MPAA to issue warnings for movie trailers online?

[Jean-Pierre Bazinet]

Attention, Web Surfers: The Following Film Trailer May Be Racy or Graphic

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LOS ANGELES, June 12 — Hollywood has been circulating movie trailers on the Web for years, but only now is the film industry retrofitting its rating system to give the studios a chance to showcase their racier material online.

No matter what the rating of the film, nearly all the trailers shown in theaters — and on the Web — have come with a so-called green band, or tag, saying they are approved for all audiences by the Motion Picture Association of America. For movies rated PG-13 or stronger, that often meant watering down the violence, sex, language and overall intensity of a trailer.

But in April a teaser trailer for Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” remake, set for release on Aug. 31, became the first to display a new yellow tag signaling that it was “approved only for age-appropriate Internet users” — defined by the Motion Picture Association as visitors to sites either frequented mainly by grown-ups or accessible only between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m.

And two raunchy comedies — “Knocked Up” and this August’s “Superbad” — are among a spate of recent films with R-rated, “red-tag” Internet trailers, which require viewers to pass an age-verification test, in which viewers 17 and older have to match their names, birthdays and ZIP codes against public records on file.

Together the yellow (for films rated PG-13 and above) and red (R or NC-17) tags amount to a colorful, albeit easily circumvented, attempt to adjust to a fast-changing advertising landscape where Internet audiences can do as much to build or hurt word of mouth as those watching the coming attractions with popcorn in hand.

“We want to protect children,” said Marilyn Gordon, head of the association’s advertising administration. “That is our job. We also want to be able to allow our distributors more flexibility in their marketing materials.”

The spike in red-tag trailers on the Web is a function of the surge in R-rated sex romps following the success of “Wedding Crashers” two summers ago, and the blessing the association gave in March to two companies offering age-verification services, which tap into public-records databases.

R-rated trailers have been permitted for decades, of course, but they all but disappeared from theaters in 2000, when the Federal Trade Commission blasted Hollywood for aiming violent and risqué content at children.

Many theater chains still refuse to run them, lest mistakes in the projection booth offend moviegoers. As a result, major studios like Warner Brothers won’t even make red-tag trailers. Universal Pictures, for one, last ran an R-rated trailer in cinemas in 1999 for “American Pie.”

Still, studio marketing executives acknowledge that they have been pushing the envelope on theatrical trailers — slipping stronger material into previews given green tags — for quite some time, and with the association’s help. They say the association has routinely worked to ensure that such trailers only run ahead of features with appropriately matched content.

A case of that envelope-pushing came in early April, when the Dimension label of the Weinstein Company worked out a deal to advertise “Halloween” as a green-tag teaser trailer ahead of “Grindhouse,” the retro exploitation thriller.

But when that trailer wound up on Yahoo, the film industry association insisted it be pulled. The “Halloween” trailer includes plenty of bare skin, slashing blades and women in peril — hardly worthy of a green tag in the context of a Web portal open to young children. Three days later the same trailer was back on the Web, though not on Yahoo and this time with a yellow tag.

Adam Fogelson, president of marketing at Universal, who pressed the association to adopt the new yellow tag, said he hoped it would be extended to theaters eventually. “There’s got to be something, if we’re being intellectually honest, between a trailer that’s appropriate for ‘Bambi’ and a trailer that would be appropriate to go up with ‘Hostel II,’ ” he said.

At Sony, Dwight Caines, an executive vice president for digital marketing, said yellow tags at least provided a way to show “some of the edgier PG-13 content we could never show before.”

A draft of the association’s guidelines reveals the middle ground it has staked out for yellow tags. Permitted, to name a few, are “some scenes of gunfire”; “some sexuality, some nudity, some less graphic sexual slang”; “some blood, wounds”; and “some limited depictions of minors using illegal drugs.”

Strictly off limits are “excessive scenes of violence or guns/weapons involving minors”; “graphic sexual scenes, including depictions of rape”; “stronger profanity”; and “excessive blood.”

That gunfire, slang and blood come at a price. For the studios’ movie sites, association guidelines limit access to yellow-tag trailers to the hours of 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. For third-party sites, the threshold is that at least 80 percent of users must be 18 and older, according to Nielsen’s Web demographic reports.

Not everyone is thrilled with the tweaks so far. Sanjeev Lamba, executive vice president of marketing at Dimension Films, praised the association for “stepping in to regulate the Internet,” but said the yellow tag for “Halloween” was doing little but “restricting my ability to reach an audience.”

“I can’t get it out in the major portals, and that’s where the major traffic is,” he said.

James Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, which reviews entertainment products for parents, said the yellow-tag Web trailers represented a significant step, for the movie studios and for families. “Trailers have a huge impact,” he said. “The crux of it will be, how good are the safeguards?”

The association says it has asked software companies to improve the restrictions, but so far they are hardly foolproof. Beating the time-of-day limits requires adjusting a computer’s internal clock and time zone. The Nielsen ratings still won’t keep a youngster from Googling his or her way to a trailer on a site mainly frequented by grown-ups.

Even the R-rated, red-tag trailer for “Superbad” doesn’t pose much of a challenge, given that it requires users only to type in an adult’s name, zip code and birthdate to gain access. “It’s really an honor system today,” Mr. Caines of Sony said. Just as under-age moviegoers are expected not to switch auditoriums to R-rated films, he said, “the consumer’s agreeing that they’re being truthful in the process.”

That said, it took only a quick Web search to gain unfettered access to the R-rated “Superbad” and “Knocked Up” trailers at slashfilm.com, owned by Peter Sciretta of San Francisco, who said he was often sent studio-quality copies of trailers from people using Gmail accounts.

Twenty minutes later Mr. Sciretta called back. Sony, alerted by the association, had just asked him to remove the R-rated “Superbad” trailer. “We’ve been the top result on Google for months,” he said, “till the moment that you asked them about it.”

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yeah, this will work !