From the Vault: The MPAA and You

I have a lot of genius-ness stored away on my hard drive in the form of school assignments, late night ramblings, and unmailed angry letters to the producers of Gilmore Girls. I plan on getting some of the gems out of the chest and onto the Internets so that years down the road someone will accidentally read one while searching for sources to cite for their paper on how Lorelie Gilmore changed the modern perception of feminism in literature, and hopefully have their universe shattered on the spot.

Bring it back you heartless Nazis!

The following piece was an "Application Assignment" for some Media Industry class I destroyed with my awesomeness:

Like a friendly neighbor who stands in your living room with your remote and chooses your channels for you, the MPAA has done research into what movies you, and millions like you, prefer to watch so that the only films that get made are exactly those that you want. According to the conveniently placed “frequently requested statistics” on their website, you don’t like R rated films because “consistent with 2005, PG and PG-13 films accounted for 85% of 2006's top 20 films.”

Great! Now you don’t have to worry about those pesky R’s or G’s, because you, the public, have spoken and Hollywood will listen. But wait, you say, how does Hollywood know what kinds of movies sociographically and demographiclly I want to see so that those are the only films released in theatres? Well, your friendly neighbor the MPAA and their helpful statistics tell studio producers, of course.

Are you an African-American? No? That’s too bad, because apparently black people rank as the highest attendees of films at an average of 9 movies per year. The question you are asking yourself is, does this affect the kinds of movies made? Let’s take a look. The list of top grossing films of 2006 included Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Cars, Da Vinci Code, and Superman Returns, which all contain overwhelmingly white casts; hardly a single person of color to be seen. What then can be said about these films? What age person enjoys pirates, cars, superheroes, and Tom Hanks? You guessed it, hooligans.

In 2005 over half of movie attendees were between 12 and 29 years old and the percentage continues to increase towards young viewers as old white people take to DVD players and Netflix, because they can afford it and because theatres are filled with "those darn kids and their rock n' roll and jujubes". As you can see, it is a chicken and egg scenario. The numbers are pretty good no matter what gender you are, as long as you come in under the age of twenty; 59% male and 56% female (wait, MPAA statiticians, that's more than a hundred percent!) How does this all add up? Ole Mr. MPAA says that the movies that do well, the ones you want made, need to appeal to black hooligans and be PG or PG-13 with lots of white people in them.

That leaves me in a pickle, because I don’t seem to fit into the intended social demographic. Granted, I am a hooligan, but beyond that my needs aren’t being met. I like R-rated films with lots of black people in them, and they still haven’t made a sequel to Still Bout It (the sequel, of course, to Bout It).