Thursday
24Jul2008
Kevin Smith's 'Zack and Miri' Make an NC-17 Rating
Thursday, July 24, 2008 at 12:52AM 
Perhaps this is payback for a certain animal sex show in
Clerks II, but
Kevin Smith's upcoming
Zack and Miri Make a Porno has been tagged with
an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America.
The Hollywood Reporter has grabbed the most
recent list of rulings by the board, and Smith's film has been given the NC-17
for "some graphic sexuality."
Now, of course, Kevin Smith talks in graphic terms
about sex all the time in his films, so clearly Zack and Miri was already
going to be an R-rated experience. But I've seen Lust, Caution and I've
seen The Aristocrats, and Zack and Miri had better be a
combination of the two to justify the harsh judgment.
Cinematical points out that Smith is scheduled
to speak Friday night at Comic Con, where he will no doubt discuss the ruling
and the status of his film, which stars
Seth Rogen and
Elizabeth Banks as friends who put together a
porn movie to make money.
Are cuts in the future? I would think so, if Smith doesn't
have the decision reversed in an appeal. And here's why: Smith has plied his
trade not as a pornographer but rather as a kind of East Coast street poet. It's
the writing that people attach themselves to (after all, it can't be the acting
in his movies, right?), so whatever instances of graphic sexuality are turning
the stomach of the MPAA, Smith is better off all the way around just describing
in a filthy manner. Maybe come up with good Star Wars euphemisms or
something, a sturdy reference to womprats, maybe.
I'm not saying that all the sex in the movie needs to be
edited out - honestly, I'm surprised that there is sex in Zack and Miri
given Smith's track record - because at a certain point, this still needs to be
Zack and Miri Make a Porno. But I have a feeling there have to be
concessions made. This is important because some exhibitors, particularly in the
Bible Belt, simply won't book NC-17 films. Small towns, which occasionally skip
R-rated horror movies and bawdy sex and drug comedies, won't go near this thing
if it can't shake the NC-17 rating. The title alone will keep it out of some
theaters, if not entire theater chains.
Obviously, fans of Smith will rally behind the film no
matter what, probably more than normal if it's saddled with the harsher rating,
and that'll be great...in the cities where it plays. But Smith is not a
commercial filmmaker anyway, so eliminating entire portions of the country
wholesale probably won't help the bottom line. So, I expect a compromise, and
since Smith appeared on screen in Catch and Release and has been a
correspondent for The Tonight Show, he should be used to compromise by
now.
But in the meantime, he'll get plenty of free press and
will once again enjoy the cause célèbres status that has highlighted his career from time to time.
Reader Comments (6)
The problem with Kevin Smith is that he doesn't have the good sense to have someone more talented direct his good scripts. As much as he'd like to think otherwise, the words from the page are the only good things about most of his stuff.
Are we talking about Mr. Smith here?
Or Mr. Lucas?
As I recall, Kevin Smith wrote a script for Superman Returns about ten years before Bryan Singer's version, only to have Tim Burton toss it out.
So it's not like the man hasn't TRIED to have his scripts directed by others with an actual sense of visual style...
That's true, but even when they finally did re-invent Superman, they screwed it up. Nobody had idea one what they wanted to do with that character for nearly a decade.
Honestly this is no big suprise. The same thing happened to Clerks when it first went before the board.
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