March 7, 2005

Here's some encouraging news.

Hollywood may be cleaning up its act...at least by their standards.

The trade magazine "Variety" reports that R-rated films are on the decline from 212 in 1999 to just 147 last year.

Even more startling, says "Variety," is that in 2004, PG films made more money than R-rated pictures for the first time in twenty years.

The last time PG was bigger business than R was 1984, the year the motion picture association introduced the PG-13 rating.

This is good news for a lot of reasons.

If Hollywood makes more money with cleaner pictures, they are more likely to make cleaner pictures.

For them, money is the bottom line.

But people must patronize the better films, as they appear to be doing, if they want to see more of them.

About R-rated pictures, one studio executive is quoted as saying, "you're leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table with an R-rating. Why? For artistic integrity? Let's be real."

Yes, let's be real.

And let's encourage Hollywood to make better pictures by patronizing the good ones.

In New York, I'm Cal Thomas.

Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C. Watch his television show, After Hours with Cal Thomas, on the Fox News Channel, Saturdays at 11 p.m. Eastern Time.