Why Hollywood's Movie Raters Are Never Named

Someone decided your favorite R-rated movie couldn't be a PG-13. You will probably never learn their name.

Six of the ten people on the Classification and Rating Administration board — the panel that stamps every studio release with a G, PG, PG-13, R or NC-17 — serve in total anonymity. They're full-time parents of children between 5 and 15, hired by the Motion Picture Association to watch roughly three movies a day, discuss what they saw, and vote. Nobody outside the building knows their names, their politics, or how they voted on any specific film. The other four members of CARA are public by design, starting at the top: Kelly McMahon, an MPA attorney who became Chair of the ratings board in 2019, does interviews, runs the appeals process, and functions as the face of a system that otherwise has none.

That split — four names, six blanks — is itself a compromise forced by controversy. Through the ratings system's first decades, every rater's identity was withheld, a practice the MPA defended as protection from lobbying and harassment by studios and publicists eager to move a film from R to PG-13. Filmmaker Kirby Dick tested that wall in 2006 by hiring a private investigator to trail CARA staff to their cars and cross-reference license plates, then built the results into "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," a documentary that named names and accused the board of running what critic David Ansen, quoted in the film, called an operation so unaccountable that "it's turning us all into children." Roger Ebert, reviewing it, put the core complaint plainly: the board insists its standards apply evenhandedly, "but the procedures are secret so nobody can tell what they are."

The MPA never fully capitulated, but it stopped pretending the chair was anonymous too. Joan Graves, who ran the board for nearly two decades, became its first publicly acknowledged face before retiring in 2019; McMahon and a small senior staff — among them Mario Moogan, who leads board discussions as senior rater, and Marilyn Gordon, who runs the separate Advertising Administration — took over that public-facing role afterward. The rank-and-file raters who actually watch the movies stayed exactly as anonymous as they were in 1968.

What that anonymous majority actually decides is oddly specific. CARA has an informal ceiling of one F-word before a movie tips from PG-13 into R — use it as a plain expletive twice and the rating usually climbs, use it once to describe sex and it climbs immediately, no exceptions. "Used more than once as an expletive, it gets kicked up to an R," McMahon told CNBC in 2022, noting that "The Batman" stayed PG-13 despite heavy profanity because it used the word only once. At least five raters must watch a film for a rating to count, the group tries to keep that number odd so no vote ties, and "it is a simple majority that rules," she said — a process with more procedural rigor than most people assume sits behind a letter on a poster.

Studios have mostly made peace with letting six strangers make that call. Appeals to CARA's separate ratings board are rare — McMahon said there had been only two in the two years before her 2022 interview — because distributors would rather quietly trim a scene than fight a decision in a closed hearing room. The same film can land a stricter rating overseas than it gets from CARA, which underscores how much of this is a house style rather than a fixed formula: American raters tolerate violence more readily than nudity, an asymmetry Ebert noted with some irritation nearly two decades ago and one the board has never really abandoned.

None of it is government regulation — that's the trade the MPA has always offered Hollywood, and the industry has always taken it. A federal ratings board would answer to courts, freedom-of-information requests and elected officials. CARA answers to the studios that fund it and, once every few years, to a documentary crew willing to hire a detective. The board keeps rating three movies a day regardless, still telling audiences almost everything about a film except who decided.

The board's public voice, such as it is, comes down to posts like this one from its official account this August — a rating and a reason, one sentence long, no names attached:

Post by @FilmRatings