A Letter Nobody Owned

By 1968 the Production Code was a document everyone negotiated around. Films had free-speech protection, the studios no longer owned the cinemas, European art films were playing without seals, and the exceptions had become the rule. Jack Valenti, who had taken over the Motion Picture Association of America two years earlier, replaced it.

The new system began on 1 November 1968, and it did not tell filmmakers what they could make. It told audiences who should see the result. There were four ratings: G for general audiences, M for mature audiences, R, which admitted children only with a parent or guardian, and X, which did not admit them at all.

G, M and R were registered as trademarks. X was not, so anyone could put the letter on anything, with or without submitting the film to the board.

For a short while X was a serious category. Midnight Cowboy was released with it in 1969 and won Best Picture the following spring, the only X-rated film ever to do so. A Clockwork Orange was released with an X in 1971 and was nominated too.

Then the adult film business noticed that the one unregistered letter was free, adopted it, and doubled and tripled it for marketing. Within a few years an X on a poster meant pornography, whatever film it was attached to. Newspapers refused advertisements for X films, cinemas would not book them, and by the middle of the decade the major studios had stopped releasing them. A category meant for serious adult films had been captured by a different trade.

The association's answer, in September 1990, was NC-17, and this time the mark was registered. Henry & June was the first film released with it. The new letter fixed the trademark and nothing else. Many cinemas still would not book it, many newspapers and broadcasters would not advertise it, and Blockbuster, then the dominant video chain, would not stock it. Showgirls was the test in 1995: a major studio, a wide release and a heavily publicised NC-17. It failed badly, and no major studio has attempted a wide NC-17 release on that scale since.

So the rating does something odd. In law it is nothing. No statute requires it, the ratings are a private service, and a filmmaker is free to release a film unrated. In trade it is close to absolute, because the businesses that put a film in front of an audience treat it as a stop sign. That is why distribution contracts routinely oblige a director to deliver a film rated R or lower, and why a director handed an NC-17 usually trims and resubmits until the letter changes.

Who decides? A panel of parents employed by the association's rating administration, whose identities were kept confidential for decades. Kirby Dick's documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) hired private investigators to find out who they were, and argued, with examples, that the board treats sex more harshly than violence, and some kinds of sex, gay sex and female pleasure among them, more harshly than others. The board's defenders answer that it reflects what American parents think, which is a claim about matching an audience rather than about applying a principle.

Appeals happen, and occasionally work. Blue Valentine was given an NC-17 in 2010 for a sex scene between a married couple, and the rating was overturned on appeal to an R without cuts.

The categories move, too. In 1984 complaints about Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, both rated PG, led to PG-13, a category Spielberg himself had suggested. A rating system that claims to measure content keeps being adjusted to what the audience will tolerate, which tells you what it is really measuring.

The defence of the whole arrangement is the one made at the start: a voluntary industry rating keeps government out. Once films had free-speech protection, the alternative was a patchwork of local boards and ordinances, and a single national system headed that off. The argument is correct as far as it goes. What it leaves out is that a private body can now do, through the market, what a public one would be challenged in court for doing, and that nobody voted for the raters.

The Code told filmmakers what they could not make. The ratings tell them, in effect, what they cannot sell, which turns out to cover much of the same ground.