"This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is a funny, diverting look at the apparently kooky workings of the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board.

The movie's big straw man is that the MPAA's wacky ratings board does a poor job of serving the artist. An inconvenient truth: It was never meant to. It was created to make it easier for the big studios to bring their products to a mass market without the interference of local censors. Judged by that standard, it works perfectly.

A brief history lesson informs us that the MPAA ratings system grew out of the mess that existed in the 1950s and 1960s, when state and local censorship boards sprang up around the country, each with its own standards and agendas.

This made it tougher for studios to distribute movies nationally; worse, local groups were making their own cuts and edits. So in 1968, the MPAA proposed that the industry police itself, established its in-house ratings board and was successful in getting civic institutions and advertisers to go along.

That hasn't made life any less exasperating for filmmakers. Actors and directors regale director Kirby Dick with entertaining stories of the board's arbitrary and arcane decisions - quailing at matters sexual (female pubic hair, the length of the female orgasm, gay sex in general) while rubber-stamping the most horrific studio-financed displays of violence.

In a Michael Moore-ish stunt, Dick hires a couple of (lesbian) private investigators to learn the names of the raters (not all are parents; some have kids as as old Irving Thalberg). He exposes them, even interviews a few.

On the other hand, he finds real evidence that studios receive input from de facto censors they have not told us about - clergymen and studio execs.

Dick also demonstrates that studios give their directors inside dope on how to beat the system, while independents are left to stumble about in the dark.

One consequence of this, unmentioned in the film, is that resourceful indie filmmakers have found other ways get their movies made, with zero interference or censorship.

The MPAA's obvious discomfort with gay sex, for instance, hasn't stopped gay filmmakers (and consumers) from developing a thriving, unadulterated gay cinema (exhibited at festivals, touted or shown online, sold on DVD).

In a recent letter to The New Yorker, Dick scolds a reviewer for not recognizing the harm the MPAA's squeamishness does to cultural attitudes toward gays. One wonders if Dick seriously believes that if more Hollywood movies featured graphic scenes of prolonged gay-sex orgasms, more Americans would rally to the cause.

Dick is correct, though, to concludethe current system is crazy. It is, perhaps like the proverbial fox. Every time a story surfaces of an outraged artist complaining of excised pubic hair, another would-be fundamentalist censor stands down.

Meanwhile, filmmakers who claim the creative process is stifled become even more creative in order to beat the MPAA game. "Team America" directors Trey Parker and Matt Stone knew the MPAA would cut 80 percent of the farcical sex in their puppet comedy, so they submitted extra reams of foul material (depicted in side-splitting outtakes here), knowing the ratings board would leave them with what they wanted all along.

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