This Essay is Not Yet Rated

Jack Valenti owes me a lot of money. Unfortunately, I just found out he’s been dead since 2007. You’d think fifteen years of bounced emails would have clued me to it sooner.

Up until 2005 he was head of the Motion Picture Association of America. His controversial 38-year tenure included actions that cost me millions of dollars. His estate should have settled with me years ago

Let me outline my grievance.  In 1968, two years into Valenti’s term as president, I was an aspiring screenwriter, amid real thoughts of moving all my operations to sunny Southern California.  One small problem was I was twelve years old.  Apparently, my parents had to agree to move to Hollywood with me. When I asked them, they didn’t give an answer.  But they did ask what drugs I was on.

How was I to learn screenwriting in my hometown of Tulare, a San Joaquin Valley hub of agriculture, dairies and 4-H clubs?  It wasn’t part of the curriculum there, although I do remember a night class that taught creative writing. The thing was, at 12, I couldn’t drive very well after dark, or even when it was light, for that matter.  And the class ended past my bedtime. 

The best way for me to learn script writing was to watch the top movies of the day. This wasn’t easy. You could manage it one-of-two ways: watch them at the movie theater or on broadcast television.

Finding good movies playing at locations nearby took dedication. Nowadays we go onto the worldwide web and get showtimes instantly.  If you tried that then you’d would have waited about twenty-five years for an answer. The easiest way to get movie information at that time was from the newspaper or the pre-recorded message when you called the theater.

My choices at 12 were mostly limited to the only theater we had in town. The Tulare Theater was ornate, old and usually very empty. Still, a lot of soon-to-be classic movies played there, many classified by Jack Valenti’s new movie rating system as R-rated: unsuitable for children under the age of seventeen, which even back in the sixties included me as a twelve-year-old.

With television, watching a desired film was even harder to do for a few reasons.  For one thing, you couldn’t just stream a movie like you do now.  The only programming available on-demand was the snow between channels. Also, most households had a single television.  For us, Ii was the one my father sat in front of each evening. He had favorite shows and none of them were movies. 

With no script writing road to follow, by the time I was thirteen I was already a has-been. I just couldn’t gain traction as a fledging screenwriter. Arbitrary movie raters took away all my hope of conquering Tinseltown by the time I could shave.

To understand this subjugation, I researched back to 1922.  That was the year the heads of the six major movie studios formed the Motion Picture Association of America, ostensibly to ensure all movies had a “clean moral code.” Many found that ironic because, as human beings, the studio heads could make Attila the Hun look like St. Francis of Assisi. They were arrogant, cruel, selfish, vindictive; and these were their good qualities. 

Other documents talk about the Hays Code, named after the first president of the MPAA, ex-Postmaster General William Hays.  It was a list of naughty behavior–content clearly destroying the moral fabric of the country.  This included scenes depicting the sleeping together of the married, the ridiculing of the clergy, the mixing of the races and the public picking of the nose.

The MPAA enlisted the enforcement arm of NATO.  It wasn’t the NATO with a weapon arsenal though, it was the one armed with flashlights held by ushers, called the National Association of Theater Owners.  Not surprisingly, movie producers didn’t flinch. Then someone came up with the idea that motion pictures could self-censure by using an age-related rating system.  That someone was Jack Valenti.

While the Hays Code tried to influence production values, the new Movie Rating System hoped to give parents the information they could use to make viewing decisions for their families.   It’s funny how much thought went into preventing minors from watching the occasional bare breast or exploding head back then when children can see that stuff instantly on the internet nowadays.

An industry insider I spoke to claims the raters used hash marks in the old days to count indiscretions. Jimmy Richards, the long-time ticket collector down at the cineplex, says its point-based--counting merits and demerits. I asked him how he knew these secrets, “you’d be surprised the things you can hear in a ticket booth,” he said.

The end resulting movie rating is like your credit score, the process of determining it is not known by mere mortals. It is all very secretive, and I was unable to crack the mystery. The MPAA has kept the entire Movie Rating System and it’s “Raters” a closed book since its beginning.

What I did do was figure out how to make peace with the past and let the Valenti estate be:  I’ll write a screenplay about it.  I’ll have my twelve-year-old self have an affair with a married Movie Rater.  A jealous co-worker will tell the rater’s husband that she is re-rating movies so she can take her too-young lover to the picture show.  There’ll be underaged foreplay; profanity–Damn you Rusty, why can’t you be seventeen!; the threat of a fist fight; pointed guns. The movie will have to be rated “R” which would keep my younger self from seeing it.  I’m okay with that because, frankly, at twelve, I probably couldn’t have handled it.

Copyright by Rusty Evans, Radio/TV/Film Department Head, 2022