That's what I felt watching Kirby Dick's firebrand documentary "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" when it premiered here Wednesday night at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
The target of Dick's investigative filmmaking is the Motion Picture Association of America, which serves both as Hollywood's chief lobbyist and - because of its all-powerful movie ratings - the movie industry's in-house censor.
Yes, the MPAA is a de facto censor, even though the group always denies it. The MPAA's ratings have the power of life and death over a movie - and the assignment of the most severe rating, the NC-17, pretty much ensures the movie will not play in most theaters, or be advertised in many newspapers, or be stocked on most video-store shelves. If that's not the equivalent of censorship, I don't know what is.
But it's not just the MPAA's power that Dick's movie rails against, it's the capricious way the MPAA wields that power.
Through interviews with filmmakers who have gone through the process, and illustrated with clips from the offending films, Dick shows what I and many critics have been saying for years - that the reasons why the MPAA assigns ratings are arbitrary, and reveal a pattern of biases that go beyond the ratings board's stated mission of protecting children.
Among the MPAA's double standards:
l Sexual content triggers harsher ratings far more frequently than violence.
l Gay sex will earn a harsher rating, even if less nudity or sexual behavior is shown than in similarly shot heterosexual sex scenes.
l Independent filmmakers are treated poorly in comparison to their studio counterparts, and the ratings board is more likely to help a studio filmmaker by suggesting what to cut to get a more-desirable rating.
l Scenes of women in the throes of orgasm (like Chloe Sevigny in "Boys Don't Dry") are considered dirty.
l What gets an R in one movie often gets an NC-17 in another, and the ratings board never has to explain why.
Perhaps most damning in Dick's movie is the revelation that the people who make these decisions - the raters and the appeals committee - hide under a cloak of anonymity, never taking responsibility for their decisions.
Dick aims to change that. He hires a private detective, a brassy lady named Becky Altringer, to track down - through such old-fashioned methods as following them home and digging through their trash - the individual ratings-board members.
What Dick and Altringer discover shows that the MPAA, so strict in monitoring cinematic transgressions, can't even follow its own rules.
For example, board membership is supposedly limited to "parents with children between 5 and 17." In fact, several raters have children who have grown up and left the nest.
The movie concludes with Dick submitting his film to the MPAA for a rating - a process that, from the inside, is both comic and chilling.
Dick's submission seems to reveal yet another case of the MPAA ignoring its own rules. According to a story in the Los Angeles Times this week, the MPAA made a copy of Dick's movie for its own purposes - even though Dick had asked the MPAA not to.
"This organization, so concerned with anti-piracy, made an illegal duplication of my film," Dick said. Dick's lawyer told the Times that he is contemplating a lawsuit. (The MPAA called Dick's accusations untrue, suggesting it's all a big publicity stunt for the movie.)
After the movie's premiere Wednesday, Dick listed three changes he would like to see: removing the veil of secrecy from the ratings process, writing clear and well-outlined standards, and bringing in child-behavior experts to consult about the true effects of sexual and violent content on children.
Those are good steps toward recovery of a broken system. But the first step is admitting you have a problem - and the MPAA is still in deep denial.
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Check out my daily blog, "The Movie Cricket," at http://blogs.sltrib.com/movies. Send questions or comments to Sean P. Means, movie critic, The Salt Lake Tribune, 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84101, or e-mail at movies@sltrib.com.
