Stuff You Should Know - SYSK’s Summer Movie Playlist: How the MPAA Works

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

You may be surprised to learn those ubiquitous ratings, from G to NC-17, put on movies in America are actually handed down by anonymous employees of a secretive organization that serves as a lobbying firm for Hollywood's six biggest studios.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nailah Simone breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast

Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also want to address the Tonys. On a recent episode of Checking In with Michelle Williams, I open up about feeling snubbed by the Tony Awards. Do I? I was never mad. I was disappointed because I had high hopes. To hear this and more on disappointment and protecting your peace, listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Chuck here for another summer movie playlist feed drop. Today we're gonna be covering how the MPAA works, and this is from June 2014, and it delves into the ins and outs of the MPAA and how they decide on rating movies, cause it's sort of a dark art as far as we're concerned. So check it out.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry. But where's Waldo? I, right over there, apparently. Man, I wish people could hear the in-between stuff.

I think Jerry was recording that last one. Oh yeah? I think so. She used to give us neat little outtakes, but she doesn't do that anymore. No. Those days are long gone. They exist in the vault though.

How you doing? Not good. No? No. I don't know what's wrong with me. I am off today. Out of your game? Yeah, it's weird. Well, I think this is the perfect podcast to set you straight.

Why? Because it's something that we both have some passion about. Against. Yeah. I think anybody who's seen the documentary, this film is not yet rated, that would be very difficult to not be persuaded to feel strongly about the MPAA and its practices.

Yeah, and at least how they do things. But we're gonna try to be objective. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say up front, I have no problem with rating a film's content so parents can decide whether or not it's appropriate. I think it's valuable, but I think there are ways to do it that I don't think the MPA does. Yes.

So I just wanted to float that early on. Okay, I think that was probably smart. Okay. Okay. I don't have kids, so I think that was probably smart. Okay. Okay. I don't have kids, so I don't really, whatever. But I mean, I can understand the value of that kind of thing. Yeah, but it gives you an idea.

I like having an idea of what I'm about to see too. I feel like I can tell just from watching a trailer, preview, seeing a movie poster. I'm pretty intuitive when it comes to the marketing techniques of movies. Yeah, but I think being a film nerd, it's like is the new Avengers movie gonna be rated R? That really tells you something. Of course it won't be.

No, it never would be. Because PG-13 is the, that's the strike zone these days. It really is. Apparently PG-13 movies pull in more money than all other ratings combined. Yeah. And it's a relatively new phenomenon. You want to talk about its origin?

Yeah, let's do it. So back in 1984, a man named Steven Spielberg had two movies out. man named Steven Spielberg had two movies out. Who? Steven Spielberg. Right. He directed one, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,

and he produced another, Gremlins. Yeah. And both of them caught, he caught a lot of heat from both of them. Sure, Indiana Jones for the heart removal scene specifically. Yeah, but also the snake, the live snake at the feast thing. Sure, Indiana Jones for the heart removal scene specifically. Yeah, but also the live snake at the feast thing. Yeah, yeah. The snake babies, the eyeballs, all that stuff.

Yeah. And then with Gremlins, it was just downright terrifying in a lot of different places, especially if you're a kid. And the reason he caught heat was because both of those movies were rated PG. So Spielberg went to the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, and said, oh, let's do something about this.

Because these clearly aren't our movies, but they apparently aren't PG movies either, so maybe we should come up with something in between, and PG-13 was born. Yeah, and this was before he had all the sway in the world. He was influential, but it wasn't like Spielberg today who could have just waved his wand and made it happen. Yeah, but I think even at the time.

He was important. Yeah, there were very few directors at that time who could have gotten something like that done, too. But, so that's where PG-13 came from, at that time who could have gotten something like that done too. So that's where PG-13 came from and like you said, that's the strike zone now and the reason why is because that is the kind of movie that caters to young teenage boys who apparently are the most successful at getting girls to go to movies with them.

successful at getting girls to go to movies with them. So if you can get a movie rated PG-13, you're going to make a bunch of money. Yeah, plus it makes sense, it's right there in the middle. But the problem is, it's become a means of almost advertising that rating, rather than cautioning parents, it's a way of attracting the audience. Yeah, true. It's like this isn't some kid's PG movie.

This is as close to an R movie as you can get in. Yeah, and I think filmmakers try to achieve that rating by either scaling back their R rated movie or juicing up their PG movie. Or adding more violence. Yeah. Because apparently PG-13 movies have tripled in violence over the last few decades.

And they now have, according to one study, more violence than their R-rated counterparts. Yeah, and different kinds of violence that you didn't used to see. You know? Alright, I guess we should go back in time a little bit. Is it way back machine? Sure, let's go way back in time in Hollywood.

Alright, it's 1922, Hollywood and Vine is a viable intersection in Hollywood at the time, unlike now. Although people are gonna say, no, they built that area back up. And that is when the NPA was born, in the early 1920s. And at the time, it was up to local authorities or your state or your municipality to either stamp something as moral or immoral, there were no ratings on movies,

and thanks to a guy named Will Hayes, who was the first president of the MPAA, he installed the Hayes Code and said, you're either gonna pass or fail, it's either gonna be stamped immoral or moral. Right, and the reason Will Hayes, who was the MPAA president, came up with the Hayes Code, which was really extensive. It was like, if you talk about the government,

it always has to be good, sexuality has to be repressed, and just basically how you think about all movies from the 30s and 40s. Just squeaky clean basically. Like the division between good and evil is very clearly defined, the good guy always wins. And if you didn't fall into that haze code, like you said, your movie would be stamped immoral. But the whole reason he came up with this code

was because local municipalities could pass their own obscenity laws and that could be bad for business. So. It's a not even get your film exhibited. Right. So remember in the ACLU episode where we're talking about that one movie that New York, just the Catholic said, no you can't show that here.

And the ACLU went to work getting the Catholics beaten in court. Right, even though it can't show that here. And the ACLU went to work getting the Catholics beaten in court. Right, even though it was just a bad movie. Had nothing to do with, well, I mean it did, but it shouldn't have been shown because it was so terrible. Was it bad?

I don't remember. Yeah, I mean, it was supposed to be not very good. OK. But it happened. That kind of thing happened a lot. Local towns said, no, we're not going to show that movie. So Hayes figured out if Hollywood policed itself, then they could control what movies came out

and therefore everybody could make a bunch of money. That's right. And that's the point of the MPAA, they're the lobbying arm of six major Hollywood studios. Yeah. They work for them. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's one way to say it.

But they, and it's just those six too, isn't it? Well, yeah, I mean, there's definitely an argument these days that independent filmmakers have a much rougher time with the MPAA. Yeah. But most of the indies too are eventually distributed by the majors anyway. I gotcha.

You know what I'm saying? Okay. So flash forward a bit in our way back machine to the 1950s, things changed a little bit after World War II, and people, I guess the easiest way to say it is people loosened up a little bit and didn't mind certain elements in their entertainment any longer.

A big example of this article I use is Frank Sinatra got an Oscar nomination for playing a heroin addict in The Man with the Golden Arm. And that couldn't have happened in the 1940s. No, millions of people hadn't died in World War II yet. That's right. I imagine that kind of loosens you up as far as seeing curse words and stuff in movies goes.

Yeah, like that's not a big deal. Like World War II is a big deal. Right. Get your haunches down. Exactly. Yeah. That was the big one, the big first crack to the Hays Code. Yeah.

And then there were, I think that, you said he won an Oscar, right? Yeah, it was a really good movie. That kind of opened the floodgates so that by the end of the 50s, you got some like it hot, and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are dressed like women hitting on Marilyn Monroe. And at that point it was pretty obvious the Hays Code was dead.

Yeah, I mean they weren't passing the code but they were still getting released. So once something is subverted like that it's dead in the water. Right, so that was fine for a little while. I think the Hays Code just kind of fell to the wayside and people were releasing movies without any kind of moral or immoral stamp, but the rating system,

as we understand it today, hadn't come about yet. So it was kind of a limbo period until 1968. And a store owner in New York with the last name of Ginsburg got busted for selling nudie mags to 16 year old boys. And he took it all the way to the Supreme Court saying, you can't say anything about this, there's federal laws about obscenity, not local laws, and the Supreme Court said,

you know what, we really think it's up to local municipalities to decide what they want their minors exposed to or not. That got Hollywood's attention because all of a sudden, local municipalities could decide whether or not they wanted to show movies to minors or not. So what was old became new again, and Jack Valenti, who was in charge of the MPAA, said we need another system, another self-policing system,

and he came up with the rating system that we have today. Yeah, and he, I mean, Jack Valenti was the head of the MPAA for close to 40 years, and he, initially, the intention was to stop censorship, because he feared that the movies were going to start being censored locally, and so I think the origins of the MPA's rating system were art centered. Art centered but also money centered because again if you have town A showing the movie

but towns B through L deciding that the movie is obscene and not showing it then you're losing that money in B through L, deciding that the movie is obscene and not showing it, then you're losing that money and beat through L. So what Valenti came up with was this idea that let us tell you what is appropriate for minors or not, what movie is, and we'll just make a simple rating system. G, P, G, R, or X. The old X.

And triple X, which wasn't even formally a rating. It was just a... Marketing tool? Yeah. Because three X's, that's like, whoa. I wonder if anybody ever came out with one with four X's. Yeah, or double X even. Yeah.

Like, yeah, we cut out that one part, so we're gonna take away the X. Yeah, Christian, our colleague here, wrote a great blog post about the former X-rated movie. Is that right? Yeah. I'll have to check that out. Yeah, it's good.

On Brain Stuff for Stuff of Genius. On the Brain Stuff blog earlier this year, and you actually recommended it on your blog. The X rating? Yeah, the best stuff you've read this week. Yeah, I remember recommending one of his things. I just don't remember that one. It was good.

I thought about asking him in here, but then I thought, nah, we got it. So yeah, back then it was G through X, and well, we'll talk about how that changed, maybe after this message break. Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google, I'm talking anywhere. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts.

That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes. So in this one case, two of the search results that are, I think we're in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan, a picture of Michael Jordan. But cops are still using it to make arrests. Police, they are trusting the software to lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works.

This is not a minority report. This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill Switch in the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything I might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip hop. It's Black Music Month and we need to talk is tapping in.

I'm Nailah Simone breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is and they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's like really the goat.

Like he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good. Like that's what's really important and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy, or my family in general.

Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the MoviePass era, where you could watch all the movies you wanted

for just $9? It made zero sense, and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Brigitte Todd, host of the Tech Podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines, like the visionary behind MoviePass, Black founder Stacey Spikes,

who was pushed out of MoviePass, the company that he founded. His story is wild and it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans. They're wearing Kobe's shirt. They're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder.

Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me, and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the internet on the iHeart all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. ["The Next Generation"] Alright, so no longer do we have X-rated movies, now we have something, I guess we should just go through what these ratings mean today in 2014. Okay. So you've got your G. G's always been G, general audience.

Anyone can see it. Yes. And that's your family cartoon that kids love and parents are forced to go to. Right. Then you've got PG, that means no drug use. Maybe a little violence, because as we'll learn, the MPA has less problems with violence

and more problems with language and sex. Huge criticism. Huge criticism. Huge criticism. PG-13, which we've kind of been through, then you've got your R, and that is no one under 17, this is a suggestion that no one over 17 be admitted without a parent. These aren't laws though, that's one thing

that's important to point out. Those are suggestions and then theaters have policies. Yes, and let's kind of dig into that. So none of this is legally binding. No. None of them are anything more than recommendations. They're basically saying that this movie has X amount of profanity or X amount of nudity

or lacks any drug use or something like that. And so for what the MPAA thinks, the average moral compass of the average American thinks about these different things like sex, drugs, nudity, all that stuff, this movie falls into this rating. And again, it's not enforceable.

You don't even need to have a rating to release a movie. But if you want to get your movie in theaters, there's basically no theater chain out there right now, no major theater chain out there right now, that will show an unrated movie. Yeah, it's a completely voluntary system to submit your film to the MPA ratings board. But it's de facto.

But you have to do it. Yeah. That's the rub. Is that. But it's de facto. But you have to do it. Yeah. That's the rub. Is that they say it's voluntary, but you actually have to pay a fee to submit your movie if you ever want to have it shown in theaters. Right, and the fee is anywhere from like $25,000 for a big budget movie to $750 for a short.

Yeah. And so you submit your movie, well we'll get into it in a second, let's talk some more about the rest of the ratings. Yeah, well there's only one more, and that's NC17 which replaced X, and that means, this is in 1990, and it basically means that it's for adults only,

and you should not come in if you're under 18. Right, and it also means these days that it's foreign, or about lesbian, or gays, basically. Yeah, not fully, but sure. It's pretty close. Yeah. And NC-17, the first movie to come out with that was Henry and June.

Yeah. Not to be confused with Benny and June. No. And it basically sunk that movie, because everybody was like, oh, this is X now. Right. NC-17, if you jumble it all together, it looks like X. And the whole reason they came out with NC17

was to replace X because X was associated exclusively with pornography in the minds of moviegoers. Yeah, exactly. All right, so let's get into this. The actual ratings board, there's the MPAA, and then working for the MPAA is the classification and ratings administration, CARA. And CARA doesn't say whether your movie stinks or not.

CARA is eight to 13 people, and they are called raters, and they are overseen by a senior rater, and they sit down and watch these movies and take copious notes on what they think, based on their standards, is, I don't want to say offensive, but just noteworthy. Like, maybe they're not offended, but they think the average mom in Sheboygan might be offended.

Supposedly. Which is kind of a thing thing because the whole rating system, as you just kind of pointed out, is subjective. Totally subjective. They supposedly, here's the other rub, is it's all secret. You can find out a federal judge's name and address, but you can't find out who a raider is for your films.

It's all conducted in private. None of this stuff is released. And that's one of the big rubs in that documentary and with filmmakers in general, is it's all done behind closed doors. There's never any explanations provided. These people are supposed to have kids between ages of five and 17, but many of them do not.

Either have kids at all or have kids that are older than 18. It basically frees them up from any accountability. To do this all in private and in secrecy. And until that movie by Kirby, what is Kirby's last name? Henry and June? No. The documentary. Oh yeah, this film is not yet rated. Yeah, Oh, oh yeah, this film is not yet rated?

Yeah, until Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated came out, all of this stuff was just conjecture and Hollywood legend. Yeah. He was the first one to really, basically, he tailed these people, tailed them to lunch to find out who they were and eavesdrop on them and did some digging and found these anonymous people

did not fall into the requirements that the MPAA said they did. And so not only was it in secret, it was fraudulent basically, this rating system. So according to the standards, you submit your film, this group of people, this anonymous group of people watch it, they rate it, then they come together and vote on a rating, and then they pass their vote

along to a senior rater who talks to the movie's distributor, director, or producer, and says, here's the rating, here's why we rated it like this. And then, you're faced with a choice. You can accept the rating, you can edit your film as per the C-A-R-A's recommendations. Take out these bad words,

cut this sex scene a little early, leave all the violence. Yeah. Or, you can reject the rating and just release your movie as unrated. Yeah, which, well, you can try to release it, but since no one will show it, it's really sort of a misnomer.

Right, but it's becoming increasingly a thing. Again, you need the rating to get your movie shown in movie theaters. Yeah. But what happens if you don't care if your movie comes out in theaters? Video on demand? Yeah, or just releasing it to the internet?

No, I'm curious about that, how that's gonna change the landscape. Well, right now, it's a huge threat to the MPAA because all of the power they wield is found in this rating system. And if... For theaters. Yes.

And if no one's going to theaters. Then the MPAA loses all of that power, which is a big deal, especially now, because the MPAA is needed more than ever as a lobbying group because of online piracy, which we'll talk about some more. So it's a very precarious time for the MPAA right now. And it's a terrible time for them to be

under as much scrutiny and public attack and critique as they are. So it's, I mean, they got spears sticking out every which way and their trunk is flailing and they're honking. That is true. One thing I should point out, as I said, is that there's no accountability. That's what the NPA says is the good thing about the secrecy, is that it frees them up,

that anonymity does, it frees them up from accountability. I just don't agree. Right. Okay. So the, if you want to appeal, there is apparently a change made in response to Kirby Dick's movie, the documentary. Before, if you were appealing your rating,

which is very difficult, almost never was done. Well, you never won, that's for sure. Right, and when you were appealing, you couldn't reference any other film. It was totally done in a vacuum, which is pretty preposterous. Yeah, like, that's the only way to be able to tell. It's like, wait a minute, way to be able to tell us, like, wait a minute, if you said this about this,

then why not this for my movie? Right, which meant that there was no real standard that you could point to, or there were standards you could point to, they just wouldn't be considered. Yeah, or at the very least, if they do have written standards, they don't release them,

so you don't even know what they are. Right. So, the MPAA, they've got their rating system, they've got the appeals process. Which was also in secret, unless that's changed, right? I think. I think the appeals board, not only was the appeals board in secret,

but they weren't even just raiders, they were people from the industry. Right. And the theater owners association. Exactly. Whereas the people who were raiders are supposedly unaffiliated with the movie industry and are just like average ordinary parents.

Representing your middle America, we'll just call it. Even though I think that's insulting. The thing is, though, is a lot of people criticize the MPAA and say these raiders are really representing the six major studios who rake in 95% of the $10.9 billion made in the United States in theaters alone. Just ticket sales, not DVD or anything like that. Yeah.

And that's what the MPAA does in addition to rating. They are, like we said, the lobby arm for these six studios. That's right, and they, I guess we should talk about piracy now, huh? That's one of their other big, besides from rating movies, they are heavy in the lobby against, well especially now with online piracy because the digital distribution network is,

seems like the way forward as far as distribution goes. Like it's not the future, it's the present and the future. And the MPAA has a, they're accused of basically trying to quell new technology by just saying, let's just keep people from peer-to-peer file sharing in total so that they can't steal movies in part. And if you go back to the early 80s, Jack Valenti was known to have railed

and lobbied against the legality of VCRs. Yeah. People are just gonna be recording things and handing them out to their friends. Exactly. So there was a, the MPA has a long history of basically just doing anything it can to stifle innovation in order to protect the profits

of these big movie studios. The other problem with them lobbying in favor of these six movie studios is that they inherently have a conflict of interest lobbying in favor of these six movie studios is that they inherently have a conflict of interest against the studios that are not part of these six that they represent, but whose movies they still rate. So they've been accused of more scrupulously

or scrutinously rating the movies of rival studios or foreign studios when assigning a rating. Well, and that's why filmmakers call consistently for transparency. I don't think there are many filmmakers out there saying there should be no rating, we should just, maybe some, like Lars von Trier, you know, or Werner Herzog. Right. They're probably like, way things at all.

But I think they just want transparency. Like open it up and let everyone know how this is all done, who these people are, and give us an idea on what in the world we're submitting to. Voluntarily, quote unquote. Pretty interesting. Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google, I'm talking anywhere.

Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes. So in this one case, two of their search results, I think we're in the top 10 of the search results, were Michael Jordan, a picture of Michael Jordan.

But cops are still using it to make arrests. Police, they are trusting the software to lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. This is not a minority report. This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch,

where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill Switch in the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the movie passPass era where you could

watch all the movies you wanted for just nine dollars? It made zero sense and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines, like the visionary behind MoviePass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of MoviePass, the company that he founded. His story is wild, and it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us.

When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

I think everything I might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip hop. It's Black Music Month and we need the talk is tapping in. I'm Naila Simone breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, cause I bring him on tour with me

and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's like really the goat. Like he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy

for your family? It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good. Like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that,

I'm really happy, or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you were talking about online piracy. And with digital distribution being a big deal now, the MPAA is needed more than ever

because they have to lobby Congress to fight online piracy at a time when more and more people are distributing online and going around the MPAA, so it's losing its power, but it needs its power more than ever. So like we said, it's a precarious time for the MPAA. And they tried a few things. They were successful with the,

what was the first one in 2000? The digital... Sopa? No, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Oh, right. Which basically, up until then, it wasn't a federal crime to share movies on peer-to-peer networks.

Right. That one did it, and they got that passed. The MPAA lobbied and got that passed. Yeah, they've cracked down on camcorder recording. Yeah. Like when you're in New York City and someone has that brand new copy of Godzilla on a video cassette for you. Yeah.

That's because if you've seen Seinfeld, someone went and sat in that theater with a camera recorder and just made a stupid, awful quality, pirated version. Yeah, and it says that those are the most common. I guess I kind of believe that. They're also the worst quality. Like sometimes people will like get up and move in front of the camera

like to go to the bathroom or something. Yeah. It's a... I've never seen one, but I think... They're terrible. Yeah. Much, I don't want to say more common, but probably more common these days

are like copies of screeners. Yeah. Like they send out DVDs to everybody who's members of the academy to vote on movies. And so around Oscar time or before Oscar time, it seems like the internet gets flooded with way more high quality copies of these major movies that are up for awards.

Yeah, I think now they have, thanks to the MPA, have something coded to your name now on your copy. So like they'll know who leaked it or whatever? I think so, if I'm not mistaken. I'm not surprised by that. Apparently, if you want to show Frozen at your church, you better have a public performance license because it is illegal to show a movie outside of your home. Yeah, that surprised me, but there are a lot of,

especially in the summertime, a lot of community screenings. Like every city now has, you know, Atlanta shows them in, I think at Oakland Cemetery. And some other places in New York, they have them all over the place. And technically, yeah, they're supposed to have a license to do so. I'm sure they do, the big ones. Yeah, the big ones, I'm sure, do. But like at your community pool, when you want to show ET.

Mm-hmm. The feds could come kick the gate down around the pool. I bet they don't love HBO these days. Because you know HBO Go? Yeah. People steal that, they're just like, hey dude, what's your login? Oh, right, yeah. And HBO came out and they're like, who cares?

Yeah, people are watching it. Yeah, they're like, go watch True Detective, maybe you'll sign up for HBO, because you liked it. Or maybe you'll just support the show, period, on social media, even though you're getting it for free. Like we're making enough money, basically. Yes, and that's something that a lot of people say, you know film industry, we don't really feel that bad for you.

Sean Austin, sit down. Because you guys made $10.9 billion in America in ticket sales alone in 2013. We don't feel that bad about this whole conundrum that the MPAA is facing right now. What's Sean Astin's deal? Is he one of the voices? Yeah, yeah.

Oh, okay. I don't think I knew that. Yeah, he was, I can't remember the, there was like a whole kind of push, an anti-piracy push a few years back. And he was the face of it. Part of it, yeah. Yeah, and he looked really mad about things too.

Rudy. But speaking of piracy, I remember there was a story that came out recently. It was, if you think about it, at first it's like wah wah, but then if you really kind of lend it some thought, it's really disturbing. There was a report of prisoners at a prison being shown pirated movies,

and some of the prisoners were there for pirating movies. Oh, wow. And like really think about the injustice behind that. Yeah. Like that's just crazy town. Imagine if you've been like selling counterfeit furs and you go to prison and all of the guards are wearing counterfeit fur coats. That'd be pretty swingin' prison.

It'd be weird, but it would also be unjust. Yeah, true. But in relation to this, it's just more and more widespread. Every day it feels like it's a losing battle, I think, that the MPAA is fighting right now. Well, I think I read somewhere today that I think they might release a few of the Raiders' names per film, not all like 13.

But I need to look that up again, because I don't know, I don't see why releasing a three out of 13 names does anybody any good. It does zero good. And speaking of doing zero good, there's kind of a new attachment to the rating system that they have now. It's called Check the Box. And it's basically a brief description of why a movie is like PG-13.

So it'll say like Intense Sci-Fi Action or something like that. Or some drug use. Yeah, that kind of thing. And some critics of the MPAA say, it's just basically like shooting a laser beam into like a 15 year old boy's brain. Like brief nudity, come see it. PG-13, check it out kid.

I think a lot of people are looking at it like it's just kind of a disingenuous advertisement, cynical advertisement, because the MPAA is accused of not regulating or even potentially directly marketing to kids under the age of the movies that are being advertised. So you're seeing a lot of ads for R-rated movies on websites that are very popular among the 17 and under crowd.

There's a lot of tie-ins for PG-13 movies with kids' toys for kids who are under 13. And so there's this idea that the MPAA is supposedly serving America's moral compasses. But really at the same time, they're undermining that morality that they're supposedly defending by marketing and exploiting kids.

That'd be like a cigarette company having a cartoon animal as their mascot. Can you imagine? That'd be weird. Well, one thing about the subjectivity of it and the fact that it is a closed book and filmmakers don't even know how to tailor their movie to achieve a certain rating, I mean, to within a certain degree,

but they've learned how to manipulate it because there is no set standard by, if you watch that, film is not yet rated. And you've heard plenty of stories over the years about filmmakers intentionally putting in things that they never intend to be in the final movie. Oh yeah. Just to sort of distract from some of the other things.

So they'll shoot something kind of really outrageous to get the MPA's, Raiders' haunches up and what they were never going to keep that part anyway. So they're subverting the system because there is no set standard. Yeah, and they're just, the stuff they want to keep in is comparatively Exactly.

more palatable. And if you don't have the set standard where you can go and, I wonder what those sheets look like on the interior. I mean, that's the great mystery. Surely they have their own interior standards. They're not just like, watch it and see what you think. Well, they have group discussions too.

Man, I'd love to sit in on those. So, I read another criticism of the MPAA is that the difference between PG-13 movies on those. So, I read another criticism of the MPAA is that the difference between PG-13 movies and our movies these days is the profanity and the sexuality. That they're similar in violence, if not more violent in PG-13 movies, and that this is kind of messed up.

That the MPAA has very little problem with violence, but when it comes to bad words or sexuality of almost any nature, except for women being objectified and men being gratified, then the MPAA suddenly puckers up. Well yeah, any woman receiving sexual gratification or a homosexual couple. NC17. Yeah.

Virtually like guaranteed or depending on how they do it, are if it's coming out of like one of the major studios. So in other words, a man can receive pleasure from a woman and of course it's scrutinized somewhat because any kind of sex is more heavily scrutinized than violence. But if a woman does, like you said, or if it's a gay couple, it's all over. So homophobic, misogynistic, you decide.

Right, and fetishistic of violence. You know? Yeah, like here's one example. There's a great article called Don't Expect Any Major Changes to the MPAA Rating System in 2014. And it's basically Chris Dodd, who's the new head in the gang,

digging in and saying, you know what, we talk to your average parents, and we poll them, and this is what they want. But they haven't released. No, none of those studies are released. None of those conversations are released. A movie like Philomena, which you saw, was rated R.

That was so good. Yeah, it was about a lady looking for her long lost son. It was so far from an R movie, it was ridiculous. Yeah, but it had a couple of F bombs in it, so they cut those out and they bring it to a PG-13. You might think, who cares, cut out the F-bombs, make it PG-13, but there's something bigger going on here, you know?

Yeah, there's a great AV club article about how just totally out of step a lot of the ratings are, and they have 15 movies listed and basically talk about their ratings Like the first one they talk about once. Yeah that romantic It wasn't like a romantic comedy was it now? I would say it was a sweet just a modern-day romance told through music right it wasn't a musical But there are a lot of musical numbers highly Highly inoffensive. Love story. Yeah.

Very sweet movie. It had the same rating as Hostel 2, which is basically torture porn. They both got the same rating. Yeah, we should read this first line from the A.B. Club. In early summer of 2007, two films were released with R ratings. One featured a scene where a naked woman

is suspended from a ceiling, while another naked woman slashes her with a sith and bathes in her blood. The other featured two Dublin musicians singing songs together, falling in love, and opting not to act on it. Like, there was never any sex scene. They didn't even get together, really.

They're both rated R. Both rated R. Because of profanity. Rushmore rated R for the scene at the end where Max is putting on the play, the Vietnam play. And there is a shot of a couple little kids looking at on the set, there's some Playboy

centerfolds up in the locker. Like on the Vietnam set. And it shows these little kids looking at those. Like a 12 year old would probably do. And it got an R for that. Got an R for that. Happiness. Todd Solons, one of my favorite movies of all time.

Yeah. They tried to give it an NC17 rating. And he said, you know what, I'm not cutting anything. You can just go take a long walk off a short pier, is what I think he famously said to them. And he released his movie as unrated. Oh really? Yep.

I don't think I knew that. Way to go Todd Solons. Or if you're looking at some serious homophobia, the great 1989 movie Longtime Companion features no real sex acts at all, nothing explicit. In fact, the AV Club says it could show on network TV today with just a few alterations. But it was about a gay couple.

And so it got an NC17. Yeah, there was something called Afternoon Delight, which was a movie about a woman who hires a gigolo. And it apparently is heavy on the woman receiving sexual gratification. It got an R rating. Despite, and it got an R rating after apparently the director cut a lot of stuff out.

And the director said, what the hey, after Wolf of Wall Street came out. With like some very graphic apparent sex scenes between a man and a woman. But Leonardo DiCaprio is the one enjoying it the most, so it's fine, it's an R. Blue is the warmest color. Yeah, last year, a teenage lesbian love story.

NC17. Yep, got a lot of attention. And there were some theaters that allowed high school age kids to go see that anyway. Because again, this isn't law, it's not binding. It's up to the theaters. Yeah, it's just so strange that such a small group of people have such influence on such a large industry in secret.

The more you dig into it, the more conflicts of interest arise and the more arbitrary the standards become, the more blood boiling it is. I highly recommend you go read some stuff, like Rated R for Ridiculous by Kirby Dick, his little op-ed about the MPAA. That one US News and World Report article you wrote, or suggested was good.

I wish I wrote it. Had you been there, would have been used correctly. Oh, did they misuse it? What? Yeah, I know. That's terrible. So the NPA will defend themselves and they say that there's no such bias

and that we, all these objectionable scenes are rated on the graphic quality and how graphic it is. But if you just look at the, you'd have to be a dummy not to see these correlations. Right. And the fact that they don't seem to care that much about violence in this age where, I don't know, does it influence people to go shoot up a school?

Who knows? Did you see that John Oliver quote that's going around? Yes, but what was it? It's like somebody unsuccessfully tries to carry a bomb onto a plane in their shoe. We all take our shoes off. Oh, right. There's like 30-something school shootings after Columbine,

and absolutely nothing's changed. Yeah. Or the Onion article that's going around too now is, this is something that can't be prevented, says the only country where this kind of thing happens all the time, something like that. I'm paraphrasing. Oh yeah, that's the onion.

Yeah, good stuff, MPAA. Keep doing the fightin' the good fight. Yeah, go check out, just go start reading up on it. It's funny how much we just take this stuff for granted, but when you just start digging just slightly beneath the surface. At the very least, see, this film is not yet rated. It's really good.

Really engrossing. And you know, for every 100 documentaries that come out, five of them are really great. Most of them are pretty good. Some are terrible. So any really good one is worth seeing just in and of itself. Agreed.

If you want to learn more about the MPAA, type those letters into the search bar at house2forks.com and I said search bar so it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this Wild Parrots. Josh mentioned in the tattoo podcast that he had heard parrots like to hang together when free and I wanted to burst in the podcast booth and tell you about the wild parrots of San Francisco

I'm not gonna get into it except to say that over the course of my life The parrots in San Francisco were sort of living legend that one would occasionally get the privilege of spotting now and then However about three years ago. I moved in with my aunt in the little San Francisco suburb of Brisbane and Apparently the famous flocks of parrots were also making their home there since it was warmer and less windy. These parrots were often hanging right outside my bedroom window, which is pretty amazing. Or no, she says amusing.

I say it's amazing. But also somewhat annoying, especially since my first son was just a little guy then and a very light sleeper, and these suckers are loud. That is true, they are very loud. Also guys, I'm sending you the link to watch the preview of the 2003 documentary,

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. So I didn't know that was a documentary. I've heard that. I've heard of that before. I never knew what it was about. Amy, I will check that out. Thank you. Thank you for writing it.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy. If you have a documentary recommendation, we are always interested in those. Heck yeah. You can tweet them to us at SYSKpodcast. You can post them on Facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web,

thebeautifulstuffyoushouldknow.com. ["The Beautiful Stuff You Should Know"] For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. ["The Beautiful Stuff You Should Know"] I think everything I might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip hop. It's Black Music Month and we Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nailah Simone breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices,

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