This review is terribly late, but I finally got around to watching the DVD of Kirby Dick’s documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” which goes after the MPAA’s movie rating system. Dick tries to paint the MPAA’s private, voluntary ratings board as a “star chamber” that sits in judgment of visual arts and routinely “censors” content it finds at odds with the desires of the studios, government, the military, churches, and so on. But to me, the whole film is much ado about nothing and, worse yet, it fails to adequately address the very real risk of a government censorship popping up in the absence of a private ratings system.
By way of quick background, the MPAA’s familiar ratings system was created by former MPAA president Jack Valenti back in 1968. It was partially a response to the growing pressure for film censorship. Back then – – and this is one of many things Dick’s documentary largely ignores – – there were local censor boards who sat in judgment of films and decided if they could be shown in their communities. And there were ongoing efforts by many lawmakers at all levels to impose regulation on movies or at least strong-arm movie makers into changing content in certain ways.
And so the MPAA ratings system was born. A crucial feature of the MPAA system was that those doing the ratings would be anonymous. The reason this was done was to protect them from being pressured by both those who made the films (who obviously want less restrictive ratings) and those in government or the public who critique the films (many of whom would want stricter ratings).
But keeping raters and the rating process secretive has always had one obvious downside: The system lacks transparency. Why is it that two films with very similar content get two different ratings? Sometimes it’s obvious, other times it’s not. And this is what has Kirby Dick, and the many directors or film critics he interviews in the documentary, up in arms.
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We’ve spent a lot of time here on the TLF discussing our reservations about age verification and data retention mandates. We object on many grounds, but privacy and data security concerns are typically at the top of our list.
Government officials or others supporting mandatory data collection / retention always assure us that our personal information will be secure and that it will not fall into the wrong hands. And then something like this happens in Utah and reminds us why we were right to be concerned:
In a jaw-dropping embarrassment, the state of Utah has mistakenly divulged e-mail addresses of kids on its so-called child-protection do-not-e-mail list–a registry proponents claim is foolproof. The gaffe stems from four citations the state issued recently against companies it alleges sent e-mail to children’s addresses on its do-not-e-mail registry promoting alcohol, gambling and pornography.
According to court papers, when Justin Weiss, director of legislative affairs for the E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition, requested copies of the citations from Utah, the state complied but failed to redact the e-mail addresses of the children in the complaints. “I have no personal knowledge of how many other unredacted copies may have been sent out to other individuals that made information requests like mine,” said Weiss in an affidavit.
State officials are reportedly mortified over the incident. “A fair amount of trust has been placed with us and this is not a good thing,” Utah’s Department of Commerce Director Francis Giani reportedly told the Salt Lake Tribune. “I’m sick about it.”
As you should be. But I also hope others heed the lesson here: Despite government assurances to the contrary, government-collected personal information is never perfectly secure. That’s why we must always be vigilant about limiting how much personal information our government can get its hands on. Read Jim Harper’s fine new book, Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood, to learn more about these dangers.
Mike Masnick notes another data point in the great King Kong debate. George Lucas thinks that the era of the $200 million blockbuster is over.
Spending $100 million on production costs and another $100 million on P&A makes no sense, he said.
“For that same $200 million, I can make 50-60 two-hour movies. That’s 120 hours as opposed to two hours. In the future market, that’s where it’s going to land, because it’s going to be all pay-per-view and downloadable.
“You’ve got to really have a brand. You’ve got to have a site that has enough material on it to attract people.”
…Lucas said he believes Americans are abandoning the moviegoing habit for good.
“I don’t think anything’s going to be a habit anymore. I think people are going to be drawn to a certain medium in their leisure time and they’re going to do it because there is a desire to do it at that particular moment in time. Everything is going to be a matter of choice. I think that’s going to be a huge revolution in the industry.”
I’m very reluctant to argue with the man who created three of the top 10 grossing films of all time, but this doesn’t seem quite right. People have been predicting the decline of the movie theater for decades, first in response to the television, and then in response to the VCR. It hasn’t happened yet. The reason, I think, is not only that the big screen makes for a better experience, but also that people like to go out, and seeing a movie is a good excuse for doing that. It’s the same reason that people go to bars when they could buy alcohol and consume it at home for a lot less money. As long as there are thousands of movie theaters, it seems to be there will be demand for big-budget blockbusters to draw people into them.
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