For This Film Is Not Yet Rated, released in 2006, Kirby Dick and investigator Becky Altringer took aim at the Motion Picture Association of America's deliberately opaque ratings process. The film argued that the MPAA's secretive board operated in the interests of major Hollywood studios, creating an uneven system in which independent filmmakers faced damaging demands while sexually explicit material—particularly homosexuality, female sexual empowerment, and other taboo subjects—could receive harsher treatment than comparable violence. The filmmakers' investigation itself became part of the scandal: rather than accepting the ratings board's confidentiality as an immovable fact of the industry, they treated secrecy as evidence of institutional power and tried to expose the people and procedures behind the anonymous decisions. Dick also began pioneering the use of unlicensed copyrighted clips under the fair-use doctrine, a legally contentious strategy that allowed him to construct a visual case against the machinery of Hollywood censorship without paying the rights holders whose footage he quoted.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 2000s
This Film Is Not Yet Rated and Hollywood's Secret Ratings Machine
This Film Is Not Yet Rated / 2000s
For This Film Is Not Yet Rated, released in 2006, Kirby Dick and investigator Becky Altringer took aim at the Motion Picture Association of America's deliberately opaque ratings process. The film argued that the MPAA's secretive board operated in the interests of major Hollywood studios, creating an uneven system in which independent filmmakers faced damaging demands while sexually explicit material—particularly homosexuality, female sexual empowerment, and other taboo subjects—could receive harsher treatment than comparable violence. The filmmakers' investigation itself became part of the scandal: rather than accepting the ratings board's confidentiality as an immovable fact of the industry, they treated secrecy as evidence of institutional power and tried to expose the people and procedures behind the anonymous decisions. Dick also began pioneering the use of unlicensed copyrighted clips under the fair-use doctrine, a legally contentious strategy that allowed him to construct a visual case against the machinery of Hollywood censorship without paying the rights holders whose footage he quoted.
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