America's Film Rating System Is a Sham

Sept. 15, 2006— -- America's film ratings board, which assigns the G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17 ratings to films, purports to operate in the public interest. But in fact, it is secretive and tightly controlled, run by and for the benefit of the six major Hollywood film studios that together control 95 percent of the U.S. film business.

The trade organization for these studios, the Motion Picture Association of America, oversees the film ratings board and the board chair reports directly to MPAA president Dan Glickman. This board ensures that studio films (which tend to be more violent) get less-restrictive ratings so that they can reach larger audiences, while films produced by the studios' competitors, independent and foreign film companies (whose films tend to include more adult sexuality) receive ratings that limit the distribution of their films.

To prevent public scrutiny of this self-serving ratings system, the MPAA has created what is perhaps the most-secretive board operating in this country today, even though its mandate is to inform the public. Yet there are no publicly available records of its proceedings, and its members' identities have been kept secret for nearly 30 years, until I revealed them in my documentary "This Film Is Not Yet Rated."

The MPAA claims the raters' anonymity protects them from industry influence. But our investigation revealed that the only people who have regular contact with these sequestered raters are executives from the film studios.

Equally disturbing is the fact that this board reserves its most extreme acts of censorship for films that include gay sex -- they receive even more restrictive ratings than similarly shot scenes with straight sex. This homophobic bias serves the studios' interests well in Washington. By aggressively censoring films with adult sexuality and in particular those with gay sex, the MPAA panders to the right wing in Congress, which has in turn rewarded the MPAA by passing a number of particularly onerous intellectual property laws that have proved very lucrative for the film studios.

Kirby Dick directed "This Film Is Not Yet Rated"