Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [55]
Some movies did not win the argument, but they were invariably counterculture films that offended sensibilities about sex. This lenience afforded horror started to run into conflict with the concerns of audiences worried about escalating crime rates. Jack Valenti sought to change policy in 1974 with a new chairman of the MPAA ratings board.
A thoughtful academic who shuttled between the university and his public television studio, where he hosted the interview program The Open Mind, Richard Heffner was hired to crack down on violence. He took over in the wake of the blockbuster buzz over The Exorcist, when criticism was mounting. When he arrived in Los Angeles for an interview, his soon-to-be predecessor Aaron Stern met him at the airport and drove him to his house in Beverly Hills in his Mercedes-Benz and explained the job. “He kept saying I had to watch out because the lifestyle is very seductive. He had a gorgeous white house. I didn’t like him a damn,” Heffner said. “He thought of himself as an editor from an aesthetic point of view.” After spending a week watching how the board operated, Heffner asked to see the films whose ratings had been controversial. One of the first ones he screened was The Exorcist. He couldn’t believe what he saw. “How could anything be worse than this?” he thought. “And it got an R?”
Heffner made his first stand the following year with the movie The Street Fighter, a low-budget Japanese martial arts film starring Sonny Chiba as a mercenary who delights in literally ripping the flesh from his victims’ bodies. In one of the gentler moments in the film, he yanks the Adam’s apple from someone’s neck. In another scene, he kills a rapist by ripping out his genitals. It was an easy target. An article in The New York Times about Heffner’s war on violence singled out this movie as the first film to receive an X rating due to violence.
Giving The Street Fighter a strict rating, Heffner let the movie industry know that he would apply more scrutiny to violence. Then again, no one in Hollywood much cared about the box office of an Asian fighting movie. Such films did not have the clout of The Exorcist. Change in Hollywood movies was not easy. There may have been too much money at stake not to inspire a serious lobbying effort by studios to protect the carnage that would sell tickets. Heffner’s big test came in June of 1975 when Universal Pictures released a terrifying new film called Jaws. Steven Spielberg’s thriller hardly showed any on-screen violence, in part because the mechanical shark didn’t operate properly. At the end, Spielberg showed a man gulped almost whole by a giant shark. The studio won again. The movie received a PG rating. This made a bigger mockery of the ratings board than The Exorcist.
There was an outcry by some critics and an assumption around Hollywood that Lew Wasserman, who ran Universal Studios and was friends with Jack Valenti, secured the rating. Small companies began to fight back. The Committee on Small Business in the House of Representatives invited Heffner to testify in response to complaints from independent production companies that the MPAA favored big studios over small ones in its handling of the ratings. The film that inspired the hearing was a scrappy little exploitation film called Dogs, a canine version of Jaws in which man’s best friend becomes a ravenous killer, with the help of the training of the United States Army.
In a letter to the producer sent July 6, 1976, Heffner explained why it received an X rating: “Dogs are not after all seldom-seen denizens of the deep or of the wilderness that children encounter only in fictional situations. They are household pets.” This made all the difference in the world to Heffner. Zombies or vampires were firmly in the realm of fantasy, but taking a figure from ordinary American life and turning it into a symbol of fear