Hey, everybody, This is Chuck and welcome to this weekend's Stuff you Should Know Selects episode. This one I picked out How the m p a A Works from June just a few years ago, and I picked this one because, well, kind of because I'm doing my new show Movie Crush, where I talked to people about their favorite all time movie, and my new episodes called Mini Crushes where I don't have a guest, but it's just Nolan High in here kind of rapping about stuff, recommendations and calling Facebook questions and stuff like that, and it just kind of got me thinking along the lines of movies in This episode on the Motion Picture Association of America was a really good one. And if you are just confused by the mp A what they do, this will clear it all up for you. So please to enjoy How the mp a A Works. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. M Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry. But where's wal though right over there apparently, and I wish people could hear in between stuff. I think Jerry was recording that last one. Oh yeah, I think so. She used to give us a neat little outtakes, but she doesn't do that anymore. Those days are long gone. They exist in the vault though. How you doing not good? No? No, I don't know what's wrong with me. I am off today. Out of your game. Yeah, it's weird. Well, I think this is the perfect podcast to set you straight. Why because it's something that we both have some passion about against. Yeah. I think anybody who's seen um the documentary this film is not yet rated, that would be uh very difficult to not be persuade, didn't to feel strongly about the m p a A and its practices. Yeah, and at least how they do things. But we're going to try to be objective. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say up front, I have no problem with rating of films content so parents can decide whether or not it's appropriate. It's valuable, but I think there are ways to do it that I don't think the mp A does. Yes, So how how I just wanted to float that early on. Okay, I think that was probably smart. Okay, Um, I don't have kids, so I don't really whatever, But I mean I can understand the value of that kind of thing. Yeah, but it gives you an idea of Like I like having an idea what I'm about to see too. I feel like I can tell just from watching a trailer previusing a movie poster. I'm pretty um, I'm pretty intuitive when it comes to the marketing techniques of movies. Yeah, but I think like being a film nerd, it's like, is the New Uh? Is the New Avengers movie gonna be rated R? That really tells you something. It won't be. No, it never would be, because PG thirteen is the the h that's the strike zone these days. It really is. Apparently PG thirteen movies pull in more money than all other ratings combined. And it's a relatively new phenomenon. You want to talk about its origin, let's do it. So back in a man named Steven Spielberg had two movies out. Who Steven Spielberg right? Uh? He directed one, Indiana Jones and The Temporary Doom, and he produced another, Gremlins, and both of them caught. He caught a lot of heat from both of them. Sure, Indiana Jones for the heart removal scene specifically, Yeah, but also the snake, the live snake at the feast thing, yea, all the snake babies, the eyeballs, all that stuff. Uh. And then with Gremlins, it was just downright terrifying in a lot of different places, especially if you're a kid. And the reason he caught heat was because both of those movies were rated PG. And so, uh, Spielberg went to the m p a A, the Motion Picture Association of America, and said, let's do something about this because he's clearly aren't our movies, but they apparently aren't PG movies either, so maybe we should come with something in between. And PG thirteen was born. Yeah, and this was before he had all this way in the world. He was influential, but it wasn't like Spielberg today, who could have just waved his wand and made it happen. Yeah, but I think even at the time he was important. He Yeah, there were very few directors at that time who could have gotten something like that done too. But um, so that's where PG thirteen came from. And uh that, like you said, that's the strike zone now. And the reason why is because that is the kind of movie that caters to um, young teenage boys who apparently are the most successful at getting girls to go to movies with them. So if you can get a movie rated PG thirteen, you're going to make a bunch of money. Plus it makes sense, it's right there in the middle. Yeah, you know. But the problem is it's become a means of almost advertising that rating rather than cautioning parents. It's a way of attracting the audience. It's like, this isn't some kids PG movie. This is as close to an OUR movie as you can get in Yeah, and I think filmmakers try to achieve that rating, um by either scaling back their our rated movie, or juicing up their PG movie or adding more violence. Apparently PG thirteen movies are um have tripled in violence over the last like a few decades, and um they now have, according to one study, more violence than there are rated counterparts in different kinds of violence that you didn't used to see. Yeah, you know. Um, all right, I guess we should go back in time a little bit. Let's is it way back machine? Sure, let's go. Let's go a way back in time in Hollywood. All right. It's Hollywood and Vine is a viable intersection in Hollywood at the time, unlike now, although people are gonna say no, they built that area back up. Yeah. Uh, And that is when the m p A was born in the early nineteen twenties. And at the time it was up to local authorities or your state or your municipality to either stamps something as moral or immoral. Um, there were no ratings on movies. And thanks to a guy named Will Hayes who was the first president of the m p A, he installed the Haze Code and said, um, you're either going to pass or fail. It's either gonna be stamped demorl or moral. Right. And the reason Will Hayes, who is the m p a A president, came up with the Haze Code, which was really extensive. It was like if you, uh, if you talk about the government, it always has to be good. Uh, sexuality has to be like repressed, and just basically how you think about all movies from like the thirties and forties, squeaky clean. Basically like the division between good and evil is very clearly defined that the good guy always wins. And if you didn't fall into that Haze code, like you said, your movie would be stamped immoral. But the whole reason he came up with this code was because local municipalities could pass their own obscenity laws and that could be bad for business. So then not even get your film exhibited. Um. So remember we're in the A c. L U episode where we're talking about that one Um, that one movie that New York just the Catholic said no, you can't show that here, and the A C. L You went to work getting getting the Catholics beaten in court, right, even though it was just a bad movie something to do with well, I mean it did, but it shouldn't have been shown because it was so terrible. Was it bad? I don't remember. Yeah, I mean it was supposed to be not very good. Um, but it happened like that kind of thing happened a lot like local, local town said no, we're not going to show that movie. So Hayes figured out if if Hollywood policed itself, then they could control what, you know, what movies came out, and therefore everybody could make a bunch of money. That's right, and that's the point of the n p A. There the lobbying arm of six major Hollywood studios there there, they work for them. Yeah, well yeah, that's one way to say it. But they and it's just those six too, isn't it. Uh well, yeah, I mean you. There's definitely an argument. These days the independent filmmakers have a much rougher time with the m B a UM, but most of the indies too, are eventually distributed by the majors. Anyway, I got you. You know what I'm saying. Uh So, flash forward a bit in our way back machine to the nineteen fifties. Things changed a little bit after World War Two and people, I guess the easiest way to say is people loosen up a little bit and didn't mind certain elements in their entertainment any longer. Yes, A big example this article uses Frank Sinatra got an Oscar nomination for playing a heroin Addict and the Man with a Golden Arm. And that couldn't happen in the nineties. No, millions of people hadn't died in World War two yet, that's right. I imagine that kind of loosens you up as far as the seeing Chris words and stuff in movies goes. Yeah, like that's not a big deal, Like World War two is a big deal. Get your haunches down exactly. That was the that was the big one, the big first crack to the Hayes Code. Uh, and then there were I think that you said he won an oscar, right, Yeah, it was a really good movie, and that kind of opened the floodgate, so that by the end of the fifties you've got some like a hot and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon are dressed like women hitting on Marilyn Monroe and um. At that point, it was pretty obvious the Hayes Code was dead. Yeah, I mean, they weren't passing the code, but they were still getting released. So once something is subverted like that, it's it's dead in the water, right, So there was a that was fine for a little while. I think the Hayes Code just kind of fell to the wayside and people were releasing movies without any kind of moral or immoral stamp. But the rating system as we understand it today hadn't come about yet, so it's kind of a limbo period until and a store owner in New York with the last name of Ginsburg got busted for selling nudy mags to sixteen year old boys, and he took it all the way to the Supreme Court saying, you can't can't say anything about this there's federal laws about obscenity, not local laws in the Supreme Court that you know what, we really think it's up the local municipalities to decide what they want their miners exposed to or not. That got Hollywood's attention because all of a sudden, local municipalities could decide whether or not they wanted to show movies to minors or not, so that what was old became new again. And Jack Valenti, who was in charge of the m p a A, said we need another system of self another self policing system, and he came up with the rating system that that we have today. Yeah and he uh, I mean Jack Valenti was the head of the NBA for close to forty years, and he initially the intention was to stop censorship because he feared that the movies were going to start being censored locally. And so I think the the origins of the m p a's rating system. We're we're arts centered, art center, but also money centered, because again, if you have if you have town A showing the movie, but Towns B through L deciding that the movie is obscene and not showing it, then you're losing that money and be through L. So what Valenti came up with was this idea that let us tell you what is appropriate for minors or not what movie is, and we'll just make a simple rating system g pg R or X the old X and triple X, which wasn't even formally a rating, it was just a marketing tool. Yeah. Yeah, because three x's that's like whoa. I wonder if anybody ever came out with one with four X or double X even yeah, like we cut out that one part so X. Uh. Yeah. Christian, our colleague here wrote a great blog post about the former X rated movie. Is that right? Yeah, let's to check that out. It's good for brain stuff, for stuff of genius on the brain stuff blog earlier this year. And you actually recommended it on your blog the X rating, Yeah the best remember this week? Yeah, I remember recommending one of his things. I just don't remember that one. It's good. I thought about asking him in here, but then I thought, yeah, we got it. Um so yeah, back then it was G through X and um. Well we'll talk about you know how that changed maybe after this message break. All right, so no longer do we have X rated movies. Now we have something I guess we should just go through what these ratings mean today in two thousand fourteen. So you've got your G. She's always been G. General audience. Anyone can see it. Yes, and that's your your family cartoon that kids love and parents are forced to go to. Right. Then you've got PG. Um that means no drug use. Um, maybe a little violence, because as will learn, the m p A has less problems with violence and more problems with language and sex. Huge criticism, huge criticism. Uh, PG thirteen, which we've you know, kind of been through. Um. Then you've got your R and that is no one under seven. This is a suggestion that no one ever seventeen be admitted without a parent. And uh, these aren't laws, though, that's one thing. It's supportant to point out those are suggestions. And then theaters have policies. Yes, it's let's kind of dig into that. So none of this is legally binding. None of them are anything more than recommendations. They're basically saying that this movie has X amount of profanity or x amount of nudity, or lacks any drug use or something like that. And so for what the m p a A thinks the average moral compass of the average American thinks about these different things like sex, drugs, nudity, all that stuff. This movie falls into this rating. And again it's not enforceable. You don't even need to have a rating to release a movie. But if you want to get your movie in theaters, there's basically no theater chain out there right now, no major theater chain out there right now that will show an unrated movie. Yeah, it's a completely voluntary system to submit your film to the m p A ratings board. But it's de fact though, but you have to do it. Yeah, that's the rub is that they say it's voluntary, but you actually have to pay a fee to submit your movie if you ever want to have it shown in theaters, right and the fee is anywhere from like twenty five dollars for a big budget movie to seven fifty dollars for a short um. And so you're you submit your movie. Well, we'll get into it in a second. Let's talk some more about the rest of the ratings. Yeah, well there's only one more and that's n C seventeen, which replaced X and that means, uh, this is and it basically means that it's for adults on me and you should not come in if you're under eighteen, right and also means these days as foreign or about lesbian or gays. Exactly. Yeah, not fully, but sure it's pretty close. Yeah. Um. And NC seventeen. The first movie to come out with that was Henry and June. Yeah, not to be confused with Benny and June. Uh. And it basically sunk that movie because everybody was like, oh, this is X now right n C seventeen. If you jumble it all together, it looks like X. And the whole reason they came up with NC seventeen was to replace X because X was associated exclusively with pornography in the minds of movie goers. Yeah, exactly. Um. Alright, so let's get into this. The actual ratings board. There's the m p a A, and then working for the m p A is the Classification and Ratings Administration CARA, and uh. CARRA doesn't say whether your movie stinks or not. Carras eight to thirteen people, and they're called raiders, and they are overseen by senior Raider and they sit down and watch these movies and take copious notes on what they think based on their standards. Is Uh, I don't want to say offensive, but just noteworthy, Like maybe they're not offended, but they think the average mom and Sheboygan might be offended. Right, supposedly, but which is a kind of a thing because the whole rating system, as you just kind of pointed out, is a subjective, totally subjective. They supposedly. Uh. Here, here's the other rub is it's all secret, right. You can you can find out of federal judges name and address, but you can't find out who a raider is for your films. It's all conducted in private. None of the stuff is released. And that's one of the big rubs in that documentary and with filmmakers in general, is it's all, you know, done behind closed doors. There's never any explanations provided. These people are supposed to have kids between ages of five and seventeen, but many of them do not, right, either have kids at all or have kids that are older than eighteen. Um, it basically frees them up from any accountability. Yeah, to do this all in private and in secrecy. And until that movie, um By Kirby, what is Kirby's last name? Henry and June No, No, the the documentary, Oh yeah, this film is not yet right, and yeah when until Kirby Dicks, um, this film is not yet rated came out, like all of this stuff was just conjection, conjecture and Hollywood legend. He was the first one to really basically he tailed these people, tailed them to lunch to find out who they were and eaves drop on them and like did some digging and found like these anonymous people did not fall into the requirements that the m p A said they did, and so not only was it in secret, it was it was fraudulent. Basically, this rating system, so according to the standards, you submit your film, this group of people, this anonymous group of people, watch it, they rate it, and then they come together and vote on a rating, and then they passed. There there um vote along to a senior rat who talks to the movies distributor or director or producer says, here's the rating, here's why we rated it like this, and then you you're faced with a choice. You can accept the rating. You can edit your film as per the uh C A r a S recommendations. Take out these bad words, cut the sex scene a little early, leave all the violence, yeah, um, or you can reject the rating and just release your movie is unrated, which, well, you can try to release it, but since no one will show it, it's really sort of a misnomer, right, But it's because, I mean increasingly a thing again, you need the rating to get your movie shown in movie theaters. But what happens if you don't care if your movie comes out in theaters, video on demand, yeah, or just releasing it to the internet. Now, I'm curious about that. How that's going to change the landscape. Well, right now, it's a huge threat to the m p a A because all of the power they wield is found in this rating system. And if for theaters, yes, if no one's going to theaters, then the m p a A A loses all of that power, which is a big deal, especially now because the m p A is needed more than ever as a lobbying group because of online piracy, which we'll talk about some more. So it's a very precarious time for the m p A right now, and it's a terrible time for them to be under as much scrutiny and public attack and critique as they are. So it's I mean, they got spears sticking out every which way, and their trunk is flailing in their honking. That is true. One thing I should point out I said it is that there's no accountability. That's what the n p A says. It's the good thing about the secrecy is that it frees them up. That anonymity does. It frees them up from accountability. Um, I just don't agree, right, Okay, So the uh, if you want to appeal there there was apparently a change made in response to Kirby Dick's movie. Um, the documentary before if you were appealing your rating, which is very difficult. Um, almost never was done and you never want that's for sure, right, And when you were appealing, you couldn't reference any other film. It was totally done in a vacuum, which is pretty preposterous. Yeah, Like that's the only way to be able to sell us. Like, wait a minute, if you said this about this, then why not this for my movie? Which meant that there was no real standard, yeah that that you could point to, or there were standards you could point to, they just wouldn't be considered. Yeah, or at the very least, if they do have written standards, they don't release them, so you don't even know what they are. Right. So, Um, the m p a A is Uh, they've got their rating system, they've got the appeals process, which was also in secret, unless that's changed, right I think. I think the appeals board not only was the appeals board and secret, but they weren't even just raiders. They were people from the industry, right, and the Theater Owners Association exactly, whereas the people who were raiders are supposedly unaffiliated with the movie industry and are just like average ordinary parents representing uh, Europe, Middle America. We'll just call it, even though I think that's insulting. The thing is, though, is a lot of people criticize the mp A and say, these raiders are UM really representing the six major studios who rake in the ten point nine billion dollars made in the United States UM in theaters alone, just ticket sales, not DVD or anything like that. UM. And that's what the m p a A does in addition to rating. They are, like we said, the lobby arm for these six studios, that's right, And they I guess we should talk about piracy now, huh. That's one of their other big besides from rating movies, they are heavy in the lobby against UM well, especially now with online piracy because the digital distribution network is uh, it seems like the way forward as far as distribution goes, right, Like it's the future. It's not the future, it's the present and the future. And the m p A has a they're accused of UM basically trying to quell new technology. Yeah, by just saying like, well, let's just keep people from peer to peer file sharing in total so that they can't steal movies. In part UM and if you go back to the early eighties, Jack Valenti was known to have UM railed and lobbied against the legality of VCRs. UM people are just gonna be recording things and handing them out to their friends exactly, So there was a The n p A is a long history of basically like just doing anything at Canada stifle innovation in order to protect the profits of these big movie studios. The other problem with them lobbying UM in favor of the six movie studios is that they inherently have a conflict of interest against the studios that are not part of these six that they represent, but whose movies they still rate. So they've been accused of UM more scrupulously or scrutinously rating the movies of rival studios or foreign studios when assigning a rating. Well, and that's why filmmakers call consistently for transparency. It's it's I don't think there are many filmmakers out there saying there should be no rating, we should just maybe some like a large Fontier, you know, verna Hertzog. They're probably no way things at all, But I think they just want transparency, like open it up and let everyone know how this is all done, who these people are, and give us an idea on what in the world we're submitting to voluntarily, quote unquote. Pretty interesting. So you were talking about online piracy um and with digital distribution being a big deal now, the m p AS needed more than ever because they have to lobby Congress to fight online piracy at a time when more and more people are distributing online and going around the m p a A. So it's losing its power, but it needs its power more than ever. So, like we said, it's a precarious time for the m p a A. And they tried a few things. They were successful with the uh what was the first one in two thousand, the Digital No the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which basically that up until then it wasn't a federal crime to share movies on peer to peer networks. That one did it, and they got that passed. The m p a A lobbied and got that passed. They've cracked out on camcorder recording, yea. Like when you're in New York City and someone has a brand new copy of Godzilla on a video cassette for you, it's because, if you've seen Seinfeld, someone went and set in that theater with a camera recorder and just made a stupid, awful quality pirated version. Yeah, and it says that those are the most common. I guess I kind of believe that they're also the worst quality. Like sometimes people will like get up and move in front of the camera, like to go to the bathroom or something, and yeah, it's I've never seen one, but I think they're terrible. Um much. I don't want to say. More common, but probably more common these days are like copies of screeners, Like they send out DVDs to everybody who's members of the Academy to vote on move these and so. Around Oscar time or before Oscar time, it seems like the Internet gets flooded with way more high quality copies of these major movies that are up for awards. Yeah, I think now they have, um, thanks to the n p A, have something coded to your name now on your copy, so like they'll know who leaked it or whatever. I think so, but I'm not surprised by that. Um. Apparently, if you want to show uh Frozen at your church, yeah, you better have a public performance license because it is illegal to show a movie outside of your home. Yeah, that surprised me. But there are a lot of especially in the summertime, a lot of community screenings, like every city now has uh. You know, Atlanta shows them in uh. I think at Oakland Cemetery, some other places in New York. They have them all over the place. And technically, yeah, they're supposed to have a license to do so, I'm sure they do the big ones. Yeah, the big ones, I'm sure due. But like at your COMMUNNY pool when you want to show E T and Uh, the Feds could come kick the gate down around the pool. I bet they don't love HBO these days because you know, HBO go um people steal that. They're just like, hey, dude, what's your log in? And HBO came out and there, like, who cares people are watching it? Yeah, go watch a True Detective. Maybe you'll sign up for HBO because you liked it, or maybe you'll just support the show period on social media, even though you're getting it for free. Like we're making enough money basically, yes, And that's something that a lot of people say, you know, film industry, we don't really feel that bad for you, Sean Austin sit down, because you guys made ten point nine billion dollars in America in ticket sales alone in two thousand thirteen. We don't feel that bad about this whole conundrum that the m p a a Is facing here the voices or yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, I don't think I knew that. Yeah he was. I can't remember that. There was like a whole um kind of push an anti piracy pushed a few years back, and he was the face of it, part of it. Yeah, and he looked really mad about things too. But um, speaking of piracy, I remember there was a story that came out recently. It was if you think about it at first, it's like wow wow, But then if if you really kind of lend lended some thought, it's really disturbing. Um, there were there was a report of prisoners at a prison being shown pirated movies, and some of the prisoners were there for pirating movies, and I like, really think about the injustice behind that, Like, that's just crazy town. Imagine if you've been like selling counterfeit first and you go to prison and all of the all the guards are wearing counterfeit for co would be pretty swing in prison. It would be weird, but it would also be unjust. Yeah, yeah, true. But in relation to this is just more and more widespread every day. It feels like it's it's a losing battle. I think that the m p A is fighting right now. Well, I think I read somewhere today that they think they might release a few of the Raiders names per film, not all like thirteen. But I need to look up that. Look that up again, because that I don't know. I don't see the while releasing a three out of thirteen names, does anybody any good? It does zero good? Uh? And speaking of doing zero good? Um, the this there's kind of a new attachment to the rating system that they have now. It's called check the box, and um it's it's basically a brief description of why a movie is like PG. Thirteen, so it'll say like intense sci fi action or something like that, or yeah, that kind of thing. Um. And some critics of the m p a A say it's just basically like shooting a laser beam into like a fifteen year old boy's brain, like brief nudity. Come see it PG thirteen. Check that out, kid, Um. And I think a lot of people are looking at it like it's it's just kind of a disingenuous advertisement, cynical advertisement, because the the m p a A is accused of not regulating or even potentially directly marketing to kids under the age of the movies that are being advertised. So like you're seeing a lot of ads for like R rated movies on websites that are like very popular among like the seventeen and undercrowd. Um, there's a lot of tie ins for PG thirteen movies with like kids toys for kids who are under who are under thirteen. Um. And so there's like this idea that there's the m p a A is supposedly serving America's moral moral compasses, but really at the same time they're undermining that morality that they're supposedly defending. By marketing and exploiting kids. Yeah, that'd be like a cigarette company having a cartoon animal as their mascot. Can you imagine the weird? Uh? Well, one thing about the the subjectivity of it and the fact that it is a closed book, and they filmmakers and even know, you know what, how to tailor their movie to achieve a certain rating, I mean to within a certain degree. But they've learned how to manipulate it because there is no set standard by if you watch that film is not irrated. And you've heard plenty of stories over the years about filmmakers intentionally putting in things that they never intend to be in the final movie just to sort of distract from some of the other things. So they'll shoot something kind of really outrageous, uh, to get the m p A's Raiders haunches up and what they were never going to keep that part anyway. So they're subverting the system because there is no set standard, and they're just the stuff they want to keep in is comparatively exactly more palatable. And if you don't have the set standard, where you can go and I wonder what those sheets look like on the interior, you know, I mean that's the great mystery. Surely they have their own interior standards. They're not just like watch it and see what you think. Well, they have group discussions. To man, I'd love to sit out on those, so the uh I read. Another criticism of the m p A is that the difference between PG thirteen movies and our movies these days is the profanity and the sexuality. Um, that they're similar in violence, if not more violent in PG thirteen movies, and that this is kind of messed up that the m p a A has very little problem with violence, but when it comes to bad words or sexuality of almost any nature except for women being objectified and men being gratified. Um, then the m p a A suddenly puckers up. Well, yeah, and any a woman a cheating receiving sexual gratification or homosexual couple n Yeah, virtually like guaranteed or depending on how they do it, are if it's coming out of like one of the major studios. So in other words, a man can receive pleasure from a woman, and of course it's scrutinized somewhat, because any kind of sex is more heavily scrutinized than violence. But if a woman does like you said, or if it's a gay couple, it's all over so homophobic, misogynistic, do you decide right? And um fetishistic of violence, you know, yeah. Like here's one example. There's a great article called don't expect any major changes to the n p A rating System, and it's basically Chris Dodd, who's the new head and the gang, digging in and saying, you know what, we talked to your average parents and we pull them and this is what they want. Um. But they released none of those studies released, none of those conversations released. Um. A movie like Filomena, which you saw, was rated to our Yeah. It was about a lady looking for a long lost son. It was so far from an our movie. It was ridiculous. Yeah. But it had a couple of F bombs in it. Um, So they cut those out and they bring it to a PG thirteen. You might think, who cares cut up the F bombs make it PG thirteen. But there's something bigger going on here, you know. Yeah, there's a great A V Club article about, um, how just totally out of step. A lot of the ratings are and they have fifteen movies listed and basically talk about their ratings. Um, like the first one they talk about once that romantic. Um, it wasn't like a romantic comedy, wasn't. No, I would say it was a sweet just a modern day romance told through music. It wasn't a musical, but there are a lot of musical numbers. Highly inoffensive love story. Yeah, very sweet movie. Uh, it had the same rating as hostile to just basically torture porn. They both got the same rating. Yeah should we should read this first line from the A B Club. In early summer of two thousand seven, two films were released with R ratings. One featured a scene where a naked woman is suspended from a ceiling while another naked woman slashes her with a scythe and base in her blood. The other featured to Dublin musicians singing songs together, falling in love and opting not to act on it, like there was never any sex scene. They didn't even get together. Really. They're both rated. Are both rated are because of profanity Rushmore rated R for the scene at the end whether Max is putting on the play the Vietnam play, and there is a shot of a couple of little kids looking at on on the set. There's some Playboy centerfolds up in the locker like on the Vietnam set, and these it shows these little kids like looking at those like a twelve year old would probably do an for that, got an R for that happiness. Todd Solins one of my favorite movies of all time. Yeah. Uh, they tried to give it an n C seventeen rating, and he said, you know what, I'm not cutting anything. You can just go take a long walk off a short pier, is what I think he famously said to them. And uh, he released his movie as unrated. Really, yep, I don't think I knew that the way to go, Todd Solins. Or if you're looking at some serious homophobia, um, the great N nine movie A Longtime Companion features no real sex acts at all, nothing explicit. Um. In fact, the A B Club says it could show on network TV today with just a few alterations. Um, but it was about a gay couple and uh so I got an n C seventeen. Yeah. There's something called Afternoon Delight, which was a um a movie about a woman who hires a gigelow and apparently is heavy on the The woman receiving sexual gratification. It got an R rating despite and it got an R rating after apparently the director cut a lot of stuff out and the director said, what the hey after um Wolf of Wall Street came out, like have you seen this movie with like some very graphic apparent sex scenes between a man and a woman. But Leonardo DiCaprio is the one enjoying it the most, So it's fine. It's an our, right, blue is the warmest color. Yeah. Last year that a teenage lesbian love story and got a lot of attention, And there were some theaters that allowed, uh, high school age kids to go see that anyway, because again, this is in law, it's not binding. It's up to the theaters. Yeah, it's just so strange that such a small group of people have such influence on such a large industry. And yeah, the more you dig into it, the more conflicts of interest arise, and the more r trary the standards become, the more blood boiling it is. I highly recommend you go read some stuff like rated R for ridiculous by Kirby Dick his Little uh his Little um op ed about the m P A a UM that one u s news and World Report article you wrote or suggested was good. I wish I wrote it had you been Uh, there would have been used correctly. How did they misuse it? What? Yeah, I know, and that's terrible. Uh So the mp A will defend themselves and they say that there's no such bias and that we all these objectionable scenes are rated on the graphic quality and how graphic it is. Um But if you just look at the you'd have to be a dummy nut to see these correlations. And the fact that they don't seem to care that much about violence in this age where I don't know, does it influence people to go shoot up a school? Who knows? Did you see that John Oliver quote that's a going around, Yes, but what was it? It's like somebody unsuccessfully tries to carry a bomb onto a plane in their shoe. We all take our shoes off. There's like thirty something school shootings after Columbine and absolutely nothing's changed. Or the onion article that's going around two now is this is something that can't be prevented, says the only country where this kind of thing happens all the time, something like that. I'm paraphrasing. Oh, Yeah, that's the onion. Yeah, good stuff. Np A. Keep keep doing the fighting, the good fight. Yeah good check out, Like, just go start reading up on it. It's funny how much we just take this stuff for granted, but when just start digging just slightly beneath the surface at the very least. See this film is not yet rated. It's really good, um, really engrossing. And you know, for every hundred documentaries that come out, what five of them are like really great? Most of them are pretty good Summer terror. Well, so any really good one is worth seeing just in and of itself. Agreed. Uh. If you want to learn more about the m p a A, type those letters into the search part house to works dot Com and I said, search parts, it's time for listener mail. Uh. I'm gonna call this wild Parrots um. Josh mentioned in the Tattoo podcasts that he had heard parrots like to hang together wind free, and I wanted to burst in the podcast booth and tell you about the wild parrots of San Francisco. I'm not gonna get into it except to say that over the course of my life, the parrots in San Francisco were sort of living legend that one would occasionally get the privilege of spotting now and then. However, about three years ago, I moved in with my aunt in the little San Francisco suburb of Brisbane, and apparently the famous flocks of parrots were also making their home there. Since it was warmer unless windy. Uh, these parrots were often hanging right outside my bedroom window, which is pretty amazing. I don't know, she says, amusing. I say it's amazing, but also somewhat annoying, especially since my first son was just a little guy then and a very light sleeper. And these suckers are loud, That is true, they are very loud. Also, guys, I'm sending you the link to watch the preview of the two thousand three documentary The Wild Parents of Telegraph Hill. So I didn't know there was a documentary. I've heard that. I've heard of that before, I never knew what it was about. Amy. I will check that out. Thank you, thank you for writing it. Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy. Uh. If you have a documentary recommendation, we are always interested in those. Yeah. You can tweet them to us a s Y s K podcast. You can post them on Facebook dot com, slash stuff. You should know uh, And you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, the Beautiful Stuff You Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com.

Hey, everybody, This is Chuck and welcome to this weekend's Stuff you Should Know Selects episode. This one I picked out How the m p a A Works from June just a few years ago, and I picked this one because, well, kind of because I'm doing my new show Movie Crush, where I talked to people about their favorite all time movie, and my new episodes called Mini Crushes where I don't have a guest, but it's just Nolan High in here kind of rapping about stuff, recommendations and calling Facebook questions and stuff like that, and it just kind of got me thinking along the lines of movies in This episode on the Motion Picture Association of America was a really good one. And if you are just confused by the mp A what they do, this will clear it all up for you. So please to enjoy How the mp a A Works. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. M Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry. But where's wal though right over there apparently, and I wish people could hear in between stuff. I think Jerry was recording that last one. Oh yeah, I think so. She used to give us a neat little outtakes, but she doesn't do that anymore. Those days are long gone. They exist in the vault though. How you doing not good? No? No, I don't know what's wrong with me. I am off today. Out of your game. Yeah, it's weird. Well, I think this is the perfect podcast to set you straight. Why because it's something that we both have some passion about against. Yeah. I think anybody who's seen um the documentary this film is not yet rated, that would be uh very difficult to not be persuade, didn't to feel strongly about the m p a A and its practices. Yeah, and at least how they do things. But we're going to try to be objective. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say up front, I have no problem with rating of films content so parents can decide whether or not it's appropriate. It's valuable, but I think there are ways to do it that I don't think the mp A does. Yes, So how how I just wanted to float that early on. Okay, I think that was probably smart. Okay, Um, I don't have kids, so I don't really whatever, But I mean I can understand the value of that kind of thing. Yeah, but it gives you an idea of Like I like having an idea what I'm about to see too. I feel like I can tell just from watching a trailer previusing a movie poster. I'm pretty um, I'm pretty intuitive when it comes to the marketing techniques of movies. Yeah, but I think like being a film nerd, it's like, is the New Uh? Is the New Avengers movie gonna be rated R? That really tells you something. It won't be. No, it never would be, because PG thirteen is the the h that's the strike zone these days. It really is. Apparently PG thirteen movies pull in more money than all other ratings combined. And it's a relatively new phenomenon. You want to talk about its origin, let's do it. So back in a man named Steven Spielberg had two movies out. Who Steven Spielberg right? Uh? He directed one, Indiana Jones and The Temporary Doom, and he produced another, Gremlins, and both of them caught. He caught a lot of heat from both of them. Sure, Indiana Jones for the heart removal scene specifically, Yeah, but also the snake, the live snake at the feast thing, yea, all the snake babies, the eyeballs, all that stuff. Uh. And then with Gremlins, it was just downright terrifying in a lot of different places, especially if you're a kid. And the reason he caught heat was because both of those movies were rated PG. And so, uh, Spielberg went to the m p a A, the Motion Picture Association of America, and said, let's do something about this because he's clearly aren't our movies, but they apparently aren't PG movies either, so maybe we should come with something in between. And PG thirteen was born. Yeah, and this was before he had all this way in the world. He was influential, but it wasn't like Spielberg today, who could have just waved his wand and made it happen. Yeah, but I think even at the time he was important. He Yeah, there were very few directors at that time who could have gotten something like that done too. But um, so that's where PG thirteen came from. And uh that, like you said, that's the strike zone now. And the reason why is because that is the kind of movie that caters to um, young teenage boys who apparently are the most successful at getting girls to go to movies with them. So if you can get a movie rated PG thirteen, you're going to make a bunch of money. Plus it makes sense, it's right there in the middle. Yeah, you know. But the problem is it's become a means of almost advertising that rating rather than cautioning parents. It's a way of attracting the audience. It's like, this isn't some kids PG movie. This is as close to an OUR movie as you can get in Yeah, and I think filmmakers try to achieve that rating, um by either scaling back their our rated movie, or juicing up their PG movie or adding more violence. Apparently PG thirteen movies are um have tripled in violence over the last like a few decades, and um they now have, according to one study, more violence than there are rated counterparts in different kinds of violence that you didn't used to see. Yeah, you know. Um, all right, I guess we should go back in time a little bit. Let's is it way back machine? Sure, let's go. Let's go a way back in time in Hollywood. All right. It's Hollywood and Vine is a viable intersection in Hollywood at the time, unlike now, although people are gonna say no, they built that area back up. Yeah. Uh, And that is when the m p A was born in the early nineteen twenties. And at the time it was up to local authorities or your state or your municipality to either stamps something as moral or immoral. Um, there were no ratings on movies. And thanks to a guy named Will Hayes who was the first president of the m p A, he installed the Haze Code and said, um, you're either going to pass or fail. It's either gonna be stamped demorl or moral. Right. And the reason Will Hayes, who is the m p a A president, came up with the Haze Code, which was really extensive. It was like if you, uh, if you talk about the government, it always has to be good. Uh, sexuality has to be like repressed, and just basically how you think about all movies from like the thirties and forties, squeaky clean. Basically like the division between good and evil is very clearly defined that the good guy always wins. And if you didn't fall into that Haze code, like you said, your movie would be stamped immoral. But the whole reason he came up with this code was because local municipalities could pass their own obscenity laws and that could be bad for business. So then not even get your film exhibited. Um. So remember we're in the A c. L U episode where we're talking about that one Um, that one movie that New York just the Catholic said no, you can't show that here, and the A C. L You went to work getting getting the Catholics beaten in court, right, even though it was just a bad movie something to do with well, I mean it did, but it shouldn't have been shown because it was so terrible. Was it bad? I don't remember. Yeah, I mean it was supposed to be not very good. Um, but it happened like that kind of thing happened a lot like local, local town said no, we're not going to show that movie. So Hayes figured out if if Hollywood policed itself, then they could control what, you know, what movies came out, and therefore everybody could make a bunch of money. That's right, and that's the point of the n p A. There the lobbying arm of six major Hollywood studios there there, they work for them. Yeah, well yeah, that's one way to say it. But they and it's just those six too, isn't it. Uh well, yeah, I mean you. There's definitely an argument. These days the independent filmmakers have a much rougher time with the m B a UM, but most of the indies too, are eventually distributed by the majors. Anyway, I got you. You know what I'm saying. Uh So, flash forward a bit in our way back machine to the nineteen fifties. Things changed a little bit after World War Two and people, I guess the easiest way to say is people loosen up a little bit and didn't mind certain elements in their entertainment any longer. Yes, A big example this article uses Frank Sinatra got an Oscar nomination for playing a heroin Addict and the Man with a Golden Arm. And that couldn't happen in the nineties. No, millions of people hadn't died in World War two yet, that's right. I imagine that kind of loosens you up as far as the seeing Chris words and stuff in movies goes. Yeah, like that's not a big deal, Like World War two is a big deal. Get your haunches down exactly. That was the that was the big one, the big first crack to the Hayes Code. Uh, and then there were I think that you said he won an oscar, right, Yeah, it was a really good movie, and that kind of opened the floodgate, so that by the end of the fifties you've got some like a hot and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon are dressed like women hitting on Marilyn Monroe and um. At that point, it was pretty obvious the Hayes Code was dead. Yeah, I mean, they weren't passing the code, but they were still getting released. So once something is subverted like that, it's it's dead in the water, right, So there was a that was fine for a little while. I think the Hayes Code just kind of fell to the wayside and people were releasing movies without any kind of moral or immoral stamp. But the rating system as we understand it today hadn't come about yet, so it's kind of a limbo period until and a store owner in New York with the last name of Ginsburg got busted for selling nudy mags to sixteen year old boys, and he took it all the way to the Supreme Court saying, you can't can't say anything about this there's federal laws about obscenity, not local laws in the Supreme Court that you know what, we really think it's up the local municipalities to decide what they want their miners exposed to or not. That got Hollywood's attention because all of a sudden, local municipalities could decide whether or not they wanted to show movies to minors or not, so that what was old became new again. And Jack Valenti, who was in charge of the m p a A, said we need another system of self another self policing system, and he came up with the rating system that that we have today. Yeah and he uh, I mean Jack Valenti was the head of the NBA for close to forty years, and he initially the intention was to stop censorship because he feared that the movies were going to start being censored locally. And so I think the the origins of the m p a's rating system. We're we're arts centered, art center, but also money centered, because again, if you have if you have town A showing the movie, but Towns B through L deciding that the movie is obscene and not showing it, then you're losing that money and be through L. So what Valenti came up with was this idea that let us tell you what is appropriate for minors or not what movie is, and we'll just make a simple rating system g pg R or X the old X and triple X, which wasn't even formally a rating, it was just a marketing tool. Yeah. Yeah, because three x's that's like whoa. I wonder if anybody ever came out with one with four X or double X even yeah, like we cut out that one part so X. Uh. Yeah. Christian, our colleague here wrote a great blog post about the former X rated movie. Is that right? Yeah, let's to check that out. It's good for brain stuff, for stuff of genius on the brain stuff blog earlier this year. And you actually recommended it on your blog the X rating, Yeah the best remember this week? Yeah, I remember recommending one of his things. I just don't remember that one. It's good. I thought about asking him in here, but then I thought, yeah, we got it. Um so yeah, back then it was G through X and um. Well we'll talk about you know how that changed maybe after this message break. All right, so no longer do we have X rated movies. Now we have something I guess we should just go through what these ratings mean today in two thousand fourteen. So you've got your G. She's always been G. General audience. Anyone can see it. Yes, and that's your your family cartoon that kids love and parents are forced to go to. Right. Then you've got PG. Um that means no drug use. Um, maybe a little violence, because as will learn, the m p A has less problems with violence and more problems with language and sex. Huge criticism, huge criticism. Uh, PG thirteen, which we've you know, kind of been through. Um. Then you've got your R and that is no one under seven. This is a suggestion that no one ever seventeen be admitted without a parent. And uh, these aren't laws, though, that's one thing. It's supportant to point out those are suggestions. And then theaters have policies. Yes, it's let's kind of dig into that. So none of this is legally binding. None of them are anything more than recommendations. They're basically saying that this movie has X amount of profanity or x amount of nudity, or lacks any drug use or something like that. And so for what the m p a A thinks the average moral compass of the average American thinks about these different things like sex, drugs, nudity, all that stuff. This movie falls into this rating. And again it's not enforceable. You don't even need to have a rating to release a movie. But if you want to get your movie in theaters, there's basically no theater chain out there right now, no major theater chain out there right now that will show an unrated movie. Yeah, it's a completely voluntary system to submit your film to the m p A ratings board. But it's de fact though, but you have to do it. Yeah, that's the rub is that they say it's voluntary, but you actually have to pay a fee to submit your movie if you ever want to have it shown in theaters, right and the fee is anywhere from like twenty five dollars for a big budget movie to seven fifty dollars for a short um. And so you're you submit your movie. Well, we'll get into it in a second. Let's talk some more about the rest of the ratings. Yeah, well there's only one more and that's n C seventeen, which replaced X and that means, uh, this is and it basically means that it's for adults on me and you should not come in if you're under eighteen, right and also means these days as foreign or about lesbian or gays. Exactly. Yeah, not fully, but sure it's pretty close. Yeah. Um. And NC seventeen. The first movie to come out with that was Henry and June. Yeah, not to be confused with Benny and June. Uh. And it basically sunk that movie because everybody was like, oh, this is X now right n C seventeen. If you jumble it all together, it looks like X. And the whole reason they came up with NC seventeen was to replace X because X was associated exclusively with pornography in the minds of movie goers. Yeah, exactly. Um. Alright, so let's get into this. The actual ratings board. There's the m p a A, and then working for the m p A is the Classification and Ratings Administration CARA, and uh. CARRA doesn't say whether your movie stinks or not. Carras eight to thirteen people, and they're called raiders, and they are overseen by senior Raider and they sit down and watch these movies and take copious notes on what they think based on their standards. Is Uh, I don't want to say offensive, but just noteworthy, Like maybe they're not offended, but they think the average mom and Sheboygan might be offended. Right, supposedly, but which is a kind of a thing because the whole rating system, as you just kind of pointed out, is a subjective, totally subjective. They supposedly. Uh. Here, here's the other rub is it's all secret, right. You can you can find out of federal judges name and address, but you can't find out who a raider is for your films. It's all conducted in private. None of the stuff is released. And that's one of the big rubs in that documentary and with filmmakers in general, is it's all, you know, done behind closed doors. There's never any explanations provided. These people are supposed to have kids between ages of five and seventeen, but many of them do not, right, either have kids at all or have kids that are older than eighteen. Um, it basically frees them up from any accountability. Yeah, to do this all in private and in secrecy. And until that movie, um By Kirby, what is Kirby's last name? Henry and June No, No, the the documentary, Oh yeah, this film is not yet right, and yeah when until Kirby Dicks, um, this film is not yet rated came out, like all of this stuff was just conjection, conjecture and Hollywood legend. He was the first one to really basically he tailed these people, tailed them to lunch to find out who they were and eaves drop on them and like did some digging and found like these anonymous people did not fall into the requirements that the m p A said they did, and so not only was it in secret, it was it was fraudulent. Basically, this rating system, so according to the standards, you submit your film, this group of people, this anonymous group of people, watch it, they rate it, and then they come together and vote on a rating, and then they passed. There there um vote along to a senior rat who talks to the movies distributor or director or producer says, here's the rating, here's why we rated it like this, and then you you're faced with a choice. You can accept the rating. You can edit your film as per the uh C A r a S recommendations. Take out these bad words, cut the sex scene a little early, leave all the violence, yeah, um, or you can reject the rating and just release your movie is unrated, which, well, you can try to release it, but since no one will show it, it's really sort of a misnomer, right, But it's because, I mean increasingly a thing again, you need the rating to get your movie shown in movie theaters. But what happens if you don't care if your movie comes out in theaters, video on demand, yeah, or just releasing it to the internet. Now, I'm curious about that. How that's going to change the landscape. Well, right now, it's a huge threat to the m p a A because all of the power they wield is found in this rating system. And if for theaters, yes, if no one's going to theaters, then the m p a A A loses all of that power, which is a big deal, especially now because the m p A is needed more than ever as a lobbying group because of online piracy, which we'll talk about some more. So it's a very precarious time for the m p A right now, and it's a terrible time for them to be under as much scrutiny and public attack and critique as they are. So it's I mean, they got spears sticking out every which way, and their trunk is flailing in their honking. That is true. One thing I should point out I said it is that there's no accountability. That's what the n p A says. It's the good thing about the secrecy is that it frees them up. That anonymity does. It frees them up from accountability. Um, I just don't agree, right, Okay, So the uh, if you want to appeal there there was apparently a change made in response to Kirby Dick's movie. Um, the documentary before if you were appealing your rating, which is very difficult. Um, almost never was done and you never want that's for sure, right, And when you were appealing, you couldn't reference any other film. It was totally done in a vacuum, which is pretty preposterous. Yeah, Like that's the only way to be able to sell us. Like, wait a minute, if you said this about this, then why not this for my movie? Which meant that there was no real standard, yeah that that you could point to, or there were standards you could point to, they just wouldn't be considered. Yeah, or at the very least, if they do have written standards, they don't release them, so you don't even know what they are. Right. So, Um, the m p a A is Uh, they've got their rating system, they've got the appeals process, which was also in secret, unless that's changed, right I think. I think the appeals board not only was the appeals board and secret, but they weren't even just raiders. They were people from the industry, right, and the Theater Owners Association exactly, whereas the people who were raiders are supposedly unaffiliated with the movie industry and are just like average ordinary parents representing uh, Europe, Middle America. We'll just call it, even though I think that's insulting. The thing is, though, is a lot of people criticize the mp A and say, these raiders are UM really representing the six major studios who rake in the ten point nine billion dollars made in the United States UM in theaters alone, just ticket sales, not DVD or anything like that. UM. And that's what the m p a A does in addition to rating. They are, like we said, the lobby arm for these six studios, that's right, And they I guess we should talk about piracy now, huh. That's one of their other big besides from rating movies, they are heavy in the lobby against UM well, especially now with online piracy because the digital distribution network is uh, it seems like the way forward as far as distribution goes, right, Like it's the future. It's not the future, it's the present and the future. And the m p A has a they're accused of UM basically trying to quell new technology. Yeah, by just saying like, well, let's just keep people from peer to peer file sharing in total so that they can't steal movies. In part UM and if you go back to the early eighties, Jack Valenti was known to have UM railed and lobbied against the legality of VCRs. UM people are just gonna be recording things and handing them out to their friends exactly, So there was a The n p A is a long history of basically like just doing anything at Canada stifle innovation in order to protect the profits of these big movie studios. The other problem with them lobbying UM in favor of the six movie studios is that they inherently have a conflict of interest against the studios that are not part of these six that they represent, but whose movies they still rate. So they've been accused of UM more scrupulously or scrutinously rating the movies of rival studios or foreign studios when assigning a rating. Well, and that's why filmmakers call consistently for transparency. It's it's I don't think there are many filmmakers out there saying there should be no rating, we should just maybe some like a large Fontier, you know, verna Hertzog. They're probably no way things at all, But I think they just want transparency, like open it up and let everyone know how this is all done, who these people are, and give us an idea on what in the world we're submitting to voluntarily, quote unquote. Pretty interesting. So you were talking about online piracy um and with digital distribution being a big deal now, the m p AS needed more than ever because they have to lobby Congress to fight online piracy at a time when more and more people are distributing online and going around the m p a A. So it's losing its power, but it needs its power more than ever. So, like we said, it's a precarious time for the m p a A. And they tried a few things. They were successful with the uh what was the first one in two thousand, the Digital No the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which basically that up until then it wasn't a federal crime to share movies on peer to peer networks. That one did it, and they got that passed. The m p a A lobbied and got that passed. They've cracked out on camcorder recording, yea. Like when you're in New York City and someone has a brand new copy of Godzilla on a video cassette for you, it's because, if you've seen Seinfeld, someone went and set in that theater with a camera recorder and just made a stupid, awful quality pirated version. Yeah, and it says that those are the most common. I guess I kind of believe that they're also the worst quality. Like sometimes people will like get up and move in front of the camera, like to go to the bathroom or something, and yeah, it's I've never seen one, but I think they're terrible. Um much. I don't want to say. More common, but probably more common these days are like copies of screeners, Like they send out DVDs to everybody who's members of the Academy to vote on move these and so. Around Oscar time or before Oscar time, it seems like the Internet gets flooded with way more high quality copies of these major movies that are up for awards. Yeah, I think now they have, um, thanks to the n p A, have something coded to your name now on your copy, so like they'll know who leaked it or whatever. I think so, but I'm not surprised by that. Um. Apparently, if you want to show uh Frozen at your church, yeah, you better have a public performance license because it is illegal to show a movie outside of your home. Yeah, that surprised me. But there are a lot of especially in the summertime, a lot of community screenings, like every city now has uh. You know, Atlanta shows them in uh. I think at Oakland Cemetery, some other places in New York. They have them all over the place. And technically, yeah, they're supposed to have a license to do so, I'm sure they do the big ones. Yeah, the big ones, I'm sure due. But like at your COMMUNNY pool when you want to show E T and Uh, the Feds could come kick the gate down around the pool. I bet they don't love HBO these days because you know, HBO go um people steal that. They're just like, hey, dude, what's your log in? And HBO came out and there, like, who cares people are watching it? Yeah, go watch a True Detective. Maybe you'll sign up for HBO because you liked it, or maybe you'll just support the show period on social media, even though you're getting it for free. Like we're making enough money basically, yes, And that's something that a lot of people say, you know, film industry, we don't really feel that bad for you, Sean Austin sit down, because you guys made ten point nine billion dollars in America in ticket sales alone in two thousand thirteen. We don't feel that bad about this whole conundrum that the m p a a Is facing here the voices or yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, I don't think I knew that. Yeah he was. I can't remember that. There was like a whole um kind of push an anti piracy pushed a few years back, and he was the face of it, part of it. Yeah, and he looked really mad about things too. But um, speaking of piracy, I remember there was a story that came out recently. It was if you think about it at first, it's like wow wow, But then if if you really kind of lend lended some thought, it's really disturbing. Um, there were there was a report of prisoners at a prison being shown pirated movies, and some of the prisoners were there for pirating movies, and I like, really think about the injustice behind that, Like, that's just crazy town. Imagine if you've been like selling counterfeit first and you go to prison and all of the all the guards are wearing counterfeit for co would be pretty swing in prison. It would be weird, but it would also be unjust. Yeah, yeah, true. But in relation to this is just more and more widespread every day. It feels like it's it's a losing battle. I think that the m p A is fighting right now. Well, I think I read somewhere today that they think they might release a few of the Raiders names per film, not all like thirteen. But I need to look up that. Look that up again, because that I don't know. I don't see the while releasing a three out of thirteen names, does anybody any good? It does zero good? Uh? And speaking of doing zero good? Um, the this there's kind of a new attachment to the rating system that they have now. It's called check the box, and um it's it's basically a brief description of why a movie is like PG. Thirteen, so it'll say like intense sci fi action or something like that, or yeah, that kind of thing. Um. And some critics of the m p a A say it's just basically like shooting a laser beam into like a fifteen year old boy's brain, like brief nudity. Come see it PG thirteen. Check that out, kid, Um. And I think a lot of people are looking at it like it's it's just kind of a disingenuous advertisement, cynical advertisement, because the the m p a A is accused of not regulating or even potentially directly marketing to kids under the age of the movies that are being advertised. So like you're seeing a lot of ads for like R rated movies on websites that are like very popular among like the seventeen and undercrowd. Um, there's a lot of tie ins for PG thirteen movies with like kids toys for kids who are under who are under thirteen. Um. And so there's like this idea that there's the m p a A is supposedly serving America's moral moral compasses, but really at the same time they're undermining that morality that they're supposedly defending. By marketing and exploiting kids. Yeah, that'd be like a cigarette company having a cartoon animal as their mascot. Can you imagine the weird? Uh? Well, one thing about the the subjectivity of it and the fact that it is a closed book, and they filmmakers and even know, you know what, how to tailor their movie to achieve a certain rating, I mean to within a certain degree. But they've learned how to manipulate it because there is no set standard by if you watch that film is not irrated. And you've heard plenty of stories over the years about filmmakers intentionally putting in things that they never intend to be in the final movie just to sort of distract from some of the other things. So they'll shoot something kind of really outrageous, uh, to get the m p A's Raiders haunches up and what they were never going to keep that part anyway. So they're subverting the system because there is no set standard, and they're just the stuff they want to keep in is comparatively exactly more palatable. And if you don't have the set standard, where you can go and I wonder what those sheets look like on the interior, you know, I mean that's the great mystery. Surely they have their own interior standards. They're not just like watch it and see what you think. Well, they have group discussions. To man, I'd love to sit out on those, so the uh I read. Another criticism of the m p A is that the difference between PG thirteen movies and our movies these days is the profanity and the sexuality. Um, that they're similar in violence, if not more violent in PG thirteen movies, and that this is kind of messed up that the m p a A has very little problem with violence, but when it comes to bad words or sexuality of almost any nature except for women being objectified and men being gratified. Um, then the m p a A suddenly puckers up. Well, yeah, and any a woman a cheating receiving sexual gratification or homosexual couple n Yeah, virtually like guaranteed or depending on how they do it, are if it's coming out of like one of the major studios. So in other words, a man can receive pleasure from a woman, and of course it's scrutinized somewhat, because any kind of sex is more heavily scrutinized than violence. But if a woman does like you said, or if it's a gay couple, it's all over so homophobic, misogynistic, do you decide right? And um fetishistic of violence, you know, yeah. Like here's one example. There's a great article called don't expect any major changes to the n p A rating System, and it's basically Chris Dodd, who's the new head and the gang, digging in and saying, you know what, we talked to your average parents and we pull them and this is what they want. Um. But they released none of those studies released, none of those conversations released. Um. A movie like Filomena, which you saw, was rated to our Yeah. It was about a lady looking for a long lost son. It was so far from an our movie. It was ridiculous. Yeah. But it had a couple of F bombs in it. Um, So they cut those out and they bring it to a PG thirteen. You might think, who cares cut up the F bombs make it PG thirteen. But there's something bigger going on here, you know. Yeah, there's a great A V Club article about, um, how just totally out of step. A lot of the ratings are and they have fifteen movies listed and basically talk about their ratings. Um, like the first one they talk about once that romantic. Um, it wasn't like a romantic comedy, wasn't. No, I would say it was a sweet just a modern day romance told through music. It wasn't a musical, but there are a lot of musical numbers. Highly inoffensive love story. Yeah, very sweet movie. Uh, it had the same rating as hostile to just basically torture porn. They both got the same rating. Yeah should we should read this first line from the A B Club. In early summer of two thousand seven, two films were released with R ratings. One featured a scene where a naked woman is suspended from a ceiling while another naked woman slashes her with a scythe and base in her blood. The other featured to Dublin musicians singing songs together, falling in love and opting not to act on it, like there was never any sex scene. They didn't even get together. Really. They're both rated. Are both rated are because of profanity Rushmore rated R for the scene at the end whether Max is putting on the play the Vietnam play, and there is a shot of a couple of little kids looking at on on the set. There's some Playboy centerfolds up in the locker like on the Vietnam set, and these it shows these little kids like looking at those like a twelve year old would probably do an for that, got an R for that happiness. Todd Solins one of my favorite movies of all time. Yeah. Uh, they tried to give it an n C seventeen rating, and he said, you know what, I'm not cutting anything. You can just go take a long walk off a short pier, is what I think he famously said to them. And uh, he released his movie as unrated. Really, yep, I don't think I knew that the way to go, Todd Solins. Or if you're looking at some serious homophobia, um, the great N nine movie A Longtime Companion features no real sex acts at all, nothing explicit. Um. In fact, the A B Club says it could show on network TV today with just a few alterations. Um, but it was about a gay couple and uh so I got an n C seventeen. Yeah. There's something called Afternoon Delight, which was a um a movie about a woman who hires a gigelow and apparently is heavy on the The woman receiving sexual gratification. It got an R rating despite and it got an R rating after apparently the director cut a lot of stuff out and the director said, what the hey after um Wolf of Wall Street came out, like have you seen this movie with like some very graphic apparent sex scenes between a man and a woman. But Leonardo DiCaprio is the one enjoying it the most, So it's fine. It's an our, right, blue is the warmest color. Yeah. Last year that a teenage lesbian love story and got a lot of attention, And there were some theaters that allowed, uh, high school age kids to go see that anyway, because again, this is in law, it's not binding. It's up to the theaters. Yeah, it's just so strange that such a small group of people have such influence on such a large industry. And yeah, the more you dig into it, the more conflicts of interest arise, and the more r trary the standards become, the more blood boiling it is. I highly recommend you go read some stuff like rated R for ridiculous by Kirby Dick his Little uh his Little um op ed about the m P A a UM that one u s news and World Report article you wrote or suggested was good. I wish I wrote it had you been Uh, there would have been used correctly. How did they misuse it? What? Yeah, I know, and that's terrible. Uh So the mp A will defend themselves and they say that there's no such bias and that we all these objectionable scenes are rated on the graphic quality and how graphic it is. Um But if you just look at the you'd have to be a dummy nut to see these correlations. And the fact that they don't seem to care that much about violence in this age where I don't know, does it influence people to go shoot up a school? Who knows? Did you see that John Oliver quote that's a going around, Yes, but what was it? It's like somebody unsuccessfully tries to carry a bomb onto a plane in their shoe. We all take our shoes off. There's like thirty something school shootings after Columbine and absolutely nothing's changed. Or the onion article that's going around two now is this is something that can't be prevented, says the only country where this kind of thing happens all the time, something like that. I'm paraphrasing. Oh, Yeah, that's the onion. Yeah, good stuff. Np A. Keep keep doing the fighting, the good fight. Yeah good check out, Like, just go start reading up on it. It's funny how much we just take this stuff for granted, but when just start digging just slightly beneath the surface at the very least. See this film is not yet rated. It's really good, um, really engrossing. And you know, for every hundred documentaries that come out, what five of them are like really great? Most of them are pretty good Summer terror. Well, so any really good one is worth seeing just in and of itself. Agreed. Uh. If you want to learn more about the m p a A, type those letters into the search part house to works dot Com and I said, search parts, it's time for listener mail. Uh. I'm gonna call this wild Parrots um. Josh mentioned in the Tattoo podcasts that he had heard parrots like to hang together wind free, and I wanted to burst in the podcast booth and tell you about the wild parrots of San Francisco. I'm not gonna get into it except to say that over the course of my life, the parrots in San Francisco were sort of living legend that one would occasionally get the privilege of spotting now and then. However, about three years ago, I moved in with my aunt in the little San Francisco suburb of Brisbane, and apparently the famous flocks of parrots were also making their home there. Since it was warmer unless windy. Uh, these parrots were often hanging right outside my bedroom window, which is pretty amazing. I don't know, she says, amusing. I say it's amazing, but also somewhat annoying, especially since my first son was just a little guy then and a very light sleeper. And these suckers are loud, That is true, they are very loud. Also, guys, I'm sending you the link to watch the preview of the two thousand three documentary The Wild Parents of Telegraph Hill. So I didn't know there was a documentary. I've heard that. I've heard of that before, I never knew what it was about. Amy. I will check that out. Thank you, thank you for writing it. Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy. Uh. If you have a documentary recommendation, we are always interested in those. Yeah. You can tweet them to us a s Y s K podcast. You can post them on Facebook dot com, slash stuff. You should know uh, And you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, the Beautiful Stuff You Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com.