schools will meet to discuss some of the issues raised in the last few weeks.
“Most directors now come out of film school, which wasn’t true 20 or 30 years ago,” Pollock said. “By addressing these issues and discussing them, we might see some changes in the next four or five years.”
