Word: nc
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...Dick - who made the terrific (NC-17) study Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist in 1977, and earned an Oscar nomination for the predatory-priest doc Twist of Faith - asks pertinent, pointed questions about the secrecy of the process. Filmmakers are not told the identity of their judges, either on the nine-person ratings committee or on the larger appeals board. Part of the movie's fun is in Dick's hiring of a detective who tracks down the names of the members on these two star chambers. (The sleuthing is amusing but ultimately irrelevant. The raters...
...chronic biases: toward films from the big studios and against indie movies; and toward violence and against sex. On the first count, 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 their movie South Park: Bigger, Longer Uncut, the board, according to Stone, offered explicit help in which scenes might be softened or removed to achieve...
...orgasm (Boys Don't Cry), a straight orgasm (Single White Female); a guy on top, with a guy (Mysterious Skin), a guy on top, with a woman (Unfaithful); two women (Henry and June), a man and a woman (Sideways). Each time, the gay scenes received an NC-17 rating while the straight scenes got an R. And in most cases, the NC-17 films were independent productions, the R films from major studios...
...Democracy within an autocracy. Art within an industry. Those are the variables a filmmaker faces in getting his work to a large audience. As for the movie studios, the only thing pure about them is their devotion to earning a buck. They see an NC-17 rating as restraint of trade, so they're unlikely to change the system in order to indulge a few artist-directors...
...Rated to the board. I would love to have been a bug (or a hidden camera) on the wall of the screening room as the members watched this expose of their methods and themselves. To no one's surprise, including Dick's, the film received an NC-17 rating. When he questioned board chair Joan Graves about her group's decision, she deflected matters of political embarrassment and simply told him the film got its rating for images of extreme sexuality - his brief clips from NC-17 films. And when he asked about the qualifications for board membership, adding that...