So he let fast-talking Quentin Tarantino pitch the movie as mainstream art. "They don't care for me," Weinstein says of the ratings board. "When I go, they make me take chunks out of my movies. Quentin, they love."

The strategy paid off — in part. The board asked for only minor trims to Grindhouse, a horror exploitation double-feature directed by Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Though the film took in a disappointing $11.6 million for its opening weekend, Weinstein knows an NC-17 would have made the movie virtually unsellable.

That unpredictability is at the crux of mounting criticism of the ratings board, which has been accused of being secretive, inconsistent and out of touch with American mores.

In response, the board, which rates more than 900 films a year, is pledging to make the system more transparent for parents and filmmakers, who say they aren't sure what levels of violence and sex merit a particular rating.

Already the MPAA appears to be flexing more muscle. Last week, it took the unprecedented step of punishing a film for advertisements it deemed offensive. The ads for the horror film Captivity showed a woman being kidnapped and tortured under the headlines "Capture, Confinement, Torture, Termination."

The ads, which ran on 30 Los Angeles-area billboards and 1,400 New York taxi tops, were yanked after parents flooded the movie company, After Dark Films, with complaints. The MPAA followed by ruling that the movie would not be rated for at least 30 days, jeopardizing the film's planned May 18 release date.

After Dark executives say that though the ads were in bad taste, the studio was made an example of. "They needed a whipping boy," says company co-founder Courtney Solomon. "They're not about protecting parents or kids. They're about keeping their power in Hollywood."

It's hardly the first such accusation aimed at the ratings board since its formation in 1968. Made up of executives from the six major studios — Disney, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. — the MPAA has drawn the increasing ire of some filmmakers and smaller studio chiefs over what guidelines govern movie ratings.

Last year's documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated leveled a number of charges at the board, from working at the behest of big studios to being outright prudes.

Joan Graves, head of the MPAA's Classification & Ratings Administration, counters that the board's primary mission is to warn parents about content, not dictate it.

Graves concedes, however, that the MPAA has become a sounding board for complaints about the industry, from directors who hate the board's rating appeals process to moviegoers displeased with parents who bring their toddlers to graphic movies such as Saw.

Since it was unveiled in 1990, NC-17 has been considered the arena for big-studio soft-core porn. And although the National Association of Theatre Owners says there is no written policy on banning NC-17 films, it acknowledges that some exhibitors won't show the movies.

"It's not an effort to have more NC-17 (films) necessarily," Graves says. "It's an effort to discard the myths around that rating. An NC-17 doesn't mean the movie is a bad movie, and it doesn't mean it's pornographic. It simply means that there are elements in it that we believe most American parents think are out of bounds for children."

"That won't be easy, given its reputation," says Rob Moore, executive vice president of worldwide marketing and distribution at Paramount Pictures. "Certainly, we don't have any NC-17 movies in the works."

•After complaints that young children were being brought to graphically violent films, the MPAA changed its R-rating advisory earlier this year to read: "Generally, it is not appropriate for parents to bring their young children with them to R-rated motion pictures."

"We had a lot of complaints … that parents had chosen to take their very young children to these very high-level R horror films that had very graphic blood and gore," she says. "They were asking, 'Can't you put more teeth in the system?' " But, she says, "it's ultimately up to the parents to decide."

• In the past, a filmmaker who was unhappy with a rating could appeal the board's decision but not cite other movies as part of that appeal. Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven, for instance, could not appeal his movie's NC-17 rating by citing the sexuality in R-rated Basic Instinct. Now, filmmakers can cite precedent.

Though critics laud the plans, they argue that the changes don't get to the crux of the board's perceived failings: its secrecy, makeup and inconsistent practices.

The MPAA typically employs 10 to 13 film raters, whose identities are kept secret. There are three senior raters who oversee the ratings process, and whose names were recently released under public pressure.

For a typical movie, eight raters watch the film and each fills out a ballot giving the film a G, PG, PG-13, R or NC-17 rating. The member also lists the factors that went into the decision, such as violence, nudity and language. After the ballots are counted, the rating is determined.

But Kirby Dick, director of Rated, says the anonymity permits the board to act without accountability. "City officials, school board officials, they make important decisions and their identities are known. It's ludicrous to think that these people shouldn't be known, too. Their decisions can affect millions of dollars in business."

That's because unrated and NC-17 movies don't make money. The average NC-17 film takes in less than $4 million, the theater owners association says. The average unrated film — independent studios do not have to submit their films for ratings — does less than $1 million.

"The R-rating has become part of the mainstream," says Paul Dergarabedian of industry tracker Media By Numbers. "The difference between an R and an NC-17 can be tens of millions of dollars."

Dick also takes issue with the makeup of the board. The MPAA requires that only parents of children 5 to 17 be permitted on the board, whose membership typically rotates when those kids turn 18. Board members have no specific training in film or child psychology.

Graves says that because the ratings system was designed for parents, the child-raising experience trumps professional training. She says the MPAA looks for average parents who "know what other parents think about in terms of making choices for children."

Dick wonders whether that's enough. "We don't ask judges to be average Joes. They have training. And why can't you be childless? They go to movies. It hardly seems like an effort to be objective."

Particularly, critics say, when it comes to sex. Graves concedes that "there's more graphic violence on screen than graphic sex." But, she says, "a lot of that is how it comes to us, not the way we rate it. We give a lot of NC-17s for violence. And those films in fact usually edit to squeeze into the R-rating."

Graves says that the board goes beyond a simple rating and lists specific reasons for a movie's categorization, from drug use to adult language to graphic violence and sex. The surge in big-screen brutality, she suggests, reflects more a shift in national standards than of individual values.

"To be quite frank with you, parents do not complain about violence," Graves says. "We hear a lot about when they think our rating is wrong about sexuality or language, and very little about violence."

"Nothing is written down, everything is secret," Captivity's Solomon says. "What's too violent? What's too sexual? How much profanity can you use? I'm not sure who they think they're protecting."

Still, even some controversial directors applaud the MPAA and acknowledge that it's a vast improvement over the system before the association was formed, when local censor boards could ban scenes or films outright from their communities.

"I actually think the MPAA has a very hard job and does it as well as they possibly can," Tarantino says. "The alternative would be every jerkwater county in America having their own obscenity laws."

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