The World Is Yours by Glenn Kenny

Author:Glenn Kenny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2024-03-06T19:45:13+00:00

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HOW TO GET AN R RATING IN THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION

As we have seen, throughout his career, Brian De Palma battled the MPAA ratings board with some frequency. His 1980 film Dressed to Kill had, in the estimation of some, pushed boundaries in both the sex and the violence categories. The scene in which a central character is slashed to death with a straight razor in an apartment elevator, while inspired by the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, differed from the 1960 black-and-white film by showing the weapon cutting flesh, repeatedly and very bloodily. And the movie’s opening sequence, depicting the sexual fantasy that character has while showering on the morning of her death, had a real “did I just see that?” effect on audiences.

In the fantasy, Angie Dickinson’s Kate is replaced in certain shots by Victoria Johnson, a Penthouse Pet; and violence is a significant part of the fantasy—Kate is looking, in life, for something rougher than what her uninspired husband provides. So in the shower, we see a man come up behind Kate, caress and then grab her genital area. One feature that distinguishes “softcore” pornography or erotica from “hardcore” is penetration, and one shot in the sequence was apt to give some viewers the impression that penetration indeed took place. It didn’t. And the ratings board must have felt confident it didn’t once it bestowed an R rating on the movie. Bill Pankow recalled the seemingly endless back-and-forth that went on regarding Scarface and, prior to that, Dressed to Kill. “The whole ratings thing was kind of exhausting. We’d be in the mixing studio and show the film to some of the studio executives and—you know, this story’s classic, everybody knows about it—one just got up and said, ‘Well, I’m not going to release an X-rated film,’ and then there was a lot of discussions about it. Eventually it got sorted out, but it was like I said before about Dressed to Kill, take out the little bit of blood here, this much blood there, can you take out some fucks? We had some fucks. Two fucks was an R, and then more than that was crazy.”

The ’70s and early ’80s found the mainstream culture taking more interest in genuine pornography than had been permissible in polite society before; the phrase “porno chic” cropped up around this time. De Palma explored it to some extent in his Scarface follow-up, Body Double. In the summer of 1980, I worked as a production assistant on a relatively high-end “adult film” titled A Girl’s Best Friend, which starred, among others, the soon-to-be-notorious Ron Jeremy. Jeremy was then, and would remain for some time, convinced that at some point in his career he could make the jump from porn into “legitimate” acting. In addition, he was at this time irritated that mainstream cinema was, to his mind, appropriating porn imagery, so to speak. In 2011 I recalled Jeremy’s indignation thusly: “A buff and boisterous 27 years of age, he was crowing to

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