Movie "It's Complicated" Gets Restricted Rating Because of Pot
By Kurt A. Gardinier
The romantic comedy “It’s Complicated,” which stars Steve Martin, Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, was recently given an R rating by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The rating was not due to explicit language, graphic violence, sex or nudity (many acts often seen in PG-13 movies), but because of a scene in which Martin’s and Streep’s characters smoke marijuana, something over 100 million Americans have done, and nearly 15 million do at least monthly.
The most alarming aspect of this story is that the R rating was apparently not given for the actual use of marijuana, but for MPAA’s concern that the movie did not show the negative consequence of the behavior. No drug is harmless, including marijuana, but independent scientific and government studies have concluded that the health risks of marijuana are significantly lower than those of alcohol or tobacco.
Will the MPAA now start giving movies R ratings for alcohol or cigarette use portrayed in a positive light? I don’t think that’s necessary. But neither is giving a silly romantic comedy an R rating for a brief scene in which two responsible adults use a substance far less harmful and addictive than alcohol.
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The MPAA's automatic "R" for drug use is well-known to the studios. It's not a matter of showing positive or negative consequences: it's use of illegal substances, period.
Alcohol and tobacco use by minors is also supposed to trigger an "R," but does not appear as uniform as the R-rating of illegal drugs .
It's possible that the producers of this film introduced the pot use deliberately to get an R-rating. The film's benign language and coy sexual situations are PG-13 grade. If the producers wanted to signal to the intended (mature) audience that this film might be a bit sexy, the pot-inspired "R" would do the marketing trick. And they did get some publicity out of it, as these posts illustrate.
There is a global movement to adult-rate future films with tobacco smoking ("R" in the US). The purpose is to incentivize producers to keep tobacco out of kid-rated films. Exposure to this imagery accounts for more than a million tobacco smokers 12-17 in the US, about 400,000 of whom will eventually die from tobacco-induced diseases. (There's a long, documented history of the tobacco and film industries collaborating on cross-promotion and product placement.)
The studios are resisting bringing tobacco into the R-rating because in their view the rating system is for their marketing and political use, not to protect the audience. Ratings are not a moral stand, to them; they are purely pragmatic.
I can watch someone gun down a dozen people on TV and no one says a thing but watch someone smoke a little pot and people get their shorts in a wad WTF?