The Reeler spent a few hours Tuesday at IFC Center, where the theater’s Stranger Than Fiction series wound to a close with a preview of Kirby Dick’s muckraking doc This Film is Not Yet Rated. It was one of best turnouts of the series’ spring session, with even Michael Moore dropping by for at least a word with Dick and glimpse at the first few minutes. Oscar-nominated Street Fight filmmaker Marshall Curry was also in the house, as were Not Yet Rated producer Eddie Schmidt and IFC’s executive producers Alison Palmer Bourke and the one-and-only Evan Shapiro.

NYU’s Thom Powers (left) grills This Film Is Not Yet Rated director Kirby Dick (center) and producer Eddie Schmidt (Photo: STV)
I had seen probably two-thirds of the film at Sundance, and at the time, a little more languid cut and an overriding sense of indignance left me a tad ambivalent. But after some tightening, the film looks to emerge as a viable challenge to the mysterious MPAA ratings board–or perhaps we should call it the “once-mysterious MPAA ratings board,” considering Dick’s relentless revealing of its members’ identities.
“We never had a problem with releasing their names,” Dick said during a discussion following the screening. “What the raters are doing is making decisions that are in the public interest of everyone, really, in society–certainly all parents. And so everyone should know that process. It should be a transparent process; it’s a transparent process in every European country. Everybody knows who judges are, for example, or school board members. The MPAA claims that the reason they do it is to protect these people from influence. But of course, the people who are in direct contact with the industry people–the people who directly influence these raters–are these senior raters and (ratings board boss) Joan Graves.
“So that point of influence exists, and there’s absolutely no reason not to open this process up except (that) the MPAA wants to keep control of it. And the way they do it is by keeping as much secrecy around it as possible, which is why all these filmmakers that you see in our film all thought they had an ‘R’ rating. These are people who had run films through the ratings system before, thought they were making an ‘R’ film, and it turns out they weren’t.”
Not that the ratings board does not want to be your friend or anything. “I think they know probably that filmmakers have this built in animosity,” Schmidt told the crowd. “So they figure that if they play it nice, then people will kind of come down in their anger. So it’s censorship with a smile, I guess.”

I plan to write more specifically about the film as its Sept. 1 theatrical release nears, but I will say that this time around, for whatever reason, I had a little less difficult time reconciling the MPAA’s censorship issues (as outlined by ratings board victims John Waters, Kimberley Peirce, Atom Egoyan [featured at right, with Dick] and others) with its assiduous attempts to out the board members. Scenes in which Dick and private eye Becky Altringer rifle through garbage and stalk raters at lunch possess a perverse entertainment value all their own, and their confinement to a subplot almost felt like a disservice. But the new cut portrays each a little more evenly (or maybe I just perceived it that way–I did sleepwalk through much of Sundance’s second half), dovetailing the threads into a conclusion you cannot help but appreciate despite seeing it coming a mile away.
Much of that foreshadowing has to do with Altringer, the intrepid investigator whose minivan exploits must be seen to believed. “We submitted the film (for a rating),” Dick recalled. “And then Becky called and said, ‘I want to go back one last time. I want to get one last piece of information.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t think they’ll be watching the film until the next day, but you’re going to take a risk.’ So she said, “OK, I’m going to do it.’
“She was out there, and it got dark. She told me she needed this license plate, and in order to get it, she had to go down and sit on this sidewalk. And she sort of pretended she was a homeless person. She didn’t pull that off quite as well, and then a guard came up and recognized her because I guess they had screened the film that afternoon. He called up and said, ‘She’s out here.’ Becky ran back into her van, which now was a new van–not the van you saw–and instead of driving away like a sane person would, she just watched Joan Graves and these guards come out and race around all over searching for her.”
As if that did not reflect the MPAA’s desperation enough , Dick also described how the rabidly anti-piracy trade group broke its own rules in plotting its damage control tactics. “Actually, they sort of pirated a copy of the film,” he said. “Prior to submitting the film to get rated, I thought, ‘You know, if I submit this, they’re not going to want to give it back.’ So I called them up and asked them, ‘Who’s going to see the film, and can they promise me that they won’t make a copy of the film?’ And they assured me that only the raters would see the film and they wouldn’t make a copy of the film.
“Sure enough, we find out a little later that Greg Goeckner, the (MPAA) attorney, has seen the film, and after that, we found out (MPAA president) Dan Glickman has seen the film. And then the attorney called me a few days later and said, ‘You know, I have to tell you, we have made a copy of the film. But don’t worry. It’s safe in my office.’ And we sent them a letter insisting that they send it back, and they said, ‘No we have a right to keep it.’ So that’s the MPAA for you.”
(Egoyan/Dick photo: Chain Camera)

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