Photograph by Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection
Michael Fassbender, starring in Shame
Is there a chance Hollywood could move the NC-17 rating out of the movie ghetto?
The
Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board handed out its
second NC-17 rating of the year this week for the French film Blue is the Warmest Colorbecause
of its explicit sexual content. In response, the movie’s distributor,
Sundance Selects, said on Aug. 21 that it will not “compromise” director
Abdellatif Kechiche’s vision for the film and re-edit it to secure an R
rating. “An NC-17 rating no longer holds the stigma it once did,” Sundance Selects (AMCX) PresidentJonathan Sehring said.
Such
news is music to the ears of Joan Graves, head of the MPAA’s
independent ratings board, which would like to see NC-17 used far more
widely in the U.S. film industry. Traditionally, NC-17 has been equated
in the average moviegoer’s mind with chilling levels of violence and sex
akin to a porn film. The rating prohibits anyone under age 17 from
seeing the movie in a theater.
“A
film like this gives me hope,” Graves says by telephone, referring to
the French film that’s scheduled for an October release. “It’s a very
fine film that will get a lot of media attention as being good. That
gratifies me because they could have said: ‘We’re going to go out
unrated.’”
Blue is the Warmest Color won the Palme d’Or prize at
the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, reportedly shocking some viewers there
with the length and graphic nature of its lesbian sex scenes. An NC-17
rating was widely expected from the 12-person board, whose members are
required to be parents with children aged 5 to 15. And in Hollywood—a
town in which a movie’s financial performance often trumps everything
else—this would typically mean making strategic editing cuts to attain
an R, or releasing the film sans rating.
That calculus could be changing, slowly. Many credit the 2011 Steve McQueen filmShame,
about a sex addict played by Michael Fassbender, with having helped
shift attitudes about the rating, which was introduced in 1990 to
replace X—a rating that had been co-opted by the adult film industry
because the MPAA never copyrighted it. Shame received mostly positive reviews and grossed nearly $18 million, according to Box Office Mojo, which tracks film income.
The
rating system is voluntary, though the six member studios of the MPAA
must have ratings for their movies. The NC-17 rating has been
little-used—only 103 times in its 23-year history—because 75 percent of
the 750 to 900 movies submitted each year for ratings are from
independent filmmakers, Graves said. Those who don’t want the marketing
baggage associated with the rating often release their movie without
one.
The year’s first NC-17 film, Lucky Bastard,
is an independent B-style horror thriller based on a porn-movie theme.
The makers of that movie, which had only a very limited release, decided
an NC-17 would be useful. Lukas Kendall, one of the producers, explained the logic to MovieWeb earlier this year:
“Now that it’s rated, it’s an easy way to communicate. Look, it’s NC-17 so no one under 17 is admitted. It has its own connotations, which are helpful for us. We also thought that being an independent production, it helped elevate the tone of what we did. Because it’s a voluntary rating system. It made sense. I don’t want to say completely that we want to hide behind that brand. Its what made sense. That’s what the rating is made for. I don’t know why people run away from it. Except that they make a financial decision that they can’t make enough money, and it may exclude children from the audience. But the rating exists for this very purpose. Its so that there are adult movies for adult audiences. We’re going to roll the dice and see what happens.”
With
some films, it’s often difficult to gauge precisely whether a weak box
office performance resulted from the NC-17 rating or reflected a subject
matter that was never likely to generate major enthusiasm among
audiences, regardless of its rating. For example, the William Friedkin
film Killer Joe,
starring Matthew McConaughey as a corrupt police detective and
assassin, received an NC-17 for its 2012 theatrical run due to its
violence. Yet with its bleak
depiction of life in a poverty-stricken East Texas burg, this isn’t the
sort of picture that draws much of an audience. The movie earned less
than $4 million—not even half its budget. “I absolutely think the rating
had an adverse effect,” says David Dinerstein, president of LD
Entertainment, which produced Killer Joe. “We were all in it, hoping we could make a bit of a change.”
Part
of that change, film industry insiders say, will come from a
large-budget film with prominent stars willing to market the film
aggressively and help to educate the public that adult content doesn’t
mean disgusting or trashy. “I think we need a major film—which you know
is going to appeal to a lot of people—accept an NC-17 and go for it,
says Graves, a former stockbroker. “Unfortunately, Hollywood looks at
numbers so much in terms of whether a film is a success or not, so
probably it needs to be a film that could gross some money.”
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