Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated shows a Kafka-esque world where my side of the battle has literally been having its ass handed to it for decades by the MPAA. It’s no surprise that the MPAA is a collusive, secret, corporate nightmare of hypocrisy, its founder, Jack Valenti, having come straight out of the Nixon administration. Every year I used to have to watch this now dead troglodyte get a mandatory standing ovation at the Academy Awards, and I’d cringe, but I have to hand it to him. The man was a master of Orwellian proportions, a man constantly throwing around hypocritical nonsense to the press, while running a secret organization one film expert in Dick’s movie refers to as fascist in nature. Not only that, he and his organization remain undefeated and barely challenged.
The beginning of Dick’s film shows a list of all the directors who have had to buckle under to the MPAA’s demand for them to edit their movies, and it reads like a hall of fame of modern directors. These are the greatest intellectuals cinema has to offer the world and their work is being edited by a secret panel of suburban parents who have absolutely no intellectual guidelines to do so other than what they find suitable to be seen in an American movie theater.
This is horrifying to me because next to television and possibly the Internet there is no other medium in America as influential on attitudes and social mores as movies. Dick’s argument also shows the numbing effect of the modern corporation. The MPAA was completely set up by the seven major film studios, and it continues to serve their purposes. In the movie, Matt Stone relates how when the board gave him an NC-17 for the movie Orgazmo, he was told that the board wouldn’t tell him what was deemed offensive at all, but when his major studio film South Park Bigger, Longer, and Uncut was rated he was given a list of what to cut to get an R rating.
Article comments
1 - Ty
This was a neat film, it's just a shame that the film spent too much time on the lesbian PI instead of on the material. It was kind of a distraction.
2 - Brent
Just a couple of facts from this review that desperately need correcting. The MPAA was not founded by Jack Valenti, it was created as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America. The name was changed to the present one in 1945. As for Jack Valenti, he would be terribly insulted to have been accused of coming straight from the Nixon administration. He was a lifelong Democrat who worked for Lyndon Johnson and was so loyal it was said that if Johnson dropped the H-bomb Valenti would call it an "urban renewal project."
3 - Brad Laidman
Brent's comments are corrent - I meant to say he created the rating system not the MPAA and he did work for Johnson not Nixon.