X is a film classification given to movies that are not suitable for children, and contain things such as extreme violence, strongly implied sex and/or graphic language. In the beginning, the X-rating simply meant for adults only with no suggestion that the movie was especially titillating or explicit.
The Motion Picture Association of America or MPAA introduced this rating in 1968.
Most people think that Birds in Peru (aka Birds Comes to Die in Peru), a drama released in 1968 was the first movie to get the infamous X rating. But in truth, that was self-given, as a marketing ploy. MPAA didn’t label this movie as X-rated.
It seems, however, the first movie to actually get the infamous X rating officially was Greetings, which was the first movie Robert De Niro ever starred in.
According to FilmSite.org – Brian De Palma’s satirical draft-dodger comedy Greetings (1968), (Robert De Niro’s debut film), was the first film in the US to receive the new rating of X by the MPAA – for nudity and profanity (in its original release), although it was later reduced to an R rating.
So what about the XXX rating?
The movie Starlet released in 1969 seems to be the first (at least that I can find) to use the infamous XXX rating. It’s the story of an actress who sleeps her way to the top.
In 1969 the movie Starlet was given an X rating and the producers of the movie rejected it and instead put in their own XXX saying, “So adult one X isn’t enough!”
The X rating of adult titles goes back a long time. In fact, all adult films are considered “X-Rated”. The XXX is simply a marketing tool. There is no XXX rating, nor has there ever been.
So imagine what a great website X.com would be?
XXX.com went up in 1994 but was never really anything more than a portal to point traffic to other websites.
So what about X.com? Well, it looks like any chance it had of becoming a shrine to all the X-rated films we known and love has passed. Last week it was announced that the domain name was sold back to the original owner, Elon Musk of Tesla fame.
In 1999 X.com was started as a site that would later become Paypal. The domain sat in limbo for years until last week Elon Musk repurchased the domain name from Paypal.
There are only so many single letter domain names out there and only two are actually in use, q.com and z.com. The other 23 are held in trust by the US Government.
It is unclear how much he purchased the domain name for, b ut it’s thought to be worth 8 figures easily. Z.com sold for nearly $6.8 million in 2014.
So what will Elon Musk do with X.com? He said he doesn’t know. But he’s open to ideas.
