Saints and Soldiers

Tonight I heard a talk by a producer of "Saints and Soldiers," an award-winning film shot in Utah and shown in all 50 states and numerous foreign countries. This young man was one of a graduating class of 3 in an arts-based private high school in Orem, Utah; he graduated in 1995, and the school has now closed. As a high school student he had a successful internship at Paramount, which helped him greatly in his career. I saw a portion of Saints and Soldiers when it ran on the History channel, but have yet to see the whole thing. I understand the film is out on DVD now. Could anyone loan me their's? The producers of the film were surprised when the MPAA initially gave the movie an R rating. As one of the key audiences of the film would be members of the LDS Church, and as the producer and many others involved in the film are LDS, and as LDS members have been counseled against seeing R rated movies, this presented a personal and business challenge. Over a period of 6 months the producers worked with the MPAA, made some changes to the film, and ultimately the film received a PG-13 rating. Some of the rationle of the MPAA was interesting. The R rating resulted from the depiction of violent combat in World War II. A key factor was that some of the characters killed in combat are principal characters, the type of characters that the audience will grow to care about as the movie progresses; the MPAA indicated that this was too much for someone less than 17 to experience. The PG-13 rating was achieved, in part, by changing the relevant scenes so they were less graphic; for example, a camera angle was changed to eliminate a view of bullets exiting a body. The producer mentioned that in movies such as Lord of the Rings there is massive violence against large numbers of creatures the audience would never identify with on an individual level, and therefore the MPAA does not deem such violence to merit an R rating. The producer posed the question of which depiction of violence is most likely to influence a young person to choose a course other than violence (e.g., a course other than a Columbine-like assault), a depiction that shows consequences of violence, or a depiction of violence without any meaningful consequence. I had not been aware of it, but the producer said the MPAA felt it had a made a mistake when it rated "Titanic," that it should have receive an R-rating. He also mentioned some things about the funding of the MPAA, as well as the policies and politics of the rating process. Pretty educational.