|
*
A
lobbying
campaign for the value of the
film, Bullying, to
young people has enlisted the
support of Meryl Streep, Drew
Brees, Justin Bieber, Johnny
Depp, Martha Stewart, Ellen
DeGeneres and nearly 500,000
other people. It also made
an overnight media celebrity out
of 17-year-old Katy Butler, a
self-described victim of
bullying who started the on-line
petition.
Among
the media outlets that are giving
advertising space to promote the
film are: Social Vibe, AOL,
Entertainment Weekly, Fandango,
HitFix, The Huffington Post, IMDb,
Maker Studios, Mediaite, Movie
Tickets, MSN, New York Magazine,
Rotten Tomatoes, Queerty,
SocialTyze, Vulture, and WeeWorld.
According
to Bladimiar Norman, Senior Vice
President of Marketing for The
Weinstein Company that produced the
film, “We faced challenges from the
MPAA to restrict the audience of a
documentary that has the ability to
change lives. These influential
sites [listed above] will help to
promote this film simply because
they know the urgency of the issue
and, like us, they care deeply about
the lives impacted by bullying."
Since
the MPAA would not change the
rating, the producers released the
film "Unrated."
However, this restricts advertising
and keeps many young people from
seeing the film -- the very audience
that most need to see it and the
audience that the film was designed
to reach.
** Although the aim of
the well-intended MPPA is to
represent "the typical parent," I
doubt if many parents who knew the
content of the popular (and
money-making) R-rated torture porn
films would want their 17-year olds
to see them.
The man's reaction cited in
McDonalds is hardly an isolated
example. When a
class was taken to see the
widely-acclaimed Oscar-winning film,
Schindler's List, depicting
World War II Holocaust events, many
students, apparently knowing little of
history's atrocities or possibly
assuming that all films were designed
as entertainment, laughed at the true,
nightmarish events.
Although the decisions of
ratings boards will invariably end up
being difficult and controversial,
especially with millions of dollars in
box office revenue typically existing
between PG, PG-13 and R ratings, we
now seem to have a system that leaves
producers only able to guess at how
their work will be rated by the
MPPA. Nor are producers given
any explanation as to why the NPPA
rated their film R instead of PG-13,
for example. They can only guess as to
what needs to be done in re-editing to
get a more favorable rating. At the
same time, it seems that films from
the major studios are judged more
leniently than films from independent
producers.
It should also
be noted that the identity of the MPPA
panel of judges continues to be a
closely guarded secret.
|