In This Film is Not Yet Rated, his MPAA investigative broadside, filmmaker Kirby Dick revealed that a Catholic priest sits on the organization's appeals board. This nugget of information became relevant again this week when the trailer for Amy Berg's Deliver Us From Evil, which won the Best Doc prize at this year's LA Film Festival, was redbanded by the ratings board - basically giving the trailer a scarlet letter - because of frequent discussions of molestation.
As noted by the Hollywood Reporter/Reuters:
In a letter sent to Lionsgate, the organization said "the content is adult in nature, with overt comments about child molestation throughout." The MPAA declined to elaborate on the specifics of the decision.
Under MPAA policy, redband trailers are allowed to be screened only before movies rated R or NC-17, but most national exhibitors enforce much stronger policies in their theaters, refusing to screen redband trailers at all. One fear exhibitors have is that a redband trailer might accidentally screen before a less restricted movie, alienating some patrons.
Perhaps fearing that the film itself would garner the MPAA's most restrictive NC-17 rating, Lionsgate has decided to release both the film and the trailer without a rating.
"We strongly disagree with the MPAA's decision to redband the trailer, but we respect their right to do so," Lionsgate president Tom Ortenberg said. "We're not looking to pick a fight with anybody. We're looking for the most cost-effective way to market a movie that needs to be seen. We owe it to our filmmaker, Amy Berg, and to the film to do whatever we can to get this movie seen."
I've been advocating to friends and colleagues for some time that the rating system as far as documentaries are concerned should be ignored. My own film would likely get an "R" rating - primarily because Kurt Cobain said "fuck" a lot. Gigantic, also may have been rated "R" because we had 2 "motherfuckers" and a single "cocksucker" - referencing the infamous Rolling Stones documentary. But so what?
However, in this case, having seen and praised Amy's film, I can't remember anything that exists in Deliver Us From Evil that couldn't or shouldn't air on television. Perhaps there's are curse words that I am forgetting, but that doesn't seem to be the issue. What the MPAA seems to be arguing here is that the very facts of an important issue like molestation are, somehow, forbidden, that we should fear the accidental screening of this information about molestation to a wide public. Considering the recent Dateline NBC stings of naked men who think they're meeting underage boys and girls from the internet, this seems fishy at best.
So, one must ultimately wonder if the MPAA, which seems to pride itself on having religious members, including a Catholic priest, is trying to protect the LA Archdiocese, which comes in for important scrutiny and criticism in Berg's film. There's certainly nothing in this trailer that would be deemed vulgar or offensive, unless you consider that certain members of the Catholic Church look really, really, well, evil.
And even if they are not in bed with the Archdiocese and Cardinal Roger Mahony, this scandal, and I mean that literally - it's as important as anything in Kirby Dick's film - continues to provide evidence that the MPAA has a different set of guidelines for sex and for violence. And here, they'd rather protect the Catholic Church, they'd rather your kids be in the dark about predators, than open themselves for political criticism.
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