In the simpler time before the Web, the MPAA's Classifications and Ratings Administration had things so much better. A restrictive "R" or "NC-17" rating on a studio property would irritate no more than a few executives, filmmakers and producers at a time, all of whom would fuss in the press about censorship before making the necessary trims to get their movies to a releasable, marketable standard for their intended audiences. But while the process hasn't necessarily gotten any easier for the creatives and their studio patrons, at least now there's some wider cultural pushback that may finally help reinvent the rating system for modern times.
Not that the studios themselves are any happier with what CARA boss Joan Graves proposed Sunday in the New York Times. Just when they'd gotten used to developing, budgeting and marketing films on the basis of their MPAA ratings -- particularly in the vague windows between PG, PG-13 and R -- Graves had an interesting response to the Web sites that have increasingly influenced the film economy with their own ratings gauging everything from morality to smoking in cinema: A "15" rating, which would indicate a parental advisory for content possibly unsuitable for kids under, well, 15.
Graves doesn't specifically reference examples of films, scenes or thematic material that would qualify, but I imagine Angels and Demons -- with its lung-blood spray and graphic priest immolations -- might be a prime candidate alongside intense but more innocuous releases like Slumdog Millionaire. Or anything else with strong sexual references and/or prodigious cigarette consumption, the latter of which faces shrill opponents who have already accrued way more influence in Hollywood than they have any right to. Never mind that some 15-year-olds are smoking on their way to the multiplex where they'll probably have sex in the back row of an R-rated film they snuck into -- pressure is pressure, and if a public ratings reconsideration will buy the MPAA time (and reinforce its relevance), then the generally press-shy Graves will take the NYT's call.
That's not the only call she'll be taking. The studios who underwrite the MPAA and who supported a ratings system in the first place to avoid government oversight don't want to even think about the box-office implications of something like The Dark Knight or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen facing a 15 rating. Nor do theater owners, who don't feel like increased policing of young patrons across the ratings spectrum is really their job. (Especially not when they have to pay for it out of their own pockets.)
Filmmakers, meanwhile, who have long been fed up with the thinly veiled censorship represented by CARA, would probably embrace a 15 rating insofar as it allowed for a little more consistency at the ratings stage of postproduction. Bruno or The Hangover would still be Bruno and The Hangover. But if Sam Raimi could up the gore or intensity quotients of his PG-13 Drag Me to Hell to please his old-school splatter fans and the new-generation comic-book contingent, then that rating could actually be a boon for him and Universal (not to mention their relatively anemic box office). After all, if, as Graves tells the NYT, transparency is as of much interest to her as it is to her oft-frustrated subjects, then aren't the most specific possible ratings worth a look? How is a 15 not a good thing?