During all of this, the studios had been losing both money and power at a previously unparalleled rate. Over the next ten years, the increasing severity and frequency of the strikes was incredibly costly for the producers and had substantially increased the pull unions had over the studios' actions. They needed to put an end to the struggle and to the labor force's push for power. Luckily for Richard Heffner's “owners of Hollywood” and their new and improved ratings board, a little known senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy, was about to change the climate in which artistic freedom existed in American domestic politics.
The heads of studios found their solution at the heart of the McCarthyist movement. Roughly between the late nineteen forties and late nineteen fifties , Senator McCarthy was able to instill a fear of communist infiltration into the American populous. Suspected persecutors were pursued, interrogated and tried accordingly. Luckily for the film producers, their struggle with the unions was happening at the same time.
The key then for the studios was to make the involvement within a union a dangerous act. By aligning the unions and their participants with communism by way of association with McCarthy, the studios were able to take advantage of the American travesty that was about to unfold. The Hollywood Blacklist and McCarthyism are not however indistinct events: “People generally associate [the blacklist] with McCarthyism. Well, it had nothing to do with McCarthy at all.” “Once the MPAA got on board, the MPAA did it all themselves” .
The unions witnessed the appearance of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which inquired into possible communist penetration of the Hollywood film industry. They therein associated being in a Hollywood union with being a communist. For example, a typical question asked to artists during the hearings was: “are you a member of the communist party and have you ever held any position in a Screen Writer's Guild?” . Asking the two questions together inherently implies that there is a connection between the two and therefore makes saying yes to either one, a dangerous act.
A further oft-overlooked point concerning this period is the fact that the actual Blacklist itself had nothing to do with the government. It was decided upon and enforced by the same people, who strived to evade government involvement in the rating system, who pay the bills for Jack Valenti and the MPAA, and who (most pertinently) sought to dislodge the power of the labor unions in Hollywood. Once again, the Heads of the major movie studios' keen ability to resourcefully manipulate political circumstances was on full display in this period.
Political Structure and The Importance of Money
Over the course of this examination of the MPAA's history, it has become clear how such an organization came to power, and to some extent how and for what reasons it exerts such a power. It is, to this point however, unclear exactly how a seemingly simple rating given to a film can truly affect the greater ideals of artistic freedom, especially in a society such as this one that places so much value on freedom of speech. Jack Valenti defends his system in saying that “if you make a movie that a lot of people want to see, no rating will hurt you. If you make a movie that few people want to see, no rating will help you,” . There are several facts in defense of the MPAA's rating system that must be taken into account. First of all, no filmmaker is required to accept the rating given to his or her film by the CARA. Furthermore, if an artist feels that their project has been misevaluated, there is an elaborate appeal system into which they may enter.
It is particularly when approaching the NC-17 rating that things become less cut and dry. Box office analyst, Paul Dergarabedian explains the situation as follows: “ The difference between an NC-17 and an R rating could […] mean the difference on some films maybe even tens of millions of dollars, because it definitely limits your ability to market the film. If you are limited on your ability to market a film, people […] are not going to know to even go to the theatre to see that movie” . In other words, if an artist receives an NC-17 rating on a film, or refuses to take the rating, they are virtually guaranteed a loss of money on the film, and most major film studios will not even release it. Many studios even provide for contractual agreements with directors that obligate them to produce a sub NC-17 rating .
In that light the ratings board obviously plays a very large role in determining what will and will not be exposed to the American viewers. That power, so long as it is applied equally in all areas, may not be such a travesty. This however is not the case. Take for example, John Waters' 1972, NC-17 rated comedy, Pink Flamingos. Independently produced and financed, the entire film was shot on weekends and cost only twelve thousand dollars to make. The rating was given on the grounds of overly sexually explicit material and “tough content” . That same year, another director released a film containing horrendously graphic depictions of violence and gang activity. Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather was produced by Paramount studios and boasted an estimated six million dollars in production cost , an unheard-of sum of money to spend on a film at the time. The Godfather was rated R despite “startling close-ups, vivid death agony sequences and Technicolor blood spurting everywhere” . The film grossed one hundred and thirty four million dollars , Pink Flamingos made a fraction of that. This is only one example of the MPAA's consistently recurrent disservice to the independent filmmaker.
