I'm not sure I agree with all the producers in this article who say that sex makes America nervous, but I'm pleased to read that people prefer to keep sexuality private rather than parading it publically.
As any theater owner will eagerly tell you, American audiences like their movies PG and PG-13, not R, and certainly not NC-17. At the recent ShoWest convention, National Association of Theatre Owners president John Fithian urged Hollywood to give theater owners more PG-rated hits and a lot fewer R-rated losers.Last year, five of the top-10-grossing movies were PG. Of the top 25, only four were rated R. "Increasingly, if a movie is rated R," says producer John Goldwyn, "audiences won't go."
Not because Americans don't like sex, but because sexual material is so easy to access at home that it's easy to keep it private.
But they're not making movies like that anymore.Why? These days, sex is in the home. In the privacy of your own room, you can see all the racy material you want in "Sex and the City," "The L Word," "Queer as Folk," "Deadwood" and "Desperate Housewives."
"Today's audiences aren't comfortable being seen in a mass-audience public place like a cinema complex seeing something that is inevitably notorious because of its sex," producer Bill Horberg writes in an e-mail. "If you go to a complex, you might run into your kids, much less neighbors, co-workers." ...
"We are a Puritan society," Press says. "We'd rather watch it at home."
And I say, good. It makes it easier for parents to control what their kids are exposed to. I don't really care what people want to watch in their own homes, but the majority should get to rule on what dominates the public sphere. In this case, it's market forces that are shutting out highly sexual movies, which is far better than if the government were getting involved.
It should be noted that movies with sex in them aren't the only ones that are R-rated. The thirst for violence in movies... at least among certain demographics... is plenty strong. If the R rating is on a movie with graphic violence and the theme is patriotic or historical, on the other hand, it is almost universally welcomed by the American public.
Not sure I buy the theory that individuals prefer PGs and PG-13s, so much as the market "prefers" them in the sense that they are accessible to everyone. Whatever it is, it's not an aversion to sex per se. I don't remember any sex scenes from the R-rated version of The Passion of the Christ, but I do understand why Mel Gibson made the PG-13 version anyway.
The real test of preferences is between PGs and PG-13s, or between all three if you limit your survey to people over 17.
People have been noting for years that R rated movies are comparative money losers yet Hollywood still keeps churning them out in out of proportion numbers. Perhaps part of it has to do with the "direct to video" stigma. We judge movies by their box office numbers and that's a problem if we want certain types of entertainment in private and other types in public. R movies are going to be overproduced for theater consumption so that the good home viewing profits can be had and they'll stay in a theater run so it doesn't have the dreaded moniker, "direct to video" attached to it.