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...play at this game. Brüno, the Wrap's Sharon Waxman reported on Sunday, "has been slapped with an NC-17 rating on its first submission to the Motion Picture Association of America because of numerous sexual scenes that the ratings board considers over the line." The NC-17, which forbids admission to those under age 17, is a toxic label. Many theater chains won't play a film with that rating; some newspapers and TV networks won't advertise it; and retail behemoths like Wal-Mart won't stock the eventual DVD. (See the 100 best movies...
...Hollywood, you see, the making of a movie involves two crucial groups of people: the creative team, who put it together, and the MPAA ratings board, which decides whether and in what form it can be shown if it is to win the magic R. In rare cases, a film's rating has been appealed to a higher committee, the MPAA's Supreme Court, and won. Generally, though, achieving a softer rating is a matter of negotiation. The board tells you what to take out, and you do it. Or they don't, and you have to guess...
...that can depend on who your backer is. Back in 2006, I reviewed This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick's polemical documentary about the MPAA board, which charged that the ratings system had a bias toward films from the big studios and against indie movies. I wrote: "Dick takes a deposition from Matt Stone, who created South Park with Trey Parker. Stone says that when their indie comedy Orgazmo was slapped with an NC-17, they were given no hints in cutting the film to get a less proscriptive rating. Yet two years later, when Paramount was behind...
...moment, Baron Cohen is doubtless playing the uncompromising artist, insisting that every frame of his film be shown as is; and Universal, I'd guess, is exerting its muscle both on the MPAA to approve a version with some shock value and on their star-auteur to throw the board a few boners and get the damn R. Baron Cohen shoots a lot of footage in his docucomedies, and, the studio spokesman told Waxman, "With the quantity of material available, I cannot foresee a problem. It's not even April and the film comes out July...
...Earlier this month, though, the Financial Accounting Standard Board proposed a change to bookkeeping rules that would allow banks to characterize these loan sales as "distressed." That would allow banks to continue to claim they could get more for the loans they have yet to sell once this whole global financial crisis thing finally blows over...