The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Doesn't Make X-rated Movies

Introduction

1 TAKE ONE: Puppet sex. Two naked marionettes “making love.” This explicit two-minute sequence from Team America: World Police was given an NC-17 (no one seventeen and under admitted) in September 2004 by the Rating Board of the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), the movie rating system operated by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Contractually obligated to deliver an R-rated product (under seventeen requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) to Paramount, the filmmakers Trey Parker and Matt Stone—who four years earlier had a similar ratings ruckus over South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)— resubmitted the scene nine times with various alterations before the Rating Board agreed to change the NC-17 to an R.1 “They said you can’t do anything but missionary position,” remarked Parker, as his production team eventually whittled down the first cut of the scene from two minutes to forty-five seconds for theatrical release.2 The final cut of the edited puppetpassion sequence expunged many shots of nontraditional lovemaking practices , including moments of defecation and urination, while scenes featuring gory bullet-ridden bodies, gruesome dismemberments, and other forms of marionette-on-marionette violence remained untouched. For Parker this incongruity represented CARA’s hypocritical treatment of simulated sex and simulated violence. “We blow [a puppet of actress] Janeane Introduction Our characters are made of wood and have no genitalia. If the puppets did to each other what we show them doing, all they’d get is splinters. —Scott Rudin, producer of Team America: World Police People get shot in the head and bashed to a bloody pulp in movies all the time, but we get an NC- for a glimpse of pubic hair. Why is that, do you think? —Wayne Kramer, director of The Cooler 5 Garofalo’s head right off. But the MPAA is more concerned with the puppets being naked.”3 TAKE TWO: One and a half seconds of pubic hair. Thirty-six frames of film. That is all that stood between an R and an NC-17 rating for The Cooler in June 2003. The brief moment considered too explicit for an R by the Rating Board was a bedroom encounter between actors William H. Macy and Maria Bello that revealed a glimpse of the actress’s pubic region as Macy kissed her torso. Not in question were two other moments: a shot of frank sexuality where Bello has her hand cupped over Macy’s genitals and a graphically violent scene where a hotel director, played by Alec Baldwin, whacks the kneecaps of Macy’s son with a tire iron.4 Director Wayne Kramer contended that the Rating Board capriciously applied the NC-17 rating to The Cooler, arguing that many other R-rated films, particularly those filled with violence , were much more objectionable than The Cooler’s mature and honest lovemaking scenes. “Go see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [2003],” explained Kramer.“This is an R-rated movie where somebody blows their head off, and then the camera moves through the hole in their head and out the back of their head again, and that’s perfectly okay. Why is that so much more palatable than a beautiful naked body of a regular person?”5 Macy echoed Kramer’s disgust, characterizing the R rating as a “catch-all” category for violence . “Road to Perdition [2002] got an R and they mowed down thirty men in cold blood. It was just wholesome murder, a movie about vengeance. The fact that they gave that an R rating and wouldn’t give The Cooler an R unless we cut two seconds of Maria Bello’s pubic hair is sick.”6 While Paramount, an MPAA-member distributor, acquiesced to the Rating Board’s R specifications for Team America, the independent distributor Lions Gate, a non-MPAA member, elected to appeal the NC-17 for The Cooler to CARA’s Appeals Board. Needing a two-thirds majority of the Appeals Board members present to overturn the Rating Board’s original rating, Lions Gate lost by one vote, nine to six.7 Members of the Appeals Board urged the distributor to release the film with an NC-17, but Lions Gate went for the R, replacing the one and a half seconds of non-hard-core imagery with alternative footage for U.S. theaters. For Lions Gate or for Paramount, the adultsonly category was never really an option. The NC-17, like its predecessor, the X, which it replaced in 1990...