By John Horn
and Amy Kaufman
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - For all of those teenage boys dying to see Judi Dench playing an elderly Irish woman: Now you don’t have to bring your parents to get into “Philomena.”
In a victory against the Motion Picture Association of America that could be as much publicity win as potential box-office triumph, the Weinstein Co. successfully appealed the R rating given to the Dench movie, which has been given a PG-13 mark.
“Philomena,” which stars the Academy Award winner as a mother searching for a son she was forced to give up for adoption 50 years earlier, was initially given the restrictive rating because it included more than one utterance of a certain expletive, an automatic trigger in most instances of an R rating.
Studio head Harvey Weinstein, as he did in the past with “The King’s Speech” and the documentary “Bully,” turned the ratings decision into a political and promotional battle, enlisting Dench to film a video assuming the character she played in the Bond series, MI5 Chief M. The clip soon went viral.
Steve Coogan, who produced the film and co-stars opposite Dench as a journalist who is trying to help her track down her son, appealed the MPAA rating with Weinstein Co. lawyer Bert Fields on Wednesday.
The two presented the MPAA appeals board with several movies, including “The Social Network” and “Jobs,” that were rated PG-13 even though they contained an equal or greater number of profanities. Coogan said that the MPAA’s advocate in the proceedings said the swear words in those films were more incidental and dropped casually into conversation than in “Philomena,” an opening that the actor seized upon.
