On the "Erotic '90s" season of her hit Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth delves into the history of the NC-17 rating. Put briefly, NC-17 was created to replace the old X rating, a designation for adults-only entertainment - like, say, Midnight Cowboy or A Clockwork Orange - that came to be associated with hardcore pornography. Newspapers gradually refused to advertise X-rated films, theater chains refused to show them, and video rental stores refused to stock them. Studios began "neutering" their more risk-raking films, while arthouse and indie films found themselves trapped, not always able to afford appeals and re-edits. Many found critical acclaim...but no release.
One such film was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The character study of the titular serial killer and his spree through the rattier edges of Chicago was always going to be a tough sell, no matter what decade it was made in, but it spent four years looking for distribution even while it continued to garner positive reviews - including one from Roger Ebert himself! But distributors wanted a guaranteed R rating, something that the film, with its cavalcade of horrors including rape, murder, incest, and pederasty, was struggling to get. Not only did the MPAA give it an X rating, they told the filmmakers there were not enough cuts that could be made to make it releasable without it. An unedited, unrated version was finally released, one city at a time: good reviews, good box office (it made back six times its budget), even five nominations at the Independent Spirit Awards. Still, it was a four-year road, all due to the stigma of the X.
Even if one received a theatrical release, there was still the home video market to consider. Take The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, a British arthouse flick about a crude gangster who buys a swank restaurant, only for his wife to use it for assignations with a more genteel individual: a flick of food and fucking, in other words. While this masterpiece had a modest reception in its native Britain, the controversy over its material and subsequent unrated release gave it enough publicity to make it millions in the USA. But large chains like Blockbuster had their own policies about stocking films that were or were almost deemed X by the MPAA; to get around this, Miramax released two versions on VHS. The first was the original theatrical cut; the other, an R-rated version that ran 30 minutes shorter for wider video release.
Miramax seemed to have enough, and it took on the MPAA with the release of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar and starring Antonio Banderas as a hot but unwell young man who kidnaps his favorite porn actress (a terrific Victoria Abril, executing a highwire act of terrified and turned on) in the hopes of making her fall in love with him, it was already was a hit in its native Spain, where it became the country's #1 film of the year. It's a dark comedy, a melodrama, a romance: it's provocative, to say the least - and for the sin of including a woman both using the toilet and experiencing sexual pleasure, it was slapped by the Motion Picture Association of America with an X rating. Miramax took the MPAA to court, arguing that the outdated ratings system was failing to distinguish art from pornography, sabotaging the business - and, frankly, seemed to be exercising its power over foreign and independent films in particular, films willing to take on subject matter the major Hollywood studios wouldn't touch.
Miramax lost its case, but that same year, the MPAA came up with a new rating: NC-17. Standing for "No Children Under 17", it was supposed to be a more respectable alternative, signifying that something was strictly for adults but not necessarily pornography. Still, as Miramax complained, the designation seemed reserved more for adult films focusing on sex rather than on hyperviolence.
This certainly seems to be the case with the first film released bearing the NC-17 designation, Henry & June, a biopic based on the diaries of Anaïs Nin, detailing her relationship with Henry Miller (author of Tropic of Cancer) and his wife June. It's a patient, beautifully-shot movie, whose sex scenes are, yes, erotic and character-building, whose plotting and philosophy are absolutely geared to an over-17 adult sensibility. Yet when mainstream critics viewed it, they dismissed it as a big tease - the consensus seemed to be that the rating was a big tease, as the film didn't have enough sex or nudity or eroticism to maintain an audience member's interest. Ah, well. The film went on to gross over $11 million in the US and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.
Studios still try to avoid NC-17 much like they did the X, but it still pops up every now and then. Some recent famous examples: Shame and Killer Joe (2011), Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), and Blonde (2022), whose star Ana de Armas was nominated for Best Actress. Exhibitors are still wary of screening them since the rating automatically limits their ticket sales; its reputation for being reserved for hypersexual films doesn't help, either. It's not just that studios need to grow some balls: audiences need to grow up.
Anyway! Sunday we start delving into the movies themselves, in order of release. And we begin with the movie that made Julia Roberts a star...
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