IF you want to see a depiction of sex the MPAA thinks is unacceptable for children under 17 and then compare it with a version of the same scene that they deemed OK for children accompanied by a parent, check out the Web site for “Black and White,” the controversial new movie by writer-director James Toback.
The site (which is at http://www.sputnik7.com/blackandwhite) offers both versions of the movie’s opening: a sexual encounter in Central Park between two teenaged girls (played by Bijou Phillips and Kim Matalova) and a slightly older boy (played by Power of the rap group Wu-Tang Clan).
The movie, to be released early next year, is about hip-hop-obsessed Manhattan rich kids who hang out with Harlem gangbangers.
Its cast includes Marla Maples, a dreadlocked Brooke Shields, Robert Downey Jr., Ben Stiller, Mike Tyson (as himself) and Allen Houston of the Knicks.
In both versions of the problematic scene, Power is fully clothed, but you see Matalova’s (not quite bare) buttocks and Phillips’ breast as Matalova pinches it.
The only difference – and it takes a couple of viewings before you can spot it – is that the R version removes frames showing Phillips’ elbow jerking up and down.
While you cannot actually see Philips’ hand, the implication is that she has it between Matalova’s thighs.
Executive producer Hooman Majd put the images on the Web out of frustration and anger with the MPAA, and in support of his director.
“I wanted to put it on right away – to inform film fans about the way the process works,” Majd said. “Given all the press the MPAA is getting about violence and now about ‘Eyes Wide Shut,’ it seemed like good timing. And the Web is a kind of democratizer: It’s the only way to get to the public and show them the preposterousness of the ratings board.”
Majd, the production chief at Palm Pictures, explains that “it’s commercial death to get an NC-17, so we had to cut the movie in a way that’s ridiculous.”
One of the points he wanted to make, he said “is that if you cut those few seconds you don’t change the whole effect of the scene on a child under 17.”
Majd says that the site has received “hundreds of comments back, at least 99 percent in our favor.”
Complains James Toback, who also fought a bitter battle to get an R rating for “Two Girls and A Guy,” “You make a serious movie and you work very hard, so to be reduced to counting elbow jerks is not just undignified, it’s disgusting.”
According to Toback, the board identified six unacceptable elbow movements in the scene and “suggested that two might do it. So I resubmitted the scene with just two elbow movements. But although I had a majority [for getting an R] I didn’t have two-thirds so I still got an NC-17.”
He then cut out all the elbow movements.
Toback believes he was being personally persecuted by MPAA co-chairman Richard Mosk, whom he said he has called “a totalitarian pinhead” in print. Mosk, reached at his home in Beverly Hills, had no comment.
The movie is now rated R for strong sexuality, graphic language, some violence and drug use.