Give The Rating System an X

By RICHARD CORLISS

You've heard a lot about these new X-rated movies, and you want to know what all the rumpus is about. So you go to The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover and find that it's mostly about unpleasant people arguing at the dinner table. You figure you can get that at home for free, so you check out Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and wait for the big sex scene. Sorry. The lovers are fond and tender, and they don't even get slaughtered at the end. You visit The Killer, a Hong Kong melodrama rated X for violence. Lots of gunplay but, darn the luck, no explicit maiming. Well, Frankenhooker sounds promising. But it doesn't deliver: the movie's big scene, of prostitutes' bodies exploding, is done on so meager a special-effects budget that the victims look like Barbie dolls on a test range.

What ever happened to prurient interest? Who took the sex out of X? All the films recently rated X are either low-budget thrillers (Hardware, In the Cold of the Night) or art-house dramas (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Life Is Cheap...but Toilet Paper Is Expensive). They are not porno or slasher films. You can find kinkier sex in Wild at Heart and grosser violence in Total Recall. In contrast, the new X-rated films look far too tepid or obscure to be at the center of Hollywood's hottest controversy.

They are, though. The movie industry is enduring one of its rare crises of conscience, when a filmmaker's rights are measured against box-office mandates. Since 1968 the rating system of the Motion Picture Association of America -- which designates films G for tots, PG and PG-13 for older children and adolescents, R for children in an adult's company and X for adults only -- has functioned as a guide for parents seeking suitable movies for their children and, not coincidentally, as a bulwark against state censorship of films. Now critics and directors are posing crucial questions about commercial films. Who gets to make a movie -- the artist or the industry censor? And who gets to see it -- everyone, adults only or just about nobody?

Hugh Hefner used to set the standards for American permissiveness. Now Richard Heffner does. The chairman of the M.P.A.A.'s ratings board is deemed one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He is known to negotiate personally with directors, urging them to remove, say, a beheading from this film, an orgasmic groan from that. Lately Heffner hasn't liked a lot of what he sees. When he emerged from a screening of Frankenhooker, the story goes, he told a representative of the film that it "should be rated S for s - - -."

In the M.P.A.A.'s New York City office, Heffner and six other solons, whose main qualification is that they are parents, rate each picture. The director may contest their decision, but he is unlikely to win. First, he needs a two- thirds majority of the appeal board to overturn the original verdict. Second, if the film is still rated X, and if his studio is a member of the M.P.A.A. (as all the major studios are), he is contractually obligated to recut the film for an R rating.

The smaller distributors are not bound by the X rating. They can even be helped by its notoriety; The Cook the Thief earned a surprising $7 million in its first four months of release. But even the independents can suffer. Most newspapers and TV stations refuse to run advertising for an X-rated film, because the scarlet letter is popularly, and incorrectly, thought synonymous with pornography. Most theaters will not book an X; some have clauses in their building leases that prohibit it. For the distributor of an independent action movie like The Killer or Hardware, an X can mean the difference between opening in 400 theaters and opening in only 40. As with so many other battles, the ratings wrangle is ultimately about real estate.

Early this year, as the cultural right wing campaigned against 2 Live Crew and Robert Mapplethorpe, the Heffner board began handing out Xs as if they were parking tickets. The National Society of Film Critics objected, and last month 31 directors (including Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Spike Lee and Barry Levinson) petitioned Jack Valenti, head of the M.P.A.A., to designate "a new rating of A (for adult) or M (for mature) . . . to indicate a film contains strong adult themes or images and that minors are not to view them." Two weeks ago, Valenti met with writers and directors to discuss the problem. All participants are mum on the meeting, but there are hints that Valenti was less opposed to change. "There isn't anything in the world," he reportedly said, "that can't be made better."

Industry apologists are worried that any change could make things worse. The current system, they believe, is courtproof; an amended system might not be, especially in today's unstable political climate. "It is not an easy problem," says Glenn Gumpel, executive director of the Directors Guild of America. "There will not be an easy solution. If there is a way to allow parents to make a more informed choice and, at the same time, take some movies out of the X category, then we should explore that."

One possibility -- replacing the X with an A or M -- would remove some toxicity from the rating. But even if the M.P.A.A. accepted it, theater owners might not -- and there's no point in making a product if you can't market it. Another proposal is to release a film in both its X and R versions, as is sometimes done when a controversial movie appears on video. "That may be usable occasionally," says an industry insider. "But it is unclear if it would solve all the problems." He means that Hollywood is an industry posing as an art -- and only a fool would propose any rating that excludes the all- important teen audience.

But pandering to teens is precisely the problem. Under the R-or-nothing system, every film must be designed only for those under 17. That leaves adults without their own ambitious movie entertainment. Now there's an idea that should be rated X.

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CREDIT: NO CREDIT

CAPTION: X MARKS THE PLOT

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York