Christians on Football Film: Give Us a G!
WASHINGTON — A low-budget, inspirational football movie made by Baptist pastors in Georgia has triggered a flood of attacks by Christian groups that accuse Hollywood's main trade association of penalizing the film by giving it a PG rating.
In the last week alone, the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which oversees the rating board, has been swamped with more than 15,000 e-mails arguing that "Facing the Giants" deserves a more family-friendly G rating. The complaints -- the number of which may be 10 times the previous record for reaction to a ratings decision -- say the movie is being unfairly targeted for its religious themes.
The filmmakers say they were told that those themes had prompted the PG rating. MPAA officials deny that was the reason.
Across the Internet and on talk radio, religious groups and conservative commentators have seized on the rating flap as evidence that Hollywood is anti-Christian. And the third-ranking House Republican has written to MPAA Chief Executive Dan Glickman demanding answers.
"This incident raises the disquieting possibility that MPAA considers exposure to Christian themes more dangerous for children than exposure to gratuitous sex and mindless violence," said Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.).
The MPAA created the voluntary film rating system in 1968 in response to public concerns about increasingly daring Hollywood productions. A 10-person board of parents, solicited from groups such as the PTA, serves the Classification and Rating Administration, an independent body funded by filmmakers.
By design, the process is cloaked in secrecy. Except for the chairwoman, board members' names are not made public and the deliberations are conducted in private, in part to shield board members from outside pressure. But filmmakers often complain that the board's decisions can be arbitrary, inconsistent and so lacking in specificity that it's hard to know why they were applied.
So opaque is the system that director Kirby Dick made a documentary about it, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which debuted at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The film examined what Dick alleged was the MPAA's habit of imposing more restrictive ratings on explicit depictions of sex than on gruesome violence.
Usually, ratings battles focus on the other end of the scale, with filmmakers lobbying to get an R instead of an NC-17, or sometimes a PG-13 instead of an R. But always, the debates center on the inherently subjective nature of the decision-making.
