A petition urging the film-ratings board to overturn the R rating it gave to the teen-centric documentary “Bully” has garnered more than 250,000 signatures, but at least one organization is OK with the decision.

The Parents Television Council praised the Motion Picture Association of America for maintaining the rating despite pressure from the public and the film’s distributors to lower it to PG-13.

The group says its position is based on the language reportedly used in the film. The MPAA also cited language as the reason for the rating.

The council called for increased public involvement in the ratings process.

A Michigan teenager met with MPAA officials this week as part of the campaign to lower the “Bully” rating after collecting signatures online.

A teenage activist has collected more than 200,000 signatures in an effort to change the R rating of the teen-focused documentary “Bully,” but she says the Motion Picture Association of America doesn’t want to make the change.

The 17-year-old Katy Butler met Wednesday with MPAA officials and delivered four boxes of papers containing the signatures she collected online. She is urging the organization to change the film’s rating from R to PG-13 so more young people can see it.

“Bully” follows five young bullying victims and their experiences during the school year.

Joan Graves of the MPAA says that though “Bully” is a “wonderful film,” the organization’s primary responsibility is to provide information to parents about films’ content. “Bully” earned an R rating because of its use of profanity.

The ReelzChannel television network says it scheduled a pro-Sarah Palin documentary on the same weekend as HBO’s “Game Change” debut strictly for business considerations, not political ones.

“The Undefeated,” a Palin documentary by conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon, will have its television premiere on Sunday. It will come 23 hours after HBO opens “Game Change,” based on the 2008 campaign book by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, and starring Julianne Moore as Palin.

Stan Hubbard, ReelzChannel CEO, said he licensed “The Undefeated” for the same reason that his network aired “The Kennedys” miniseries last spring after it was dropped by the History channel — to draw attention to a nearly 6-year-old network with a low public profile. ReelzChannel is in 62 million homes, a little more than half the country.

“For a young network, public relations is important to us, which is why we hunt for opportunistic things,” Hubbard said. Read the full story

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Fresh off his Oscar glory with “The Artist,” there’s no silence for Harvey Weinstein when it comes to his next film.

The famously bellicose producer is protesting the R rating received by a documentary his Weinstein Co. is releasing. “Bully,” directed by Lee Hirsch, is an examination of school bullying that follows five kids and families over the course of a school year.

It received the rating, which restricts kids under the age of 17 from seeing it without an accompanying adult, because of six expletives. Weinstein claims such a rating restricts the very audience the film can most benefit: high school teens.

The Weinstein Co. appealed the decision, but the Motion Picture Association of America, which oversees movie ratings, declined to lower the rating to a PG-13.

“I find it outrageous,” says Weinstein, who has long been renowned for his combativeness. “This is, on a personal level because of my own temper, a redemptive act for me.”

“We’re hoping that smart people come to their senses,” he adds.

Weinstein has threatened to withdraw his future films from the MPAA rating system. But John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theatre Owners, has reminded him that such a tactic would result in theaters treating unrated films as NC-17 movies, which can kill a film’s artistic or commercial success.

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The story of late rap icon Heavy D will be highlighted in a documentary airing Sunday on Centric TV.

The 24-hour channel, part of the BET Network, says “Be Inspired: The Life of Heavy D” will feature interviews with the Jamaican-born rapper’s family and artists such as Will Smith, Mary J. Blige and Queen Latifah.

Heavy D, whose given name was Dwight Myers, is considered one of the most influential rap artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, both as the front man for his group, Heavy D and The Boyz, and as a solo artist. He died last November at age 44, from a blood clot in his lung.

Centric said the documentary includes footage from Heavy D’s last televised performance, at the BET Hip-Hop Awards last October.

An Italian movie showing inmates of a high-security prison staging Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” has been awarded the Berlin film festival’s top award Saturday.

The documentary “Cesar Must Die” by directors Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani received the Golden Bear award out of 18 contenders at what is the first of the year’s major European film festivals.

The Taviani brothers, both in their early 80s, thanked the international jury led by British director Mike Leigh and sent their greetings to the inmates of Rome’s Rebibbia prison who starred in the movie.

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Mike deGruy, an award-winning cinematographer who spent three decades making documentary films about the ocean, was killed in a helicopter crash in eastern Australia. He was 60.

His employer, National Geographic, said Sunday that deGruy and Australian television writer-producer Andrew Wight died Saturday.

Their helicopter crashed soon after takeoff from an airstrip near Nowra, 97 miles north of Sydney, police said. Australia’s ABC News reported that Wight was piloting the copter when it crashed.

DeGruy won multiple Emmy and British Academy of Film and Television Arts, or BAFTA, awards for cinematography.

An accomplished diver and submersible pilot, the Santa Barbara resident was the director of undersea photography for James Cameron’s 2005 documentary “Last Mysteries of the Titanic.”

“Mike and Andrew were like family to me,” Cameron said in a joint statement with National Geographic. “They were my deep-sea brothers and both were true explorers who did extraordinary things and went places no human being has been.”

After spending three years at the University of Hawaii in a Marine Biology Ph.D. program, DeGruy moved to the Marshall Islands, according to his website. He spent three years there, working as the manager of the Mid-Pacific Marine Lab, before transitioning to filmmaking.

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A documentary filmmaker has been arrested at a House hearing after trying to film the proceedings without the required credentials.

Joshua Fox of Milanville, Pa., was charged by Capitol Police on Wednesday with unlawful entry.

Fox directed the anti-drilling documentary “Gasland,” which was nominated last year for an Oscar. Fox also is an activist who has spoken out against hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which was the subject of the House Science, Space and Technology subcommittee hearing.

Fracking takes place when large volumes of water, sand and chemicals are injected into wells to break up underground rock formations, allowing natural gas to escape.

The oil and gas industry has criticized Fox and his film for what they say is a sensationalized attack on fracking.

James Marsh won the documentary prize Saturday at the Directors Guild of America Awards for “Project Nim,” his chronicle of the triumphs and trials of a chimpanzee that was raised like a human child.

It was the latest major Hollywood prize for Marsh, who earned the documentary Academy Award for 2008′s “Man on Wire.” Among those Marsh beat out for the guild award was Martin Scorsese, who had been up for the documentary honor for “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” and also was nominated for the evening’s highest honor, for feature-film directing.

The film favorites were guild awards regular Scorsese for his Paris adventure “Hugo” and first-time nominee Michel Hazanavicius for his silent movie “The Artist.”

Also in the running were Woody Allen for his romantic fantasy “Midnight in Paris”; David Fincher for his thriller “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”; and Alexander Payne for his family drama “The Descendants.”

At the start of the ceremony, Guild President Taylor Hackford led the crowd in a toast to one of his predecessors, Gil Cates, the veteran producer of the Academy Awards broadcast who died last year.

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Turkey has marked the international Holocaust Remembrance Day by airing a French epic documentary about the Holocaust.

TRT television’s documentary channel showed filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” late on Thursday, on the eve of the remembrance day.

The filmaker said this is the first time the film was broadcast on state television in a Muslim country.

The documentary was aired as part of a campaign to promote understanding between Jews and Muslims and to fight Holocaust denial.

In March, a Los Angeles-based Farsi satellite channel had also broadcast the 9-plus-hour documentary in Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned historical accounts of the Holocaust.

Lanzmann worked for 11 years on the film, which was released in 1985.