UPDATE 03/13/12: AMC Theaters CEO Gerry Lopez comes out against the R rating: “To ‘automatically default’ BULLY is a mistake. Automatic default to a rating, a category, a genre… doesn’t matter, is a mistake. The message, the movie and its social relevance defy that kind of formulaic, conventional thinking. AMC will show this movie, and we invite our guests to engage in the dialogue its relevant message will inevitably provoke.”

The documentary film Bully, slated for release by The Weinstein Company, has catalyzed the latest in a never-ending string of complaints against the MPAA's long-standing movie ratings system. What's new is that, as of this morning, politicians are getting involved, with California Democratic Representative Mike Honda gathering signatures on Capitol Hill for a campaign pressuring the ratings board to award the movie a PG-13 rating rather than the more restrictive R. "We believe an R rating excludes the very audience for whom this film is desperately important," Honda wrote in a letter to MPAA President and CEO Chris Dodd.

When it comes to a film's content, documentarians don't have the same degree of control as narrative filmmakers. The director of a cop drama or a science-fiction action adventure can tweak the content of a film to reach a target audience. If you're making a gritty inner-city crime film destined for an R rating, you'll be dropping a few f-bombs in your screenplay and hiring a make-up FX team to create some grisly exit wounds that can hold up in a close-up. But if you're angling for a PG-13, you'll be cleaning up the expletives and taking a more bloodless approach to violent action. 

By contrast, documentary filmmakers are charged with capturing real events. Sure, they make decisions about how to build a story out of the footage they capture, just like any filmmaker. But what about material in a film that could cause offense, like profane language? If the filmmaker is pressured to excise some of that material in the interest of making a more audience-friendly picture, doesn't that act tend to change the political and even moral message of the film?
 
Simply put, Bully got slapped with an R rating because it showed high-schoolers being high-schoolers, including their use of schoolyard language — specifically, the much-feared "f-word," which can apparently be heard six times over the film's length.
 
Harvey Weinstein was understandably upset about the decision. For one thing, it must be frustrating to make a film about schoolkids that gets a rating suggesting it's inappropriate for high-shoolers to watch. For another, the R rating has significant financial repercussions for the film, since public schools in the U.S. generally forbid the screening of any and all R-rated films as a matter of course. Weinstein argued that Bully deserved a PG-13 because of the importance of its subject matter. He had a good point — in 2005, the board ended up agreeing with a similar appeal, downgrading the Iraq War documentary Gunner Palace from R to PG-13 despite its 42 reported utterances of the f-word. But in 2012, the appeals panel stood firm, voting to uphold the R rating for Bully by a margin of one.
 
Tensions escalated. The Weinstein Company threatened to retaliate by releasing films with no rating at all. (Weinstein can do that; the MPAA ratings have no legal status.) The head of NATO, John Fithian, responded with a letter warning that he would advise movie theater operators to treat any unrated films as is they had been slapped with an NC-17 — the MPAA's adults-only rating that, in the current U.S. exhibition climate, serves as the kiss of death for a film's commercial prospects. 
 
 
It's important to understand why NATO would respond that way. When the movie ratings system was instituted in the late 1960s, it was touted as a way to inform parents about the content of a given movie. It was also a way for the industry to shield movie theaters from prosecution under the variety of "harmful to minors" statutes in local jurisdictions that made it illegal to show movies with certain types of explicit content in different cities, states, and counties across the country. By instituting a system that barred under-17s entirely from X-rated films, the MPAA was able to assure exhibitors that any film that bore an MPAA rating had been vetted by the industry as appropriate for general exhibition, and was unlikely to land them in legal trouble with local prosecutors. If The Wei
nstein Company snubs the MPAA ratings, it shifts that burden from the ratings board to the movie-theater owners, and NATO doesn't want that. 
 
In short, it's unlikely that NATO is too concerned about whether Bully gets an R or a PG-13, but it does not want to see the current rating system undermined.
 
For filmmakers, the problem with the current system is that it requires that their artistic decisions be informed by financial concerns — or else. The MPAA rating is so inextricably tied to commercial success in the United States that directors generally work under a contractual requirement that they deliver a film with a certain rating. The idea of making grand artistic statements that go out in an uncensored director's-cut version has a certain maverick appeal until you look at what actually happens to the mavericks. Most recently, the critically acclaimed Shame, starring Michael Fassbender, struggled to earn less than $4 million in the U.S. despite a strong marketing push from Fox Searchlight and a respectable take of $10 million outside the U.S.
 
Which brings us back to documentarians. Editing the film seems to be off the table — it looks like the company is committed to releasing the film that director Lee Hirsch made. In defending its hardline approach to language in Bully, ratings board honcho Joan Graves cited a study indicating that American parents are more concerned about bad words than they are about graphic violence. "We asked specifically about the f-word, which clearly bothers a large number of people," Graves told Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein. "Language matters." 
 
Personally, I'm not a big fan of arguments that the MPAA should go easy on a given movie because of the importance of its subject matter. Asking members of the ratings board to serve as movie critics in addition to surrogate parents is probably a bad, bad idea — directors making ostensibly frivolous, straightforwardly entertaining films deserve to be treated fairly on this front. Nor do I think it's the MPAA's fault that school districts across the country have instituted blanket policies banning R-rated pictures from the classroom rather than taking responsibility for evaluating their own curricula. 
 
The newest twist in the saga of Bully is the threat that Congress might get involved. No legislation is threatened. But The Hollywood Reporter said today that 20 members of Congress have signed a petition by high-school student Katy Butler asking the MPAA to give the film a PG-13. I think it's great that 275,000 ordinary citizens are exercising their right to protest the rating, but I'm not so happy when politicians get involved. (Ironically, a Wednesday screening of the film is scheduled in Washington D.C., where both Weinstein and MPAA Chair Chris Dodd — an erstwhile politician himself — are slated to appear on a panel.) 
 
Maybe the MPAA needs to come up with a new rating that essentially distinguishes between "hard-R" and "soft-R" pictures. Maybe it makes sense to think about evaluating documentaries under different criteria, making allowances for violence, profanity, and maybe even nudity in the context of honest reportage. But something should be done soon — the last thing we need is for Congress to decide it needs to take more concrete action to rework the movie-ratings system.