'This is Not Yet Rated' Q&A

Trevor Jronston speaks to documentary maker Kirby Dick.

Aug 29 2006

LA-based documentarist Kirby Dick has made films on subjects as diverse as French philosopher Jacques Derrida, self-styled 'supermasochist' Bob Flanagan, and child abuse accusations against America's Catholic Church. His latest feature is 'This Film Is Not Yet Rated', a witty investigation into the secrecy-shrouded working practices of the Motion Picture Association of America (who issue guidance ratings for films on release in the US), probing their contentious response to sexual and violent imagery, and their alleged preferential treatment for Hollywood product over the arthouse sector.

Obviously, there's a need for consumer advice, so isn't your documentary just a collection of filmmakers like John Waters complaining because they didn't get the ratings they wanted?

I wish it were as simple. If it were a transparent system, I would never have made the film. But it's a completely non-professional system, with no written standards, and untrained raters who're just put into viewing rooms the next day. Basically, the MPAA wants to control ratings because they represent the Hollywood studios and ratings affect box office – a more restrictive rating will dramatically inhibit potential takings. It's all set up so that the violent films made by the studios get less restrictive ratings and get out to a wider audience, while the competition, from foreign and independent films with more mature themes and images of adult sexuality, receive harsher decisions which hobble their potential audience reach.

But wouldn't the MPAA argue that they're simply reflecting the values of Middle America?

Yes, but they're also setting the cultural agenda. It's true America's a very violent country, and it's also true that there's a certain puritanical streak. But I think the MPAA has to take a certain responsibility for the violence in the country because of the way it has unleashed violent images to a PG-13 audience.

So where do the MPAA's value judgments come from?

This is not a morally driven system for the most part. There's a political element too. The MPAA is the lobbying arm for the six major studios which together control 95 per cent of the US film business, and ratings is just one part of what they do. Their major presence in fact is in Washington, where they've been very successful in recent years at getting some very onerous intellectual property laws and copyright legislation passed. So, by giving films which have sex in them a restrictive NC-17 rating it plays very well to the right and the Christian right who at present control Congress. The political calculation is that by seeming to crack down on 'smut' – regardless of whether it's made by the great film artists of our time – it helps the MPAA get the laws through Congress that they want to see.

So behind the ratings board's counting of pelvic thrusts or its seemingly punitive response to images of gay sexuality, there are clear financial imperatives?

They're the representatives of major corporations, they're driven by the bottom line. Which is why the whole issue of transparency becomes important. The system is set up in such a way that everything's kept secret, so that nobody can construct a critique. Industry people and Hollywood journalists actually gasped during our Sundance screening when we revealed who was on the Appeals Board.

Could you still have made the film without that investigative element?

I'd been wanting to do this for about ten years, and there were actually funding problems because several sources of finance were too closely associated with the MPAA. But when I hit on the idea of hiring a private investigator that's when I knew I had a dramatic arc. The conceit of submitting my own film for a rating gave it a kind of one-two punch, so I knew I'd have a film that worked, whether or not we were actually able to name names.

But since you were never going to get a more lenient decision, wasn't it just grandstanding to go through the appeals process?

No, because that was the only way I could get inside the system. Certainly there's a stunt quality to that, but if you have a certain polemic behind the stunt it can be very interesting. Look what I learned about the sheer absurdity of the Appeals Board, where you can't bring your own attorney and you're not allowed to quote precedence. At the same time, the MPAA knew this film was going to get a lot of attention, so they had to be really straight with me, and couldn't come across as vindictive. They're still very savvy when it comes to publicity.

'This Film Is Not Yet Rated' opens on Friday.

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