SYSK’s Summer Movie Playlist: How the MPAA Works

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Hey, everybody, Chuck here for another Summer Movie Playlist Feed Drop.

Today we're going to be covering how the MPAA works, and this is from June 2014.

And it delves into the ins and outs of the MPAA and how they decide on rating movies because it's sort of a dark art as far as we're concerned.

So check it out.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant and Jerry.

But where's Waldo?

Right over there, apparently.

Man, I wish people could hear the in-between stuff.

I think Jerry was recording that last one.

Oh, yeah?

I think so.

She used to give us neat little outtakes, but she doesn't do that anymore.

No.

Those days are long gone.

They exist in the vault, though.

How you doing?

Not good.

No?

No.

I don't know what's wrong with me.

I am off today.

Out of your game?

Yeah, it's weird.

Well, I think this is the perfect podcast to set you straight.

Why?

Because it's something that we both have some passion about.

Against.

Yeah.

I think anybody who's seen the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated,

that would be

very difficult to not

be persuaded to feel strongly about the MPAA and its practices.

Yeah, and at least how they do things.

But we're going to try to be objective.

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say up front, I have no problem with rating a film's content so parents can decide whether or not it's appropriate.

I think it's valuable, but I think there are ways to do it that I don't think the MPAA does.

Yes.

So I just wanted to float that early on.

Okay.

I think that was probably smart.

Okay.

Okay.

Um,

I

don't have kids, so I don't really

whatever.

But I mean, I can understand the value of that kind of thing.

Yeah, but it gives you an idea.

Like, I like having an idea of what I'm about to see, too.

I feel like I can tell just from watching a trailer or preview seeing a movie poster.

I'm pretty um

I'm pretty intuitive when it comes to the the marketing techniques of movies.

Yeah, but I i think like if being a film nerd it's like is the new uh

is the new avengers movie going to be rated r that really tells you something of course it won't be no it never would be because pg13 is the the uh that's the strike zone these days it really is apparently pg13 movies pull in more money than all other ratings combined yeah and it's a relatively new uh phenomenon you want to talk about its origin yeah let's do it so back in 1984 a man named Steven Spielberg

had two movies out.

Who?

Steven Spielberg.

Right.

He directed one, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,

and he produced another, Gremlins.

Yeah.

And both of them

caught a lot of heat from both of them.

Sure.

Indiana Jones for the heart removal scene specifically.

Yeah, but also the snake, the live snake at the feast thing.

Yeah, yeah.

All the snake babies, the eyeballs, all that stuff.

Yeah.

And then with gremlins, it was just downright terrifying in a lot of different places, especially if you're a kid.

And the reason he caught heat was because both of those movies were rated PG.

And so

Spielberg went to the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, and said, oh, let's do something about this.

Because these clearly aren't our movies.

Yeah.

but they apparently aren't PG movies either.

So maybe we should come up with something in between.

And PG-13 was born.

Yeah, and this was before he had

all the sway in the world.

He was influential, but it wasn't like Spielberg today who could have just waved his wand and made it happen.

Yeah, but I think even at the time...

He was important.

Yeah, there were very few directors at that time who could have gotten something like that done.

Yeah.

Too.

So that's where PG-13 came from.

And

that, like you said, that's the strike zone now.

And the reason why is because that is the kind of movie that caters to young teenage boys who apparently are the most successful at getting girls to go to movies with them yeah so if you can get a movie rated pg 13 yeah you're going to make a bunch of money yeah plus it makes sense it's right there in the middle yeah you know but the problem is is it's become a means of almost advertising that rating.

Rather than cautioning parents, it's a way of attracting the audience.

Yeah, true.

It's like this isn't some kid's PG movie.

This is as close to an R movie as you can get in.

Yeah, and I think filmmakers try to achieve that rating

by either scaling back their R-rated movie or juicing up their PG movie.

Or adding more violence.

Because apparently, PG-13 movies

have tripled in violence over the last like few decades.

Yeah.

And they now have, according to one study, more violence than their R-rated counterparts.

Yeah, and different kinds of violence that you didn't used to see.

Yeah.

You know?

All right, I guess we should go back in time a little bit.

Let's.

Is it Wayback Machine?

Sure.

Let's go Wack in Twitter.

All right, it's 1922.

Hollywood and Vine is a viable intersection in Hollywood at the time, unlike now.

Although people are going to say, no, they built that area back up.

Yeah.

And that is when the MPA was born in the early 1920s.

Yeah.

And at the time, it was up to local authorities or your state or your municipality to either stamp something as moral or immoral.

There were no ratings on movies.

And thanks to a guy named Will Hayes, who was the first president of the MPAA, he installed the Hayes Code and said,

you're either going to pass or fail.

It's either going to be stamped immoral or moral.

Right.

And the reason Will Hayes, who was the MPAA president,

came up with the Hayes Code, which was really extensive.

Yeah.

It was like,

if you talk about the government, it always has to be good.

Sexuality has to be repressed.

And just basically

how you think about all movies from like the thirties and forties just squeaky clean basically sure like the the division between good and evil is very clearly defined and the good guy always wins and if you didn't fall into that haze code like you said your movie would be stamped immoral but the whole reason he came up with this code was because local municipalities could pass their own obscenity laws and that could be bad for business so it's a not even get your film exhibited right Right.

So remember in the ACLU episode where we were talking about that one

that one movie, that New York, just the Catholics said, no, you can't show that here.

And the ACLU went to work getting the Catholics beaten in court.

Right, even though it was just a bad movie.

It had nothing to do with.

Well, I mean, it did, but it shouldn't have been shown because it was so terrible.

Was it bad?

I don't remember.

Yeah, I mean, it was supposed to be not very good.

Okay.

But it happened.

Like, that kind of thing happened a lot.

Like, local towns towns said, no, we're not going to show that movie.

So Hayes figured out if Hollywood policed itself, then they could control

what movies came out, and therefore everybody could make a bunch of money.

That's right.

And that's the point of the MPAA.

They're the lobbying arm of six major Hollywood studios.

Yeah.

They work for them.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, that's one way to say it.

And it's just those six, too, isn't it?

Well,

yeah, I mean, there's definitely an argument these days that independent filmmakers have a much rougher time with the MPAA.

Yeah.

But most of the indies, too, are eventually distributed by the majors anyway.

I got you.

You know what I'm saying?

Okay.

So flash forward a bit in our Wayback Machine to the 1950s, things changed a little bit after World War II.

And people,

I guess the easiest way to say it is people loosened up a little bit.

and didn't mind certain elements in their entertainment any longer.

Yes.

A big example this article uses, Frank Sinatra got an Oscar nomination for playing a heroin addict in The Man with a Golden Arm.

And that couldn't have happened in the 1940s.

No, millions of people hadn't died in World War II yet.

That's right.

I imagine that kind of loosens you up as far as

the seeing curse words and stuff in movies goes.

Yeah, like that's not a big deal.

Like World War II is a big deal.

Right.

Get your haunches down.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So that was the that was the big one, the the big first crack to the Hayes Code.

Yeah.

And then there were, I think that, you said he won an Oscar, right?

Yeah, it was a really good movie.

That kind of opened the floodgate so that by the end of the 50s, you got some like at hot, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon are dressed like women hitting on Marilyn Monroe.

Yeah.

And

at that point, it was pretty obvious the Hayes Code was dead.

Yeah, I mean, they weren't passing the code, but they were still getting released.

So once something is subverted like that, it's dead in the water.

Right.

So

there was a that was fine for a little while.

I think the Hayes Code just kind of fell to the wayside, and people were releasing movies without any kind of moral or immoral stamp.

But the rating system, as we understand it today, hadn't come about yet.

Yeah.

So it's kind of a limbo period until 1968.

And a

store owner in New York with the last name of Ginsburg got busted for selling nudie mags to 16-year-old boys.

And he took it all the way to the Supreme Court

saying,

you

can't say anything about this.

There's federal laws about obscenity, not local laws.

And the Supreme Court said, you know what?

We really think it's up to local municipalities to decide what they want their minors exposed to or not.

That got Hollywood's attention because all of a sudden, local municipalities could decide whether or not they wanted to show movies to minors or not.

So what was old became new again, and Jack Valenti, who was in charge of the MPAA, said, we need another system of self another self-policing system.

And he came up with the rating system that we have today.

Yeah, and he

I mean, Jack Valenti was the head of the MPA for close to 40 years.

And he

initially

the intention was to stop censorship because he feared that the movies were going to start being censored locally.

And so I think the the origins of the MPA's rating system were were

art-centered.

Art-centered, but also money-centered.

Because again,

if you have town A

showing the movie, but towns B through L deciding that the movie is obscene and not showing it, then you're losing that money in B through L.

So what Valenti came up with was this idea that

let us tell you what is appropriate for minors or not, what movie is, and we'll just make a simple rating system.

Yeah.

G, P, G, R, or or X.

Ah, the old X.

Yeah.

And triple X, which wasn't even formally a rating.

It was just a.

Marketing tool?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because three X's, that's like, whoa.

I wonder if anybody ever came out with one with four X's.

Yeah, or double X even.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, we cut out that one part, so we're gonna take a rate X.

Uh

yeah, Christian, uh, our colleague here, wrote a great blog post about the the former X-rated movie.

Is that right?

Yeah.

I'll have to check that out.

Yeah, it's good.

For on Brainstuff for Stuff of Genius.

On the Brainstuff blog earlier this year, and you actually recommended it on your blog.

The X rating?

Yeah, the best

I recommend this week.

Yeah, I remember recommending one of his things.

I just don't remember that one.

It was good.

I thought about asking him in here, but then I thought, nah, we got it.

Nice.

So, yeah, back then it was G through X.

And,

well, we'll talk about, you know, how that changed.

Maybe after this message break.

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All right, so no longer do we have X-rated movies.

Now we have something.

I guess we should just go through what these ratings mean today in 2014.

Okay.

So you've got your G.

G's always been G.

General audience.

Anyone can see it.

Yes.

And that's your family cartoon that kids love and parents are forced to go to.

Right.

Then you've got PG.

That means no drug use.

Maybe a little violence because as we'll learn, the MPA has less problems with violence and more problems with language and sex.

Huge criticism.

Huge criticism.

PG-13, which we've kind of been through.

Then you've got your R, and that is no one under 17.

This is a suggestion that no one over 17 be admitted without a parent.

And these aren't laws, though.

That's one thing that's important to point out.

Those are suggestions, and then theaters have policies.

Yes.

Let's kind of dig into that.

So none of this is legally legally binding.

No.

None of them are anything more than recommendations.

They're basically saying that this movie has X amount of profanity or X amount of nudity or lacks any drug use or something like that.

Sure.

And so for what the MPAA thinks the average moral compass of the average American thinks about these different things like sex, drugs, nudity, all that stuff, this movie falls into this rating.

Right.

And again, it's not enforceable.

You don't even need to have a rating to release a movie.

But if you want to get your movie in theaters, there's basically no theater chain out there right now, no major theater chain out there right now, that will show an unrated movie.

Yeah, it's a completely voluntary system to submit your film to the MPA ratings board.

But it's de facto.

But you have to do it.

Yeah.

That's the rub is that they say it's voluntary, but you actually have to pay a fee to submit your movie if you ever want to have it shown in theaters.

Right, and the fee is anywhere from like $25,000 for a big-budget movie to $750 for a short.

Yeah.

And so

you submit your movie.

Well, we'll get into it in a second.

Let's talk some more about the rest of the ratings.

Yeah, well, there's only one more, and that's NC17, which replaced X.

And that means this is in 1990.

And it basically means that it's for adults only.

And you should not come in if you're under 18.

Right.

And also means these days that it's foreign or about lesbian or gays.

Basically.

Yeah, not fully, but sure.

It's pretty close.

Yeah.

And NC17, the first movie to come out with that was Henry in June.

Yeah.

Not to be confused with Benny in June.

And it basically sunk that movie because everybody was like, oh, this is X now.

Right.

NC17, if you jumble it all together, it looks like X.

And the whole reason they came out with NC 17 was to replace X because X was associated exclusively with pornography in the minds of moviegoers.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

All right, so let's get into this.

The actual ratings board, there's the MPAA, and then working for the MPAA is the Classification and Ratings Administration, CARA.

And

CARA doesn't...

say whether your movie stinks or not.

CARA is 8 to 13 people, and they are called raiders, and they are overseen by a senior raider, and they sit down and watch these movies and take copious notes on what they think based on their standards is,

I don't want to say offensive, but just noteworthy.

Right.

Like, maybe they're not offended, but they think the average mom and Sheboygan might be offended.

Right.

Supposedly.

Which is a...

kind of a thing because the whole rating system, as you just kind of pointed out, is subjective.

Totally subjective.

They supposedly,

here's the other rub, is it's all secret.

Right.

You can find out a federal judge's name and address, but you can't find out who a raider is for your films.

It's all conducted in private.

None of the stuff is released.

And that's one of the big rubs in that documentary and with filmmakers in general, is it's all done behind closed doors.

There's never any explanations provided.

These people are supposed to have kids between ages of 5 and 17, but many of them do not.

Right.

Either have kids at all or have kids that are older than 18.

Yep.

It basically frees them up from any accountability.

Yeah.

To do this all in private and in secrecy.

And until that movie

by Kirby, what is Kirby's last name?

Henry and June?

No.

No.

The documentary.

Oh, oh, yeah.

This film is not yet rated?

Yeah.

Until Kirby Dick's, this film is not yet rated, came out, like all of this stuff was just

conjecture in Hollywood legend.

Yeah, he was the first one to really basically tailed these people, tailed them to lunch

to find out who they were and eavesdrop on them and like did some digging and found like these anonymous people did not fall into the requirements that the NPAA said they did.

And so not only

was it in secret, it was

fraudulent, basically, this rating system.

So

according to the standards, you submit your film.

This group of people, this anonymous group of people, watch it.

They rate it.

Then they come together and vote on a rating.

And then they pass their

vote along to a senior rater who talks to the movie's distributor, director, or producer, and says, Here's the rating.

Here's why we rated it like this.

And then you're faced with a choice.

You can accept the rating.

You can edit your film as per the CARA's recommendations.

Take out these bad words, cut this sex scene a little early.

Right.

Leave all the violence.

Yeah.

Or you can reject the rating and just release your movie as unrated.

Yeah.

Which, well,

you can try to release it, but since no one will show it, it's really sort of a misnomer.

Right.

But it's becoming increasingly a thing.

Again, you need the rating to get your movie shown in movie theaters.

Yeah.

But what happens if you don't care if your movie comes out in theaters?

Video on demand?

Yeah, or just releasing it to the internet.

Now, I'm curious about that, how that's going to change the landscape.

Well, right now, it's a huge threat to the MPAA because all of the power they wield is found in this rating system.

And if for theaters.

Yes.

And if no one's going to theaters.

Then the MPAA loses all of that power, which is a big deal, especially now because the MPAA is needed more than ever as a lobbying group because of online piracy, which we'll talk about some more.

So it's a very precarious time for the MPAA right now.

And it's a terrible time for them to be under as much scrutiny and public attack and critique as they are.

Yeah.

So it's, I mean, they got spears sticking out every which way, and their trunk is flailing and they're honking.

That is true.

One thing I should point out, as I said it, is that there's no accountability.

That's what the NPA says is the good thing about the secrecy is that it frees them up that anonymity does.

It frees them up from accountability.

I just don't agree.

Right.

Okay.

So

if you want to appeal, there is apparently a change made in response to Kirby Dick's movie,

the documentary.

Before, if you were appealing your rating,

which is very difficult,

it almost never was done.

You never won, that's for sure.

Right.

And when you were appealing, you couldn't reference any other film.

It was totally done in a vacuum, which is pretty preposterous.

Yeah, like that's the only way to be able to tell.

It's like, wait a minute, if you said this about this, then why not this for my movie?

Right.

Which meant that there was no real standard

that you could point to.

Or there were standards you could point to, they just wouldn't be considered.

Yeah, or at the very least, if they do have written standards, they don't release them, so you don't even know what they are.

Right.

So

the MPAA is ⁇ they've got their rating system.

They've got the appeals process.

Which was also in secret, unless that's changed, right?

I think...

I think the appeals board ⁇ not only was the appeals board in secret, but they weren't even just raiders.

They were people from the industry.

Right.

And the theater owners association.

Exactly.

Whereas the people who are Raiders are supposedly unaffiliated with the movie industry and are just like average ordinary parents.

Representing

Middle America, we'll just call it.

Even though I think that's insulting.

The thing is, though, is a lot of people criticize the NPAA and say these Raiders are

really representing the six major studios who rake in 95% of the $10.9 billion made in the United States

in theaters alone.

Just ticket sales, not DVD or anything like that.

Yeah.

And that's what the MPAA does in addition to raiding.

They are, like we said, the lobby arm for these six studios.

That's right.

And they,

I guess we should talk about piracy now, huh?

That's one of their other big,

besides from raiding movies, they are heavy in the lobby against,

well, especially now with online piracy because the digital distribution network is,

seems like the the way forward as far as distribution goes.

Right.

Like it's the future.

It's not the future, it's the present and the future.

And the NPAA has a, they're accused of basically trying to quell new technology

by just saying like, well, let's just keep people from peer-to-peer file sharing.

in total yeah so that they can't steal movies in part um and if you go back to the early 80s jack valenti was known to have um railed and lobbied against the legality of VCRs.

People are just going to be recording things and handing them out to their friends.

Exactly.

So there was a the MPA has a long history of basically like just doing anything it can to stifle innovation in order to protect the profits of these big movie studios.

The other problem with them lobbying

in favor of these six movie studios is that they inherently have a conflict of interest against the studios that are not part of these six that they represent,

but whose movies they still rate.

Right.

So they've been accused of

more scrupulously or scrutinously rating the movies of rival studios or foreign studios when assigning a rating.

Well, and that's why filmmakers call consistently for transparency.

I don't think there are many filmmakers out there saying there should be no rating.

We should just maybe some, like Lars von Trier, you know, or Werner Herzog.

They're probably like, no ratings at all.

Yeah.

But I think they just want transparency.

Like, open it up and let everyone know how this is all done, right?

Who these people are, and give us an idea on what in the world we're submitting to

voluntarily, quote unquote.

Pretty interesting.

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So you were talking about online piracy.

And with digital distribution being a big deal now,

the MPA is needed more than ever because they have to lobby Congress to fight online piracy at a time when more and more people are distributing online and going around the MPAA.

So it's losing its power, but it needs its power more than ever.

So like we said, it's a precarious time for the MPAA.

And they tried a few things.

They were successful with the

what was the first one in 2000?

The digital...

SOPA?

No, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Oh, right.

Which basically,

up until then, it wasn't a federal crime to share movies on peer-to-peer networks.

Right.

That one did it.

And they got that passed.

The MPAA lobbied and got that passed.

Yeah.

They've cracked down on camcorder recording.

Yeah.

Like when you're in New York City and someone has that brand new copy of Godzilla on a video cassette for you.

Yeah.

That's because if you've seen Seinfeld, someone went and sat in that theater with a camera recorder and just made a stupid, awful quality pirate version.

Yeah, and it says that those are the most common.

I guess I kind of believe that.

They're also the worst quality.

Like sometimes people will like get up and move in front of the camera like to go to the bathroom or something.

Yeah.

It's a

thing.

They're terrible.

Yeah.

Much, I don't want to say more common, but probably more common these days are like copies of screeners.

Yeah.

Like they send out DVDs to everybody who's members of the academy to vote on movies.

And so around Oscar time or before Oscar time, it seems like the internet gets flooded with way more high-quality copies of these major movies that are up for awards.

Yeah, I think now they have,

thanks to the NPA, have

something coded to your name now on your copy.

So like they'll know who leaked it or whatever?

I think so.

Yeah,

I'm not surprised by that.

Apparently, if you want to show

Frozen at your church,

you better have a public performance license because it is illegal to uh show a movie outside of your home.

Yeah, that surprised me, but there are a lot of uh especially in the summertime, a lot of community screenings.

Mm-hmm.

Like every city now has

you know Atlanta shows them in, I think at Oakland Cemetery.

Some other places in New York, they have them all over the place.

Sure.

And technically, yeah, they're supposed to have a license to do so.

I'm sure they do, the big ones.

Yeah, the big ones, I'm sure, do.

But like at your community pool when you want to show E.T.

and

the feds could come kick the gate down around the pool I bet

everybody I bet they don't love HBO these days because you know HBO go yeah

people steal that they're just like hey dude what's your login oh right yeah and HBO came out and they're like who cares yeah people are watching it yeah like go watch True Detective maybe you'll sign up for HBO yeah because you liked it or maybe you'll just support the show period on social media yeah even though you're getting it for free Like, we're making enough money, basically.

Yes, and that's something that a lot of people say, you know, film industry, we don't really feel that bad for you.

Yeah.

Sean Austin, sit down.

Because you guys made $10.9 billion in America in ticket sales alone in 2013.

We don't feel that bad about this whole conundrum that the MPAA is facing.

What's Sean Aston's deal?

Is he his

voices?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

okay.

Yeah.

I don't think I knew that.

Yeah, he was.

I can't remember the.

There was like a whole kind of push, an anti-piracy push a few years back.

And he was the face of it.

Part of it, yeah.

Yeah, and he looked really mad about things, too.

But speaking of piracy, I remember there was a story that came out recently.

It was, if you think about it, at first it's like, wah, wah, but then if you really kind of

lend it some thought, it's really disturbing.

Yeah.

there was a report of prisoners at a prison being shown pirated movies and some of the prisoners were there for pirating movies.

Oh wow.

And it I like really think about the injustice behind that.

Yeah.

Like that's just crazy town.

Imagine if you've been like selling counterfeit furs and you go to prison and all of the

all the guards are wearing counterfeit fur coats.

That'd be a pretty swinging prison.

It'd be weird, but it would also be unjust.

Yeah.

Yeah.

True.

But in relation to this, it's just more and more widespread.

Every day it feels like.

It's a losing battle, I think, that the NPAA is fighting right now.

Well, I think I read somewhere today that I think they might release a few of the Raiders' names per film.

Not all, like 13.

Right.

But I need to

look that up again, because I don't know.

I don't see

why releasing a three out of 13 names does anybody any good.

It does zero good.

Yeah.

And speaking of doing zero good,

there's kind of a new attachment to the rating system that they have now.

It's called Check the Box.

Yeah.

And

it's basically a brief description of why a movie is like PG-13.

Yeah.

So it'll say like intent sci-fi action or something like that.

Some drug use.

Yeah, that kind of thing.

And some critics of the MPAA say,

it's just basically like shooting a laser beam into like a 15-year-old boy's brain.

Yeah.

Like brief nudity, come see it.

Right.

TG-13.

Check it out, kid.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people are looking at it like it's just kind of a disingenuous advertisement,

cynical advertisement, because

the MPAA is accused of not regulating or even potentially directly marketing to

kids under the age of the movies that are being advertised.

Yeah.

So, like, you're seeing a lot of ads for like R-rated movies on websites that are like very popular among like the 17 and under crowd.

Yeah.

Um,

there's a lot of tie-ins for PG-13 movies with like kids' toys for kids who are under P who are under 13.

And so, there's like this idea that there's the MPAA is supposedly serving America's moral compasses.

Yeah.

But really at the same time, they're undermining that morality that they're supposedly defending

by marketing and exploiting kids.

Yeah.

That'd be like a cigarette company having a cartoon animal as their mascot.

Can you imagine?

That'd be weird.

Well, one thing about the...

the subjectivity of it and the fact that it is a closed book and filmmakers don't even know, you know

how to tailor their movie to achieve a certain rating.

I mean, to within a certain degree, but they've learned how to manipulate it because there is no set standard.

By, if you watch that, film is not yet rated.

And you've heard plenty of stories over the years about filmmakers intentionally putting in things that they never intend to be in the final movie

just to sort of distract from some of the other things.

So they'll shoot something kind of really outrageous

to get the MPA's Raiders' haunches up and what they were never going to keep that part anyway.

Right.

So they're subverting the system because there is no set standard.

Yeah.

And they're just

the stuff they want to keep in is comparatively

more palatable.

And if you don't have the set standard where you can go and, I wonder what those sheets look like on the interior, you know?

I mean, that's the great mystery.

Yeah.

Surely they have their own interior standards.

They're not just like, oh, watch it and see what you think.

Well, they have group discussions, too.

Man, I'd love to to sit in on those.

So the uh I read uh another criticism of the MPAA is that the difference between PG-13 movies and our movies these days is the profanity and the sexuality.

Um that they're similar in violence, if not more violent in PG-13 movies, and that this is kinda messed up.

That the MPAA has very little problem with violence,

but when it comes to bad words or sexuality of almost any nature, except for women being objectified and men being gratified,

then the MPAA suddenly puckers up.

Well, yeah, any woman achieving receiving sexual gratification or a homosexual couple.

NC 17.

Yeah.

Virtually like guaranteed, or depending on how they do it, R, if it's coming out of like one of the major studios.

So in other words, a man can receive pleasure from a woman.

And of course it's scrutinized somewhat because any kind of sex is more heavily scrutinized than violence.

Right.

But if a woman does, like you said, or if it's a gay couple, it's all over.

So

homophobic, misogynistic,

you decide.

Right.

And

fetishistic of violence.

You know?

Yeah, like here's one example.

There's a great article called Don't Expect Any Major Changes to the MPA rating system in 2014.

And it's basically Chris Dodd, who's the new head in the gang, digging in and saying, you know what?

We

talk to your average parents and we poll them, and this is what they want.

But they never released.

No, none of those studies are released.

None of those conversations are released.

A movie like Philomena, which you saw, was rated R.

Yeah, it was about a lady looking for her long-lost son.

It was so far from an R movie, it was ridiculous.

Yeah, but it had a couple of F-bombs in it.

So they cut those out and they bring it to a PG-13.

You might think, who cares?

Cut the F-bombs, make it PG-13, but there's something bigger going on here, you know?

Yeah, there's a great AV Club article about

how just totally

out of step a lot of the ratings are.

And they have 15 movies listed and basically talk about their ratings.

Like the first one, they talk about once.

Yeah.

That romantic,

it wasn't like a romantic comedy, was it?

No, I would say it was

just a modern-day romance told through music.

Right.

It wasn't a musical, but there were a lot of musical numbers.

Highly inoffensive.

Love story.

Yeah.

Very sweet movie.

It had the same rating as Hostile 2, which is basically Torture Porn.

They both got the same rating.

Yeah,

we should read this first line from the A.B.

Club.

In early summer of 2007, two films were released with R ratings.

One featured a scene where a naked woman is suspended from a ceiling while another naked woman slashes her with a Sith and bathes in her blood.

The other featured two Dublin musicians singing songs together, falling in love, and opting not to act on it.

Like, there was never any sex scene.

They didn't even get together, really.

No.

They're both rated R.

Both rated R.

Because of profanity.

Rushmore rated R for the

scene at the end where Max is putting on the play, the Vietnam play,

and there is a shot of a couple of little kids looking at on the set.

There's some Playboy Center folds up in the locker.

Yep.

Like on the Vietnam set.

And it shows these little kids looking at those.

Like a 12-year-old would probably do.

And it got an R for that.

Got an R for that.

Happiness.

Todd Solins, one of my favorite movies of all time.

Yeah.

They tried to give it an NC-17 rating, and he said, you know what?

I'm not cutting anything.

You can just go

take a long walk off a short pier, is what I think he famously said to them.

And he released his movie as unrated.

Oh, really?

Yep.

I don't think I knew that.

Away to go, Todd Solins.

Or if you're looking at some serious homophobia, the great 1989 movie, Longtime Companion,

features no real sex acts at all, nothing explicit.

In fact, the A.B.

Club says it could show on network TV today with just a few alterations.

But it was about a gay couple, and

so it got an NC-17.

Yeah, there's something called Afternoon Delight, which was

a movie about a woman who

hires a gigolo.

Yeah.

And it apparently is heavy on the

woman receiving sexual gratification?

It got an R rating.

Yeah.

Despite, and it got an R rating after apparently the director cut a lot of stuff out.

And the director said, what the hey?

After Wolf of Wall Street came out.

Like, have you seen this movie?

With some very graphic, apparent sex scenes between a man and a woman.

Yeah.

But Leonardo DiCaprio is the one enjoying it the most.

So it's fine.

It's an R.

Right.

Blue is the warmest color.

Yeah, last year that a teenage lesbian love story NC 17.

Yep got a lot of attention and there were some theaters that allowed

high school age kids to go see that anyway.

Because again, this isn't law.

It's not binding.

It's up to the theaters.

Yeah, it's just so strange that such a small group of people have such influence on such a large industry.

And yeah, the secret.

The more you dig into it, the more conflicts of interest arise and the more arbitrary the standards become, the more blood-boiling it is.

I highly recommend you go read some stuff like Rated R for Ridiculous by Kirby Dick,

his little op-ed about the MPAA,

that one U.S.

News and World Report article you wrote or

suggested was good.

I wish I wrote it.

Had you been,

there would have been used correctly.

Oh, did they misuse it?

What?

Yeah, I know.

Man, that's terrible.

So the MPA will defend themselves, and they say that there is no such bias, and that we

all these objectionable scenes are rated on the graphic quality and how graphic it is.

But if you just look at the

you'd have to be a dummy not to see these correlations, right?

And the fact that they don't seem to care that much about violence in this age where,

I don't know, does it influence people to go shoot up a school?

Who knows?

Did you see that John Oliver quote that's going around?

Yes, but what was it?

It's like somebody unsuccessfully tries to carry a bomb onto a plane in their shoe.

We all take our shoes off.

Oh, right.

There's like 30-something school shootings after Columbine, and absolutely nothing's changed.

Yeah.

Or the Onion article that's going around too now is

this is something that can't be prevented says the only country where this kind of thing happens all the time.

Something like that.

I'm paraphrasing.

Oh, yeah.

That's the onion.

Yeah, good stuff, MPA.

Keep doing the fight in the good fight.

Yeah, go check out, like, just go start reading up on it.

It's funny how much we just take this stuff for granted, but when just start digging just slightly beneath the surface, at the very least, see, this film is not yet rated.

It's really good.

Yeah.

Really engrossing.

And, you know, for every hundred documentaries that come out, what, five of them are like really great.

Sure.

Most of them are pretty good.

Some are terrible.

So any really good one is worth seeing just in and of itself.

Agreed.

If you want to learn more about the MPAA, type those letters into the search bar at housedefworks.com.

And I said search bar, so it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this wild parrots.

Josh mentioned in the tattoo podcast that he had heard parrots like to hang together when free.

And I wanted to burst in the podcast booth.

and tell you about the wild parrots of San Francisco.

I'm not going to get into it except to say that over the course of my life, the parrots in San Francisco were a sort of living legend that one would occasionally get the privilege of spotting now and then.

However, about three years ago, I moved in with my aunt in the little San Francisco suburb of Brisbane, and apparently the famous flocks of parrots were also making their home there since it was warmer and less windy.

These parrots were often hanging right outside my bedroom window, which is pretty amazing.

Or no, she says amusing.

I say it's amazing.

But also somewhat annoying, especially since my first son was just a little guy then and a very light sleeper and these suckers are loud that is true they are very loud also guys i'm sending you the link to watch the preview of the 2003 documentary the wild parrots of telegraph hill so i didn't know that was a documentary i've heard that yeah i've heard of that before i never uh knew what it was about amy i will check that out Thank you.

Thank you for writing it.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy.

If you have a documentary recommendation, we are always interested in those.

Heck yeah.

You can tweet them to us at SYSK Podcast.

You can post them on facebook.com slash stuffy should know

and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at housetuffworks.com.

And as always, join us at our home on the web, the beautiful stuffyushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com

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