- Joined
- Apr 22, 2015
The MPAA has an unmitigated hate-boner for indie films, which is typically what the documentary is about, but there's a lot of horror stories about the MPAA fucking over indie films. The one I'm most familiar with is with what happened to Saints and Soldiers, which was one of the first to get some mainstream attention brought to the mistreatment of indie films. The filmmakers were shooting for a PG-13 rating, but when it was getting rated, it got an R-rating that baffled them because it's not all that violent; there's depictions of war, but it's not Saving Private Ryan violent. But they gave it an R-rating for one scene in which a main character got fatally shot. Just the one scene for "personalized violence".
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There was also how the MPAA gave the first Appleseed movie an R-rating just because some random soldier's head explodes in a second sometime in like the first five minutes, and that's it. Everything else is PG-13 appropriate. They hate foreign films, too, much like the Academy Awards. Hollywood owes a lot of its existence to foreign filmmakers, but they do everything they can to sweep them under the rug whenever they think they can get away with it.
The whole association as it stands today is fucking bullshit and they don't try to hide it. It's been needing a reform for years at this point.
It's been well documented. The MPAA is just a an extension of the studio's control of the game. Trey Parker and Matt Stone had tons of problems getting Orgazmo (their 2nd feature) an R rating even though there's no hard core sex, the cursing is pretty low key in comparison to the South Park movie, and there's a brief tit shot that's a blink and you miss it moment. The MPAA wanted this scene gone:
Trey and Matt refused.
Meanwhile, compare this to something like Boogie Nights that came out around the same time and you realize how much of a joke the MPAA is.