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MPAA Rating System Essay examples

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In 1968 Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), established the Classification and Ratings Administration (CARA) in an effort to reduce the amount of objectionable material in film. Before 1968, the MPAA required that all films follow the guidelines of the Production Code. The Production Code stipulated what was and was not appropriate to appear in films. In 1966, the MPAA elected Jack Valenti president and he changed the code to a rating system based on the amount of objectionable content in a film. The rating system went through several amendments until the current rating system. A controversy arose when The Weinstein Co. film Blue Valentine received an NC-17 rating for a sexually explicit scene …show more content…

Since film director, Steven Spielberg, introduced the PG-13 rating in 1984, ratings creep has infected films. Ratings creep allows material such as perverse language or mature content that would appear in an R rated film to make its way into films rated PG-13 (Hansen 273). In a content analysis that was conducted by three researchers they found that “[recent] studies of movie content have indicated that movies with ratings of G, PG, and PG-13, which are unrestricted for child audiences, have included increasing amounts of adult content . . . across the past decade” (Potts and Belden 267). In PG-13 rated films more material that is objectionable is appearing in the films. In an article for the Journal of Adolescent Health, the author writes, “[despite] the criterion that [‘] rough or persistent violence is absent [’] in PG-13 films, studies indicate that PG-13 contains equal, if not more, violence than R films” (Nalkur, Jamieson, and Romer 4). Ratings creep is something that can happen over time. The Production Code of the early Hollywood years saw a digression of censorship during the late 50s and early 60s when the committee started to make compromises allowing more elements that were objectionable to creep into films of that era. Because of the digression of the Production Code the MPAA president, Jack Valenti, decided to change the Production Code to the current rating system. It is also a corrupt

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