Trailer cop decides just how racy movie marketers can be

LOS ANGELES -- If you want to get a racy movie trailer into theaters, first you have to talk to the Hand -- Bethlyn Hand.

While most people know that the Motion Picture Association of America rates movies for violent or sexual content, few know about Hand, who with her small staff reviews every piece of marketing material, including trailers and newspaper ads, for suitability.

She doesn't decide how movie studios market their films. But for the past 27 years, the 64-year-old Hand has been the MPAA's gatekeeper. And for 27 years, marketing executives have been trying to push the envelope in an attempt to get people to see their movies.

"With the teen-age movies, there's always a lot more sex marketers want in the advertising than we will agree to," Hand said, sitting in her office at the MPAA's Western offices in Encino, a suburb of Los Angeles.

A lot has changed in trailers over the years.

In 1978, for instance, she rejected a trailer for the movie "Coming Home" because it showed Jane Fonda wearing a wedding ring while in bed with Jon Voight, who played a man who was not her husband.

"I wouldn't allow the wedding ring because it showed she was in a compromising position outside of her marriage," Hand remembers. "And now, nobody cares."

The hardest marketing campaigns for Hand to review are for horror films.

"How much is too much fright?" she asked.

For last year's "The Others," starring Nicole Kidman, she made Dimension Films redo a trailer that showed an ominous hand reaching out and touching a child.

"We wanted to be very careful not to show the children in jeopardy and yet let the audience know it was a horror film," she said. "The studio was happy with the trailer because they got to keep a lot of the creepy stuff in, and I was happy because it didn't show the children in jeopardy."