X." In 1974, Richard Heffner took over as president of the board. During his interview process, he had asked to screen recent films that had sparked ratings controversies, including The Exorcist. "How could anything be worse than this?" he recalled thinking later. "And it got an R?" After he took over as head, he would spearhead efforts to be more aggressive with the X rating, especially over violence in films. In 1976, he got the board to give the Japanese martial arts film The Street Fighter an X rating for its graphic violence, the first time a film had earned that rating purely for violence. Commercial viability of the NC-17 rating The NC-17 rating has been described as a "kiss of death" for any film that receives it. Like the X rating it replaced, NC-17 limits a film's prospects of being marketed, screened in theaters and sold in major video outlets. In 1995, United Artists released the big-budget film Showgirls (1995); it became the most widely distributed film with an NC-17 rating (showing in 1,388 cinemas simultaneously), but it was a financial failure that grossed only 45% of its $45 million budget. Some modest successes can be found among NC-17 theatrical releases, however; Fox Searchlight Pictures released the original NC-17-rated American edition of the European film The Dreamers (2003) in theaters in the United States, and later released both the original NC-17 and the cut R-rated version on DVD. A Fox Searchlight spokesman said the NC-17 rating did not give them much trouble in releasing this film (they had no problem booking it, and only the Salt Lake City newspaper Deseret News refused to take the film's ad), and Fox Searchlight was satisfied with this film's United States box office result. Another notable exception is Bad Education (2004), an NC-17 foreign-language film that grossed $5.2 million in the United States theatrically (a moderate success for a foreign-language film). In 2000, the Directors Guild of America called the NC-17 rating an "abject failure", for causing filmmakers to re-edit films to receive an R rating, rather than accept an NC-17 rating. They argued that this was "not only compromising filmmakers' visions, but also greatly increasing the likelihood that adult-oriented movies are seen by the very groups for which they are not intended." As of March 2007, according to Variety, MPAA chairman Dan Glickman had been made aware of the attempts to introduce