ARTICLES

R-Rated

TEEN SEX LURE

Four high school seniors vow to find out the truth about God before they graduate. Their girlfriends just want them for sex, their worried parents just want them to get into the right colleges, and their agnostic teachers just want them to stop asking philosophical questions. But in spite of all temptation to succumb to fornication; in spite of peer pressure, parental pressure and the jeers of cheery agnosticism, the four young men become Catholics; one of them goes on to become a priest.

You'll wait a long time on line for that teen comedy. No wonder Marguerite, 16, waiting outside the Chula Vista CinemaStar while her 24-year-old sister bought tickets to the R-rated movie American Pie , looked so sad "I don't really want to watch it," she confided to me last July, a week after the movie opened. "My older sister really wants to see it, so she's taking me.

"I think teenage sex comedies are so stupid," Marguerite went on. A movie like American Pie is not only "unrealistic"; "it makes us [teens] look stupid," she said. Bracing herself for yet another indignity, Marguerite said: "I'd really like to watch something intellectual."

What she watched instead was "a riotous and raunchy exploration of the most eagerly anticipated -- and most humiliating -- rite of adulthood known as Losing One's Virginity," as American Pie is described on its official website (www.universalpictures.com/americanpie). "Hopelessly inexperienced but fueled by hormones raging full-tilt, the guys each try a different but equally outrageous approach to scoring with the female sex. The girls are just as anxious -- but also confused, trying to act cool as they romanticize and idealize what is basically just pure physical attraction. The end result is an honest and affectionate look at a time in all of our lives when we try our hardest to hold onto our dignity, and end up failing miserably."

"Honest and affectionate looks" can harden, however, into "voyeurism and illusion" -- something which is to be avoided, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church . "Christian purity requires a purification of the social climate ," it says. "It requires of the communications media that their presentations show concern for respect and restraint." American Pie lets loose with scenes in which one young woman masturbates in the shower, another young man masturbates in a pie (hence the title) and yet another young man has sex with the mother of one of the kids.

"We all felt there hadn't been a really good comedy of this kind since were kids," says movie producer Warren Zide, "and we'd talk for a long time about how we'd love to make one, and we wanted to shoot it R-rated. We wanted to show how teenagers really talk."

"To write a movie about sex and not have it be R-rated," screenwriter Adam Herz chimes in, "you're not giving your audience enough credit." The R-rating, given by the Motion Picture Association of America, means "Restricted: under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian."

Yet the filmmakers and Universal Pictures want to have their pie and eat it too: A story in the July 6 Wall Street Journal revealed publicity and marketing targeted at teens under as well as over 17. For example, American Pie has been dished up in media such as CosmoGIRL magazine (for girls 12 to 17) and Teen People .

The ages of the actors in the movie range from 17 to 25, insuring, says the website, "that the picture would reflect a realistic portrait of teens today."

All of which adds up to American Pie being a study in teen frustration in another sense. "I think it's ridiculous," said Sage, 16, after she couldn't get in. "Everything has sex in it." American Pie is "for teenagers," she maintained, "it's a teenage movie. If they base it towards teenagers, and they give it an R-rating...."

Why is it based towards teens? "Because they have teenagers in the movie's casting," she replied. "They say it's a sex comedy; I didn't go for the sexual content, I went for the people playing."

"It's a teenage movie," said a sixteen-year-old man who had likewise had his expectations dashed.

It's "a big deal about nothing," said his eighteen-year-old friend (both declined to give their names). "Most of my friends are all under 17, and they all want to see it."

Not on Bernard Miller's watch. "We got it well covered," the movie theater manager told me. Someone buying a ticket to see American Pie must show I.D. both at the box office and before entering the auditorium where it's screening.

Later, Miller is called to defuse an argument which a young man is offering the box office cashier. He apparently has I.D. showing that he is 17 or older, but the young woman with him doesn't.

"It doesn't matter," the cashier tells her, "you have to watch the movie with your mom or dad."

"How you guys doing," Miller interjects.

"I'm her guardian," the young man says. "She's my sister."

"You can't be her guardian," Miller replies. "You have to go to the courts for that."

It's ironic, however, that it's up to a parents and guardians to usher their charges into R movies: for the very essence of an R movie is the judgment that contains scenes which most parents and guardians would guard their charges from seeing. "An R-rated film," writes Jack Valenti in an Motion Picture Association of America fact sheet, "may include hard language, or tough violence, or nudity with sensual scenes, or drug abuse... so that parents are counseled, in advance, to take this advisory rating very seriously. Parents must find out more about an R-rated movie before they allow their teenagers to view it."

Valenti became president of the Encino-based MPAA in 1966. It was founded back in 1922 to "stem the waves of criticism of American movies ... [as] rambunctious and rowdy, and to restore a more favorable public image to the motion picture business," as Valenti testified before a senate committee last May in the wake of Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado.

In 1968 Valenti (in his own words) "junked" the production code of his predecessor, Will Hays, (with its "stern, forbidding catalogue of Dos and Don'ts"). In conjunction with the National Association of Theatre Owners, he put the current system of rating categories in place. And it's still in place to this day.

The film industry recognized "that we had a duty to inform parents about film content," Valenti told the senators. Although the ratings system is voluntary, the theater owner group estimates that 85 percent of owners subscribe to it, and "the vast majority of producer/distributors do in fact submit their films for ratings," according to Valenti.

"The ratings are decided by a full-time rating board located in Los Angeles," Valenti writes. "There are 8 to 13 members of the board who serve for periods of varying length.... There are no special qualifications for board membership, except that the members must have a shared parenthood experience, must be possessed of an intelligent maturity, and most of all, have the capacity to put themselves in the role of most American parents so they can view a film and apply a rating that most parents would find suitable and helpful in aiding their decisions about their children's moviegoing."

American Pie reportedly had to be edited and resubmitted four times in order to receive an R-rating instead of an NC-17-rating, i.e., no one 17 and under admitted. That makes it unlikely that it could have ever been sanitized into a PG-13 ("parents are urged to be cautious; some material may be inappropriate for pre-teenagers). I called the Valenti's Washington, D.C. office to ask whether, given the marketing of American Pie to teens under 18, it might have been a public service to hold fast for a rating of NC-17. A spokeswoman told me that the ratings board decision is based strictly on the movie's merits and doesn't take into account things such as its marketing.

But movie producers do; and they covet the R-rating because the NC-17 is "the kiss of death at the box office" according to an Aug. 10 Los Angeles Times article, because "movies with that rating are prohibited from advertising in many media outlets, screening in many theaters or renting in some video stores, movie studios usually contractually require directors to work with the MPAA to whittle films down to at least an R-rating." No wonder last year 65 percent of all movies received an R-rating from the MPAA.

And no wonder critic Ebert wrote "This is the summer of Raunch, and Valenti and his hypocritical rating system are its authors." Ebert proposed an adults-only category for material that is not pornographic. But that has already been tried and found wanting, both three decades ago, when the X-rating was originally established, only to become the hallmark of pornography, and more recently, when even a big-name director like Stanley Kubrick, whose movies are almost always successes artistically and financially, played it safe with Eyes Wide Shut , digitally doctoring it to get the R-rating. Valenti said on the Today show that the MPAA would be inundated by lawsuits from producers who feel their films deserve the "good adult" and not the "bad adult" rating -- and he's probably right.

So dismal is this prospect of the film industry policing itself that even governmental censorship begins to look good. "By promulgating laws and overseeing their application, public authorities should ensure that 'public morality and social progress are not gravely endangered' through the misuse of the media," says the catechism, citing Vatican II.

Meanwhile, media moguls have the soul of the world -- the soul of sixteen-year-old Marguerite -- in their hands. "Certainly your profession subjects you to a great measure of accountability," Pope John Paul II told them in Los Angeles in 1987, "accountability to God, to the community and before the witness of history. And yet at times it seems that everything is left in your hands. Precisely because your responsibility is so great and your accountability to the community is not easily rendered juridically, society relies so much on your good will. In a sense, the world is at your mercy."