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Censorship - What Rating Are You?
A post over at Shooting People got me thinking this morning: a Shooter was enquiring if Script Readers et al would provide ratings for scripts if asked. The answer from BANG2WRITE would be a resounding yes by the way, but immediately it made me wonder a) what my own specs would be rated at and b) whether this would be any use in selling them.
Now, "Mary Whitehouse" and "censorship" were rude words in my house when I grew up. My father seemed to take any kind of censorship entirely personally: be it a 18, 15, 12, PG or even U certificate in question, from flesh-eating space aliens to unicorns jumping over the rainbow, he would always complain it was no one's right but his own to decide what he could and could not watch. With this background then, I became very interested in film censorship: WHY were films classified anyway? This is a democracy, right??
The wind was taken from my sails then when I discovered, after attending a few conferences at the BBFC and talking to people who sat on the board (one nice lady even helped me with a university project on the subject), that in actual fact, we are all part of the classification process. Decisions on how to rate films are apparently made on the opinions not only of a select few, but audiences as well. That's why films seem to get gorier and certificates seem to be going down - they actually are: our ability to withstand gore in particular has gone up, quite literally.
That doesn't mean classifiers do not make mistakes. Anyone remember The Cave? That was rated 12A at the cinema, the same as both Batman Begins and Spiderman: knowing my son likes monsters, I almost took him to see it. Thankfully I didn't. It involved a rather nasty scene in which a man is impaled on spikes that made me wince. Me, wince: lover of all things horror! Later it was re-classified to 15, more in the keeping of a film with that level of gore and creature violence in my view.
But it's sex that appears to make certificates jump up to 18 - in this country, anyhow. Would A History Of Violence have been classified at 15 instead, even with those close-ups of mangled faces, had it not had both those very flagrant (and rather fabulous) sex scenes? I think so: No Sex Please, We're British?
However, does knowing the possible rating of your script have any bearing on whether you can sell it? I don't think so. I do however think it can help you understand your story - something a surprising amount of writers do not seem able to pinpoint when asked, "What's this script about?" Also, perhaps it will throw up some recurring themes in what you want to write about: knowing you have a problem is half the battle in breaking the addiction! ; )
So, I had a look at a few of my scripts with this in mind:
THY WILL BE DONE. Supernatural Thriller, Redemption. Think this one is an "18": there is a scene in which a child is murdered, but also two graphic sex scenes, one which is pretty violent, though not rape.
EYE OF THE ECLIPSE. Horror, Revenge. Again, "18". Though the monsters are pretty gory, again I think it's the sex that will assign this to adults-only if it ever made it to the cinema.
HUSBAND AND FATHER. Drama, Coming-Of-Age. "18" again: though very different in tone to the other two, again it's the sex!
I am definitely seeing a recurring theme here. Am I obsessed? "They" say you unconsciously reveal your preoccupations through your writing after all...
Now you've seen my dirty laundry, what about you?
bang2write at 14:30:00 o'clock GMT Blog about this entry |
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Hi Lucy,
Thanks for that.
I would have kept those 4 lines in a single paragraph, but it's nice to hear comments from a reader on a clear example. Duly noted and writing style adjusted :)
Regards
Chris -
Jackson - FAIRLY MILD SEX! that's an oxymoron where I come from, shame on you m'lad ; )
Chris - are you trying to say that there's a foul-mouthed reprobate inside YOU bursting to get out so much your characters take over your screenplay with their incessant swearing??
As for vertical screenwriting - Charles Deemer is right on the money, as usual. Basically it's a WHITE ON THE PAGE article - and Readers don't get enough of that, so whoever endorses it is a diamond in my book. In fact, I think I'll add it to the "Required Reading" list. -
I think I write 15s, for swearing and (fairly mild) sex scenes.
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Hi Lucy,
I had a character in a script who used a lot of foul language.
I didn't set out to have him talk this way, but that's how he ended up talking. In the end I re-wrote the character and made him less of a prick, removing a lot of the language in the process, but I often wondered if I was reducing my audience writing a character like this. Someone talking to me using the f word every sentence would put me off, so would the reader be put off in the same way?
In the end I decided it was okay as long as a character in that format fit in with the rest of the script. I guess that's the only time I came close to thinking about censorship, and it had more to do with pleasing the reader than avoiding (or striving for) an 18 cert.
On another note, the Moviequill wrote about this article on vertical screenwriting: http://www.screenwritersutopia.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=2698
From a readers POV, what do you think about the example given?
Regards
Chris -- http://ukscriptwriter.blogspot.com
31/01/07 18:36