A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

Just thinking of the children

Huzzah, it's the 20th anniversary of the PG-13 rating:

LOS ANGELES -- This is the story of how a gooey green guy in a microwave, a pagan witchdoctor with a beating heart in his hand and that unlucky numeral 13 changed the way Hollywood makes its movies.

It has been two decades since the summer of 1984, when Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom caused an uproar among some parents who took their young children to the PG-rated films and walked out wishing the rating had suggested more guidance than just "parental guidance suggested."

The solution became the PG-13 rating.

But instead of being solely an extra warning to parents, as it was originally conceived, it has evolved into the preferred rating of studios and filmmakers. As Steven Spielberg told The Associated Press recently, PG-13 puts "hot sauce" on a movie in the viewer's mind.

Steve must prefer Louisana style hot sauce to the habanero stuff, because the PG-13 rating is a pretty mild seasoning. It stopped denoting extra zestiness long agao, and has more recently provided studios with a means to angle for the teen crowd by emasculating movies that might otherwise have shot for an R.

After Temple of Doom opened May 23, some parents complained to theater managers and the ratings board that their kids were mortified, and news reports began questioning whether the ratings board was being too lax.

Jack Valenti, the longtime MPAA head who recently announced his retirement, told the AP that the heart scene was the catalyst. "By today's standards it's not a big deal," he said. "But it was pretty off-putting. And there was a real problem about how to label that picture."
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The debate might have faded there if not for Gremlins, which came out two weeks later.

Joe Dante, the director ofGremlins, and later Small Soldiers and Looney Tunes: Back in Action, blames the backlash on the early trailers.
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Dante said the spots also were deliberately "imitating the color and style of the E.T. ads" from two years earlier, hoping to draw people in based on Spielberg's producer credit.

"So the idea of taking a 4-year-old to see Gremlins, thinking it's going to be a cuddly, funny animal movie and then seeing that it turns into a horror picture, I think people were upset," Dante told the AP. "They felt like they had been sold something family friendly and it wasn't entirely family friendly."

I honestly don't remember the Gremlins trailers, but even back in the hoary days before internet movie gossip, I don't think anyone doubted that it was going to be more frights than "Phone home."

Valenti is right, for once, that it's not a very horrifying movie by today's standards, but plenty of films that were both gorier and more horrifying than either Gremlins or Temple of Doom. Hell, Jaws was rated PG, and that was the movie that made an entire country scared to take a bath.

Okay, maybe it was just me. I was only eight, for crying out loud.

And a lot of the stink surrounding Temple of Doom, aside from Mola Ram's Eagle Claw of Kali, was aimed at the steamed monkey brains, scenes of torture, and overall darker tone of the film compared to the first. If Valenti had just admitted he was looking for a way to put Kate Capshaw out of work, I'd have backed him 110%.

"In a way it's better to get a PG-13 than a PG for certain movies," Spielberg said. "Sometimes PG, unless it's for an animated movie, it turns a lot of young people off. They think it's going to be too below their radar and they tend to want to say, 'Well, PG-13 might have a little bit of hot sauce on it.'"

The disposable income teens spend coming back again and again to their favorite flicks is the fuel that keeps Hollywood running. Would they have flocked to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in as many numbers if it had not been marked with the darker PG-13?

Please. Teenagers don't care as long as a movie isn't obviously aimed at the child market, like the Pokémon films. Teen girls went to Pirates of the Caribbean because they wanted to see Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom, teen boys went because their dates wanted to see Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom. And because everyone likes pirates.

The article goes on to note several of the top grossing movies of all time (Titanic (#1), Spider-Man (#6), Jurassic Park(#10)) were rated PG-13. Obviously, those mercurial adolescents wouldn't plunk down their hard-earned allowances for anything else, right? Right, except for Shrek 2 (#4), Star Wars: Episode I (#5), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (#15), and the G-rated Finding Nemo (#12).

What a PG-13 does allow movie studios to do is tone down films that might otherwise get an R rating in order to fatten their take. This is why recent releases like Alien vs. Predator and King Arthur are bled dry of anything that might make them more interesting to adult fans. Movies don't necessarily have to be swimming in blood or nudity to make them more appealing to an older crowd (and I don't know how much it would've helped in either case), but it's nice to occasionally have the option available.

Ultimately, the PG-13 rating is a failure because it doesn't increase the restrictions on kids getting into the movies. A 10-year old trying to buy a ticket for an R-rated flick is going to have a tough time of it, the same kid going to a PG-13 film won't get a second glance. The rating is only as good as the parents make it, and if they're in the habit of dropping the kids off at the theater with their friends, it might as well not even exist.

Which means, according to the MPAA's carefully thought out ratings system, those lucky children will be able to see decapitations, drownings, exploding buildings, multiple gunshot wounds, stabbings, and every variety of murder imaginable, but no "sexually oriented" nudity (women flashing their tits for "humorous effect" is right on). And no more than one utterance of the word "fuck." Because any more than that and your children will become sex-crazed Ecstasy addicts, roaming the city in feral packs on an insatiable quest for ass and pills.

Clinton Democrats, in other words.