An alternative to receiving an X or NC-17 rating was and is to fail to submit a film to be rated at all. Filmmakers are charged a fee in order to be rated. It is hoped that once a movie is rated, the target audience will more than offset the fee that must be paid before film is rated. Since children under 17 are supposedly restricted from seeing R-rated movies, a movie which receives an R-rating could receive much lower box-office receipts than it might have earned as a PG or PG-13 film. When there was still the possibility of receiving an X-rating from the MPAA, an X-rated film could lose a substantial portion of its potential audience. So far, the impact of an NC-17 rating has had a negative consequence on a movie's audience appeal and on box-office receipts. So far, no NC-17 films have been very successful at cinemas that I know of, but Paul Verhoeven's notorious "Showgirls" has become a cult classic on home video. Likewise, unrated films could also lose a large share of their potential audience. (to be cont'd)
[The original version of this essay first appeared in Eastern Connecticut State University's Campus Lantern student newspaper in the early '90s, in my unpublished manuscript "In Mediocrity We Trust... In Debt We Die" And Other Essays, and in UMass/Boston's Mass Media student newspaper in the mid-90s.]
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