As usual, Landmark Theatres doesn't fight this act of corporate censorship.

The kicker is that Sex & Lucia won an award in a film festival where one of the offending newspapers was a corporate sponsor.

So if GWTW remained unrated as it was in 1939, nobody under 17 would be allowed to see it at some of those theaters. However, since they slapped a G on it, a 6-year old can walk up and get a ticket by themselves. Go figure.

When WB re-released the "uncut" version of The Wild Bunch, the ratings board initially hit it with an NC-17. Strangely, the scenes that had been cut in the first place had no additional violence than the original R cut, which shows that standards of violence have been toughened up since the 60's. WB's saving grace was finding the documentation that proved the R had been given to The Wild Bunch before the general release version cuts had been made, so the MPAA rules allowed this version to retain the R rating.

Strangely, the Times' former competitor, the P-I, used to run ads for X-rated theaters; until the two papers advertising departments merged in a Joint Operating Agreement. Back in 1981 my junior high social studies class used the P-I in an assignment, and one of the tasks was to find a G or X-rated movie advertisement and add it to our clippings for the assignemnt. According to the Times' spokesperson, I should have been warped for life for that.

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Then again it's good to see a "Film Snob" admire The Fast and the Furious.

If a film maker or studio does not like the rating they got, they can
appeal the rating. In Los Angeles the appeal screening is done at a
screening room other than the MPAA screening room in Sherman Oaks, Ca.. They run the film and afterwords talk for about 1-2 hours about
the cuts that were done to the film. Most of the time the director
or studio rep. is waiting in the lobby of the screening room. The directors would try to come into the booth to see what was happening
in the other auditorium. When I was in Los Angeles, I worked at a screening room in Beverly Hills that did all the MPAA appeals screenings. So I saw a few MPAA ratings appeals, every few months.

Perhaps it is because the paper will not allow print ads for anything containing the word 'SEX'?

Y Tu Mama Tambien (and your mother too) and L.I.E., while both containing very graphic sexual material, do not have the magic word 'SEX' in their titles.

In the sales contract for the land, there is a "covenant" in the deed that will prevent us from ever showing any movie rated harder than "R". The land we bought was city owned... and the Mayor and Town Council would only agree to the terms of the sale if that "covenant" was included.

quote:

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that will prevent us from ever showing any movie rated harder than "R".

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Pun intended?

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