In short, you’re correct.
Orignally (in 1968) the ratings were G, M, R, and X. Soon M was renamed GP (General audiences, Parantal guidance suggested), because people were assuming it was a ‘worse’ rating than R. That was eventually renamed PG. (Unfortunately, the page doesn’t have dates, for those. It all happens between '68 and '84 (when PG-13 is introduced).)
The problem with the MPAA having one top rating for pornographic films and one for non-pornograhpic films is that the MPAA doesn’t actually rate pornographic films! Adult films are almost always released straight to video and then sold online or in specialist shops, studios have no reason to submit them to the MPAA and it’s unlikely the MPAA would even want them to.
I think we’re all missing a basic issue. If they created an ‘A’ rating for non-porn adult films, how often would it get used? A couple of movies have been mentioned (Midnight Cowboys, Clockwork Orange) and you would probably put Hellraiser in there, but after that, there’s pretty much nothing except an ocean of skin flicks. Is it really worth it to create a seperate rating that’s probably going to get used once every 5 or 10 years?
Ah, but they will rate them if they’re asked to. Indeed, when the NC-17 rating came out, porno companies started submitting their films to get that rating, partly to “legitimize” their type of art but mostly as a dumb publicity stunt – which further entrenched in the minds of Americans that NC-17 = porn. :mad:
The ratings system is 100% voluntary. It’s just that all the major studios have an agreement with the MPAA to attach a rating to all of their films. Independent and foreign studios will often submit movies to be rated as well, if they’re hoping to get any sort of wide distribution. The “Unrated” and “Not Rated” ratings are almost as much a hindrance as NC-17, though it’s more of an “artsy-fartsy” stigma than a pornographic one, and most unrated films don’t play anywhere outside a handful of theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. 
The idea is that movies which today get “edited down” to an R rating (or barely squeak by with one) would receive the “A” rating. This list is much longer than you think, from Goodfellas to Clerks to South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut to Scarface to Dice Rules to every gory horror film you can imagine, as well as the notorious examples like Basic Instinct and Eyes Wide Shut. The “ocean of skin flicks” you describe would all get the stronger rating. Of course the BIG problem would be defining pornography itself – isn’t the strong sexual imagery in Kubrick’s last film no less graphic than, say, one of those soft-core sex flicks Cinemax shows late at night? (Which generally do bear the NC-17 rating; believe me, I know this. 
)
There’s no question that it all began with Woolf. My source was Jack Valenti himself. In his own words:
*
Almost within weeks in my new duties, I was confronted with controversy, neither amiable nor fixable. The first issue was the film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” in which, for the first time on the screen, the word “screw” and the phrase “hump the hostess” were heard. In company with the MPAA’s general counsel, Louis Nizer, I met with Jack Warner, the legendary chieftain of Warner Bros., and his top aide, Ben Kalmenson. We talked for three hours, and the result was deletion of “screw” and retention of “hump the hostess,” but I was uneasy over the meeting.
It seemed wrong that grown men should be sitting around discussing such matters. Moreover, I was uncomfortable with the thought that this was just the beginning of an unsettling new era in film, in which we would lurch from crisis to crisis, without any suitable solution in sight.
[…snip…]
Finally, in April 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutional power of states and cities to prevent the exposure of children to books and films that could not be denied to adults.
[…snip…]
Within weeks, discussions of my plan for a movie rating system began with the president of the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) and with the governing committee of the International Film Importers & Distributors of America (IFIDA), an assembly of independent producers and distributors.
Huh. That’s strange. I’ve always heard it was Bonnie and Clyde. Have I been misinformed all these years? And if so, why?
Bonnie and Clyde, which was also on my top 50 list (Number 29), indeed was shocking at the time for its violence. But Valenti gives a fairly thorough and chronological history of the ratings, and he himself says that his meeting with Warner over the word “screw” in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Number 12) led to his conceiving the ratings system and working to implement it. It’s hard to imagine whose word I might take over his.
NC-17 will be perceived by many (myself included) as a movie with bad acting, no plot to speak of, excessive violence, profanity and/or gratuitous sex scenes.
For $8.00, I want to be entertained. If I want to watch a fight, I’ll go down to the Navigation Blvd. area and watch the winos duke it out for free. Probably get to watch some screwing as well. If I want to be sworn at, I’ll go to work.
No doubt your sources are more authoritative than mine. But then how did B&C get attached to the MPAA history? Was it the first movie to receive a rating? Did it create so much outcry that the public demanded some sort of censorship? Is this just an urban legend?
This is really going to bother me until I find out.
Melvin Van Peebles made that movie.
In 2003, the movie, Baadassssss! was made by Mario Van Peebles, Melvin’s son who was in the “child porn” scene in S.S.B.A.S.
A lot of people liked it. I thought it was a little slow, but worth watching. The kid who played Zero in Holes played young Mario.
When you put it that way, the new rating sounds more like a “hard R” than a “non-porn X.” I could go for that. Split R into two new ratings: M and A. M (Mature Audences) is for movies that were not intended for children, but can be seen by them if a parent accompanies them. For example, a typical big-budget action movie. A (Adults Only) is for movies that are absolutely not appropriate for kids, but are not porn. No one under 18 allowed. Many horror movies, and everything Quentin Tarantino has ever made, would go in this category.
I liked how they handled it in the region 1 release of Crash: you can select the R or NC17 version of the movie after pressing “play feature”, the latter consisting of a few minutes worth of added explicit scenes. It’s the same disk, no releasing the theatrical version and then later the “too hot for the screen” version.
Of course, that movie was creepy enough in the “R” version. I wonder how they’d make an R rated version of Caligula, it would probably be the length of a commercial.
Well you see some of us out there have jobs where we don’t get sworn at. So we actually enjoy some well placed overindulgence in profanity (think Joe Pesci in Casino) and we don’t believe people like you should ruin it for us with their non-functional morality based rating systems thankyouverymuch. :rolleyes:
Is there any good reason for people under 18 to be banned from explicit movies anyway? For most of them, it’s certainly nothing new. I can understand the PG-13 rating, but I honestly cannot think of any reason to ban a sixteen year old from seeing something.
As a bit of trivia, it’s actually the rating system that allowed non-underground pornographic movies to exist. Before, there simply was no place for them. Afterwards, they had a perfectly legit place.
Personally, I think the video game rating system makes a lot more sense than the American movie rating system. Since R-rated movies up here mean restricted to anyone under 18, I never understood why kids could go to R-rated movies in the US.
I’ve seen one, actually. It was about an hour shorter than the unrated version, barely long enough to be called a movie.
The problem is the arbitrariness of the MPAA’s standards. As said in this illuminating article:
The problem with that is that you run the risk of developing a set of formulas and checkboxes that determine how movies are made. Movie codes like this are generally a bad thing as far as creativity and artistic vision goes.
Really though, can anyone really defend the ratings system? The standards for what people want to see and what they don’t want their kids to see vary so much that nothing besides actually learning about the movie and watching what your kids are doing will really work. Why do they need a committee to tell them what their kids are allowed to watch?