"Midnight Cowboy" features a few flashes of nudity -- some almost identical to the nudity in "Titanic."
What's different about the two films? "Midnight Cowboy" (1969) was rated X when it was released, although it's now been revised to an R rating."Titanic" -- marketed to include a preteen audience -- was rated PG-13.
Have the standards of the American public changed that much in 25 years? Or is Hollywood up to something?
The movie rating system, which is supposed to draw a definitive line between adult and kid movies, has the moral certitude of government officials committing youthful indiscretions.
About 15 years ago, the ratings had some starch. You could send your kids to a PG movie and feel confident that they wouldn't be surprised with sex, nudity, profanity or intense violence.
Now the ratings flop all over the place, with today's PG-13 being closer to yesterday's R, there's more than you may want your kids to know. Even the kid-safe G isn't completely safe anymore.
Why do movie studios want to stretch the boundaries of the ratings? Three reasons: marketing, marketing, marketing.
Studio marketing departments aren't supposed to be in control of movie ratings. Movies receive their ratings from the Motion Picture Association of America, which claims to render independent judgments on the questionable
content of movies screened by its ratings board.
But guess who funds the MPAA? The movie studios.
The MPAA was established by Hollywood's major studios to pre-empt any government attempts at film censorship. The MPAA was a love child of two films: "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" which talked frankly about sex, and "Blow Up," which showed it.
By today's standards, neither of these films is particularly startling. But in the mid-'60s, they were revolutionary.
The MPAA continues to be funded by the major studios. Expecting the ratings board to go against the wishes of the studios that finance it is like asking Congress to eliminate lobbying abuses. They're not in the business of biting the hands that feed them.
That's how we get big summer films such as "Deep Impact," "Armageddon," "Godzilla" and "The Mask of Zorro," which contain profanity, nudity and/or violence but receive the mild PG-13 rating.
The target audience for these movies is heavily teenage. An R rating would keep some of them out, which would ruin profit projections. Studios don't like to pour $150 million to $200 million into making movies and then watch an R rating limit their audiences.
And the MPAA judgments keep getting a little more permissive each year. Used to be that showing nudity or under-covers sex, or using America's favorite forbidden word got your film an R.
No longer.
Now you can use that F-word and still get a PG-13 rating, as long as you don't use it to mean what it means. Casual cursing is apparently OK for kids, according to the MPAA, but accurate cursing is not.
You can now show nudity, especially if it's from the rear, as long as it's shown in a non-sexual context. That's how we get a half-dozen naked men roped to a cactus in the PG-13 "Mask of Zorro," or lingering shots of the topless Kate Winslet in the PG-13 "Titanic."
You can even show people having sex as long as they're not naked, and as long as you could plausibly deny that's what they're doing.
Marketing always comes before content. "Spice World," the Spice Girls movie, had to be rated PG because it was pitched to preteen girls. The rating board must have been looking the other way when the male dancers turned around to reveal that their pants had no bottoms but that they did.
Exactly what is the preteen, PG-rated message of five scantily clad young women who sing songs about sex while adopting the pouting poses of Playboy centerfolds and Cosmo cover girls?
Sex may be what the Spice Girls really, really want, but a large portion of the preteen allowance, enhanced by the PG rating, is what the studio really, really wants.
While most of the rating games are played to get PG-13s for R films, another small blurring of the line occurs between PG and G ratings with, of all things, animated films.
It is also possible for a film to be submitted to the MPAA, receive an NC-17 rating and then be released unrated or cut down to an R. But before that happens, the film's marketers have milked the publicity over the ratings furor to tempt audiences.
That's not a ratings battle; it's marketing strategy.
There was some talk before the release of "Saving Private Ryan" that the MPAA would rate the movie NC-17 for the graphic violence of its battle scenes.
The question going around: Would director Steven Spielberg accept an NC-17 or go back and snip out a few seconds here and there to tone down the violence and get the R? He never had to face that issue because the MPAA gave the movie an R without the editing it often requires of films that show people having sex not under the covers.
"Ryan" got the R despite its dismemberments, disembowelments, shattered bodies and pools of blood.
Was the less-restrictive rating a recognition of Spielberg's superior filmmaking talents and the historical value of a movie that honestly explores the butchery of mechanized warfare?
Perhaps not. If the board gave an NC-17 to "Ryan" for violence, it would be obligated to give NC-17s to slasher and horror flicks, such as "Scream," that show even more intensely graphic violence and have no socially redeeming value.
Violence is bad enough in movie theaters but even worse in video stores. Why? Because studios take ultraviolent scenes that were cut from theatrical release and reinsert them into films before they're sent out for video rental.
And as TV cop shows ratchet up the level of violence, movies stay ahead by making their killings even more gory and penetrating to the viewers' psyche.
Will the race toward intense violence ever end? As long as TV pushes the envelope from one end, movies will pull at the limits from the other. The problem with ratings isn't that Hollywood makes movies that contain sex, nudity, profanity and violence. Movies, like books, cover the entire range of stories.
The problem is truth in advertising. The mis-rated films (so far) of 1998:
G films that should have been rated PG:
"Mulan" and "Quest for Camelot" (the intensity of the villain's desire to slaughter everyone).
PG films that should have been rated PG-13:
"The Education of Little Tree" (innocent nudity, light profanity), "Washington Square" (background sex), "Spice World" (male rear nudity, deep female cleavage), "Wide Awake" (profanity), "Tarzan and the Lost City" (violence).
PG-13 films that should have been rated R:
"Sphere" (horror, violence), "The Wedding Singer" (profanity, sex jokes), "Hush" (profanity, nudity), "The Man in the Iron Mask" (graphic violence, nudity, sex), "Mr. Nice Guy" (violence, profanity, sex talk), "Rush Hour" (profanity), "Mrs. Dalloway" (sex, nudity), "The Newtown Boys" (violence, nudity), "Lost in Space" (freaky violence, profanity, risque sexual references), "City of Angels" (nudity, sex, profanity, a touch of surgical gore), "Love and Death on Long Island" (profanity, nudity), "The Big One" (profanity), "Sliding Doors" (profanity, sex), "Les Miserables" (violence, nudity), "Deep Impact" ( profanity, violence), "Armageddon" (profanity, violence), "Black Dog" (violence, profanity), "Godzilla" (violence), "Music From Another Room" (mature talk of sexual matters), "Almost Heroes" (profanity, nudity, risque humor), "Six Days, Seven Nights" (profanity), "The X-Files" (profanity, violence, gore), "Dr. Dolittle" (toilet humor, sniggering sex jokes), "Small Soldiers" (freaky violence), "The Mask of Zorro" (nudity, violence), "What Dreams May Come" (profanity, nudity), "A Night at the Roxbury" (profanity, nudity, sex), "Practical Magic" (violence, profanity), "Pleasantville" (profanity, sex, nudity), "The Waterboy" (profanity, nudity, sex), "Meet Joe Black" (profanity, sex).