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| Bob Hope, representing Hollywood' s Old Guard while hosting the 42nd Academy Awards. |
"This will go down in history as the cinema season that proved that crime doesn’t pay, but there’s a fortune in adultery, incest and homosexuality."
This was one of several acid observations from comedian Bob Hope, who didn't even try to hide his dismay at changing standards when he hosted the 42nd Academy Awards on April 7, 1970. In a retrospective article, Variety's Bret Lang reflects on the divisions in that year's Oscar nominees. The two major contenders were Hello, Dolly, a musical extravaganza of the kind that had been very popular over the past decade, but whose popularity was starting to wane; and Midnight Cowboy, a grimy, street-level drama with homosexual overtones that had earned an "X" rating.
Midnight Cowboy's win was no upset. The movie had been all but universally praised by critics and had become one of 1969's biggest box office successes, while Hello, Dolly was largely greeted as "more of the same." It had also cost so much to make that, despite healthy ticket sales, it ended up losing money.
But it was notable that a movie carrying the "X" rating had been named as Best Picture of 1969. Times were changing, and many of the old Hollywood guard must have felt, as Bob Hope clearly did, that the film industry was moving in a direction they didn't particularly recognize and certainly didn't much like.
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| The Hays Code seal, certifying a motion picture's approval. |
THE DEATH OF THE HAYS CODE:
"No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin."
-the first stated principle of the Motion Picture Production Code, better known as the Hays Code.
I've previously discussed the tendency of the American motion picture industry to avoid government regulation by policing itself. The Hays Code, introduced in 1930, applied a rigid set of rules that movies needed to follow in order to receive Hays certification. In the 1930s and '40s, Hays certification was largely a requirement for a US theatrical release. I've also discussed the Hollywood Blacklist, the industry's response to the Second Red Scare. Movie professionals who were blacklisted became unemployable (at least under their own names) for the bulk of the 1950s.
A constant throughout history is that social standards change. Neither the Hays Code nor the blacklist was particularly adaptable. It took little time for studios to start finding ways around the blacklist, and it was less than a decade after its implementation before major producers and directors began flat out defying it. The Hays Code at least could be amended, and it was on occasion. But the Code itself was specific in what it forbade and therefore rigid.
European-born directors such as Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger decided to just ignore that straitjacket, releasing movies with no Hays Certification. The lack of the Hays seal did nothing to harm their 1950s releases, which struck a chord with audiences and were highly successful. The Code lurched along until 1968 (and I'll admit to being surprised that it lasted that long), but it was neutered by the end of the 1950s.
With the Hays Code no longer effective, the industry was faced with a problem. Movies were becoming increasingly sexually frank, changing to address the tastes of much of the public. Without regulation, it would only be a matter of time before Hollywood drew the eye of the government. Some sort of replacement Code was needed.
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| A 1968 poster explains the new Movie Rating System. |
THE MPAA RATING SYSTEM:
"Jack (Valenti, President of the MPAA) set up the system in a way that accounts for changing values... how to reflect standards rather than set them."
-former Classification and Ratings Administration Chair Joan Grave, quoted in the MPAA's publication, G is for Golden: The MPAA Film Ratings at 50.
By 1968, it was obvious that contemporary audiences wanted movies to be able to feature explicit content and to directly tackle mature themes. Jack Valenti, who had become president of the MPAA in 1966, recognized that the Hays Code had become a relic, but he also knew that something was needed to take its place, if only to keep at bay those "who saw adult-themed movies as a threat to America's moral fiber."
After some back and forth, Valenti and the MPAA eventually settled on replacing the increasingly irrelevant censorship code with an age classification system. There were four initial ratings: G, for general audiences; M, for mature audiences, with parental discretion advised; R, for restricted audiences, with children under age 16 not admitted without a parent or guardian; and X, with admittance strictly for people ages 17 and up.
THE RATINGS EVOLVE:
"The PG rating probably had too much latitude. The net it cast over content was wide enough to encompass a movie with a little bit of implied violence, like Walt Disney’s The Black Hole or Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Also, movies so corrosively upsetting in tone... such as The Mechanic, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Killer Elite, (and) The Legend of Hell House..."
-Roger Ebert, Some Material May Be Inappropriate.
The ratings evolved, a process that started almost immediately. In 1969, the M rating was changed to PG to better distinguish it from the harder R rating. This made sense. Think about it from the perspective of a parent in the late 1960s: if you're casually perusing film listings, would you know that the new "Mature" rating involved less objectionable content that the new "Restricted" rating?
The next change occurred because of a shift in perceptions of the "G" and "PG" ratings. G - "general audiences" - was initially a default rating for a movie with no objectionable content. It did not mean "kids movie," as can be seen from several decidedly adult-oriented titles from the 1960s and '70s, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Andromeda Strain, and Silent Running.
But the highest profile G-rated movies were released by Disney. A flood of Disney films, both cartoons and family-friendly live action fare, led to audiences gradually reinterpreting "G" as "children's movie." Since adults and older kids generally don't want to watch "children's movies," studios started actively inserting curse words to secure a "PG" instead. The result was that the "PG" rating became overly broad.
The MPAA addressed this by introducing "PG-13" in 1984. This created a middle ground for movies that were not explicit enough to warrant an "R," but that also were not suitable for younger viewers... which, yes, was what "PG" rating had been originally intended to be.
A final ratings swap occurred in 1990 - but before I get into that, I'm going to wind back to 1968 and the release, and commercial and awards success, of Midnight Cowboy.
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| Midnight Cowboy's X rating didn't stop it from becoming a hit. But it was an exception to the rule. |
MIDNIGHT COWBOY AND THE RISE AND FALL OF THE "X" RATING:
"When they first trademarked our ratings, they didn't trademark the 'X'... It was an adult rating, so anybody could indicate something was adult; they didn't need to trademark it. What happened is the sex industry took it over."
-Joan Graves, former Board Chair of the MPAA Ratings Board, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
I noted in my review that, even by the standards of the time, Midnight Cowboy's "X" rating seemed odd. It may deal frankly with sexual topics, but it's not even remotely explicit. Per Nancy Buirksi's documentary, Desperate Souls, Dark City, and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, the rating was actually requested by United Artists, out of fear that young people would imitate the homosexual behavior portrayed. Frankly, I think most young male viewers would have been more likely to mimic Ratso's limp and speech patterns than Joe Buck's unappealing movie theater escapades, but what do I know?
Midnight Cowboy was far from the only well-received film to initially be released with an "X." Stanley Kubrick's 1971 release, A Clockwork Orange, is probably the most famous example. Director Lindsay Anderson released If... with an "X" in 1968, the year before Midnight Cowboy. Other titles include Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, director Ralph Bakshi's take on artist Robert Crumb's Fritz the Cat, Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, and John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Even early on, though, the "X" rating posed a problem for studios. Midnight Cowboy was a hit; but the flat restriction against underage viewers being admitted, even with their parents, automatically meant less revenue for most titles. It should be noted that If..., Midnight Cowboy, and A Clockwork Orange were all re-released with an R rating. Of the three, Midnight Cowboy was the only one that was re-rated without editing.
As Joan Graves observed in the quote above, however, the real death blow for the "X" came from pornographic films. Whether, as Graves indicates, out of a feeling that there was simply no need or (as I suspect) out of a sense of prudishness, the MPAA chose not to trademark the adults only rating. As those few high-profile X-rated movies resulted in a higher profile, pornographic movies began to advertise their fare as "X"... then as "XX"... and finally as "XXX."
This led movie theaters to increasingly refuse to even carry X-rated content, and more and more newspapers refused to advertise X-rated motion pictures. Studios had already been hesitant to accept an "X," in most cases preferring to edit their titles to receive a more audience-friendly rating. Now that hesitance became flat refusal. The handful of legitimate X-rated titles that trickled out in the late 1970s and the 1980s are, to a one, low-budget independent releases and/or foreign films, rather than anything produced by a major studio.
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| Author Henry Miller (Fred Ward) has an affair with aspiring writer Anaïs Nin (Maria de Medeiros) in Henry & June, the first motion picture to be rated NC-17. |
THE "NC-17" RATING:
"Mad slasher films like the Friday The 13th series routinely get an R rating from the MPAA and play at millions of teenagers... but let an artistic film come along that really sincerely considers the subject, and it’s banished by the MPAA... This must be the only civilized country on Earth that doesn't believe that there is such a thing as an adults only movie."
-Roger Ebert, in a 1990 episode of Siskel & Ebert, expresses frustration while championing Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert discussed (and argued) over movies for more than two decades across multiple movie review shows. They started with PBS's Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, which was later re-titled Sneak Previews. The breakout success of Sneak Previews led them to bigger paychecks and a bigger audience with At the Movies before they finally signed with Disney for the final version of their show, Siskel & Ebert & the Movies. Though many argue about the duo's legacy, they enjoyed a large audience and a surprising amount of influence - and to their credit, they frequently used that influence to champion foreign films and independent cinema.
In April 1990, the two reviewed Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, a movie that Greenaway released unrated rather than agree to make edits to avoid an "X." In that same episode, they laid into the contemporary state of the MPAA ratings.
I'm sure that it's total coincidence that the MPAA introduced "NC-17" in September of that year, less than six months after that episode aired.
The first motion picture to earn the new NC-17 rating was Henry & June, co-writer/director Philip Kaufman's drama about the relationship among author Henry Miller, his wife June, and budding writer Anaïs Nin (whose memoir was the basis for the film). I have to admit to finding it a bit... well, dull. Kaufman's earlier The Unbearabe Lightness of Being was a better movie on every level, and it was also a lot sexier. Still, Henry & June was both a "real" movie and a serious one (too serious by half); and while its box office performance was unspectacular, it likely made more money because of the controversy created by its rating.
In the years that followed, major studios avoided releasing NC-17 movies the exact way they used to avoid releasing X-rated ones. As a result, most titles were - again - either foreign films or indie fare. Director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas made one big attempt to pull the rating into the mainstream. They had the clout, building on the success of their hit erotic thriller, Basic Instinct, and their project drew a great deal of press.
I remember, in the weeks leading up to the release of 1995's Showgirls, reading articles that breathlessly wondered if this would be the new Midnight Cowboy, legitimizing the adults only rating. Unfortunately, the resulting film did the opposite. Showgirls turned out to be a hackneyed exploitation film, good for some unintentional (?) comedy and not much else. Its failure doomed most movies with that rating to obscurity. Every so often, an independent picture gets released as "NC-17" - but the major studios have steered well clear. The letters may be different, but the overall situation is exactly the same.
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| Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls was meant to bring "NC-17" into the mainstream. It ended up doing the opposite. |
CONCLUSION:
Midnight Cowboy's Best Picture win seemed to herald a rising legitimacy for serious movies aimed strictly at adult audiences. This seemed to be borne out by several releases, from Linday Anderson's If... to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. But it ended up being a mirage, with even those titles resubmitted or, more often, re-edited in order to gain wider distribution.
The ratings system itself was a success for Jack Valenti's MPAA, enduring for more than two decades longer than the Hays Code it replaced. The ratings don't directly impose direct content restrictions, allowing studios and filmmakers to meet the tastes of contemporary audiences without direct defiance of the board. Also, as a classification system, ratings have been better able to adapt to shifting standards.
That is a simplification. The 1972 New York Times article, Putting the Hex on "R" and "X," observed that, even at that early stage, the ratings allowed the MPAA board to be censors in all but name. The threat of a rating that would greatly limit revenue resulted in the MPAA directing changes to many movies, something that still happens to this day (these days, often to keep movies from even being released with an "R").
Still, the success of the ratings compared to the failure of the Hays Code points to the importance in any system of having the ability to encompass and adapt to changes in times, tastes, and values.
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