SYSK’s Summer Movie Playlist: How the MPAA Works

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1:01app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Chuck here for another summer movie playlist feed drop. Today, we're going to be covering how the MPAA works. And this is from June 2014. And it delves into the ins and outs of the MPAA and how they decide on rating movies because it's sort of a dark art as far as we're concerned. So check it out. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

1:38Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry. But where's Waldo? Right over there, apparently. Man, I wish people could hear the in-between stuff. I think Jerry was recording that last one. Oh, yeah? I think so. She used to give us neat little outtakes, but she doesn't do that anymore. No. Those days are long gone. They exist in the vault, though. How you doing? Not good. No? No. I don't know what's wrong with me. I am off today. Out of your game? Yeah, it's weird. Well, I think this is the perfect podcast to set you straight. Why? Because it's something that we both have some passion about.

2:20Against. Yeah. I think anybody who's seen the documentary, this film is not yet rated, that would be very difficult to not be persuaded to feel strongly about the MPAA and its practices. Yeah, and at least how they do things. But we're going to try to be objective. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say up front, I have no problem with rating a film's content so parents can decide whether or not it's appropriate. I think it's valuable, but I think there are ways to do it that I don't think the MPA does. Yes. I just wanted to float that early on. Okay. I think that was probably smart. Okay. Okay. I don't have kids, so I don't really, whatever.

3:10But I mean, I can understand the value of that kind of thing. Yeah, but it gives you an idea. I like having an idea of what I'm about to see, too. I feel like I can tell just from watching a trailer, a preview, seeing a movie poster. I'm pretty intuitive when it comes to the marketing techniques of movies. Yeah, but I think being a film nerd, it's like, is the new Avengers movie going to be rated R? That really tells you something. Right. Of course it won't be. No, it never would be. Because PG-13 is the strike zone these days. It really is. Apparently, PG-13 movies pull in more money than all other ratings combined.

3:53Yeah. And it's a relatively new phenomenon. You want to talk about its origin? Yeah, let's do it. So back in 1984, a man named Steven Spielberg had two movies out. Who? Steven Spielberg. Right. He directed one, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and he produced another, Gremlins. Yeah. And both of them, he caught a lot of heat from both of them. Sure, Indiana Jones for the heart removal scene specifically. Yeah, but also the live snake at the feast thing. Yeah, yeah. The snake babies, the eyeballs, all that stuff. Yeah. And then with Gremlins, it was just downright terrifying in a lot of different places.

4:37Especially if you're a kid. And the reason he caught heat was because both of those movies were rated PG. And so Spielberg went to the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, and said, let's do something about this. Because these clearly aren't our movies. But they apparently aren't PG movies either. So maybe we should come up with something in between. And PG-13 was born. Yeah, and this was before he had all the sway in the world. He was influential, but it wasn't like Spielberg today who could have just waved his wand and made it happen. Yeah, but I think even at the time... He was important.

5:18Yeah, there were very few directors at that time who could have gotten something like that done, too. So that's where PG-13 came from, and like you said, that's the strike zone now, and the reason why is because that is the kind of movie that caters to young teenage boys who apparently are the most successful at getting girls to go to movies with them. So if you can get a movie rated PG-13, you're going to make a bunch of money. Yeah, plus it makes sense. It's right there in the middle. Yeah. But the problem is it's become a means of almost advertising that rating. Rather than cautioning parents, it's a way of attracting the audience.

6:07Yeah, true. It's like, this isn't some kid's PG movie. This is as close to an R movie as you can get in. Yeah, and I think filmmakers try to achieve that rating by either scaling back their R-rated movie or juicing up their PG movie. Or adding more violence. Yeah. Apparently, PG-13 movies have tripled in violence over the last few decades. Yeah. And they now have, according to one study, more violence than their R-rated counterparts. Yeah, and different kinds of violence that you didn't used to see. Yeah. You know? All right, I guess we should go back in time a little bit. Let's. Is it Wayback Machine?

6:49Sure. Let's go way back in time in Hollywood.

6:58All right, it's 1922. Hollywood and Vine is a viable intersection in Hollywood at the time, unlike now. Although people are going to say, no, they built that area back up. Yeah. And that is when the MPA was born, in the early 1920s. Yeah. And at the time, it was up to local authorities or your state or your municipality to either stamp something as moral or immoral. There were no ratings on movies, and thanks to a guy named Will Hayes, who was the first president of the MPAA, he installed the Hayes Code and said, you're either going to pass or fail. It's either going to be stamped immoral or moral.

7:41Right, and the reason Will Hayes, who was the MPAA president, came up with the Hayes Code, which was really extensive. Yeah. It was like if you talk about the government, it always has to be good. Sexuality has to be repressed. And hetero. How you think about all movies from the 30s and 40s. Yeah. Squeaky clean, basically. Sure. The division between good and evil is very clearly defined. The good guy always wins. And if you didn't fall into that Hays Code, like you said, your movie would be stamped immoral. But the whole reason he came up with this code was because local municipalities could pass their own obscenity laws, and that could be bad for business.

8:28It said not even get your film exhibited. Right. Remember in the ACLU episode where we were talking about that one movie, that New York, just the Catholics said, no, you can't show that here. And the ACLU went to work getting the Catholics beaten in court. even though it was just a bad movie. It had nothing to do with... Well, I mean, it did, but it shouldn't have been shown because it was so terrible. Was it bad? I don't remember. Yeah, I mean, it was supposed to be not very good. Okay. But it happened. That kind of thing happened a lot. Local towns said, no, we're not going to show that movie.

9:03So Hayes figured out if Hollywood policed itself, then they could control what movies came out and therefore everybody could make a bunch of money. That's right. And that's the point to the MPAA, they're the lobbying arm of six major Hollywood studios. Yeah. They work for them. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's one way to say it. And it's just those six, too, isn't it? Well, yeah, I mean, there's definitely an argument these days that independent filmmakers have a much rougher time with the MPAA. Yeah. But most of the indies, too, are eventually distributed by the majors anyway. I got you. You know what I'm saying?

9:43Okay. So flash forward a bit in our way back machine to the 1950s, things changed a little bit after World War II. And people, I guess the easiest way to say it is people loosened up a little bit and didn't mind certain elements in their entertainment any longer. Yes. A big example of this article he uses, Frank Sinatra got an Oscar nomination for playing a heroin addict in The Man with the Golden Arm. And that couldn't have happened in the 1940s. No, millions of people hadn't died in World War II yet. That's right. I imagine that kind of loosens you up as far as seeing curse words and stuff in movies goes.

10:23Yeah, like that's not a big deal. World War II is a big deal. Right. Get your haunches down. Exactly. Yeah. That was the big one, the big first crack to the Hays Code. Yeah. And then there were, I think that, you said he won an Oscar, right? Yeah, it was a really good movie. That kind of opened the floodgates so that by the end of the 50s, you got some like it hot, and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are dressed like women, hitting on Marilyn Monroe. Yeah. And at that point, it was pretty obvious the Hays Code was dead. Yeah, I mean, they weren't passing the code, but they were still getting released.

10:56So once something is subverted like that, it's dead in the water. Right. So that was fine for a little while. I think the Hays Code just kind of fell to the wayside, and people were releasing movies without any kind of moral or immoral stamp, but the rating system as we understand it today hadn't come about yet. Yeah. So it was kind of a limbo period until 1968 and a store owner in New York with the last name of Ginsburg got busted for selling nudie mags to 16-year-old boys. And he took it all the way to the Supreme Court saying, you can't say anything about this. there's federal laws about obscenity, not local laws, and the Supreme Court said, you know what?

11:40We really think it's up to local municipalities to decide what they want their minors exposed to or not. That got Hollywood's attention, because all of a sudden, local municipalities could decide whether or not they wanted to show movies to minors or not. So what was old became new again, and Jack Valenti, who was in charge of the MPAA, said, we need another system, another self-policing system. And he came up with the rating system that we have today. Yeah, and he, I mean, Jack Valenti was the head of the MPA for close to 40 years. And he, initially, the intention was to stop censorship because he feared that the movies were going to start being censored locally.

12:24And so I think the origins of the MPA's rating system were art-centered. Art-centered, but also money-centered. Because, again, if you have town A showing the movie, but towns B through L deciding that the movie is obscene and not showing it, then you're losing that money in B through L. So what Valenti came up with was this idea that, let us tell you what is appropriate for minors or not, what movie is, and we'll just make a simple rating system. Yeah. G, P, G, R, or X? The old X. Yeah. And triple X, which wasn't even formally a rating. It was just a... Marketing tool? Yeah. Yeah. Because three Xs, that's like, whoa.

13:12I wonder if anybody ever came out with one with four Xs. Yeah, or double X even. Yeah. Like, yeah, we cut out that one part, so we're going to take away an X. Yeah, Christian, our colleague here, wrote a great blog post about the former X-rated movie. Is that right? Yeah. I'll have to check that out. Yeah, it's good. On Brain Stuff or Stuff of Genius? On the Brain Stuff blog earlier this year, and you actually recommended it on your blog. The X rating? Yeah, the best stuff you've read this week. Yeah, I remember recommending one of his things. I just don't remember that one. It was good. I thought about asking him in here, but then I thought, eh, we got it.

13:48Nice. So yeah, back then it was G through X. And well, we'll talk about how that changed. Maybe after this message break? New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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16:28All right, so no longer do we have X-rated movies. Now we have something. I guess we should just go through what these ratings mean today in 2014. Okay. So you've got your G. G's always been G. General audience. Anyone can see it. Yes. And that's your family cartoon that kids love and parents are forced to go to. Right. Then you've got PG. That means no drug use. Maybe a little violence because, as we'll learn, the MPA has less problems with violence and more problems with language and sex. Huge criticism. Huge criticism. PG-13, which we've kind of been through. Then you've got your R, and that is no one under 17, this is a suggestion that no one over 17 be admitted without a parent.

17:16These aren't laws, though. That's one thing that's important to point out. Those are suggestions, and then theaters have policies. Yes, and let's kind of dig into that. So none of this is legally binding. No. None of them are anything more than recommendations. They're basically saying that this movie has X amount of profanity or X amount of nudity or lacks any drug use or something like that. And so for what the MPAA thinks, the average moral compass of the average American thinks about these different things like sex, drugs, nudity, all that stuff, this movie falls into this rating. And again, it's not enforceable.

17:59you don't even need to have a rating to release a movie. But if you want to get your movie in theaters, there's basically no theater chain out there right now, no major theater chain out there right now, that will show an unrated movie. Yeah, it's a completely voluntary system to submit your film to the MPA ratings board. But it's de facto. But you have to do it. Yeah. That's the rub, is that they say it's voluntary, but you actually have to pay a fee to submit your movie if you ever want to have it shown in theaters. Right, and the fee is anywhere from like$25 ,000 for a big budget movie to$750 for a short.

18:37Yeah. And so you submit your movie. Well, we'll get into it in a second. Let's talk some more about the rest of the ratings. Yeah, well, there's only one more, and that's NC-17, which replaced X, and that means, this was in 1990, and it basically means that it's for adults only, and you should not come in if you're under 18. Right. It also means these days that it's foreign or about lesbian or gays, basically. Yeah, not fully, but sure. It's pretty close. Yeah. And NC-17, the first movie to come out with that was Henry and June. Yeah. Not to be confused with Benny and June. And it basically sunk that movie because everybody was like, oh, this is X now.

19:21Right. NC-17, if you jumble it all together, it looks like X. And the whole reason they came out with NC-17 was to replace X because X was associated exclusively with pornography in the minds of moviegoers. Yeah, exactly. Alright, so let's get into this. The actual ratings board, there's the MPAA, and then working for the MPAA is the Classification and Ratings Administration, CARA. And CARA doesn't say whether your movie stinks or not. Kara is 8 to 13 people, and they are called Raiders, and they are overseen by a senior Raider, and they sit down and watch these movies and take copious notes on what they think, based on their standards, is, I don't want to say offensive, but just noteworthy.

20:12Right. Like, maybe they're not offended, but they think the average mom in Sheboygan might be offended. Right. Supposedly. Which is kind of a thing, because the whole rating system, as you just kind of pointed out, is subjective. Totally subjective. They supposedly, here's the other rub, is it's all secret. Right. You can find out a federal judge's name and address, but you can't find out who a raider is for your films. It's all conducted in private. None of this stuff is released. And that's one of the big rubs in that documentary and with filmmakers in general, is it's all done behind closed doors.

20:52there's never any explanations provided. These people are supposed to have kids between ages of 5 and 17 but many of them do not. Right. Either have kids at all or have kids that are older than 18. Yeah. It basically frees them up from any accountability. Yeah. To do this all in private and in secrecy. And until that movie by Kirby what is Kirby's last name? Henry and June? No. No. The documentary. Oh yeah. Yeah, this film is not yet rated. Yeah, until Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated came out, all of this stuff was just conjecture and Hollywood legend. Yeah. He was the first one to really, basically, he tailed these people, tailed them to lunch to find out who they were and eavesdrop on them and did some digging and found these anonymous people did not fall into the requirements that the MPAA said they did.

21:50and so not only was it in secret, it was fraudulent basically, this rating system. So according to the standards, you submit your film, this group of people, this anonymous group of people watch it, they rate it, then they come together and vote on a rating and then they pass their vote along to a senior rater who talks to the movie's distributor or director or producer It says here's the rating, here's why we rated it like this. And then you're faced with a choice. You can accept the rating, you can edit your film as per the CARA's recommendations. Take out these bad words, cut the sex scene a little early, leave all the violence.

22:39Yeah. Or you can reject the rating and just release your movie as unrated. Yeah, which, well, you can try to release it, but since no one will show it, it's really sort of a misnomer. Right, but it's becoming increasingly a thing. Again, you need the rating to get your movie shown in movie theaters. Yeah. But what happens if you don't care if your movie comes out in theaters? Video on demand? Yeah, or just releasing it to the internet. Now, I'm curious about that, how that's going to change the landscape. Well, right now, it's a huge threat to the MPAA because all of the power they wield is found in this rating system.

23:19For theaters. Yes. And if no one's going to theaters. Then the MPAA loses all of that power, which is a big deal, especially now because the MPAA is needed more than ever as a lobbying group because of online piracy, which we'll talk about some more. So it's a very precarious time for the MPAA right now, and it's a terrible time for them to be under as much scrutiny and public attack and critique as they are. Yeah. So it's, I mean, they got spears sticking out every which way, and their trunk is flailing, and they're honking. That is true. One thing I should point out, as I said, is that there's no accountability.

23:57That's what the NPA says is the good thing about the secrecy, is that it frees them up. That anonymity does. It frees them up from accountability. I just don't agree. Right. Okay. So if you want to appeal, there was apparently a change made in response to Kirby Dick's movie, the documentary. Before, if you were appealing your rating, which is very difficult, it almost never was done. Well, you never won, that's for sure. Right. And when you were appealing, you couldn't reference any other film. It was totally done in a vacuum, which is pretty preposterous. It's imposterous. Yeah, like that's the only way to be able to tell.

24:42It's like, wait a minute, if you said this about this, then why not this for my movie? Right, which meant that there was no real standard that you could point to. Or there were standards you could point to, they just wouldn't be considered. Yeah, or at the very least, if they do have written standards, they don't release them, so you don't even know what they are. Right. So the MPAA, they've got their rating system. They've got the appeals process. Which was also in secret, unless that's changed, right? I think... I think the appeals board, not only was the appeals board in secret, but they weren't even just raiders.

25:19They were people from the industry. Right. And the theater owners association. Exactly. Whereas the people who were raiders are supposedly unaffiliated with the movie industry and are just like average, ordinary parents. representing Europe, middle America, we'll just call it. Even though I think that's insulting. The thing is, though, is a lot of people criticize the MPAA and say these raiders are really representing the six major studios who rake in 95 % of the$10.9 billion made in the United States in theaters alone. Just ticket sales, not DVD or anything like that. Yeah. And that's what the MPAA does in addition to rating.

26:05They are, like we said, the lobby arm for these six studios. That's right. And they, I guess we should talk about piracy now, huh? That's one of their other big, besides from rating movies, they are heavy in the lobby against, well, especially now with online piracy because the digital distribution network is, seems like the way forward as far as distribution goes. Right. Like it's not the future, it's the present and the future. And the MPAA has a, they're accused of basically trying to quell new technology. Yeah. By just saying like, let's just keep people from peer-to-peer file sharing. All together.

26:48So that they can't steal movies in part. And if you go back to the early 80s, Jack Valenti was known to have railed and lobbied against the legality of VCRs. Yeah. People are just gonna be recording things and handing them out to their friends. Exactly. Yeah. So there was a, the MPA has a long history of basically just doing anything it can to stifle innovation in order to protect the profits of these big movie studios. The other problem with them lobbying in favor of these six movie studios is that they inherently have a conflict of interest against the studios that are not part of these six that they represent, but whose movies they still rate.