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In the United Kingdom, the X certificate was issued between 1951 and 1982 by the British Board of Film Censors. It was introduced as a result of the Wheare Report on film censorship. From 1951 to 1970, it meant "Suitable for those aged 16 and over", and from 1970 to 1982 it was redefined as meaning "Suitable for those aged 18 and over". The X certificate was replaced in 1982 by the 18 certificate and the R18 certificate. See History of British Film Certificates.
In the United States, the X-rating originally referred to a non- trademarked rating that indicated a film contained content unsuitable for minors such as extreme violence or explicit sex and thus was for adults only. When the MPAA film rating system was instituted in 1968 in the U.S., the X-rating was given to a film by the MPAA if submitted to them or, due to its non-trademarked status, it could be self-applied to a film by a distributor who knew beforehand that their film contained content unsuitable for minors. In the late 1960s to mid 1970s, several mainstream films were released with an X-rating such as Midnight CowboyMidnight Cowboy starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, is a 1969 John Schlesinger film, based on a novel by James Leo Herlihy, in which a naive young Texas cowboy named Joe Buck ( Jon Voight) comes to New York City to be a male hustler (a "midnight cowbo, The Exorcist and A Clockwork OrangeA Clockwork Orange is a dystopian 1962 novel by the Mancunian writer Anthony Burgess, adapted as a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. It is widely regarded as a successor to earlier great British dystopian novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New W. Because the X-rating was not trademarked, anybody could apply it to their films, including pornographers, which many began to do in the 1970s. As pornography began to become chic and more legally tolerated, pornographers placed an X-rating on their films to emphasize the adult nature of them. Some even started using multiple X's (i.e. XX, XXX, etc.) to give the false impression that their film contained more graphic sexual content than the simple X-rating. It should be noted that nothing beyond the simple X-rating was ever officially recognized by the MPAA. Because of the heavy use of the X-rating by pornographers, it became associated largely with pornographic films and thus non-pornographic films given a X-rating would have fewer theaters willing to book them and fewer avenues for advertising. This led to a number of films being released unrated sometimes with a warning that the film contained content for adults only. To try to rectify this problem, the MPAA eventually agreed to a new NC-17 rating that would be trademarked and thus could only be applied by the MPAA itself.
Midnight CowboyMidnight Cowboy starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, is a 1969 John Schlesinger film, based on a novel by James Leo Herlihy, in which a naive young Texas cowboy named Joe Buck ( Jon Voight) comes to New York City to be a male hustler (a "midnight cowbo is the only X-rated film ever to win the Academy Award for Best PictureThe Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the awards given to people working in the motion picture industry by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the awards are voted on by other people within the industry. As is the customary practice in. At the time the X-rating did not have the stigma it later took on. Midnight CowboyMidnight Cowboy starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, is a 1969 John Schlesinger film, based on a novel by James Leo Herlihy, in which a naive young Texas cowboy named Joe Buck ( Jon Voight) comes to New York City to be a male hustler (a "midnight cowbo has also been deemed " culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Due to a degree of relaxation in attitudes regarding sex in film, the film has since been re- rated R.