The Motion Picture Association of America—or MPAA—has been the subject of scorn and ridicule over the years for its ratings classifications and with good reason.They have madesome truly boneheaded decisions over the years in the name of protecting innocent young eyes and minds, while also creating horrible double standards along the way. Sex, nudity, and profanity are routinely cause for stricter ratings than violence, causing filmmakers to dodge their stupid rules by gaming the system. By desaturating the color of blood or sometimes just eliminating it altogether, more and more violent content has slipped past the censors while sex, nudity, and language almost never get the same kind of pass.
In our new series,Stupid Moments in MPAA Ratings History, we're going to be taking a look at sex scenes and nude scenes that have been thetarget of the MPAA in the past, comparing and contrasting them to see if there's any sort of rhyme or reason to their decision making process. This week, we look at some absolutely ridiculous lengthsto whichfilmmakers went to avoid getting slapped with an NC-17 or X rating!
Damage (1992)
Director Louis Malle's penultimate film Damage detailed the torrid affair between a French ambassador (Jeremy Irons) and his son's fiancée (Juliette Binoche). It was also the subject of a mild bit of ratings controversy upon its release late in 1992. The NC-17 rating had barely celebrated its 2nd anniversary and was already as toxic to filmmakers, studios, and theaters as the X-rating it had replaced. The handful of films sporting the rating in its first two years either flopped badly or barely got released, rendering it almost instantly obsolete.
In order to get his latest filmseen before the end of the year in order to qualify for awards, he andNew Line Cinemas sent screeners of the film tocritics and voting members of the various guilds before it had been submitted to the MPAA for an official rating. That cut of the film was then screened by the MPAA and slapped with an NC-17, which New Line refused to release, sending Malle back into the editing suite to acquiesce to the MPAA's demands.
In his review of the film at the time of its release in Variety, critic Todd McCarthy had this to say about the cuts demanded by the MPAA...
The original version, which was screened for critics while the battle with the MPAA over the NC-17 rating was played out, contains nothing that hasn’t been seen in countless R-rated pix over the years; if the entire flap hadn’t happened , one wouldn’t have thought anything of it. As things stand, the film is being cut to R-rating specifications, which must now be considerably more rigorous than they were a few months ago.
At this point you may be wondering what all the fuss was about. When the film was released on home video, the theatrically released R-rated version was put out alongside Malle's original "unrated" cut of the film, with the only difference between the two being a single shot. Critic Ty Burr summed it up best in a June 1993 article about the film's home video release...
Home video restoreth what the theatrical release taketh away, and both sides make money. So does it matter that in some cases the shorter version turns out to be the better movie? Has damage really been done to Damage, for instance? The major difference between the R-rated and unrated versions is a single shot in a sex scene between Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche... Malle made his anger clear to anyone who would listen, but what’s equally clear is how ludicrous that shot is: The lovers, coitally entangled in a doorway, flop about as if engaged in a game of naked Twister. Suggesting Monty Python more than mounting passion
Here's the moment in GIF form, so you can see for yourself how ridiculous the shot is as well as how absurd it is that the MPAA be satisfied by its removal...
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Stanley Kubrick's final film remains one of his most hotly debated films of the 1990s. Some people love it, some people are baffled by it, and some people flat out hate it, which is the mark of any truly great film. We've discussed it before in depth in our Anatomy of a Nude Scene column, but today we're going to be looking at a completely different side of the film and the concessions Kubrick made to the MPAA just before his death in March, 1999.
The film's centerpiece sequence finds our hero Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) attending a masked orgy at an extravagant mansion somewhere in the New Jersey suburbs. As he wanders through the house, taking in the sights and sounds of the orgy, there are many sex acts being performed as people gather around to watch. None of the content is overtly explicit other than to suggest that the people having sex are really enjoying themselves—a big bone of contention with the MPAA we'll get back to in a moment.
Just prior to his death, the MPAA demanded that he cut down some of the orgy footage and Kubrick, no stranger to a ratings controversy himself, came up with a rather ingenious—if slightly invasive—solution. Because these scenes were mostly steadicam tracking shots which were rather difficult to trim without ruining their integrity, he thought about using cgi to insert spectators in front of the more explicit moments. There were already people gathered in the rooms to watch, so why not just block off some of the more convincing looking sex acts by rearranging and even adding spectators?
It worked and the MPAA posthumously awarded Kubrick the R-rating he needed to get the film into theaters. This version has since become completely obsolete as every release of the film since the original has done away with this rather intrusive device and restored the scene to Kubrick's original vision. If you've never seen it, here's just a taste of what it looked like in theaters and on VHS...
Again, it's not terrible, but it just goes to illustrate how boneheaded the MPAA's decision-making process is when dealing with sex. Imagine if they would insert people to block moments of extreme violence in film. It's no less intrusive than this is and might actually help to rationalizetheir double standard concerning sex vs violence.
Boys Don't Cry (1999)
Kimberly Peirce's Oscar-winning drama based on the true story of Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank), a trans man who was assaulted and murdered in horrific fashion in one of the worst hate crimes of the 1990s. Brandon fell in love with Lana Tisdel (Chloë Sevigny), but a group of Lana's friends discover that Brandon was born a woman and decide to attack and assault Brandon. They then threatenBrandon with further retaliation if they're reportedtothe authorities, but when Brandon does report the crime, the police take no action.Lana and Brandon decide to run away together, but Brandon is then viciously murdered by the same men who had assaulted her earlier.
Hearing this description, you might wonder what it was that director Kimberly Peirce had to cut from her film in order to secure an R-rating. Violence, in particular sexual violence, is an awful thing to have to depict and itwould have beencompletely understandable had the MPAA requested cuts to the two assault scenes in the film. Of course, that's not at all what the MPAA objected to as we all know how routinely they turn a blind eye to this sort of content.
No, the MPAA wanted trims to a love scene between Swank and Sevigny earlier in the film. 54 minutes in, Swank and Sevigny have a very tender outdoor love scene that culminates in the former going down on the latter. Peirce focuses her camera squarely on Sevigny, never cutting away to Swank, in an artistic attempt to avoid showing anything gratuitous in the sex scene. Of course, the MPAA wasn't swayed by this concession and demanded the scene be trimmed down.
In the 2006 documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, Peirce said that the MPAA's issue was the length of Sevigny's orgasm which they simply told her was "too long," providing no further direction on what it was they wanted cut. Peirce then pointed out the fact that the same board members had "no quarrel with Brandon being shot through the head in explicit detail."
Please enjoy the full, uncut version of the scenein which Chloë Sevigny's orgasm was considered "too long," leaving us to wonder if any of the people making this decision had ever actually spent the time to bring a woman to orgasm...
