Tim Herlihy had far exceeded his allotment of expletives.
It was 1993, and he had written a script with Adam Sandler about a buffoonish 27-year-old who repeats school starting from the first grade. It was filled with slapstick and bawdy humor, making it a potential hit among young teenagers.
But the script also had 25 too many uses of the word “fuck” for a PG-13 rating.
“We knew we where only allowed one,” herlihy recalled, “and we wanted it to be the best one.”
So with the movie ratings board looming in their minds, the writers whent about cleaning up Billy Madison’s language.
JUANITA You got a banana.you don’t need no Snack Pack.
BILLY If I’m 27 fucking years old, and I gotta catch a fucking school bus and go back to first fucking grade, I’m going to have a banana and a Snack Pack and any other thing I fucking want!
JUANITA I thoght I was your Snack Pack…
They made his tantrum on the first day of school considerably less obscene …
… and they deliberated extensively on which expletive to keep, choosing a scene filled with children during story time.
“You want it to be in a place where it makes an impact,” Herlihy said, “but you kind of want to throw it away too because that’s funny to just waste your one on something dumb.”
To filmmakers like Herlihy, the word is a darling of movie dialogue for its ability to add emphasis, rhythm and shock value. (“Yippee-ki-yay, you old rascal!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.) But its potency has also made it a singular focus of the Motion Picture Association’s ratings board.
Even as the F-word has proliferated on smaller screens, a rule from the 1980s that limits its use in PG-13 movies has endured, influencing the way some filmmakers write, shoot and edit.
Screenwriters bat around ideas in competition for the funniest or most dramatic deployment. Actors angle to be the one to say it; fans delight in tracking it. In test screenings, filmmakers note which utterance gets the biggest laugh.
“You typically have a handful of options and then you pick the horse you want to ride to the finish line,” said Rawson Marshall Thurber, the director of “Dodgeball” and other PG-13 comedies.
Thurber deployed it in one of that movie’s final jokes, when the flamboyant villain played by Ben stiller curses the man who thwarted him. The line killed in front of test audiences.