Murder Gets an R; Bad Language Gets Nc-17

By RICHARD CORLISS

Oliver Stone eagerly tells you about the 150 shots he had to remove or trim in ( Natural Born Killers to secure an R rating from the classification board of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). There was the bring-me-the- head-of-Tommy-Lee-Jones scene, where prisoners put the warden's head on a spike. There was the see-through-the-palm-of-Robert-Downey-Jr. shot, after Mallory blows a hole in the newsman's hand. Stone has more, if you want to hear them.

And next year, you'll be able to see them. Like other films that lost scenes in ratings wrangles, NBK will have a "director's cut" in video stores. Bruce Willis promises a similarly complete version of Color of Night, the steamy drama that opened last week in R-rated form after love scenes of the frontally nude star were excised. Willis has decried the board's "sexism," noting that Basic Instinct, with Sharon Stone displaying roughly comparable areas of her anatomy, got an R.

The R rating is so desirable because the restrictive NC-17 category (no children under 17 allowed) can mean "economic suicide," says Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax Films. "Many theaters won't play your movie, you're not able to advertise on TV, and many newspapers don't take your ads."

For 20 years, the rating board's chief arbiter of explosives and orifices was Richard Heffner, routinely described as one of Hollywood's most powerful men because the Stones and Scorseses had to tailor their visions to his stern standards. He recently retired from the job and was succeeded by Richard Mosk, 55, a prominent Los Angeles lawyer whose father is a justice of the California Supreme Court. This month Mosk's rating board slapped two Miramax films with an NC-17. On the basis of these decisions, the Heffner era may soon be regarded as an age of enlightenment.

Leslie Megahey's The Advocate (originally The Hour of the Pig) is an acid British satire of legal and moral hypocrisy, a tart black comedy about the black-plague years in the 14th century -- and the 20th. The film was cited for undue boisterousness in a (really quite mild) sex scene.

Kevin Smith's Clerks., a rakish comedy set in a New Jersey convenience store, was proscribed for "language" -- a wittier, more stylized version of the wry obscenities that are the lingua franca of today's teenagers. "I don't want to become a poster boy for vulgarity," says Smith, 24, "but in this film it works. There's nothing in Clerks. that is more vulgar than the language Jennifer Jason Leigh uses as a phone-sex operator in Robert Altman's ( Short Cuts, and that movie got an R. In fact, that was done in a sexually titillating way. In our movie it's not. It's just conversation."

That's one problem with both of the NC-17 movies: their action and dialogue are natural, recreational, an expression of the characters' personalities. The sex is presented as play in The Advocate, the language as banter in Clerks. If they had been used in a threatening or violent fashion -- as a tool of melodrama, the way they are in most R-rated Hollywood pictures -- the board might have shrugged them off.

The Advocate appealed but lost; it opens this week with a few seconds cut and an R rating. The case for Clerks. comes up next month. "The mpaa must have a double standard, one for the big studios and one for everybody else," says Weinstein, "if Natural Born Killers slips through and our two don't. Otherwise, I just don't get it."

The real issue isn't a double standard; it's the censorious clout of the rating system. Jack Valenti, the MPAA boss who invented the system, insists it is "purely voluntary" and meant only as a guide to parents. If that were so, he would allow separate versions of a film (R and NC-17) to play in different theaters. Then smart, serious moviemakers like Stone, Smith and Megahey would be able to write and direct pictures to their own standards, and not a 16- year-old's.

With reporting by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles and David E.Thigpen/New York