 Starring: Aileen Quinn, Albert Finney, Ann Reinking, Carol Burnett, Tim Curry
Director: John Huston
Year Of Release: 1982
Plot: Young Annie is living a deprived life in an orphanage when she gets the opportunity to spend a week living with the fabulously rich Oliver Warbucks. While the industrialist is initially unsure about his new charge, he warms to Annie and offers a reward if her real parents come forward, which brings a couple of con artists out of the woodwork, who may destroy Annie’s newfound happiness. |
It’s one of the lesser known facts about the 1982 musical Annie, that the studio added the words ‘goddamned’ into the script several times, just so the films wouldn’t get a G rating in the US. The logic was that only parents with very small parents would go and watch a G-rated musical, hurting the film’s chances at the box office, and so the ‘goddamns’ were put in to ensure a PG rating and a hopefully a bigger box office.
It’s a particularly oddity, because Annie is one of the most sickly sweet movies ever created, and there’s nothing about it other than those goddamns that would even vaguely suggest it deserves anything but the lowest rating available. I do kind of like it, but whenever I watch it, I feel like I ought to have a sick bucket by my side, just in case the nausea overwhelms me. However it just goes to show how important film ratings are.
You tend to think of the rating coming at the end of the process – you make the movie, get it how you want it, and then send it off to the ratings board, who give it whatever certificate they think it deserves. However that’s not how it works at all. With mainstream Hollywood entertainment, the certificate they want for the movie is one of the first things decided on, with all sorts of research going on into which rating does best for different types of film. Discussions with the MPAA (the US ratings board) often start before the film is made, to ensure the script is headed in the right certificate.
This may seem like a rather contrived way of doing things, with movies being compromised by a desire for a particular rating rather than making the best version of that story whatever the certificate, but it is really our own fault.
When Columbia worried that only little kids would go to watch Annie if it was G-rated, they were probably right. In the US particularly, ratings have a massive effect on a film’s box office, because of what people expect from films given particular certificates. The G-rating has become something that most consider to be reserved for small kids’ entertainment, to the extent that even some animated movies now deliberately set out to get a PG certificate, because they know that even some relatively young children are resistant to G-rated movies (seeing them as being for babies). They’re also aware that a PG rating is more attractive to parents, as it suggests there might be something for them to enjoy in the film as well (whether that’s rational or not).
A few years ago PG was also where you’d find most blockbuster movies, however nowadays most are deliberately made to be PG-13 (this rating was added to the US system in 1984 and is roughly the equivalent to 12A in the UK), because again a PG rating suggests it’ll be too soft and safe for its target audience of teens and adults. Only family films are now PG, whereas teens and adult expect PG-13 for most blockbusters, assuming anything rated lower will be for kids.
In fact if you look at the list of the top grossing PG rated films ever in the US, it really does show how things have changed since the 80s. Older movies like Star Wars, ET and Jaws, still make the list of the 20 highest earning PG movies ever, with all the newer entries being animated films like Shrek 2, or family movies such Narnia and Harry Potter. However on the PG-13 list, because all the big budget blockbusters have migrated to that certificate the oldest movie left in the top 20 is 1993’s Jurassic Park, with 15 of the movies on the charts made since 2000.
However an R-rating (roughly the equivalent of a hard 15 or 18 rated movie in the UK) will probably hurt a blockbuster movie, due to the fact that teens make up a huge amount of the audience for these bits of mega-bucks entertainment, and it’s much more difficult for them to see a R-rated movie, unless they have an adult with them. Only 20 R-rated films have ever grossed more than $150 million in the US, while there have been more PG-13 rated movies grossing that much just in the last two years.
It’s for this reason that so many horror movies seem soft and comparatively gore-less nowadays, because the studios have realised that the main audience for these films is teenagers, and by a making PG-13 horror movie, you’ll normally make more money than if you make a gory horror flick, because a lot more teens can go watch it. In fact it’s not a stretch to say that the rating may now be the most important part of the marketing plan for a movie, as it’ll probably have a bigger effect on the eventual box office than virtually anything else.
In case you think it must be different in the UK, because we just gets most films from the States and the BBFC gives them a rating, you’d be wrong. When a distributor submits a movie to the BBFC, they can tell the ratings board what certificate they’re hoping to get. If the BBFC thinks it ought to get a different certificate, it’ll then advise the distributor about what needs to be changed to get the certificate they want. As a result more films are now cut in the UK to get a particular certificate that the studio wants, than because the BBFC won’t let it past at all otherwise.
For example this year, no 18 rated movies have been cut for cinema release, but four were chopped to get a 15 certificate, and four to get a 12A rating. The cuts are normally needed because the US and UK ratings certificates don’t overlap perfectly (for example a PG-13 rated movie may be more violent than what the BBFC will accept at 12A).
A 12A certificate has become important to blockbuster films in the UK, as it suggests the right level of adult material to attract a broad audience, while also allowing in younger members of the family (if accompanied by an adult).
Annie’s also a good example of how things used to be rather different in the UK than in the US. While Columbia was worried enough about getting a G-rating in the US to add in ‘goddamns’ to get a PG certificate, in the UK the film got the lowest available rating of U, and this wasn’t seen as a problem at all (apparently over here we didn’t think small children would immediately turn their backs on society on hearing the word ‘damn’). Back in the early 80s, the likes of the Star Wars films and ET got a U rating and no one seemed to think anything about it. Nowadays a rating like that would be seen as the kiss of death to anything wanting an audience beyond young children (only Pixar animated movie tend to get away with it).
It’s odd that such a sickly sweet movie as Annie would get caught up in the oddities of the ratings system, but it certainly shows that even in the very earliest stages of making a movie, the rating is one of the most important considerations that studios take into account.
TIM ISAAC
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