Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [54]
Aaron Stern, the head of the ratings board in the early seventies, had very strong feelings about sex. He recommended that the rating for Midnight Cowboy be changed from R to X. Woodstock, which featured music and free love and lots of nudity, got the same rating. In The Movie Rating Game, Stephen Farber, a member of the ratings board for a short stint before leaving and becoming a journalist, wrote that Stern suggested that films rated G or GP should only show sex “in the context of a loving relationship.”
Violence, well, that was something else. The prevailing opinion of the ratings board was that horror was harmless because it was fantasy and therefore not imitable, the unofficial critical standard. No child would suck blood, but they might want to have premarital sex, so that was a more pressing concern. The Exorcist tested this view, since it showed the sexualizing of a twelve-year-old girl. The Devil communicates through her by making her masturbate with a crucifix. The purpose here was clear—to use the sexuality of a prepubescent girl to unsettle a modern audience. Nothing like this had ever been seen in a mainstream movie. Friedkin wanted more blood and gore than had been seen in Hollywood before, but he also wanted a huge audience. That meant that the film needed an R rating. In a rare move, Stern watched the movie before the other members of the board and called Friedkin personally to tell him that he would release it without any cuts. Stern, the first person from outside the production to give the director feedback, said it was an “important” movie. So he gave it an R.
If a film that shows a child masturbating with a crucifix doesn’t get an X, what would? Theaters in Washington, D.C., and Boston simply ignored the MPAA and rated the movie X. The movie brought the fairness of the MPAA into doubt. “If ‘The Exorcist’ had cost under a million or had been made abroad, it would almost certainly be an X film,” Pauline Kael wrote in her review. “But when a movie is as expensive as this one, the MPAA ratings board doesn’t dare give it an X.” In The New York Times in February of 1974, MPAA president Jack Valenti defended himself, writing that the film had “unwavering morality.”
Only a few years after they were instituted, it was clear that the ratings had little effect in protecting children from violent studio films. They served the industry that created them but only hurt the other parts of the movie business. What they did quite effectively was put pressure on independent producers, like Herschell Gordon Lewis, who couldn’t exactly make the argument that his movies were artistically or politically important. “When I saw what [the studios] were getting away with, I realized I can’t match that. The MPAA killed me,” he said. “My little spot in the film world was gone.”
Some independent producers and distributors learned how to game the system. William Immerman, the lawyer for American International Pictures, describes the process as a kind of horse trading. We’ll take out a gory nipple if you let us keep a severed head, what do you say? “With Stern, you were always negotiating,” he says, singling out the 1970 movie Count Yorga, Vampire, a modern spin on the vampire myth.
After the first screening, three members saw Yorga as part of the tradition of violent escapism led by Frankenstein and Dracula. They argued for an R rating. The other three, led by Farber, argued that this movie represented something different, a mixing of sex and violence that could be very disturbing. “The others looked on it as something totally unreal. But the people on the board were old-timers, carryovers from another era. The things that came out in the sixties were Vincent Price films or the Hammer movies. That was their frame of reference,” Farber says. While everyone on the board wanted an R or an X, AIP had other ideas. They played