Terry Mattingly has posted a follow-up item on the wildly overblown kerfuffle over Facing the Giants and its PG rating, at GetReligion.org. He makes some good points, e.g.:
To make a long story short, the studio and the producers behind Facing the Giants stand by their story that their original communications with the the MPAA — email and telephone talks — said the PG rating was based on content that could be interpreted as characters proselytizing on behalf of Christianity. There were multiple people involved in these talks and emails, but only one is speaking on the record: Kris Fuhr of Provident Films (which is linked to Sony).
Meanwhile, MPAA leaders have done a rare thing — discuss one of the board’s secret decisions. Some of these public statements have been interesting, to say the least. The board is saying the PG was not based on faith issues or on religion, in and of itself. But the board has not said that about the proselytizing issue.
What we have here is one voice saying, “This decision was based on A.” Then the other voice says, “That is totally wrong. This decision was not based on B!” One group says “apples” and the other replies by talking about “oranges.”
However, both his column and his blog post end on a note which suggests that no other movie has ever been treated this way before, and which asks if the MPAA will go on to treat all other evangelistic movies the same way — but as I noted in my own column on the subject, the MPAA has been applying this standard to Billy Graham films for years, and recently applied it to Al Gore’s global-warming movie, too. So there is nothing new here, and the answer to that question would seem to be out there already.
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