What does a filmmaker whose track record includes the depiction of a man driving a nail through his own penis and another man vowing to urinate on the grave of a Catholic priest who sexually molested him as a teenager do for an encore? The answer from fearless documentary-maker Kirby Dick is This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a thorough and at times very funny examination, in the words of censored filmmakers and the work of a lesbian private investigator, of nearly 40 years of the shamefully shrouded activities of the Motion Picture Association of America's [MPAA] film ratings board.
Dick quickly gets to the heart of why queer filmgoers should care that eight once totally anonymous middle Americans get to decide if candidly framed films about us will make it to a filmgoing public beyond Sunset Blvd., the Mission District and the Lower East Side.
Dick and producer Eddie Schmidt confess it wasn't easy to get filmmakers whose work was clipped for mainstream viewing by the MPAA ratings board to appear on camera. Kimberly Peirce, whose Boys Don't Cry inspired an Oscar-winning performance by Hilary Swank, describes her incredulity at receiving the MPAA board's NC-17 rating, which meant fewer theatre bookings, and practically no newspaper or TV ads to support her pioneering depiction of a young transsexual's ultimately deadly attempt to pass for a boy.
"I said to my lawyer, what were the problems? There were three: after Brandon goes down on Lana, he comes up and he wipes the cum off his mouth. We had a strike on that. 'What's the problem?' 'Well, we don't really know, but that's really offensive.' So I was like, 'I shoot Brandon in the head, and do all these things to him, and that's fundamentally okay? Can somebody explain that?'
"'Okay, what's the second one?' 'The anal rape, they want to cut it out.' 'Well, I'm not cutting it out, that's just inherent to the movie. What's the third thing?' 'Well, Lana's orgasm is too long.' I was like, 'Well, who's ever been hurt by an orgasm that was too long?' 'Well, it's offensive.'
"So when I looked at Lana's orgasm, I was like, 'Oh, this is totally about Lana's pleasure. So there's something about that that's scaring them.'"
Peirce notes "most movies are written by men, directed by men, they're mostly the male experience. Even in sex scenes, it's from a male perspective. I don't think the focus is female pleasure. I think that [to the censors] female pleasure is unnatural, scary. If you're a woman who understands female pleasure, you're probably going into terrain that's unfamiliar. Unfamiliarity is what breeds these N-17s."
Apart from the lovely subplot of a lesbian private eye shadowing film board members, photographing them with a hidden camera and rooting through their garbage, the eye-popping moments for queer viewers are documentation of what we've long suspected: a double standard exists, gay love vs. straight. Dick lays several scenes of almost identical bedroom positions side by side: Boys Don't Cry/gay sex/NC-17; American Pie/straight sex/the much more commercial R.
Sex dish
There are also some hilarious moments when John Waters dishes the ratings board for penalizing the mere discussion of sex on screen; director Wayne Kramer and Cooler co-star Maria Bello complain that a brief glimpse of Bello's pubic hair threatened that film with an NC-17; and South Park creator Matt Stone chimes in about the disparity of treatment received at the Ratings Board by studio-backed pictures vs. budget-challenged indies. Stone claims that studio producers receive detailed information on how they can get a better rating, while independent producers are left in the dark.
Dick's conceit is that he's making the very film you're watching to be reviewed by the film board, and that he then challenges his own NC-17 rating. In the press notes for the film, Dick's producer Eddie Schmidt notes the delicious irony of board members, "the ultimate voyeurs, watching a film about themselves, the ultimate voyeurs."
In turning his little doc about the ratings board into a kind of film noir mystery about the identity of the film raters, Dick needed a villain. He found a good one in the MPAA's former president and creator or the rating system Jack Valenti. Having an officious Texan (former Lyndon Johnson aide) dispense pious homilies about why ratings are good for us not only fits our current national malaise, but also gives a nice insight into how power is wielded (for 38 years) in official Hollywood. Dick cuts between Valenti's smiling face and those unsmiling eyes to a brief history lesson on the relationship between the MPAA, Tinseltown union-bashing and the subsequent rise of the blacklist.
Not Yet Rated is well worth seeing for its high-speed car chases, public confrontations (a priceless scowl on the face of a female board member caught on lunch break), lovely snippets of NC-17 footage (we get most of Lana's self- indulgent orgasm) and a trip across an American culture landscape bounded by Walter Cronkite and John Waters.