R-rated movies are hard to find at the Mid-Continent Public Library

The Johnson County Library owns six dozen DVD copies of Straight Outta Compton, the 2015 feature film about the rise of the rap group N.W.A. Even so, the supply can’t keep up with demand. A catalog search last week indicated there were 123 holds on the item.

There’s no waiting list for Straight Outta Compton at the Mid-Continent Public Library. There’s no list because there are no DVDs of that movie in the system, the largest in the metropolitan area. Straight Outta Compton is rated R, and Mid-Continent is selective about the R-rated features it acquires.

How choosy? Mid-Continent patrons hoping to catch up on last year’s theatrical releases will not find Fifty Shades of Grey; Kingsman: The Secret Service; The Wedding Ringer; Crimson Peak; or Black Mass at any of the system’s 35 libraries in Platte, Clay and Jackson counties. Was Jake Gyllenhaal’s boxing movie Southpaw as tedious as critics said? Was Get Hard just a nice paycheck for Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell? Mid-Continent users will not find answers to these questions on the DVD shelves of their local branch.

Mid-Continent doesn’t take an absolutist approach to R-rated features, though. The system owns DVD and Blu-ray copies of, for instance, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant. Steven Potter, Mid-Continent’s CEO and library director, tells The Pitch that the system acquires films nominated for Academy Awards, Golden Globes and Critic’s Choice Awards, regardless of how the Motion Picture Association of America has rated them.

As for Ted 2 and other movies left out at awards season, Potter says Mid-Continent can fulfill patrons’ requests via interlibrary loan. “Just because we don’t acquire it doesn’t mean that we’re not willing to provide access for it,” he says. “We borrow quite a bit of material from other libraries if we don’t own it. That’s true of really anything — book, music, video, whatever it might be.”

Still, Mid-Continent is out of step with its peers in using the R-rating as a guide in purchase decisions. The public library systems in Johnson County, Lawrence and Kansas City (Kansas and Missouri) offer Magic Mike XXL and other R-rated features you won’t find in Mid-Continent’s catalog.

“We select our movie collection the same way we do our reading collection: What’s popular in neighborhoods where our branches are, what people are asking for, what will have a reasonable lasting value,” Courtney Lewis, the Kansas City, Missouri, Public Library’s media relations coordinator, says in an e-mail.

The American Library Association is generally wary of rating systems. The organization’s bill of rights states that rating systems “presuppose the existence of individuals or groups with wisdom to determine by their authority what is appropriate or inappropriate for others.”

That said, it’s not unusual to find a public library using R ratings as a buying guide. “I wouldn’t say that it’s common, but it’s not unique,” James LaRue, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, tells The Pitch.

The primness evident in Mid-Continent’s video collection is a function of several factors.

First, the district puts an emphasis on the printed word. Mid-Continent’s purchasing policy, Potter explains, is to own one copy of a book for every three hold requests that patrons submit. Meeting the goal of having short waiting times for books may reduce the size of the audio-visual collection, Potter says. The MPAA’s R rating, in other words, is in some ways a budgetary tool.

Second, Mid-Continent tends to be deliberate. There was a time when the library system did not lend any feature films — not Showgirls and not Bambi. Potter, who has worked at Mid-Continent for nearly 25 years, says that when he was a less senior staff member, he used to plead the case for adding feature films to the collection.

Third, library officials feel the R-rated policy is appropriate for the community.

Potter says he meets regularly with directors of the other library systems in the area. “The one thing that I am very confident in is that our clienteles are very different. Sometimes things that are more readily and easily acceptable at Kansas City Public Library and [its] clientele or the Johnson County Library — even the Olathe Public Library — may not be as easily acceptable in some of the clientele at the Mid-Continent district.”

Potter notes that the Mid-Continent system covers diverse territory, including portions of Platte County he calls “traditional agricultural communities.” He adds: “We’re all in one metro, but we do have a little bit different norms in some of the outlying areas of the Mid-Continent district.”

Differences that look obvious to Potter may require others to squint. While Mid-Continent has a branch in Dearborn (population: 506), two of its busiest locations are in Lee’s Summit, a community that closely resembles the area served by the Johnson County Library. The district’s “destination” branch, North Independence, is less than three miles from the Trails West branch of the Kansas City Public Library.

Mid-Continent’s avoidance of some R-rated movies, as well as TV series on premium cable channels, creates a level of incoherence in the stacks. The system has eight copies of The Sopranos: The Book but zero copies of The Sopranos, the television show. You can experience Straight Outta Compton by checking out the soundtrack (though the catalog says it’s the “edited” version of the album). The film, which was nominated for an Academy Award in the best original screenplay category, is available only via interlibrary loan.

The selectivity with regard to R-rated movies may not last forever. There was a time, Potter says, when Mid-Continent did not carry television series that were still in production. The policy changed, and today patrons can find DVDs of The Big Bang Theory and Game of Thrones in the catalog.

Potter says he tends to be cautious, using the metaphor about the difficulty of getting toothpaste back into the tube. But he’s not afraid to change.

“We’re dynamic, and we’re going to keep moving,” he says. “Just because we’re doing it this way today doesn’t mean we’re going to do it this way forever.”