Jack Valenti's Legacy

[zengrifter]

REASON-ONLINE

Censors for Free Speech
Jack Valenti's legacy

Jesse Walker | May 1, 2007

Jack Valenti, the long-reigning king of the Hollywood lobbyists, died last Thursday, nearly four decades after he fathered the Motion Picture Association of America's movie rating system. It is thanks to Valenti that compact codes like "PG" and "NC-17" define who is allowed to watch a film in a theater and who must wait 'til he's 18 or the picture comes out on video, whichever happens first.

From the beginning, the movies have faced not just direct government censorship but unofficial, semi-voluntary restrictions by private bodies within the industry, formed to forestall more intrusive regulations imposed from without. Three such efforts stand out, each emerging during a period associated with liberal reform. The National Board of Censorship, born in 1909, was a product of the Progressive Era. The Production Code Administration got its teeth in 1934, not coincidentally the second year of the New Deal. And the modern MPAA ratings were created by a former aide to Lyndon Johnson in 1968, at the tail end of the Great Society. Each system was different from the others, but all embodied the same paradox: They were formed to fend off public censorship, but it was the threat of public censorship that gave them their power.

...more - http://www.reason.com/news/show/119948.html

[Automatic Monkey]

That's a totally ridiculous complaint from Reason magazine. What the hell is wrong or non-libertairian about a warning label informing viewers that a movie is not for kids?

It's not censorship in any way. No one in the MPAA has ever attempted to prevent movies from being made.

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by Automatic Monkey

That's a totally ridiculous complaint from Reason magazine. What the hell is wrong or non-libertairian about a warning label informing viewers that a movie is not for kids?
It's not censorship in any way. No one in the MPAA has ever attempted to prevent movies from being made.

You need to see the hard-hitting documentaryTHIS FILM NOT YET RATED. The point of the artcile is that Valenti's film rating system is arbritrary in ways that most people haven't considered. zg

PETER TRAVERS REVIEWS
THIS FILM NOT YET RATED



Kirby Dick's indispensable guerrilla attack on the film-ratings system gives Hollywood a swift, smart and hilarious kick in its institutional, hypocritical ass. Since the Motion Picture Association of America, which operates the ratings board in conjunction with the National Association of Theater Owners, is more secretive than the CIA, Dick used unorthodox methods to get his story. He hired two female detectives to spy on -- some would say stalk -- execs of this private club and reveal their identities. He interviews filmmakers, from Boys Don't Cry's Kimberly Peirce to South Park's Matt Stone, to show how the ratings gurus come down hard on indie films with graphic sexual content, especially if it's gay, and ease up on costlier movies from major studios, which basically pay their salaries. Though the rotating raters are not supposed to offer advice on what scenes to cut to dodge the box-office-killing NC-17 rating, Dick finds them doing just that. Violence gets off easy. From the evidence here, it's OK to show a guy hack up a babe, but not OK to show him go down on her. The sham goes on with illustrative samples from censored scenes that will prove eye-opening in more ways than one.

xxx