A History of Movie Ratings

by Chris Hicks

Overview

The wire-thin line that separates movies rated PG and R has been crossed over so many times in both directions that industry observers are questioning whether the rating system carries any validity at all. Just where did this system come from? And who's been trusted with dishing out the ratings anyway? As a movie reviewer for more than thirty years, author Chris Hicks knows a thing or two about Hollywood. His masterful synopsis of CARA, the MPAA, and the mess we're in today will make you think twice before you take a film rating at face value.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939629111
Publisher:	Familius
Publication date:	07/23/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	916 KB

About the Author

Chris Hicks has been writing about movies for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City for more than thirty years, and during that time also spent thirteen years reviewing films for KSL TV and radio. Now retired, he continues to write a weekly entertainment column and home-video reviews for the Deseret News. Chris and his wife Joyce live in Holladay, Utah, and have a combined family of twelve children and thirty-plus grandchildren, all of whom love movies.

Read an Excerpt

The voluntary movie rating system was born on November 1, 1968, the offspring of Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Valenti created the ratings as a way of deflecting government censorship, which had been hovering over the movie industry since the late 1950s, when those flickering images in theaters around the country suddenly began to say things and show things that for many years had been forbidden. Parents were in an uproar, school boards were calling for reforms, and newspapers were editorializing about our children being threatened by shocking depravities on the big screen that were far too adult for their tender minds to process.Actually, this was nothing new. Movies had been offending audiences and prompting censorship by local government entities, almost since the first cinematic entertainment began popping up throughout the country at the turn of the 20th century. During that first decade of the 1900s, movie studios found themselves doing battle with state, county, city, and town censorship boards, which often banned certain movies outright or took the scissors to them, editing out the naughty bits.