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In our era of secrecy, you can't compete with the federal government's relentless campaign to prevent you from knowing much of anything - from Guantanamo to the 9/11 attacks to the president's military record. Next to that achievement, Jack Valenti's tenure as president of the Motion Picture Association of America seems modest enough. All he did was get the government to put the thumbscrews (and the FBI) on anyone suspected of pirating Hollywood product and oversee the creation in 1968 of an MPAA-administered Voluntary Rating System to "help" parents choose films for their children.

You don't hear much about the MPAA ratings unless a film gets a rating that seems unreasonable, which is more often than you think. Just ask John Waters, Mary Harron, Kevin Smith, Jamie Babbit and Atom Egoyan about their own experiences with the ratings board. As the old clich� goes, it would be funny if it weren't so unfair.

It's still funny enough if you approach the MPAA by way of This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick's first-person account of his campaign to unmask the secret anonymous "parents" who hand down judgments on films, including this very documentary about the ratings system that he submits to the MPAA in the course of his story. If you ever took MPAA ratings seriously - and there must be someone out there who does, or did - you'll never take them seriously again after seeing this documentary.

After hearing laments from his fellow independents about the arbitrariness and inanity of rulings on their films, Dick walks us through a MPAA-for-Dummies, using the word "fuck" to entangle us in the logic that raters might deploy when confronted with those four fearful letters. He then hires private eyes to find out who makes these decisions. They are not your ordinary PI's, but a gentle lesbians and her daughter, Becky and Cheryl, who manage, with old-fashioned surveillance and a hidden camera bought in a "Spy Shop," to identify all of the MPAA's film raters. The once-anonymous raters stand out only in their ordinariness as they are named on-screen to the tune of perky music that could have been used for The Dating Game. Dick does get to talk on the phone to the MPAA's predictably-officious ratings chief, Joan Graves, who tells him that his doc got an NC-17 rating, due to "some graphic sexual content."

Jack Valenti is more an obvious target than an easy one. In television clips that Dick uses abundantly, Valenti comes off as a pompous, sententious little man, a veteran of advertising and politics, whom the studios liked well enough to have made him their mouthpiece for four decades. Valenti talks as if he loves the sound of his own voice. His pronouncements have the hollowness that one has come to expect of officialdom. Just wait until you hear an MPAA lawyer describe the rules of a ratings appeal hearing.

In this story of secrecy, it's no secret that the MPAA ratings, designed to "protect families," are protecting Hollywood against the imposition of a system operated by the government, though that at least might allow for some review of arbitrary decisions. The same ratings protect Hollywood's best product - violent films that tend to be given far less restrictive ratings than films that tread on sexual boundaries. The message seems to be "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid, of Sex."

Authority begets hypocrisy. Secrecy in the name public policy, with moral decisions outsourced (or is it in-sourced) to an industry lobby? It's a story that we've known for years, but a story that hasn't been told on the screen until now and, as Kirby Dick explains, it wasn't easy. For filmmakers who seek an audience, it still isn't.

I spoke with Kirby Dick about prying open the Fort Knox of film.

The suggestion, or at least the implication, that I get from your film, is that the current MPAA ratings system amounts to a form of censorship. Is that accurate?

Yes. It is a form of censorship, because it's part of a system that restricts certain types of films from getting out to a marketplace that they might otherwise get out to. And the way it works is that, for films that are NC-17, there are video chains that won't carry it, there are newspapers that won't carry advertising for it. So it's not just a ratings category that says people under 18 can't see it. It actually means that certain exhibitors won't play it, even though there may be a market for it.

Yours is the first documentary to address this issue head-on, but we've heard complaints for years about the injustice or often just the idiocy of the ratings system - and the threats from Harvey Weinstein and others to market the NC-17 rating that a film got as a badge of honor or dishonor. Has there been any effective resistance to this weapon of studio power?

The ratings system is administered and funded by the MPAA, which is the lobbying arm and trade organization for the six major film studios. These six major film studios control 95 percent of the film business. Critics are a very small part of the film business vis-�-vis the MPAA, and they really don't have much power, and the way the MPAA has responded to criticism historically has just been to ignore it. There have been major film critics, major filmmakers, and major parents organizations that have had very strong and legitimate criticisms for many years, and for the most part, the MPAA just ignores them, because the MPAA has the power to do so.

Did you have any personal experience before making this film that led you into the project?

No. I'd been wanting to make a film on the ratings system for a long time, but because of their incredible secrecy, it seemed like a very difficult project to undertake. Structurally, I also thought it would be more of a talking heads film, interviewing filmmakers and hearing their experiences, and I wanted to do something more. So when I hit upon the idea of hiring a PI firm and following their experiences as they unmasked the identities of the raters, I realized that this would give me two things - it would give me a very interesting narrative structure to follow, but it would also give me an act or a gesture that would get at the heart of what is really wrong about the ratings system, which is its secrecy.

Was hiring the PI what began the project, or did you have to resort to hiring the PI, in real life, so to speak, when you were confronted with the secrecy of the organization and their unwillingness to discuss so many things?

I decided to make the film once I came up with the idea of hiring a PI. The hard strand of US film history is based around the exploits of PI's. It seemed very appropriate for our film that we hire a PI, but rather than hire the more typical male 30s existential gumshoe, we have a middle-aged woman, lesbian, in a family. We thought that was very appropriate, having someone that wasn't in the mainstream, who was investigating the mainstream.

Was Jack Valenti still there as president of the MPAA when you started making the film, or had [former Congressman and Agriculture Secretary] Dan Glickman come in?

Glickman had come in as president of the MPAA, but for a time when we were making the film, Valenti still oversaw the ratings system, actually in September 2005, and we finished production in January 2006. We put out requests on several occasions to both Valenti and Glickman to be interviewed for this film. And we received no response.

No response?

We talked to their assistants or whoever handled their affairs. They were receptive, but we never heard back. We followed up and still never heard back.

Do you get a sense that, under Glickman, business is going to change in any significant way?

I hope so. The system is structured to benefit the studios right now, so there's an impetus, and there will be a real pressure to keep the status quo. I would imagine that he would want to put his stamp on the ratings system and try to change it in some way, but he is hired by the studios. Basically, I don't think the studios care whether there's a rating system, but if there's going to be one, they want to be in charge of it. The kinds of films they make are films that are targeted a lot toward adolescents. Those films have a lot of violence in them because adolescents respond to that. The MPAA makes sure that their rating system, which they control, lets those films get out with less restrictive ratings. Their competition - independent films and foreign films - tend to focus on more cutting edge material, with adult sexuality. In that case, it's just fine for them for those films to get more restrictive ratings - because it doesn't hurt them, it helps them. It's their competition that's getting impacted. They've got a system set up that benefits them, so it's going to be very hard for Glickman to make major changes. If he's strong and courageous, he can do it. I think it would be welcome from every corner outside of the MPAA.

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