Movies - This Film Is Not Yet Rated

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	Movies - This Film Is Not Yet Rated

This Film Is Not Yet Rated is an independent documentary film about the Motion Picture Association of America's secretive rating system and its effect on American culture. It will premiere at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and air on the Independent Film Channel in fall 2006.

The MPAA gave the film an NC-17 rating for "some graphic sexual content".

Topics in the film include disparities in ratings and feedback between Hollywood and Independent films, gay and straight sexual situations, and between violence and nudity.

The Independent Film Channel plans to air the documentary uncensored and uninterrupted.

Kirby Dick
- Director
Eddie Schmidt - Producer

People interviewed in the documentary:

Darren Aronofsky, Filmmaker (Requiem for a Dream
)
Maria Bello
, Actress (The Cooler
)
Atom Egoyan, Filmmaker (Where the Truth Lies
)
Mary Harron, Filmmaker (American Psycho
)
Kimberly Peirce, Filmmaker (Boys Don't Cry)
Bingham Ray, Distributor (October Films
, former President, United Artists)
Kevin Smith
, Filmmaker (Clerks)
Matt Stone
, Filmmaker (South Park)
John Waters, Filmmaker (A Dirty Shame
)

Controversies About Methodology of Filmmakers

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006 (an ideal venue for a work which specifically addresses itself to the concerns of independent filmmakers), where it received a standing ovation at its initial public screening. The limited number of initial reviews were mainly positive, but there were also questions about the accuracy and methodology of This Film Is Not Yet Rated levelled almost immediately. Dick's approach to the material was deemed overly manipulated by even some favorable critics, and was accused of being riddled with outright falsifications by other writers.

The day after its premiere screening, self-avowed Kirby Dick fan David Poland of the website "Movie City News" wrote "even though it speaks to a subject I think is very important - the failures of the rating system and, specifically the NC-17 - the tough, smart research just isn't in the film. Instead, resorts here to easy, cheap shots and falls into a first person role, which strikes me as a clever way to deal with the fact that he just didn't get the real story."

In a lengthy two part essay labelling the film "willfully distorted," the exhibitor-centric publication BOXOFFICE Magazine levelled a number of more serious charges: that in using longtime enemies of the ratings system such as South Park co-creator Matt Stone as "expert witnesses" to make assertions outside their area of expertise, Dick was essentially fabricating facts; that Dick implied that the ratings board had no gay members in its history, even though openly gay film critic and former MPAA rater Stephen Farber is a featured interview in This Film Is Not Yet Rated; that Dick supressed facts about the ratings history of the war documentary Gunner Palace, which he depicted as being kept from youthful audiences by an R-rating, when it was actually re-rated PG-13 on appeal before its release to theatres.

BOXOFFICE also attempted to undermine the film's claim to being an authoritative statement on the film ratings system by indicating that Dick never mentioned the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), co-founder and co-operator of the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA) ratings board, and instead chose misleadingly to depict the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as sole proprietor of the CARA process.

Even critics favorable to the film were made uneasy by some of its "guerilla filmmaking" tactics. In a generally positive review, Hollywood Reporter writer Kirk Honeycutt expressed reservations about what he called the film's "Michael Moore techniques" of "entertaining graphics, mocking cartoons, unrelated footage from Columbine and Buchenwald and an ambush-style investigation into board members' identities," adding that "the `Candid Camera' gotcha shots of members shopping or eating lunch belong in a movie about a stalker, one that should be rated R."

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