Documentarian Kirby Dick isn't afraid of taking on powerful institutions. In Twist of Faith, he delved into the Catholic Church's sidestepping of responsibility for the rampant sexual abuse of altar boys by priests. Now with This Film Is Not Yet Rated, he takes on the Motion Picture Association of America ( MPAA ) —the enormously powerful movie industry lobbying group whose top-secret ratings board seems to unfairly target independent films for harsh treatment over studio releases. One prominent issue in the movie is the repeated unfair ratings GLBT films have been slapped with when compared to their straight counterparts—a practice that particularly incensed the filmmaker.
WCT: Did you have one of those lightning bolt moments that made you decide, 'OK, I'm going to take these guys on?'
KD: Well, no. Actually, it was more cumulative. I've actually wanted to make the film for more than a decade. It seemed to get stronger with each unfair rating of an independent or foreign film or a film with gay content. At one point I just decided, 'This is going to make a good film.'
WCT: Can you talk a little bit about the imbalance that seems to exist in the ratings system between straight movies and GLBT ones?
KD: I was so shocked. I mean we all knew it, right? I knew [ director ] Jamie Babbit—not well.
WCT: I just talked to her last week actually about this.
KD: Oh good. To get the project off the ground before we got a green light, we interviewed Jamie and we interviewed [ South Park's ] Matt Stone because I thought that was a great range to present and Jamie was fantastic. She was just amazing but I remember being so pissed off when she started telling me the details about how her film [ But I'm A Cheerleader ] was censored. I think it was the only time I was like, 'What the fuck!?'
WCT: Yeah and it's so great, too, that you show the scene in question from the film because it's so benign.
KD: Yeah—it's so benign, it's so benign! And you know that it's not just because it's gay content—although that's a huge part of it—but it's also because she's a new, powerless filmmaker and they just went in there and just stomped on her. In general, I think there's almost a nearly—but not quite—full rating more restrictive for films with gay content versus films with straight content and I find that appalling. When Kori Bernard the spokesperson for the MPAA was asked about this discrepancy or this bias in the ratings system her response was, 'We don't set the standards; we reflect them.' Now that's a basic defense of homophobia and what if the standards were racist or anti-Semitic—would they reflect those? I mean, what kind of answer is that? That is an outrageous statement.
WCT: That's pretty appalling.
KD: It's completely appalling and obviously I don't think parents should be telling their kids that they should only see films with straight content and not gay content but absolutely if anybody's going to make that decision for their kids it's the parents that should make that decision and not 10 anonymous parents living in Los Angeles.
WCT: And as Jamie Babbit makes the point in the film, it would be nice to have a gay or lesbian parent as part of the mix.
KD: Exactly! Exactly! Because what is the average American parent? But I think the MPAA—which is a trade organization and lobbying arm for the six major film studios that together control 95 percent of the film business—gains politically from coming down hard on films with gay content because the rating system is only a small part of what they do. Their major efforts are in Washington—lobbying Congress to pass laws, particularly very onerous intellectual property laws, like the DMCA [ Digital Millennium Copyright Act ] and the extension of copyrights. That's where they're really making a lot of money: by getting Congress to grant them these rights that, in many ways, are trampling on even the Constitution. So by coming down hard on gay films it plays well to the right, which now controls Congress, and that allows them to get these laws passed. It's a very cynical use of the ratings system.
WCT: But those kinds of things have been in place against gay films since the rating system started. It's always been much more taboo in that area: 'You can't see Victim or Boys in the Band—oh my God!'
KD: You're absolutely right.
WCT: So how do you change it? How do you break their autonomy?
KD: Well, I don't think you're going to break the autonomy of the MPAA. But I'm hopeful that this film gets a lot of people upset and informs a lot of people about what's going on. Many people take the ratings for granted and, really, this is a story of media consolidation. It's like any other industry in the pursuit of the bottom line. It's doing things that hurt society and one of these things obviously is this homophobic rating system.
WCT: Yeah, a big one.
KD: [ Laughs. ] A big one, yeah.
WCT: So to get Kimberly Peirce and Jamie Babbit and John Waters to appear on camera—did they hesitate or was it like they couldn't wait to start talking about this?
KD: Jamie dove right in, to her credit. I think John Waters has very legitimate concerns and is afraid that his future films might be more harshly rated. He says that in our film and he said it again to me a few weeks ago. He said, 'I'll talk to people about the film but I've got to be careful what I say about the MPAA rating system because I've got another film going that's got to go before them and I'm worried.' You know, that kind of paranoia kind of robs an art form. A person should be able to criticize a rating system and not think that that ratings [ body ] is going to react by censoring their next film.
