Movie ratings and other rambles

[mariness]

Back in high school, when I was well under 17, a friend and I walked into an R movie. Quite openly. Our plan had been to buy tickets for a PG movie and then sneak into the R movie we wanted to see (one reason to always be slightly skeptical of movie ticket sales as an indication of actual viewership - I can't imagine the American teenager has

Comments

[wyldemusick]

There was a documentary about the ratings system some years ago (trying to remember the title) that was sent to the Ratings And Classification Board and was promptly classified NC-17, despite the lack of any actual reason to rate it so.

Wrting and cutting to gain a specific rating is an old game, and it can get very odd indeed -- there was the case of, for example, Sam Peckinpah's THE KILLER ELITE, which was made as a fairly typical Peckinpah movie, and which everyone expected to come out as an R rated film for the usual reasons. Peckinpah suddenly decided to recut the thing (without reshoots!) to get a PG, which rather mortally wounds the film...which still has in it a brief but bloody shot of an agent having his brains blown out, and numerous bare breasts. No-one has been able to figure out why Peckinpah did this, although he might have been jumping in before the studio decided to whack at it.

There's some pretty legendary examples, though -- TIE ME UP, TIE ME DOWN got an NC-17 initially, MIDNIGHT COWBOY was rated X for a long time, and then re-rated to R, David Cronenberg's CRASH had a special cut for Blockbuster rental & sale that excised a lot of material as Blockbuster doesn't take NC-17 titles.

A lot of the harsher ratings fall, unsurprisingly, on the indies, in part because they can't afford to fight it as much, and partly because the bigger studios give better perks. Even here sometimes the board just cuts to the chase -- which is why THE DARK KNIGHT got a PG13.

[cardinalximinez]

"This Film Is Not Yet Rated"? ...which I still need to watch one of these days.