Word: pg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...PG-13 Outcry
...teaches martial arts and pacifistic wisdom to the 97-lb. weakling tired of being beaten up by the bullies at school. Robert Mark Kamen's script is developed with maddening predictability, and John G. Avildsen's direction is literal and ambling. Films like this are what the PG r ating is supposed to be all about. And how one longs to spot a few gremlins chuckling malevolently in the corner...
Grisly scenes like these have not hurt the box-office receipts of either picture. Indiana Jones earned a phenomenal $94.5 million in its first 23 days, and Gremlins grossed $ 12.5 million in its first weekend. But they have incited a torrent of complaints that the PG rating given both movies fails to warn impressionable young children. The outcry has come not just from peevish movie critics but from theater owners and parents as well. Carl Hoffman, a film buyer for the Dubinsky Brothers movie chain in the Midwest, says that 50 people stalked out of a screening of Gremlins because...
Similar sentiments are growing in Hollywood. Last week the Motion Picture Association of America (M.P.A.A.) seemed close to making perhaps the most sweeping change in the rating system since it was established 16 years ago. Ready for unveiling is a new rating, known as PG-13, that would prohibit children under 13 from being admitted unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. The rating would presumably be used in the future for movies like Indiana Jones that are deemed acceptable for teen-agers but potentially harmful to younger children...
...PG-13 proposal has been endorsed by a number of studio chiefs and theater owners and by the chairman of the M.P.A.A. rating board. Even Spielberg, confessing in a TV interview that there were parts of Indiana Jones that he would not want a ten-year-old to see, advocated the creation of the new rating. The proposed change, however, has been opposed by M.P.A.A. President Jack Valenti. He argues that the current system is working well enough and that adding more classifications would cause more confusion. "Who is smart enough to say what is permissible for a 13-year...