In the interview between talk show host Aaron Harber and MPAA CEO Dan Glickman, Harber plays devils advocate and tries to disrupt the current system of rating movies. He begins with the board of raters. Ten to fifteen parents watch movies all day and rate them from G to NC-17 with "descriptives", as Glickman puts it, "based on if their own children were to go to watch these movies". Harber is extremely critical of this. He first asks about an issue presented in "Dame in the Kimono". Harbor asks Glickman if there is a process to appeal a rating and get it reduced to a lower rating to get a bigger audience. We know from "Dame in the Kimono" that this did go on, quite unprofessionally, in the mid 1900s. After a rating had been made, if the producers wanted it lowered, they could "cut a deal" with the MPAA by dropping a few scenes or words and "dropping some cash under the table". Also mentioned in the book, however, was the point that once branded with an X, even if changed, the movie would still hold a negative reputation (276). In the interview, Harber asks Glickman to address the issue of rating appeals. Glickman answers, "you can accept the rating, you can appeal the rating, you can make changes to the film to modify the rating... but nine times out of ten it doesn't change".
The last point that Harber brings up is that the panel of only ten to fifteen parents would not accurately represent the distribution of American families and their opinions of violence on movies; and that the parents would be desensitized to the violence after seeing so much of it. Glickman immediately responds that these are fair points and that they are taken into consideration in the rating process. The MPAA attempts to remedy these situations and "biases" with a board of raters that consists of a diverse group of couples and individual parents with different tastes and opinions. Also, the raters need to see more than average number of movies a year to be able to get the feel of what's out there so the raters can compare and contrast the movies. He also addresses the fact that some people may get "numb" to violence or sex or language, or whatever it may be, but the MPAA makes sure to rotate the raters between violence, language, sex, and even cartoons.
The MPAA does everything it can and does it fairly well. I believe that more people LOTS more people check the ratings than most people think. Any parent checks to see if their children can watch it. But, the ratings play a separate role. Now, teenagers and more matured young adults check rating to see the movies that they don't WANT to see. For example, I haven't, nor will i ever, see "Horton Hears a Who" simply because it is rated G. I feel like my genetic make up is to mature to find anything amusing or entertaining about that movie.
So many people would argue that the MPAA rating system is biased, but it is evident that Glickman and his panel are doing everything to avoid as much bias as possible. In the interview on "The Film is Not Yet Rated", Kirby Dick suggests that homosexual movies would get a worse rating than heterosexual movies. So I ask, is this actually a wrong thing. I am not a homophobe, people are free to make the choices they want, but just by numbers, homosexuals are in a vast minority. So is homosexual activity getting a worse rating an unnecessary bias? I'll pose a scenario and let you decide. If a child watches a film with heterosexual scenes in it and has questions as to what is happening, parents can easily, though it may be awkward, explain what they want to their kid. If the same child then sees a homosexual scene, they are mind-blown and everything they knew about sexuality just went out the window.
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