You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

This started as a comment to chickadilly, but it got kind of long. :P It occurs to me that I probably wasn't that clear yesterday about the hasty CGI job done on the Indy trailer and what it really means. I am fairly certain that this is NOT a change to the film itself, only the U.S. trailer.

But the point isn't whether that shot is in the movie or not. The MPAA can't make them magic the guns out of the movie itself - the ratings board will just give the movie a certain rating, based (in part) on the presence of guns. Once it has a rating, the audience has been warned, and hopefully anyone who goes to see it can handle seeing them. The MPAA has done their job of informing the audience, and they can sleep at night.

But trailers and posters and things are available to everyone, and children don't have to be accompanied by parents in order to see them most of the time. They don't have ratings, but the MPAA can, for example, keep a studio from using a certain poster. That happened with Sleepy Hollow several years ago, when the MPAA kept the studio from using a poster because it "depicted decapitation" (well, DUH, it's the Headless Horseman, yo!). And while they can't *stop* a trailer from being released, they *can* force the studio to put a warning at the front of it. This comes in the form of the usual green screen that precedes a trailer being replaced by a red one (these restricted trailers are usually called "red-band" trailers). This happened to a lot of films this year, such as No Country For Old Men and Lust, Caution.

So Spielberg & Co. could have released the trailer as-is, but they might have been asked to put the red card at the front of it, which would mean that it wouldn't be shown in movie theaters and people would have to confirm their birthdate to watch it online. Which would probably mean that it would get a lot of online traffic, but despite the rising power of internet advertising, if your preview isn't playing in theaters, your film might as well not exist. Also, the red-band label has a similar effect to the NC-17 rating. People associate it with porn or extreme violence, whether that's warranted or not, and it's understandable that a studio would want to avoid that - especially over something as ridiculous as showing a few machine guns.

It's clear to me what happened here. Spielberg and Lucas send the Indy 4 trailer to the MPAA in order to get the approval needed to put that "preview approved for all audiences" green title card at the front of it. The MPAA sends it back, saying that they couldn't approve it for a general audience and that if they're going to release it, it will have to be a red-band trailer. Spielberg and Lucas, fearing the impact that releasing a red-band trailer would have on their film, ask what's keeping it from being a green-band trailer. The MPAA says it's that first shot of Indy, with all those machine guns pointed at him - it's a little too intense for a general audience. Probably rolling their eyes madly, but seeing that this is a fairly easy fix, Steve and George CG out the guns and release the trailer (while releasing it for foreign consumption exactly as it was the first time they sent it to the MPAA). This at least could explain why it took so long for this to come out in the first place.

For those who think that the sight of machine guns are a silly thing to be protected from or that the MPAA is being inconsistent, I'll say I WHOLEHEARTEDLY AGREE. The MPAA has made stupid decisions like this before, and a lot of time it's not a bit related to protecting and informing people. Sometimes it's just plain political. The Sleepy Hollow poster thing I mentioned above is widely believed to have been a knuckle-rapping for producer Scott Rudin, who had previously produced the South Park movie that so shamelessly ripped the MPAA a new one. Not that this was their first attempt to slap the South Park movie in the face. Well before its release, the MPAA got wind that the title of that movie was to be South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose. They start to wag their fingers, saying that you can't have "hell" in your title, because titles have to be G-rated, no matter what the rating of the film is. Naturally, Trey Parker and Matt Stone would have the last laugh, changing their title to the much more suggestive but MPAA compliant "Bigger, Longer, and Uncut." But this rule would have been news to the dozens and dozens of filmmakers who released movies that had "Hell" in the title. And it went mysteriously unenforced the next year, when the Hughes brothers released their Jack the Ripper flick From Hell.

Anyway, bottom line, this isn't about the movie itself, which I'm sure will have guns aplenty. It's about the MPAA deciding that we suddenly need protection from seeing machine guns pointed at people in a movie trailer, like we're not going to be EXPECTING to see them in an Indiana Jones movie in the first place!