Context really does matter. Am I going to watch my language if I'm speaking at a grade-school library? Of course. Am I going to be less circumspect if I'm doing a midnight horror panel at a convention, in front of an audience composed entirely entirely of adults? Sure.
Thinking about the lecture scene ("pee-pee envy," &c.) in
High Anxiety.
There's a world of difference between shouting "Fuck you, asshole!" in a heated moment and, say, Dorothy Parker famously telegraphing her editor: "Fucking busy -- and vise versa."
Indeed! (ROFLMFAO!)
How about the neo-fascists in America who won't type out obscenities because they're dirty but will endorse authoritarianism and violent insurrections? Some "well-bred" and "sophisticated" examples of humanity they are.
That's one fucked up sense of priorities.
On that we are in complete agreement.
Re: SW, CE3K, and ET, I never said that they could have gotten G ratings
as released. Of course the editing decisions would make a big difference in the ratings. A far bigger difference, at least for those three films, than they would make in the storytelling.
The biggest mistake Jack Valenti made when he designed the ratings system was that he failed to anticipate two things: (1) Theatrically released pornography (up to then, pornographic films were something you watched in the back room of an "adult bookstore," or rented for a stag party), and (2) films primarily intended for very small children, of a sort that most adults would find uninteresting, and older children and teens would find distasteful (a genre that, in its own way, is every bit as exploitative as pornography). His second biggest mistake was in remaining, ostensibly to avoid spoilers, "as tight-lipped as an Aldebaran Shellmouth" about the
reason for a given rating, which led to the X (and its trademarked successor, NC-17) being debased by an automatic assumption that it meant hardcore pornography.
(On that assumption, I will note that I recall seeing ads for a movie called
Zombie, released without a rating, that declared [1] that it had no sexual content, and [2] that the producers themselves were requiring theatres to deny admission to anybody under 18.)
There is no doubt in my mind that Valenti intended G to be the most common rating for mainstream movies. I cited a short list out of the nearly 200 G movies released between 1968 and 1972 as an indication of that; if you look at the entire list (not difficult to call up on the IMDB site; go to Advanced Title Search), you will see for yourself that G movies from that time period included at least as many movies most young kids wouldn't want to see as movies that teens and non-parent twenty-somethings wouldn't want to see. And I cited Yorga as an example of what GP (which started out as M, and ended up as PG) was
intended to cover, something that was either re-rated PG-13, or that somebody at the IMDB mistakenly listed as PG-13, based on today's standards, despite the very legible trademarked GP logo on the poster.
