NC-17: The Radioactive Rating

I know that in the minds of many, the phrase “adults only” is synonymous with “pornography” and “no redeeming value.”  For a long time, I had hoped that an adults-only Hollywood movie would challenge this conception.  For a long time, I had hoped that a major motion picture with content best restricted to adult audiences — but also clearly of redeeming value — would shake up such reductive categorizing.  And in the years 1998 and 1999, I thought that my hope might become a reality. 

It was in those years that I learned from the entertainment press that two prestigious big-studio productions — Steven Spielberg’s combat film Saving Private Ryan in the earlier year and Stanley Kubrick’s psychological drama Eyes Wide Shut in the next — were having ratings problems.  In their respective years, it was rumored that they might be “slapped” with NC-17s, Hollywood’s adults-only rating.  Saving Private Ryan was in danger of receiving the usually unwelcome rating for the intensity and grisliness of its World War Two violence, and Eyes Wide Shut might earn an NC-17 due to an orgy scene.  I remember wishing that the two films by famous auteurs, both starring big-name movie stars, would be designated as such in order that they could thereby prove to the movie-going public that an NC-17-rated film wasn’t a euphemism for “smut.”

To better explain my state of mind, it helps to take a look back:

When Hollywood switched from its Production Code to its age-based rating system in 1968, its X rating, the rating telling audiences that the film was for adults only, was supposed to be value neutral.  The trade organization the Motion Picture Association of America copyrighted its other ratings — G (general audiences), M (mature audiences — later GP and then PG for “parental guidance”), and R (restricted audiences) — it did not copyright the X rating.  (The MPAA added a fifth rating in 1984: PG-13, to occupy a middle ground between PG and R.)  But the X rating was not copyrighted so that films could assign themselves the adults-only rating without the members of the board needing to sit through one pornographic film after another.  (As a child, I remember watching a brief film explaining the new ratings system.)

Poster for ‘Midnight Cowboy’ (1969): note the X rating in the bottom left corner

In 1969, when the makers of Midnight Cowboy, an early Hollywood production to deal openly with the issue of homosexuality, wanted to declare up front that their film confronted controversial subject matter, they voluntarily gave their movie an X rating without screening it for the board.  Midnight Cowboy became a hit (“I’m walkin’ here!”) and won the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year.  Afterwards, the producers submitted their film for an official rating, whereupon it received an R.  To date, Midnight Cowboy is the only X-rated film with an Oscar for Best Picture.  This is one high-profile example of “adults only” not having its usual connotations.

However, after Midnight Cowboy and a few other prestigious X-rated productions (such as Kubrick’s 1971 futuristic drama A Clockwork Orange) had been released, the MPAA’s adults-only rating became synonymous with pornography.  Why?  This was because the intervening years saw the massive popularity of Deep Throat (1972) and other titles to show unsimulated sex in exacting detail, something that the big screen was never allowed to show legally before.  The greater accessibility of hard-core pornography in some mainstream theatres — as well as some porno movies boasting about their X rating or even hyperbolizing it as “XXX” — stigmatized the rating among U.S. audiences.  As a result, exhibitors became increasingly reluctant to show any film, however meritorious, with an X.  With the profitability of such films now imperiled, the major studios eventually seemed to go out of their way to avoid an X rating.

British poster for William Friedkin’s ultimately R-rated ‘Cruising’ (1980)

I didn’t really keep my ear to the ground, ratings-wise, when I was a teenager, but I remember hearing in the newspapers about the ratings tussle over William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), and how it was cut and re-cut to dodge an X rating.  I thought to myself at the time, “Why doesn’t Cruising just accept the X — the same way that Midnight Cowboy and A Clockwork Orange did — and be done with it?”  When Cruising was eventually released with an R rating, and I learned that both Midnight Cowboy and a slightly edited Clockwork Orange had been re-rated with Rs, it finally dawned on me that the meaning of the adults-only rating had changed. 

I later found out that a movie branded with an X rating was shut out of many cinemas, and such offerings were also frequently ignored by newspapers that refused to advertise or review them.  I learned that an X-rated movie, whatever its value, was immediately thought of by a lot of people as pornography, with all the pejorative associations that come with that category.  In short, by 1980, a movie with an X rating, unlike the early years of the designation, had a harder time making its money back.  I thought — and still think today — that the easy equation of “adults-only” with “porn” was unfortunate.  Just because a work might find its best audience exclusively among adults, that ought not to mean ipso facto that the work is obscene.  So, I was dismayed by this turn of events. 

Film critics Gene Siskel (left) and Roger Ebert: they discussed the new
NC-17 rating on a 1990 episode of their eponymous TV show

So were some like-minded film critics.  Among them, one critic was named Siskel, and another Ebert.  Starting in 1987, they pushed the MPAA for an adults-only rating that wouldn’t instantly connote pornography.  On their various film-review TV programs, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert lobbied the association to create something new: an “A” rating — A for “adults only.”  The head of the MPAA at the time, Jack Valenti, pushed back.  The film-ratings system was supposed to be an objective means by which parents could judge whether a film was appropriate for their children to see, Valenti said in his interviews and press releases at the time, and to introduce an A rating would be asking the board to assess film quality: to assess artistically redeeming sex and violence from sex and violence that was not artistically redeeming, a task reputedly outside the rating board’s systematic purview.  However, Valenti never substantively addressed the fact that X-rated feature films were usually stigmatized by audiences and exhibitors and therefore economically disadvantaged.  For years, the forces that favored a different kind of adults-only rating and those that didn’t fought each other to a standstill.

‘Henry & June’ (1990): the first film
to be rated NC-17

Things seemed to get especially testy around 1990, when the MPAA saddled Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Wayne Wang’s Life Is Cheap…but Toilet Paper Is Expensive, independent films of edgy subject matter but recognized artistic worth, with X ratings.  The feud over the ratings system then moved into the headlines of the entertainment press.  Then came Philip Kaufman’s Henry & June (1990), produced by Hollywood heavyweight Universal Pictures.  This fact-based feature about the erotically charged encounter between Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in 1930s Paris garnered an X by the MPAA, hitting Universal in the pocketbook.  The studio reportedly protested to Valenti.

Given the months of mounting controversy, I assume that Henry & June was the straw that broke the MPAA’s back.  Before long, Valenti announced the creation of a new rating: NC-17, the designation for a film in which no children under 17 years of age were to be admitted (later revised to disallow anyone 17 or younger).  The copyrighted rating replaced the X; it did not, as Siskel and Ebert urged, stand as an intermediary between the respectable R and the pornographic X. 

Maria de Medeiros (left) and Uma Thurman in ‘Henry & June’

Many film enthusiasts cheered the change and hoped that NC-17 would mark a new beginning for films reserved for adults.  But almost immediately afterwards, exhibitors, especially those in the more conservative parts of the U.S., let it be known that they regarded the NC-17 as nothing more than the smutty X by another name, and they refused to screen films with the rating.  Some newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times, said basically the same thing and refused to advertise them.  Now, instead of editing their adult-oriented films to avoid an X, the major studios edited them to avoid an NC-17.  Furthermore, in what was a rarity and clearly a test case, Hollywood’s NC-17 release with the highest profile, Paul Verhoeven’s sudsy and salacious melodrama Showgirls (1995), bombed at the box office (but did respectable business on video), furthering NC-17’s association with poor quality and further repelling the major studios from the rating.  The new beginning turned suddenly into the same old thing.

‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998)

That’s why I hoped that first Saving Private Ryan and then Eyes Wide Shut would receive the NC-17 rating: so that they would prove that the rating isn’t synonymous with pornography.  I remember at the time reading a Spielberg quote saying that if the MPAA gave his cut of Ryan an NC-17, he would respect the decision and distribute the film with the adults-only rating (a promise few other directors could make, because Spielberg co-owned his distribution company, Dreamworks SKG).  The stage was set, I thought, for the NC-17 to be given a new lease on life. 

But such was not to be.  Despite the ferocity and the bloody carnage of its opening D-Day scene, Spielberg’s cut of Saving Private Ryan received a respectable R.  I think that any reservations an MPAA member might have had about the opening scene’s graphic violence was offset by the rest of the film: a heartfelt salute to the World War Two generation, an affectionate tribute wrapped in star-spangled sentimentality.  As for Eyes Wide Shut, the digital insertion of a figure to block the view of a couple at the orgy — a remedy conceived by Kubrick himself — was all it took to remove the danger of an NC-17.  Eyes Wide Shut was released (after the director’s death, sadly) with an R rating.  I was dismayed that these two films didn’t challenge the negative connotations of the NC-17.  That would need to wait for another day — or another millennium.

However, it wasn’t very long after Eyes Wide Shut’s release that I discovered the book Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry by university professor Jon Lewis.  This is the thesis of Lewis’ scholarly book:

• Hollywood movies are commodities that, in order to maximize their profitability, need to circulate in as free a market as possible. 

• Perhaps the greatest hindrance to any film’s circulation is for it to be labeled “obscene” and being taken off the market for that reason. 

• Thanks to a 1974 Supreme Court decision, films rated G to R by the MPAA are effectively shielded from any charge of obscenity, but films rated NC-17 are not. 

• By reserving the NC-17 for “obscene” films, those rated G, PG, PG-13, and R are able to circulate freely without fear of obscenity accusations, thereby maximizing their profitability.  This is why adult-themed movies sometimes struggle so mightily to avoid an NC-17: they are simultaneously avoiding the uneconomical prospect of being tagged as obscene.

What Lewis says makes a lot of sense, and Hollywood v. Hard Core gives a thorough history of both the Production Code and the ratings system, analyzing the pertinent court cases (Supreme and lower) to make Lewis’ point.  Had I known this in 1998 or 1999, I might not have anticipated Saving Private Ryan and Eyes Wide Shut as films with censorship-challenging missions.

‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999)

Today, I’m not as preoccupied as I used to be with what particular movies are rated, and with what those ratings mean.  While some outlets still understandably bemoan the seeming inscrutability of the ratings system, such as Kirby Dick’s MPAA documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006), the debate has lost any real meaning for me.  The only context in which an NC-17 can really hurt a film’s performance is the theatrical market, and movies now have a longer and more important life on video.  Only when it comes to buying a ticket for a movie at a cinema’s box office does the rating carry any real stigma. 

Theatrical films originally rated NC-17 but edited to achieve an R can now release their first cut as an “unrated” edition for home video, perhaps alongside its R-rated iteration, thus maximizing profits even more.   And so many “films” (some now even shot directly on high-definition video) are now watched at home on DVD and tape that any trouble with the MPAA can be seen as a momentary hiccup in its monetary circulation, a mere initial inconvenience in its long march to video.  Moreover, some recent non-Hollywood NC-17 films have been screened in the prestigious theatres of large cities, films such as Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (色,戒, 2007) and Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle, 2013), a sign that the rating might be losing some of its ignominy, at least in major metropolitan areas.

So, the NC-17 seems to be sliding slowly into irrelevance, except for a controversial film’s (i.e., future unrated video’s) theatrical release.  And given new electronically based media and distribution systems, I sometimes even wonder if our entire contemporary conception of “movies” and “theatrical releases” may be slowly slouching towards irrelevance as well.  Gradually, mainstream audiences — particularly home-video audiences — seem to be realizing what I thought and tried to communicate all along: “adults only” need not be the same thing as “pornography.”

Ellen DeGeneres: ‘Best Photo Ever’

Why I Don’t Believe in ‘Reverse Racism’

  Australian comedian Aamer Rahman, from his video ‘Fear of a Brown Planet’

The Comic-Book Movie: The New Western?

Which is the more expensive and prestigious production?
Douglas Wilson in the 1942 serial ‘Batman’ (left), Christian
Bale in the 2008 feature film ‘The Dark Knight’ (center), and Adam West in the 1966-68 TV series ‘Batman’

Here’s a quick and inchoate thought: Are today’s comic-book (or as some prefer, “graphic-novel”) movies the counterpart of Hollywood’s World War Two-era and postwar westerns?  I don’t mean as the preferred action genres of their respective eras.  I mean as kinds of films with similar histories, two genres that went from pulp to prestige.

While some prestigious westerns were made during Hollywood’s silent era, the genre fell out of favor for most of the 1930s.  This may have been due to the poor box-office performance of expensive examples like The Big Trail (1930).  But for whatever reason, the western genre was relegated to B movies and serials with rather thinly drawn characters, films of poor quality with heavy-handed moral messages.  And these movies seemed aimed more at children than adults. 

John Wayne in ‘The Big Trail’ (1930)

In fact, The Big Trail was John Wayne’s first starring role in an A picture.  Had the film (which, incidentally, was shot in a widescreen process 23 years before the first CinemaScope feature) been a success, it might have been the vehicle that launched him into Hollywood superstardom.  However, The Big Trail’s ticket sales disappointed, and like the genre itself, Wayne was relegated to B movies and serials for most of the decade.  Yes, there were films that were exceptions, like the Oscar-winning Cimarron (1931, the only western to win Best Picture in the first 62 years of the award’s history), but that movie was also based on a respected Edna Ferber novel and (like Heaven’s Gate 50 years later) didn’t seem to sell itself as a western. 

The full arrival and flourishing of the sound-era western as a genre for adults as well as children would need to wait until the financial success of Henry King’s Jesse James and John Ford’s Stagecoach in 1939.  So, for most of the 1930s, the western was thought of as a low-budget pulp genre with black-and-white stories primarily made for juvenile audiences. I wonder if you told the average moviegoer (or movie critic) at the time that, in a few years, this disdained genre would one day be an esteemed, high-budget vehicle for important themes and Hollywood’s best talent — and especially that the B-movie actor most associated with the genre would become moviedom’s most enduring star — that audience member would have believed you.  Would this filmgoer have been able to take seriously the idea of such adult-oriented and critically acclaimed postwar westerns as Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950), George Stevens’ Shane (1953), and Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966), never mind Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969)?

John Wayne as 1930s B western star (left) and as postwar Hollywood icon

Fast-forward to the present.  Until the commercial triumphs of George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) and Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) (cemented by Steven Spielberg’s serial-inspired megahit Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981]), fantasy and super-hero properties weren’t usually thought of as prime adaptation sources for Hollywood.  Like the western of the 1930s, movies made from comic-book-type material were relegated to shabbily made B movies and serials.  The low budgets often produced laughable results because the heroes’ costumes that looked so impressive on the comics page looked less so on the screen, especially when made by second-rate costumers. 

The few super-hero feature films that were made when theatres stopped showing double bills (and therefore no longer needed B movies or serials) were campy, not serious, and still low-budget — such as the 1966 Batman feature that used the resources of the 1966-68 Batman TV series.  And like the B western, such movies were thought of primarily as offerings for juveniles.  I understand that the producers of Donner’s Superman were desperate to sign Marlon Brando for the project so that the rest of Hollywood would take it seriously and not think it was supposed to be a (full-blown) comedy.  When Tim Burton cast comic (as in ha-ha) actor Michael Keaton in his 1989 production of Batman, fans feared that the director would make another spoof like the 1960s TV series.  The fact that Burton did not make a comedy demonstrated the new earnestness with which Hollywood henceforth would deal with comic-book properties.

Kirk Alyn in the 1948 serial ‘Superman’ (left) and Christopher Reeve in the 1981 feature ‘Superman II’

As with the western of the 1930s, I don’t think that the average pre-Star Wars moviegoer would think that this heretofore-risible (when onscreen) comic-book subject matter would one day command Hollywood’s prime talent, and even deal with serious themes.  In the Production Code days, the industry would shy away from solemn subjects like rape and miscegenation, but when placed in the context of a familiar and long-ago genre like the western, the topics could become more palatable to the audience — hence John Ford’s The Searchers (1956).  Today, the issue of our civilized society slipping into anarchy might be too intense and too disturbing for the usual Hollywood patron, but in the guise of a super-hero film, such a subject becomes more digestible — hence Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008).  I also wonder if that pre-Star Wars filmgoer, who would have lived in a time when dozens of westerns would be screened theatrically each year, would imagine a day when the genre would become an infrequent anomaly in the major studios’ release schedules.

However, when the western was Hollywood’s most popular genre, the American motion-picture industry still produced a wide variety of films.  But nowadays, with the rise of pop culture’s respectability (at least financial respectability) and the spiraling costs of feature films, most releases from the major studios (with only a few exceptions, such as raunchy or romantic comedies and Oscar bait) need some sort of readily identifiable, pre-sold identity to the audience.  For the past few years, whenever I watch a trailer for a Hollywood movie in a multiplex, the advertised film contains some kind of fantasy/horror/science-fiction/comic-book/super-hero/action/video-game/television-series subject matter.  In twenty-first century mainstream American cinema, the aura of the fantastical that was once associated with the typical comic book has now become the dominant element in most of Hollywood’s big-screen productions — while more down-to-earth subject matter is increasingly relegated to smaller distribution arms and exhibition spaces.  I wonder when the homogenizing ubiquity of Hollywood’s fascination with the fantastical will finally, like the western genre, ride off into the sunset.

Trailer for the sci-fi film ‘Cowboys & Aliens’ (2011), based on the graphic novel: virtually the only way you can get anything like a western made these days

Got to Be a Joker

After watching the TV special The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to the Beatles (for the second time) last night, I recall this anecdote:

About 15 years ago, I used to vist a British pub in L.A. that hosted a Beatles tribute band every Saturday.  In a twist, this tribute band’s “Ringo” was a long-haired young woman.  Watching the band set up one night, I recalled a phrase that I used to hear in my childhood and thought I’d make a joke. “Hey, Ringo,” I called across the room, “get a haircut! You look like a girl!”

The joke was completely lost on her. She didn’t know a time when it wasn’t acceptable for men to have long hair.

What’s in a Name?

Cartoon by Steve Sack for the Minneapolis Star Tribune

“I wish the Washington Redskins would change their name,” I said, apropos of nothing.

My Dad gave me this strange look, as though desiring that Washington’s National Football League team would go by a different moniker was the most bizarre statement that anyone anywhere could make.

This happened about three years ago.  I can’t really remember anything else about the incident.  I don’t remember the context of my statement.  I think I made the comment in my Dad’s kitchen, where the two of us would often congregate whenever I visited him at his home not far from the team’s District of Columbia stomping ground.  I don’t remember if I was sitting or standing.  I don’t remember if we were just passing through the kitchen on our way to somewhere else or if we had settled ourselves next to the stove.

I can only remember my Dad’s expression: a look that mixed both puzzlement and pity, worried incredulity that such a trivial and useless thought would ever occupy anyone’s head.

Why did I say it?  Maybe the two of us were sitting at the kitchen table and watching the small portable TV on the counter, as the monitor beamed a football game.  Maybe I was sitting at the table reading the Washington Post, as I often did.  Whatever the reason, it’s a thought I had harbored for a long time.

Coming from the Washington area, I was closer to this issue than I would have been if I had grown up in another part of the country.  I’m not into sports, but I always wanted to root for my hometown-area teams whenever I caught them playing a game on my local Los Angeles bar’s TV.  However, rooting for Washington’s NFL team was always difficult for me.  Although several other professional sports teams are saddled with problematic names referencing Native Americans — the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs — Washington’s football team is the only one whose name is an outright racial slur.  So, whenever I want to cheer on a hometown-area NFL team, I root for the Baltimore Ravens.  (The Ravens are named after a poem by Baltimore resident Edgar Allan Poe.  How cool is that?!)

Although I dislike the Washington NFL team’s name, I had no intention of doing anything about it.  The issue of the team changing what it’s called had come up many years before, and its fans — in interviews on the local news, in letters to newspapers, and elsewhere — made an adamant show of defending the name.  I knew that if I ever made any kind of gesture advocating a change of the team’s nickname, I would be hit by gale-force blowback that I’d never want to deal with.  If the name ever changed, I thought to myself, it would do so when Washington football fans grew away from it.  However, I occasionally fantasized about Native American casino owners buying the team and transforming the appellation that way.  (My choice: the Washington Whities — turn the tables.)

So, it’s something of a surprise to me that the issue of the Washington NFL team changing its name has picked up steam in recent months.  Why did the topic suddenly become so pressing that owner Dan Snyder felt compelled to write an open letter in the Washington Post last October defending what the team is called? After searching the Internet for the reason, I came upon this recent op-ed in the Chicago Tribune:

That debate [about its name] has more traction now because the team faces a critic that is more persistent and has deep pockets to finance a campaign. As The Washington Post recently reported, the Oneida Indian Nation, which is leading the campaign, has become a financial and political powerhouse thanks to its huge interests in casino gambling in New York state.

So, that’s the reason!  Native American casino owners didn’t need to go to the extent of actually buying the team to make their displeasure with the name palpable and relevant.

As for Snyder’s letter, his defense of the team moniker was mostly about its emotional associations for him and other fans.  The team, which was originally based in Beantown, was first known as the “Boston Braves” but changed its name in 1933 to avoid confusion with an identically titled baseball club.  So, the phenomenon of the franchise changing its name is not unheard of, and I wonder if the 1933 alteration of nomenclature met with similar resistance.  But words change connotations all of the time, and if a majority (not just those whom Snyder cites) of those most directly affected by the word (in this case, Native Americans) object to it, shouldn’t that trump the emotional associations that outside groups have with that word?  Missing for me in Snyder’s letter was why the name “Redskins” conveyed “strength, courage, honor, and respect” in a way that no other name ever could, and in a way that outweighs this country’s troubled history of race — for that history is what the name denotes.

More recently, lawmakers in Washington have sent letters urging Snyder to change the name, and some have even introduced legislation to disallow “the federal registrations of trademarks using the word redskin in reference to Native Americans.”  I would advise these legislators to back off now that they have made their opinions on the matter known.  If the Washington NFL team ever changes its sobriquet due to political pressure directly from Congress, fans would become especially resentful, and conservatives and libertarians would gain a new scapegoat to epitomize the Heavy Hand of Government.  Leave this issue to the private market and Native American activists.

Good luck, folks of the Oneida Indian Nation.  Your cause is a good one, and I’ve supported it for a long time.  You’re obviously ready to deal with the blowback from the name’s defenders in a way I never was.  You can look forward to some passionate advocacy of the name from die-hard Washington football fans.  And maybe some vituperation, too. 

But here’s one thing I’m sure of: if the subject of the Washington NFL team changing its name ever comes up again between me and my Dad, he probably won’t give me such an incredulous look the next time.