Section I

Time has corne

An

end to all this idiocy

The time now has come to add another letter to the GMRX of the movie rating system. The X rating is today the most restrictive. No one inside under 16.

I would add a new catagory, a Z designation: Not recommended for man or beast.

Your average Z picture, and there are some of them out today, although they aren't rated as such, makes itself objectionable by lack of artistry in what it presents as much as by what it shows.

In the field of sex, a Z picture depicts all sorts of indiscriminate wrestling, either heterosexual or homosexual, depending on what sort of picture we have here. The sound track sets forth vast breathing sounds until once I thought Vesuvius was about to erupt.

From the tangle of bodies on the screen I

By Emerson Batdorff

have often been unable to figure out who is trying to do what. Usually these scenes are quite long and the Z rating is to be awarded to those in which this pointless dalliance amounts to felonious boredom for the audience.

I have been unable to figure out why these scenes take place at all on the screen in the way that they do. They certainly don't thrill and they are a remarkably poor way to show nudity.

No one ever made love like that anywhere except before the cameras. Even in Sodom and Gomorrah there is no record of partners in passion threshing around in a way to break the floor lamps and overturn the easy chairs.

Yet I am informed that several movie companies have had to add repair men to their prop departments specifically to keep the floor lamps of movie sets in good working order, owing to their having been sideswiped by athletic lovemakers.

In the vast field of violence, it probably is not too early to get the committee on the Z rating to consider the problem of cannibalism. True, there have been few cannibal films so far, probably because the movie makers haven't considered the subject really attractive yet.

I think any film showing people actually cooking and eating other people, or parts

thereof, should be considered for a Z. Unless, of course, the treatment were in historical context or dealt with practical, as opposed to ritual, cannibalism.

In spite of all our professed freedom of religion, the practice of ritual cannibalism has been discouraged in the United States although in some parts of the world it has a strong religious connotation.

Movies obviously are in less danger of offending if they concentrate on the more practical sort, namely there is nothing else to eat.

If we except this situation from the blanket requirement that cannibalistic films get a Z rating, it would allow movies to be made about people trapped in lifeboats for long periods of time and, more to the point, the Donner party.

The Donner party consisted of sturdy emigrants to the far west. They got caught in the Donner Pass by heavy snow and were trapped there all winter. There was nothing to eat. But in the spring a few people made it out and the rest could not be found at all, leading to some pretty black suspicions.

Actually, this is being made into a movie now by Roman Polanski.

But enough details. You get the idea of how the Z rating would work.