Twenty five years ago, the Motion Picture Association of America gave a gift to avant-garde filmmakers and boundary-pushing studios in the form of the NC-17 rating. The new adults-only rating was to meant replace the pornography-tainted rating X and usher in an era of mature films for Americans aged 18 and older.

On the occasion of its silver anniversary, it’s obvious the NC-17 failed to live up to its promise and there’s no better illustration than Fifty Shades of a Grey, a movie whose S&M source material was begging for an NC-17 adaptation. Initially, it seemed as though that’s what Hollywood would deliver, with the screenwriter promising a film explicit enough to earn the MPAA’s most restrictive rating. Instead, Universal balked, toning down the adaptation to earn a more acceptable R.

View photos

Fifty Shades won’t be as naughty as it could’ve been

It’s hard to blame the studio. Despite the most optimistic expectations, theaters and advertisers have been just as reluctant to screen and promote NC-17 films as those rated X, giving studios an unwelcome choice between self-censoring or sacrificing profits. How did it end up this way? All this week, we’ll be reviewing the notorious rating and the movies it’s branded, from explicit campfests like Showgirls to serious adult fare like Blue Valentine. Today, we look back at a timeline of the NC-17 and the rating it replaced.



November, 1968: The MPAA, led by Jack Valenti, introduces its four-tiered rating system to replace the outdated Hays Code, including G, PG, and R. The most severe rating is X, reserved for those movies that should admit only people 16 and over. That age would soon be revised upward to 17 or 18, varying by state.

View photos

Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy

May, 1969: United Artists releases Midnight Cowboy with a self-applied X rating. Though the movie is not explicit enough to receive an X on its own, United Artists chairman Arthur Krim decides to self-apply the X after a Columbia University psychiatrist shares concerns about the effect of the film’s “homosexual frame of reference” on young people. It will go on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards and remains the only X-rated film to ever win an Oscar for anything.

December, 1971: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange hits theaters with an X rating. It will eventually receive four Oscar nominations.