Tim Herlihy had far exceeded his allotment of expletives.
It was 1993, and he had written a script with Adam Sandler about a buffoonish 27-year-old who repeats school starting from the first grade. It was filled with slapstick and bawdy humor, making it a potential hit among young teenagers.
But the script also had 25 too many uses of the word “fuck” for a PG-13 rating.
“We knew we were only allowed one,” Herlihy recalled, “and we wanted it to be the best one.”
So with the movie ratings board looming in their minds, the writers went about cleaning up Billy Madison’s language.
JUANITA You got a banana. You don’t need no Snack Pack.
BILLY If I’m 27 fucking years old, and I gotta catch a fucking school bus and go back to first fucking grade, I’m going to have a banana and a Snack Pack and any other thing I fucking want!
JUANITA I thought I was your Snack Pack…
They made his tantrum on the first day of school significantly less obscene …
… and they deliberated extensively on which expletive to keep, choosing a scene filled with children during story time.
“You want it to be in a place where it makes an impact,” Herlihy said, “but you kind of want to throw it away too because that’s funny to just waste your one on something dumb.”
To filmmakers like Herlihy, the word is a darling of movie dialogue for its ability to add emphasis, rhythm and shock value. (“Yippee-ki-yay, you old rascal!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.) But its potency has also made it a singular focus of the Motion Picture Association’s ratings board.
Even as the F-word has proliferated on smaller screens, a rule from the 1980s that limits its use in PG-13 movies has endured, influencing the way some filmmakers write, shoot and edit.
Screenwriters bat around ideas in competition for the funniest or most dramatic deployment. Actors angle to be the one to say it; fans delight in tracking it. In test screenings, filmmakers note which utterance gets the biggest laugh.
“You typically have a handful of options and then you pick the horse you want to ride to the finish line,” said Rawson Marshall Thurber, the director of “Dodgeball” and other PG-13 comedies.
Thurber deployed it in one of that movie’s final jokes, when the flamboyant villain played by Ben Stiller curses the man who thwarted him. The line killed in front of test audiences.
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story 2004
Movie ratings have the power to shape a film’s audience and alter its commercial prospects. A PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned) can unlock new demographics, while an R (anyone under 17 must be with an adult) can mean millions of dollars less at the box office.
To determine ratings, which range from G to NC-17, the parents on the board examine onscreen violence, sex, nudity, drug use and crude language, keeping a tally of expletives. The words “bitch,” “jackass” and “dick” are considered to have a PG-13 sensibility, while more vulgar swearing pushes a movie toward an R.
But only one word has its own provision in the board’s rulebook: A single use of the F-word requires at least a PG-13, while additional uses will elevate it to an R.
There are caveats. If it is used in a sexual context, just one utterance can escalate the rating. And the raters can supersede the rule with a two-thirds vote, a workaround that has resulted in PG-13 movies skating by with two or three uses.
But venture much beyond that and filmmakers are in R territory.
That is why R ratings were given to a movie about an 11-year-old boy falling in love with ballet …
… and an otherwise tame film about a future king battling a stutter.
Some filmmakers view the rule as puritanical. Many are troubled by how a couple of F-words can have the same effect on a rating as the violence and mutilation in “Saw.”
“I’d much rather have a kid hear somebody say ‘go fuck yourself,’ than have them watch someone blow somebody’s brains out in this kind of voluptuous, pornographic fountain of guts and brains and skull matter,” said Tony Kushner, the screenwriter who has regularly collaborated with Steven Spielberg, including on “Lincoln” and “The Fabelmans.”
Others admit a need for the rule. Some are even fond of the restriction, which can help writers not rely on the expletive as a crutch. (An R rating can open the dam of obscenity: “The Wolf of Wall Street” has 506 utterances of the word, and “Uncut Gems” 560.)
“As much as I understand how frustrating it can be for a filmmaker to have to curb their use of the F-word,” said Kelly McMahon, the chair of the ratings board, “language, sex and nudity are still top concerns for parents.”
The limitation has meant that the word is often treated like a precious resource in PG-13 movies — and that its rare uses tend to have even more power.
Filmmakers often save it for a moment of rage …
… surprise …
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves 1991
… desperation …
… dominance …
… or comic absurdity.
It can also factor into the plot. In “Anchorman,” Will Ferrell’s character jeopardizes his career by unintentionally cussing on a news broadcast.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy 2004
Often, it is used to deliver an emotional high point.
In “Real Women Have Curves,” America Ferrera’s character underscores her passionate rejection of rigid beauty standards.
“It was a way to tell society: ‘How dare you tell me what I have to look like?’” said Josefina López, one of the movie’s screenwriters.
Real Women Have Curves 2002
In “Love & Basketball,” a son’s bitterness toward his father spills over.
“He wanted to show his father in that moment that he was a man — that he was a bigger man,” said Gina Prince-Bythewood, the movie’s director and screenwriter. Without the expletive, she said, “I don’t think it would have had the same impact.”
Before there were movie ratings there was the Hays Code, a rigid treatise on morality in cinema that Hollywood censors started applying in the 1930s. The code had no shortage of restricted words and phrases. Its list included common expletives such as “hell” and “damn,” as well as slang such as “pansy,” “tom cat” and “hold your hat.”
After a Hollywood rebellion against the censorship code gained force in the 1950s, a new M.P.A. president, Jack Valenti, overhauled its system in 1968, framing the new ratings as information for parents rather than dos and don’ts for filmmakers.
By the 1970s, the ratings board adhered to the “automatic language rule,” under which any use of the F-word required an R rating. But filmmakers sometimes secured a PG by bringing their case to the M.P.A.’s appeals board — as happened with “All the President’s Men.”
All the President’s Men 1976
Then came PG-13, a rating introduced in 1984 that arose from a proposal by Spielberg. He had just released “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” prompting complaints from parents shocked that a beating heart could be ripped out of a man’s chest in a PG movie.
Spielberg would become a PG-13 expert, sometimes finding a place in his movies to drop a choice expletive.
Valenti was under pressure from some parents to ban the expletive from PG-13 movies, said Joan Graves, who joined the board in 1988 and ran it for nearly two decades.
Valenti viewed a total ban as a tough sell to filmmakers, she recalled, but he agreed to limit use of the word to one.
“This was a rule, and an unusual one, because there aren’t a lot of rules in rating,” Graves said. “It’s a gut reaction with parameters around each rating.”
While working on “Tremors,” a movie about gigantic wormlike creatures terrorizing a desert town, the director Ron Underwood encountered the rule for the first time. He remembered having to cut about eight utterances of the obscenity to secure a PG-13.
“It was a wake-up call,” he said. “But it was not a difficult decision about where to use it.”
After the movie’s heroes slay their first monster, Kevin Bacon relishes the moment.
Underwood decided to dub over the other offending language.
Over time, filmmakers tested what would pass muster with the board.
They learned that bleeped expletives were allowed.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World 2010
As were strategically placed background noises.
Sometimes, the board would let two or three of the expletives slide, which Graves said happened when a movie would seem “absolutely silly” with an R rating.
“Adventures in Babysitting” received a PG-13 with two utterances.
Adventures in Babysitting 1987
In the 21st century, the rule underwent a series of pressure tests.
“Gunner Palace,” a documentary about an American artillery regiment in Iraq, initially received an R rating for the soldiers’ language. The filmmakers objected, persuading the ratings appeals board with arguments about the realities of war and their desire for teenagers to freely access the movie.
In an extremely rare exception, the PG-13 film contains more than 40 uses of the F-word.
The most high-profile confrontation was over the best picture winner “The King’s Speech,” which has a particularly colorful scene in which the future king of Britain learns that his stutter stops when he swears.
The filmmakers argued that the words were not gratuitous but central to the plot. The appeals board did not budge.
“It was devastating to us because we didn’t want to touch the picture,” said Ethan Noble, a ratings consultant who worked on the appeal.
The filmmakers released the movie with an R rating for “some language.” But to broaden the movie’s audience, they later put a PG-13 cut in theaters. In the key scene, all but one of the offending expletives were dubbed over with “shit.”
Over the years, the board has periodically gathered data on how parents feel about the F-word. In a survey taken in 2022 by 1,500 American parents, respondents were divided on how to classify a movie with a handful of them. When asked how they would rate a movie with five, just over half selected PG-13; the rest chose R.
There have been signs of a bit more flexibility. “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which drew masses of young fans to theaters, received a PG-13 despite four uses of the expletive — all of them sung.
But the rule has remained on the books. It has persisted into an age when children’s media consumption has become radically more difficult for parents to control, with streaming and social media providing easier access to profanity-laden material, from “The Sopranos” to the Nelk Boys. Under pressure to regulate content for teenagers, Instagram recently took a cue from the ratings board, introducing restrictions that it says are based on the PG-13 rating.
In the film industry, many continue to go to great lengths to make sure they do not run afoul of the rule.
After filming “M3gan” with an R rating in mind, the filmmakers decided to edit the horror movie about a murderous artificial-intelligence doll into a PG-13, said the director, Gerard Johnstone. The visual effects work involved dulling the brightness of the blood and excising more than a half-dozen F-words said by the domineering toy company executive played by Ronny Chieng.
“We basically took frames out and morphed his mouth back together,” Johnstone said.
Often, filmmakers will position the word in the latter half of their movie, where it can guarantee a moment of comedy or drama.
Spielberg saved it for one of the final lines of “The Fabelmans,” in which the aspiring filmmaker modeled after himself gets a few minutes with his idol: the Hollywood auteur John Ford.
This particular line of dialogue was not one that Spielberg, who wrote the screenplay with Kushner, was willing to dilute. A young Spielberg had heard it from Ford himself in a similar encounter.
Wearing an eye patch and puffing on a cigar, Ford — played by David Lynch — gives the young man a gruff lesson in filmmaking. Then, he yells him out of his office, a command made all the more startling with a choice expletive.
“It never fails to boost the amperage of a line,” Kushner said of the word. “‘Get out of my office’ would not have been the same — it needed that kick in the pants.”
Script provided by Tim Herlihy. Additional production by Gabriel Gianordoli. Videos: 20th Century Fox (“The Martian,” “Behind Enemy Lines,” “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” and “Minority Report”); Warner Bros. (“Crazy, Stupid, Love,” “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” “All the President’s Men” and “Ocean’s Twelve”); Universal Pictures (“Fast Five,” “Oblivion,” “Billy Madison,” “Sneakers,” “Tremors,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” and “M3gan”); Columbia Pictures (“White House Down”); Netflix (“Wake Up Dead Man” and “Red Notice”); StudioCanal (“Billy Elliot”); See-Saw Films (“The King’s Speech”); Touchstone Pictures (“Armageddon” and “Adventures in Babysitting”); Roadside Attractions (“All Is Lost”); Searchlight Pictures (“Jojo Rabbit”); DreamWorks Pictures (“Dreamgirls” and “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”); HBO Films (“Real Women Have Curves”); New Line Cinema (“Love & Basketball”); Palm Pictures (“Gunner Palace”); Amblin Entertainment (“The Fabelmans”).
