Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (67 page)

A statement like that has a certain genius to it. It seems to imply that the MPAA is holding the line against the appearance of unspeakable practices on our neighborhood movie screens, when in fact all Valenti is really doing is sending up a smoke screen.

The answer to his question, of course, is that the same "mere human beings" who draw the lines between the PG-13 and R ratings would also be expected to know when the R ended and the A began. Valenti's board members would not have to make those difficult hypothetical decisions between art and pornography because the A rating would still leave the system open-ended. If the MPAA refused a film an A rating, it would still be able to go out unrated, or with a self-applied X.

But to answer his question directly: where do we draw the line? What I told Valenti that day was that there was scarcely a mature person alive who did not instinctively know the difference between A and X, between "adults only" and pornographic, and that if they needed help, they could use the Supreme Court's definition of pornography.

The point, in any event, is not to include pornography within the MPAA system, but to release the pressure on the overburdened R category. When the MPAA originally installed its ratings system, it intended the X to perform the same function that the A is now being suggested for; Valenti and his planners clearly did not foresee the rise of hardcore, and the preemption of the X by the pornographers.

If the A rating seems like such manifestly good common sense, why are Valenti and his MPAA so inflexibly opposed to it? I am not a mind reader, but I can think of an obvious possibility.

The ratings system in its current form contains no category that advises theater owners not to sell tickets under any circumstances. If an A category were introduced, exhibitors who subscribe to the voluntary MPAA system would be required to actually refuse admission to anyone under seventeen.

That's a requirement that conjures up a dreaded nightmare in the imagination of theater owners. It's the specter of a potential customer standing at the ticket window, being told he cannot buy a ticket. If Hollywood has to choose between the loss of artistic integrity and the loss of a ticket sale, integrity loses in a flash. Before the studios and the exhibitors allow those hypothetical underage viewers and their "adult guardian" to be turned away with dollars in their hands, they'll stretch the R category until it bursts.

1990

Are Great Films Gone With the Wind?

-Newspaper headline

hey've taken another one of those polls in which Americans declare that the movies are not as good as they used to be-and that, what's more, they're too sexy, violent, profane, and expensive. As a result, the pollsters discovered, people are watching their VCR machines more and going to the movies less.

There are a few facts that would seem to fly in the face of this national poll. For one, the national box office has never been stronger, and indeed the box office take has been setting records for the last five years. For another, moviegoers demonstrate an overwhelming desire to see movies containing sex, profanity, and violence-and stay away from G-rated films with such a vengeance that studios throw in a few four-letter words just to be sure of the PG-13 rating.

What people say and what they do are often very different things, and this is never more evident than in surveys like the wire-service poll of 1,084 Americans. On the basis of the questions asked, the answers could have been predicted without the necessity of conducting the poll. For example, the one question movie critics hear over and over again is, "Are the movies better than ever?" Or, as the pollsters asked, are they better than they were in the year of 1939-which saw such productions as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, and Gunga Din? The poll found, not surprisingly, that most Americans thought the movies had gotten worse in the last fifty years.

The first thing I would want to know is, how many of the respondents were over sixty-five? That would have made them fifteen years old in 1939, a reasonable age for judging the movies. Remember that the poll sters were presumably asking about the general run of movies of 1939not j ust Gone with the Wind. So we would want someone who had gone to the movies frequently in that year. And who, of course, still goes to the movies frequently today, so that they would have a basis of comparison.

My guess is that none of the 1,084 respondents of the poll would fit the description. Instead, what the poll sample was really saying was that Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were better than the movies they had seen recently-such as, perhaps, Weekend at Bernie's and Ghostbusters 2. We are exposed to all of the movies of the present, but remember only the best movies of the past. People forget that it would be possible to put together a long list of 1939 movies that were even worse than Ghostbusters 2, hard as that might be to believe.

The questions about sex, violence, and profanity come up in movie polls all the time, and the answers never fail to amaze me. Without exception, Americans declare that the movies have too much nudity, violence, sex, and profanity. And yet when they vote with their box-office dollars, they go to violent, sexy, profane movies with great cheerfulness. This is an example of the universal human tendency to be censorious on the behalf of others, while retaining full freedom to sin for oneself. What the respondents are really saying is that dirty movies are OK for them, but not for other people.

I am reminded of the Legion of Decency, which was operated by the Catholic Church in America when I was growing up. On a designated Sunday every year, Catholics were invited to stand up in church, put their hands over their hearts, and take the pledge of the Legion of Decencywhich condemned lewd and immoral books and movies. The pledge was entirely voluntary of course, but I fail to remember anyone who refused to take it. Can you imagine the effect of someone sitting resolutely in his pew, his heart uncrossed, during the pledge? It would have been like a public pledge of indecency.

And yet Catholics did somehow attend about the same movies as everybody else in those years-even such titles as The French Line, an unspeakably sinful Jane Russell movie that got priceless publicity when the Legion condemned it. Libidinous little altar boys like myself pored over the lists of "Condemned" movies in the weekly issues of Our Sunday Visitor, and when its movie critic, Dale Francis, railed against the wet blouse worn by Sophia Loren in Boy on a Dolphin, we tore out his articles and memorized them. Most of us wouldn't have known what to look for beneath a wet blouse if it hadn't been for his warnings.

What I'm suggesting is that ordinary moviegoers have a certain fondness for sex and violence, but don't want to admit to it. Another possibility is that those people who dislike sex and violence never go to the movies anyway-and this is borne out by the fact that wholesome, G-rated family movies rarely do significant business unless they are Disney animated cartoons. If people don't like sex and violence, why is Eddie Murphy a bigger star than Benji?

I am also curious about the wording of the wire service article when it reports that people were watching their VCRs more and attending movies less. The industry's own much more far-reaching polls indicate that VCRs have actually gotten people more involved in current movies. Especially in the over-thirty group, people who had stopped going out to the movies have started again, because their interest has been reawakened by the movies they see on tapes and disks. It is also true, although the wire service didn't say so, that most video rentals are of recent box office hits-so that the stay-at-homes are watching the same movies as the filmgoers.

All of this begs the question of whether "the movies" are better or worse than they were in 1939. A newsweekly did a story on the fiftieth anniversary of that great year, in which Hollywood seemed unable to do anything wrong. And indeed it was impressive to read the names of the great films of 1939, and to reflect how sadly movies had declined since then.

But think. Any good movie is a miracle, since so many forces strain to make it fail. Movies are good not because of the year they were made, but because of the people who made them, and the struggle they waged. The Wizard of Oz is one of the great fantasies of all time, a film with universal appeal. But recently I was watching Steven Spielberg's E. T. again, on Laserdisc, and I venture to say it will stand the test of time as well as The Wizard of Oz has. Gunga Din is a great melodramatic swashbuckler-but so are the Indiana Jones pictures. And if Gone with the Wind was the greatest epic of its time, the industry has produced some great epics since, including Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now, and 2001.

I do not argue that the movies are "better than ever." I am concerned that Hollywood has grown better in recent years at marketing movies than at making them. American theaters are mired each summer in a handful of multimillion-dollar sequels and action productions, and if moviegoers tell the pollsters they are discouraged after seeing Ghostbusters z or RoboCop II, I agree with them.

I also agree, to a degree, with the complaints about violence in films. I have no argument with violence itself-it is a valid subject for moviesbut I am tired of the routine chase sequences which seem to substitute for third acts in so many of today's movies. And I am also rapidly tiring of the stalkings and shoot-outs that replace dialogue in many movies. (It takes a superior action picture, like Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon 2, to remind me that violence and sequels can still be entertaining.)

As for sex and nudity, I have news for the pollsters and the 1,084 moviegoers they polled. There is a great deal less of both in today's movies than in the movies of ten or twenty years ago. One reason is the Motion Picture Rating System, which penalizes sex more than violence, and which has lost control of the X rating-which was intended to describe "adult" pictures, but is now the exclusive terrain of hard-core pornography. A movie like Last Tango in Paris would not be made and distributed by the current American film industry.

Looking through the poll again, I find that Americans believe movies are priced too high, in addition to everything else. I wonder. When I started as a film critic, in 1967, first-run tickets in Chicago were $2. Today in many theaters they are $6 or $7. What else has only tripled in price in twenty-two years? Have you checked out the price of milk lately? Gasoline? Cat food?

The fact is that hundreds of movies are made every year, 1989 as well as 1939, and in the categories of pollsters, most of them are "poor" or "fair" but a lot are "good" and some are "excellent." That's why I was disappointed that the wire service didn't report one additional finding-that the 1,084 respondents were pleased with the high quality of film criticism in America today, which helped to steer them toward good movies so successfully that 6o percent enjoyed their last film. That would be a damn fine percentage, coming from a stockbroker or a weatherman. How sharper than a serpent's tooth is an ungrateful moviegoer.

OCTOBER 29, 1997

he movies are one hundred years old in 1997, and the Pulitzer Prizes are seventy. This would be a good time for them to get together. In addition to the journalism categories, Pulitzers are awarded in the areas of music, drama, and literature-but they have never been given to the movies, where they might actually have a greater influence.