LOS ANGELES — Never let it be said filmmaker Kevin Smith is a ratings wimp. When his latest film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, was slapped with a rating of NC-17 — no children allowed, period — Smith appealed to the Motion Picture Association of America and won. The movie will debut with an R rating on October 31st, distributed by the Weinstein Co.An R rating allows children younger than 17 to view the movie in the company of a parent.
“We didn’t set out to make an NC-17 film,” Smith told The Associated Press. “That’s just commercial suicide.”
Reportedly, the MPAA ratings board objected to two sex scenes in the movie’s original version. Even after Smith trimmed the scenes, the ratings board refused to budge.
“The ratings board felt it was rather sexually graphic,” Smith told the AP. “My point is, it was comically graphic. All the sex in the movie with the exception of one scene is very cartoonish, very campy. It wasn’t designed to titillate.”
The appeals board, a separate MPAA panel, agreed with him Tuesday and lowered the rating.
It wasn’t Smith’s first tangle with the MPAA ratings board. His first film, 1994’s Clerks, initially received an NC-17 rating but later was lowered to R on appeal. Smith’s 2003 film Jersey Girl was lowered from R to PG-13 after Smith appealed.
Smith raised one very obvious point during the Porno appeal.
“Anybody not inclined to see a movie with ‘porno’ in the title is not going to see it, so it kind of regulates itself to a degree,” he told the AP. “And anybody who is going is not going to be surprised by what they see.”
Zack and Miri Make a Porno stars Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as friends who, facing separate financial crises, decide to leap at the old maxim “sex sells” and enlist their friends to help them make an adult video. Along the way, they realize they care more about each other than either realized previously. Hilarity reportedly ensues.
