MPAA (and other shameful acts of depravity)

[will]

From the website:

R for sequences of strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and for some violence.

[nas78]

Sounds good to me...

[nas78]

But it could have been better...

'Wolf of Wall Street' Avoids NC-17 After Sex Cuts
www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/wolf-wall-street-avoids-nc-660653

[sikri06]

No surprise there.

[arnzilla]

Roger Friedman swallows bottle of Viagra.

[arnzilla]

‘Wolf Of Wall Street’ Had Its Own Consigliere For R-Rating In Tom Sherak; Exhibs Waiting To See How It Plays In Peoria
By ANITA BUSCH

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street will be released wide by Paramount Pictures on Christmas Day with a three-hour play time and an R-rating that some who have seen the film are surprised it received from the MPAA’s Classification and Rating Administration. Exhibitors who’ve seen it have called it everything from “rough” to “the hardest R I’ve ever seen from a major Hollywood studio.”

Most think it will play well on the coasts but question how audiences will react in Middle America once they realize the movie is quite different from what the ads indicate. (One exhib I spoke with Friday said it might be another Django Unchained – referring to the Quentin Tarantino pic that despite its violent content played well across the country.)

For Wolf Of Wall Street, the studio’s marketing team cut together a slick advertising campaign selling the party aspects of the film, which play to the young, college crowd (the demo that floods the marketplace during holiday break). But, the content is … well, even its star Leonardo DiCaprio aptly calls it “a modern-day Caligula.”

The film begins with an assault of coarse language — c*cksucker, f*cking, and lines like “who’s ever sucked a dog’s c*ck out of loneliness,” and “f*ck this, sh*t that, c*ck, c*nt, a**hole” — and within the first hour and 15 minutes, audiences will see two orgies; heavy drug use (smoking crack, snorting loads of cocaine); a father and son offhandedly discussing (at length) what’s au courant in women’s “bushes”; a woman performing oral sex on one man while getting rammed from behind from another; full frontal nudity of women; and lots of misogyny. There is also a scene later of a prostitute pulling a candle out of the rectum of a married Jordan Belfort (played by DiCaprio) who then drops hot wax up and down his back.

According to the current MPAA ratings system, an R-rating means the film “contains some adult material”, while an NC-17 motion picture is one that, “most parents would consider patently too adult for their children 17 and under.”

Wolf of Wall Street received an R rating.

“Even I couldn’t believe that they gave it to us,” said one of the people involved in the film. “It probably should have been an NC-17.”

It brings up some good questions. Is this the new R-rating? Or is this what society has become? After all, one of the most successful film franchises in the country right now is about children hunting down and killing other children. It’s rated PG-13.

According to sources with knowledge of the behind-the-scenes goings-on on Wolf, the mediator between the filmmaker and the MPAA’s Classification and Rating Administration was none other than Tom Sherak. It was he who was the go-between to get some of the more … um … “delicate” … trims from Wolf. As one source noted, he has been around for a long while and often has worked as a behind-the-scenes mediator with the MPAA ratings and classifications board because “he can talk to the directors.”

Sherak is the former 20th Century Fox executive and president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for three years. As some have joked who worked for him at Fox, he was the studio’s “consigliere.” Since then, he was named Los Angeles’ film czar by new Mayor Eric Garcetti to stem the tide of runaway production. So, I guess you could now call him Garcetti’s “consigliere.” But wait … when that new position was announced, Sherak told Deadline that he was bringing in his own “consigliere” (he used that word). That turned out to be Bob Pisano (who, of course, was the former “consigliere” of MGM’s Frank Mancuso). You can see how the town gets its reputation for nepotism (just a different kind of “family”). So, with Wolf Of Wall Street, Sherak became Scorsese and Paramount’s “consigliere.”

I tracked down Sherak on Monday to an office he has inside Paramount (he has been consulting) and asked him about all this. “I think it is a hard-R movie,” he agreed. “This is a Martin Scorsese movie, and when you go into a Scorsese movie, you pretty much know that you’re going to see something hard. He made a movie that’s supposed to be hard. Everything in this movie is about excess, and it’s meant to be excessive. There are no holds barred. He puts on the screen what he believes he’s trying to express. (Wolf of Wall Street) is like the extension of Goodfellas. It’s for adults.”

As one moviegoer at the WGA screening said to me a few Sundays ago when I asked him if he liked the film: “Just because a movie is about excess doesn’t mean the movie itself has to be excessive.”

But Scorsese has the reputation of pushing the limits. He’s done it time and time again. He’s no stranger to controversy and seems to revel in it, whether it be The Last Temptation Of Christ or the excessive violence in his mob films. Why does he do it? Who knows? How does he get away with what he does? Because no one says no to Scorsese. Not really … or should I say, not often.

With Casino years ago, I remember Universal executives butting heads with him over trimming some of the more graphic violence out of the film. In one scene in particular: where the brothers (based on a true story when Spilatro was beaten to death and then dumped in an Indiana cornfield) are being beaten to death with baseball bats in a field and you hear every crack of the bones. Another scene, re-enacting a true torture scene of a guy named Billy McCarthy in 1962 by Spilatro, Scorsese showed the man’s head in a vice and his eye popping out.

So, what’s a little harsh language, sex scenes that verge on pornographic, full frontal nudity (and misogyny) of women being released on one of the holiest days of the Christian calendar (the other being Easter)? Kinda reminds you of when The Exorcist was released the day after Christmas in 1973. Oh, wait, that was a phenomenal hit.

The picture, as mentioned, is opening in a very crowded Christmas holiday with nine wide releases and two others that opened this weekend that will play through Christmas. Paramount execs believe it will play well throughout the holiday, but no one would go on the record even for a positive quote without permission from their publicity department. Wonder what Jordan Belfort would have to say about that.

As for Wolf Of Wall Street’s three-hour length? Having a three-hour film in the theater means less play time for the film itself, which affects the bottom line at the box office. Simple mathematics: A 90-minute film can play several more times than a 180-minute film. More tickets sold, more cash in the exhibitors’ (and studio’s) pocket.

Some say it could have easily been cut back from the three-hour mark, and one top executive who has worked with Scorsese before called it “self-indulgent.” Exhibitors I spoke with didn’t seem to mind the length, saying it didn’t seem like three hours because it moved so quickly. As far as how long a film should be, I tend to agree with the legendary Alfred Hitchcock, who once famously said, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”

[arnzilla]

The 21 Craziest Moments in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’
SPOILERS UP THE WAZOO!

[kim]

Er not really a review but wanted to share this for obvious reasons.
flavorwire.com/430289/why-did-wolf-of-wall-street-get-a-pass-from-the-mpaa-when-feminist-films-dont-a-conversation-with-jill-soloway/

For the next few weeks we’ll all be talking about Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, because it’s a big movie, and an awards contender, and, as our own film editor says, pretty damn good. I have not seen the film yet, but per Deadline Hollywood yesterday, it displays the usual Scorsese love of the expletive and even a little more sex than we’ve come to expect from him:

The film begins with an assault of coarse language — c*cksucker, f*cking, and lines like “who’s ever sucked a dog’s c*ck out of loneliness,” and “f*ck this, sh*t that, c*ck, c*nt, a**hole” — and within the first hour and 15 minutes, audiences will see two orgies; heavy drug use (smoking crack, snorting loads of cocaine); a father and son offhandedly discussing (at length) what’s au courant in women’s “bushes”; a woman performing oral sex on one man while getting rammed from behind from another; full frontal nudity of women; and lots of misogyny. There is also a scene later of a prostitute pulling a candle out of the rectum of a married Jordan Belfort (played by DiCaprio) who then drops hot wax up and down his back.
And yet, it received an R rating, to everyone’s surprise. That light rating came about in part, Deadline Hollywood reports, to the presence of a “consigliere” named Tom Sherak who ran interference between Scorsese and the MPAA.

The item did not escape the notice of the writer-filmmaker Jill Soloway, who also had a film come out this year called Afternoon Delight. The movie stars Kathryn Hahn as Rachel, a stay-at-home mom who meets McKenna, sex worker played by Juno Temple. As you can imagine, the premise gives rise to some “racy” situations (at least, by old-fogey-MPAA lights, anyway). And when Soloway went through the MPAA ratings process, she told me, she was forced to cut quite a bit from certain scenes. In one case, she had to cut words, or expressions of enjoyment — “oh yeah” type-stuff — from a scene in which Rachel watches McKenna do her job. “They wanted it to be less intense, less uncomfortable,” Soloway says. “And I went crazy trying to get that done.” In another, there was a problem with the length— which was under ten seconds— of a silhouetted sex scene, which was apparently too much for the MPAA folk.

Afternoon Delight was, of course, a film which only saw limited release. And the MPAA’s system is theoretically optional, in the sense that theatres have been willing to disobey it. Even Soloway told me, “Director friends of mine said, ‘Let it be NC-17,’ what do you care?” But she had a contract with a distributor, and the contract said that she had to deliver an R-rated picture, so she ended up making cuts she didn’t like.

Soloway, of course, didn’t have a consigliere like Scorsese. She was kind enough to discuss the frustrations of this discrepancy with me. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our discussions about the ongoing struggle to either reform or get rid of the MPAA.

I’m not really that familiar with the MPAA process, but did you have any opportunity for a back-and-forth with them, on any of the cuts they asked for on Afternoon Delight?

Yes. They just said, “too sexually intense.” Tony and Joan [Hey and Graves] are nice people, I like them. And you know, when I showed the film at Sundance, I also felt like some scenes were too intense, and I cut them down a little myself for the theatrical version before the MPAA even got involved. Which I sort of regret, because this is a political process and in a way if I had started with a more intense version I could have kept in what I wanted in the end, maybe.

The fact is that when I watch the movie now and I experience that scene, something is materially missing. The [MPAA’s] cuts ended up making that scene worse in a way that I can feel— or rather, I miss what I used to feel— when watching it. The movie is not as good with those cuts.

It’s too bad you didn’t have a consiglieri for it.

Consigiliero, I would have wanted a woman!

So obviously you sensed a theme to the cuts they asked for?

I think it’s about the sexual agency of female characters. The scene portrays two women in a sexual situation connecting emotionally with one another. That might be what was “uncomfortable” for the MPAA. It’s infuriating, to encounter this editing-down after pushing through the many doors to get this movie made. I even won the Directing Award at Sundance, but that kind of lauding didn’t protect me from this organization’s opinion that sex from a woman’s perspective is somehow too dangerous. Did you see that thing about Evan Rachel Wood complaining that a scene where her character received oral sex was cut for the theatrical version of the movie?

Yeah. I mean, I think your film is a better example because now that I’ve seen Charlie Countryman, but reports do not suggest the frame of the movie is self-consciously feminist, where as yours is.

But it doesn’t matter, really, whether the film is feminist or not, it matters that what they cut is the one sex scene where she’s getting the oral sex! It’s about female pleasure making people uncomfortable, it’s insane. Particularly when you think about how much misogyny makes it through in other movies, how much violence, too. Is it weird that I even want affirmative action or reparations that reward women filmmakers for taking the risks of expressing authentic sexuality? I’m so mad that I was raised on the highly commercial, misogynistic characterizations of sexual women as disposable sluts or props for a man’s storyline, yet if I try to disrupt that portrayal, I have to minimize the parts that are “uncomfortable.” Uncomfortable for whom?

Right, which takes us to Wolf of Wall Street.

Yes, which made me so angry reading that Deadline Hollywood thing. I mean, look, I love Scorsese, and I bet The Wolf of Wall Street is a great movie. I remember seeing the trailer in a theater and having that stomach churn of, OK, if I see this movie I will have to do the switch-off thing that a lot of women have to do to enjoy a movie that glorifies misogyny. But even that isn’t what bothers me. What seems insane is that the MPAA allowed the scenes described — of a man receiving oral sex from a woman while another man is having sex with her from behind — but I had to cut far less sexual material to get an R instead of an NC-17. That’s what’s infuriating.

Well, and it’s obvious that there was some kind of double standard here for women.

But it’s not just women, it’s for anyone who’s other, who isn’t helping glorify the myth of the straight white hero male. By their nature, indie films disseminate the voices of people who are not commonly heard— women, queer people, people of color. These are pieces of our culture that attempt to dismantle the straight white male perspective, but because they don’t have the political muscle of the studio backing or the consigliore to walk them through the MPAA process — the likelihood that they’ll have to cut out what’s “uncomfortable” is much higher.

Do you have a solution?

I hear people call out to abolish the MPAA. I’m not sure. I don’t want to censor Scorsese, that is not my solution. We live in an age where teenagers can watch all kinds of porn all over the internet, but the same gatekeepers, same systems are in place that made me have to sneak into a theater to watch Blue Lagoon. This system is so unevenly applied and it ends up just reinforcing all the sexist, gender-violent, women-hating stuff. So sure, maybe the system can be changed, but maybe it is just time for a new way.

[sikri06]

I agree on some level with Jill Soloway. If I could decide there would be no rating system. Parents should make the decision about what their children can see, not parents of some other children in the MPAA. Or if it has to be there, get rid of the NC-17 and R-rating and make a PG-16 instead.

[arnzilla]

NY Post - My ‘orgy’ with Leonardo DiCaprio

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