By Glenn Whipp
The Associated Press
Those extra expletives you’re hearing at the movies these days aren’t just echoes.
PG-13 movies, officially allowed one nonsexual F-word per script, are making increased use of that allotment — and more — as filmmakers work the rules in a world where R-rated comedies full of both male and female trash talk have become a summertime staple.
Recent PG-13 examples include F-bomb reactions to Ryan Gosling’s abs in “Crazy Stupid Love,” Bryan Cranston’s boorish behavior in “Larry Crowne” and those rampaging robots in “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.”
“Filmmakers are certainly using it more often, taking advantage of it,” said Joan Graves, head of the Motion Picture Association of America’s Classification and Rating Administration.
Using the F-word outside of the R-rated world certainly isn’t a new phenomenon.
In fact, prior to the adoption of the PG-13 rating in 1984, the F-word would periodically pop up in PG movies. Even after the creation of the PG-13 rating, movies like “Big” and “Beetlejuice” sneaked in the F-word and still secured a PG rating.
Those days are gone, but the expletive isn’t.
“Making a PG-13 movie, it’s always a pick-and-choose battle of where do you want to use one because, often with improvisation, a couple of F-words will creep into the movie,” said “Crazy Stupid Love” screenwriter Dan Fogelman.
“So you want to pick the best one, the most appropriate one.”
Officially, the MPAA’s Classification and Rating Administration’s guidelines state:
“A motion picture’s single use of one of the harsher sexually-derived words, though only as an expletive, initially requires at least a PG-13 rating. More than one such expletive requires an R rating, as must even one of those words used in a sexual context.”
But the MPAA’s guidelines then add that if two-thirds of the rating board members believe that multiple F-words are used in a legitimate “context or manner” or are “inconspicuous,” then the movie could still be rated PG-13.
Besides “The Social Network” and “The Tourist,” add “The Adjustment Bureau,” “Iron Man 2” and “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” to recent films that have dropped more than one F-bomb and still secured PG-13 ratings.
Said the MPAA’s Graves of the rating board’s two-thirds override for language:
“It’s hard to explain. But if you’ve just seen the film and you think they’ve been innocuous, or they’re an hour and a half apart, or they’re in the background or not emphatic. Or sometimes they’re in the same scene, just repeated twice.”
Each of those qualities can make a difference to the board, Graves noted.
“All the raters are parents, and they’re charged with rating a film the way they think a majority of American parents would rate the film,” Graves said.
