Blame Washington, Not Hollywood, For R-Rated Violence In PG-13 Films

"If (studios) are prevented from freely advertising R-rated films, they will simply find ways to allow more and more “objectionable” material into PG-13 rated films." - Me, in May, 2001

Well, it's finally happened.  After over a decade of studios stuffing more and more R-rated content, specifically R-rated violence, into PG-13 movies, we've reached the point where PG-13 films actually have more gun violence than R-rated films. There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the study which will be published in the December issue of Pediatrics, but almost none of them are looking at the real issue. This isn't some conspiracy by Hollywood to fill our kids' heads with images of no-harm/no-foul gun play. It's the logical end-result of a 2001 bill spearheaded by Joe Leiberman and nearly passed into law that would have given the Federal Trade Commission the power to regulate how R-rated films were marketed. And frankly I tried to warn anyone who would listen nearly thirteen years ago.

The bill was brought about by a post-Columbine study that found that Hollywood often marketed R-rated films to audiences younger than 17 years old. Under the notion that marketing R-rated films to kids was in-fact a "false and deceptive" business practice, the bill made it a crime to target "under age" audiences for films that were rated R.  Under the intended legislation, if the Federal Trade Commission determined that a studio had marketed R-rated films to children, however they might define that (say, putting an R-rated trailer before a kid-centric PG-13 film, advertising The Matrix Reloaded during Survivor, or perhaps making that R-rated film just too darn appealing to kids), they might face a fine of $11,000 per day.

Never mind that kids under seventeen were still allowed to see R-rated films with a guardian and never mind that marketing campaigns often began long before the MPAA had awarded a rating, the studios could now face legal action for how they marketed their films based on a VOLUNTARY ratings system that in itself did not actually restrict minors from seeing films branded "restrictive". The law actually never passed, eventually dying due to First Amendment concerns and threats from Jack Valenti to basically end the ratings system if there were legal strings attached. But in the wake of this near-miss, either out of fear or self-interest, Hollywood in fact ended up doing many of the would-be suggestions that the FTC recommended.

And by 2003, faced with harsher enforcement of the R-rating guidelines meaning lesser attendance of those films by the key teenage demographic, Hollywood did the only logical thing that could be expected of a profit-based industry. Faced with theoretical threats of potential fines for marketing R-rated films to minors and now faced with a much harsher enforcement of the whole "no one under 17 admitted without a parent or guardian" guideline, the industry merely did everything they could to squeeze as much of their product into the PG-13 box. So gruesome slasher films like Screen Gems's Prom Night or violent action films like Sony's  Vantage Point which clearly would have been R-rated fare prior to this point were cut and massaged into meeting the standards for what unofficially qualifies as PG-13 violence.

Faced with declining attendance among teens for R-rated films and challenges in marketing R-rated films to general audiences, R-rated films outside the realm of uber-cheap horror all-but vanished for a decade. With the exception of the periodic Lionsgate cheapie (War, Gamer) or Denzel Washington/Tony Scott vehicle (Man On Fire, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3), R-rated action films became an endangered species for much of the last decade. Instead of "protecting" children from seeing previews for R-rated films during American Idol, those same children were now merely being exposed to the full-brunt of the basically R-rated content under the guise of a PG-13 film. Clearly adult films stuffed with adult subject matter and adult content were carefully constructed (or heavily edited in post-production) to ensure that PG-13 rating.

Previously, an eight-year old disallowed from seeing R-rated films might at worst be subjected to a trailer for an adult action thriller like Universal's The Bourne Supremacy, Sony's Angels & Demons, 20th Century Fox's  Live Free or Die Hard. But under this new system, those same kids were actually more likely to see said violent content since those films were able to skate by with a PG-13 merely due to careful editing and a lack of osncreen blood. What Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, and others created was the exact opposite of what it intended, with an entire generation of kids now exposed to what amounts to R-rated action films and R-rated slasher flicks in PG-13 clothing.

And since the R-rating became a scarlet letter outside of the Oscar season (and even during, witness Harvey Weinstein's inexplicable battle over Judi Dench's Philomena which is sure to be huge with the under-17 crowd), and the MPAA is notoriously harsher on sex than they are on violence, sexual content all-but disappeared from mainstream films outside of cheap sex comedies. R-rated films have started to make a comeback starting in late 2010 outside of franchise film making, but the proverbial "R-13" still lives on in the likes of Fox's Taken (forced sex trafficking made appropriate for the whole family) and Sony's White House Down. So it's not remotely a surprise that we now have PG-13 films that contain more gun violence than R-rated films.

Over the last ten years, the kinds of films that would most likely feature gun violence, action thrillers or horror films, were also most likely to be nipped-and-tucked into just the right shape to snag that PG-13. Yes, the MPAA is harsher on sex than violence because America is a puritanical country that is more concerned about sex than violence, but the fact remains that Hollywood reacted to a threat to the viability of the R-rating by merely allowing PG-13 films to be more violent.  Joe Lieberman's bill never became law, but the Federal Trade Commission's "suggestions" in fact became policy.

The "Media Marking Accountability Act" may have died in committee, but its legacy lives on in the most counterproductive way.The threat of underage kids seeing marketing for R-rated content has morphed into the likelihood that underage children will in fact see R-rated content hidden in plain-sight in their PG-13 entertainment. That's pretty much the opposite of what Washington DC intended twelve years ago. And I (and I'm sure others who were paying attention) saw it coming twelve years ago.