‘Bully’ pulpit
Weinstein Co. documentary’s R rating draws outrage
The New York opening of “Bully” is just days away and the battle over whether its target audience — teens — can get in to see the controversial documentary still rages. That’s because the Motion Picture Association of America has saddled the film with an R rating, which means kids can’t get in if they’re under 17 without an adult.
At the root of the fight is one scene in which a 12-year-old boy, Alex Libby, is caught on camera being tormented on his bus by a student who spews six F-bombs.
The curses automatically triggered an R under the MPAA’S guidelines.
“It’s like a denial of truth,” says director Lee Hirsch. “The few instances of the use of the F-words are meaningful because it’s how kids bully, it’s the cruelty with which insults can land.
“The truth is you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s 13 who had never heard that language before,” he says.
“So it’s sort of irony to say this is not okay for kids, but a movie like ‘The Hunger Games’ or any number of movies that have graphic violence or sexual situations, that’s okay.”
The Weinstein Co., which produced “Bully,” appealed the rating and lost.
Now it’s left with few options: recut the scene or release the movie on Friday without a rating — and risk individual theaters not letting kids under 17 in.
Harvey Weinstein is opting for Plan C: The studio head behind the Academy Award-winning “The Artist” is using his Hollywood clout to turn up the pressure.
Meryl Streep, who won an Oscar for the Weinstein Co.’s “The Iron Lady,” presided over a screening Tuesday at Manhattan’s Paley Center.
“No one wants to get heavy, but there are lives at stake,” Weinstein told the Daily News.
An estimated 13 million kids in America are thought to suffer some sort of bullying.
“The first 10 years of my business life I’ll admit I had a bad temper. It’s an act of redemption for me to do this movie and I’m not going to shy away from that.
“I think this is a fight I have to fight,” explains Weinstein
Hirsch felt the same way at the beginning of 2009 when he started filming his passion project. The Emmy winner had been mercilessly bullied growing up on Long Island.
He stumbled on Kelby Johnson, a gay high school student in Tuttle, Okla., a town of 6,158 with little tolerance.
The bullying got so bad that Kelby’s mom contacted a producer on the Ellen Degeneres show for help.
“It started in middle school,” says Johnson, now 19 and living in Oklahoma City.
“The earliest I can remember is sixth grade, just because of the clothes I wore, people already made presumptions of my sexuality. ... The first week of my junior year, I sat down in class and everyone moved away from me. That was kind of my low point.”
The documentary heartbreakingly recounts the plight of several others.
There’s Libby, slight for his age after being born premature at 26 weeks, and seemingly a magnet for mean jerks every day since.
And Ja’maya Jackson, 14, incarcerated at the time of filming for brandishing a handgun at the ruffians who mocked her.
And two couples, devastated by the suicides of their sons, who push for answers how their children’s schools failed to spot the problem.
“Bully” became very important to Michigan high school junior Katy Butler as soon as she heard about it (though she’s not in the film).
“This is such a personal issue for me because when I was in middle school, I was openly gay and a lot of people in my school didn’t like that,” says the 17-yearold, who was in New York this past week campaigning for the rating to be change. “They ended up slamming my hand in my locker and breaking my finger.
“I really want to change the entire climate of bullying and I think this movie is a fantastic first step.”
Butler has spearheaded a cross-country pilgrimage to draw attention to a four-week-old online petition to ask the MPAA to reverse course. She has almost half a million signatures. The MPAA may have been cast as the villain in this standoff, but the board insists its just doing its job — giving parents information that they need to make their own choices about what their children should watch.
“Unfortunately, there is a misconception about the R rating of this film limiting the audience to adults,” a rep said in a statement. “This is not true. In fact, many other R-rated movies on important topics, such as ‘Schindler’s List,’ have been screened in schools and viewed by children accompanied by their parents.”
MPAA head Christopher Dodd even held a Washington, D.C., screening of “Bully” for education officials to help get the message out. Plus, a studio couldn’t buy the national publicity that the standoff has received.
That doesn’t change the fact that March 30 is approaching and someone has to blink.
“I don’t know what else we can do unless somebody is going to give us something like a governor’s stay of execution, a last-minute reprieve,” says Weinstein.