The producer Lawrence Gordon was convinced that his movie The Warriors would be a major success. The research told him. Word of mouth told him. The year was 1979, before Gordon had produced such hits as Die Hard, Predator, Field of Dreams, and 48 Hours, and he thought that The Warriors—a movie about street gangs—was his ticket to producer Heaven. When the movie opened, long lines at theaters across the country seemed to confirm his hopes. Gordon, who grew up poor in the Mississippi Delta, thought he would finally be fabulously rich. But his euphoria was short-lived. When teenagers left those theaters, violence erupted. In the first week, three killings were linked to the movie. “People went out and pretended they were warriors,” Gordon says. He and Paramount recalled the film.
It was a humbling experience. Now fifty-six and with a graying beard, Gordon still produces action-adventure movies. But when he speaks of the impact of on-screen violence he does not sound, as some others in Hollywood do, like a cigarette manufacturer insisting that there is no conclusive proof that smoking causes cancer. “I’d be lying if I said that people don’t imitate what they see on the screen,” he says. “I would be a moron to say that they don’t, because look how dress styles change. We have people who want to look like Julia Roberts and Michelle Pfeiffer and Madonna. Of course we imitate. It would be impossible for me to think they would imitate our dress, our music, our look, but not imitate any of our violence or our other actions.”
Compared with our current movies—or TV fare, music, books, or advertisements—Gordon’s The Warriors was tame. The average American child, watching around three hours of television a day, has by seventh grade witnessed eight thousand murders and more than a hundred thousand other acts of violence, according to the American Psychological Association. What we see or hear does affect our behavior, even if it doesn’t transform most Americans into killers or rapists. How could it not? More than three thousand studies arrive at a similar conclusion: what appears on the screen influences the behavior or attitudes of viewers, particularly young viewers.
In 1991, the Motion Picture Association of America rated only 16 percent of American movies as fit for kids under thirteen. Yet a PG film is more than three times as likely as an R-rated film to gross over a hundred million dollars at the domestic box office. Twenty-two of the forty-six films that crossed this threshold between 1984 and 1991 were PG rated. Yet the percentage of films with a PG rating has dropped, according to the media research firm Paul Kagan Associates. Which leaves this question: If PG movies generally do better at the domestic box office, why are there so many bloody action-adventure films?
The simple answer is profits—particularly overseas profits. For a hit movie, the studio makes more money from foreign rights, video sales, and rentals than it does from domestic movie theaters. Larry Gordon’s Die Hard 2, for instance, is expected to gross nearly five hundred million dollars, only a third of that total from domestic theaters. “The action genre travels well around the world,” Gordon says. “Everyone understands an action movie. If I tell you a joke, you may not get it, but if a bullet goes through the window we all know how to hit the floor, no matter the language.”
Few deny that violence and sex are often sensationalized to excite rather than inform customers. The studios play a game of Can You Top This? Gordon adds, “We’re aware that people expect something. You need excitement.” Much of this competition is like a mindless arms race, says Hollywood producer Norman Lear, creator of such enduring TV series as All in the Family. “I just brought home Paths of Glory, and there’s not a single ‘fuck’ or a ‘shit’ or even a ‘damn’ in it.”
Of course, another reason for the genre is that America, the country most strongly addicted to the moving image, is among the most violent of Western societies. On average, a violent crime is committed here every seventeen seconds. The entertainment industry alone cannot be blamed for this, any more than guns alone, and not the people who pull their triggers, can be blamed for gun-related deaths. But the connections are inescapable. If there were fewer guns, fewer people would be shot to death; if there were fewer violent images, fewer people might think that violence is a viable option. Little wonder, then, that the American Psychological Association issued a report last year entitled “Big World, Small Screen,” which concluded: “Accumulated research clearly demonstrates a correlation between viewing violence and aggressive behavior—that is, heavy viewers behave more aggressively than light viewers. Children and adults who watch a large number of aggressive programs also tend to hold attitudes and values that favor the use of aggression to solve conflicts.”
The people who help shape our culture are often questioned about their success but rarely about their values, except by the likes of former vice president Dan Quayle, whom they smugly flick aside like a flea. Quayle’s motives were dismissed as political, but “family values”—as any desperately poor teenage mother trying to raise a couple of kids while battling the influence of the streets and the TV screen knows—are not some right-wing confection. Bill Clinton, in an interview with TV Guide which was published just after he was elected president, echoed Quayle, saying that he was “mortified” by much of what is created in Hollywood, and he urged the industry to lead in “deglamorizing mindless sex and violence.” But the entertainment industry as a whole has probably given more thought to the pollution of rivers than it has to the pollution of minds. “They don’t even think about what they put in movies,” a key figure at one of the six major studios says of his colleagues. “The same people who are so enlightened and socially responsible don’t even think about it.”
Don’t they? And, if they do, what limits do they put on themselves? I interviewed a cross section of the executives and artists who decide what we watch on the large or small screen, surprising each of them by asking, “What won’t you do?”
In the office where three of Rupert Murdoch’s secretaries sit, just outside his own office on the Twentieth Century Fox lot, four clocks show the time in Los Angeles, London, Sydney, and Hong Kong, representing four of the continents on which Murdoch’s worldwide media empire operates. No matter how busy he is with his television, movie, cable, newspaper, magazine, and book-publishing enterprises, Murdoch seems to suspend the clocks and the phones when you enter his office. Wearing a white shirt and tie, he greets a visitor and welcomes him with undivided, courteous attention.
What wouldn’t you do?
Murdoch broods a long while before answering the question, his eyes closed. “You wouldn’t do anything that you couldn’t live with, that would be against your principles,” he says. “It’s a very difficult question if you’re a man of conscience. If you thought that you were doing something that was having a malevolent effect, as you saw it, on society, you would not do it. We would never do violence such as you see in a Nintendo game. When I see kids playing Nintendo, and they’re able to actually get their character on the screen to bite his opponent in the face, that’s pretty sick violence. And you watch kids doing this to each other and they’re yelling and laughing for hours on end. Is it all fantasy, and is it all harmless fantasy? I don’t know. There has been violence in movies that we put out. Some of it I dislike.… But is violence justified? Is the violence of Lethal Weapon OK? I think so. If it involves personal cruelty, sadism—obviously, you would never do that. The trouble is, of course, that you run a studio, and how free are you to make these rules? The creative people give you a script and are given last cut on a movie. The next thing, you have a thirty-million-dollar movie in the can which you may disapprove of.”
Murdoch’s Sun, in London, publishes a photograph of a bare-breasted woman on page three every day, and he regards that as harmless fun, but he is critical of the sexually prurient Sharon Stone/Michael Douglas movie Basic Instinct and says, “I wouldn’t have made that picture. The violence, the homosexuality, the varied aspects that were added just for shock effect—it was a film of no redeeming moral values.”
Does he believe that screen violence has an impact on the audience?
“I would tend to believe that,” he answers. “There are different orders of this, and there’s a question of what age people see movies and are affected by them. I’ve seen a lot of very violent movies in my lifetime, and I’ve never been violent.”
Murdoch assails Hollywood liberal groupthink and its knee-jerk reaction against “family values” and against fellow conservative Dan Quayle. He sees Hollywood as a town populated by too many insecure, eager-to-please people, who probably spend too much time consulting their psychiatrists. “This town has a very monolithic view of life,” he says. “You mention things like family values, and they’re terribly suspicious that you’re talking sort of religious rules. It really is very hard to have a discussion here with people of a different opinion about things, the way you can in New York.” In Hollywood, he says, “certain things are accepted as absolute givens—abortion, gay rights.”
How does he reconcile the two Murdochs—the citizen who embraces “family values” with the publisher and programmer who sometimes undermines those values?
“Without being specific or apologizing for anything—I’m sure I’ve made lots of mistakes in sixty-two years—I’m not going to spend my life looking back,” he says. On the other hand, referring to Gerald M. Levin, the CEO of Time Warner, who defended gangsta-rap recording artists, he says, “I’m not going to do a Jerry Levin and say, ‘Hey, everything’s fine under the First Amendment. We publish everything and anything by everybody.’ We don’t. We reserve the right to edit. I think you should not give offense to people’s religious beliefs. For instance, I hope that our people”—at HarperCollins, the Murdoch-owned book publisher—“would never have published the Salman Rushdie book. It clearly went out of its way to give great offense to a lot of people. Now, obviously, I’m not supporting anyone saying, ‘Let’s kill him for it,’ but I think it went to the point of being an abuse of free speech.”
Most senior people in Hollywood, he believes, do wrestle with these value issues, though there are too many, he says, who are “deluded” and think “you can do almost anything under the name of art.” He cites director Oliver Stone’s most recent movie: “I thought that JFK was a fundamentally dishonest movie, and I hope it was a movie we wouldn’t make. Yet I went to see Malcolm X expecting to dislike it and I loved it. I didn’t know much about the subject. And I realized this wasn’t necessarily perfect biography. But it was a very interesting point of view, with interesting insight into some of the black experience.”
During the course of our interview, Murdoch says he is annoyed that a “generally flattering” article in The Economist suggested that his London newspapers have contributed to a “coarsening of British public life.” I ask: Don’t you think a tabloid TV show like Fox’s much-imitated A Current Affair—some of whose recent segments have been headlined “Hollywood Sex,” “Topless Haircut,” “Killer Doctor,” “Sexy Calendars,” “Super Bowl Hookers,” “Felony Nannies,” “Teacher Pervert,” and “Sex Addiction”—have had a coarsening influence on American life?
He replies, “If you want me to get up and defend every film, every program, I won’t do it.” He acknowledges that sometimes A Current Affair “got out of control. ‘Coarsening’? I don’t know. If you were to say that there have been occasions when A Current Affair has treated some subjects sleazily in the past, I’d have to say yes. To say that Hard Copy is sleazier is no defense.” He says he wants A Current Affair to be “a popular edition of Nightline,” and adds “It is changing. That’s what it was intended to be in the first place.” But it is changing very slowly. If one judges by the titles of the 108 half-hour segments of A Current Affair aired between October 1992 and February 1993, sex or violence dominated more than 90 percent of these segments.
Until March of 1993, the executive producer of A Current Affair was a former NBC News producer, John Terenzio, a short, affable man who worked out of a crowded Fox office on East Sixty-seventh Street in Manhattan. Terenzio also says that Fox is planning to clean up the show, so as to attract quality advertisers and respond to research suggesting that viewers were tiring of gratuitous sex and violence.
So what wouldn’t Terenzio do?
He has been accosted by so many sleazy people who wanted money or publicity or retribution that Terenzio seems to have thought more about the question than Murdoch and many of the other people I would interview. He ticked off a list: He wouldn’t pay a convicted felon when there was a victim of the crime, or in the case of a homicide. He wouldn’t invade the privacy of a child. He wouldn’t invade the privacy of an adult by identifying someone as being HIV-positive. He wouldn’t out a homosexual. He wouldn’t, he says, “do anything that makes fun of the average guy—like the story I killed about the controversy in a little town in Kentucky over the fact that a guy had followed the local sheriff around and got a picture of him necking with a woman other than his wife.
“I like to see the program as a guerrilla army,” he explains. “Guerrilla armies are predicated on being armies of the people. They are predicated on having an irreverence towards authority. They are predicated on never being part of the establishment. I like to say it will never be a member of the country club. All of that is good. What I think happened was, the irreverence toward authority creeped into irreverence toward the average guy.”
Terenzio describes other changes the show has made consistent with Murdoch’s vision of a tabloid Nightline. The focus-group research they did late last fall conveyed the strong impression, he says, “that viewer patterns were changing and becoming more conservative.… family values is a real phenomenon. And even in the focus groups we’re doing right now for other shows, they’re indicating a very strong drift away from the freak show, the transvestites, toward ‘What can this magazine show do for me?’ ” Instead of a story ending with a tragic death, says Terenzio, they now try to find, for instance, one about a mother of a victim who launches a one-woman crusade and brings the killer to justice.
“I think there’s a big pullback on sex and violence in general and toward a more meaningful, fulfilling content,” he says. “I’m not saying that they have got to laugh, because the world is so depressing. I’m saying the viewer wants to feel up.”
But is “up” what Terenzio was giving viewers? In the executive producer’s small office a monthly schedule of shows is posted on a board. The shows’ titles holler of scandal, sex, mayhem, and murder.
Terenzio concedes this is true, saying, “With a show like this, we’ve got a moneymaker here. It’s a slow transition.” He admits that the previous night’s program “was a sexy show,” with three screaming segments: “Swaggart Scandal,” “Dead Soap Star,” and “Carnival.” There was a recent segment about the dark-haired woman who slept with Fergie’s father, and a segment on the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of the first Playboy Club. “We have a one-on-one interview with Hugh Hefner,” boasts Terenzio.
And no pictures? Terenzio smiles. Of course there are pictures.
What else won’t you do?
“This program did not pay a hundred thousand dollars for an interview with Amy Fisher, although we were offered it first,” says Terenzio. “We pay for a lot of exclusivity, but not for convicted felons.”
Does being the parent of two young children affect the programs he selects?
“I’ve never put anything on the program I couldn’t defend journalistically, and I’ve put lots on the program I’m really proud of,” he says, before adding, “There’s lots I’ve been uncomfortable with. And when your wife and your friends question it repeatedly, it takes its toll. Unquestionably.”
Did he let his kids watch daddy’s show?
“That’s where I’m going,” says Terenzio. But he’s not there yet.
Oliver Stone, the director of Wall Street and JFK, is a First Amendment absolutist. Stone is currently editing a movie he just filmed for Warner Brothers, Heaven and Earth, and is working out of a makeshift Santa Monica office that looks like a warehouse. He is an intense man whose thinning hair lifts from his head as if electrically charged. He wrestles only briefly with the question “What won’t you do?”
“Off the top of my head, I’d pretty much do anything,” he says. “I don’t view ethics from the outside, only from the inside. What you would find shocking I probably would not. For me, it’s a question of taste.”
For example?
“Lurid, sexual, kinky stuff which I might like privately I don’t necessarily want to do publicly. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘I just don’t subscribe to your bourgeois morality. It bores me.’ You can do anything as long as you do it well. I think Hitler would make a great movie.”
Does he believe, as Bill Clinton does, that Hollywood is too preoccupied with violence and sex?
“That’s an old issue,” Stone says. “I don’t believe that government has the right to legislate art or censor it.” A movie is “a limited art form that sells for three to seven dollars and fifty cents a ticket, and it’s a person’s choice whether to buy it or not. It’s like buying a book. Buying Ulysses once made you commit an illegal action, made you subject to fine and imprisonment. So where is this going to go? Is Tipper Gore going to be our cultural commissar? I resent that. Bill Clinton is talking through his asshole. He’s just catering to the body politic. Nobody’s forcing anybody to go see Bad Lieutenant. But thank God that Abel Ferrara made it. It was an act of liberation. As is Madonna’s Sex book. She has a perfect right. And if Ice-T wants to say what he wants to say about cops, he’s got a right.”
Since few say that Madonna or Ice-T don’t have that right, why does Stone equate criticism with censorship?
“It depends on what form the criticism takes,” he replies. “Aesthetic criticism is fine. If you’re saying, ‘I don’t like the subject matter and I don’t think you have the right to say that,’ you’re engaging in a form of criticism that borders on censorship.”
Does Stone reject the argument that there’s too much violence in movies?
“Yes and no,” he says. “Yes, there’s too much violence when the violence is badly done. I go back to my aesthetic defense. If it’s badly done it becomes obscene. It’s not real. If it’s well done, it has impact, it has a dramatic point, then it has meaning. It’s valid.”
Some people—Rupert Murdoch among them—accuse Stone of dishonesty for promulgating conspiracy theories as facts. How does Stone justify putting words in the mouths of famous men, as he does in JFK?
“It comes out of context,” Stone says. “If you examine the movie, you’ll see that nothing is factually put in. It’s surmised. Donald Sutherland describes a scenario: ‘This could have happened. And that is possible.’ And he lays out a paradigm of possibilities. And you choose. In fact, Lyndon Johnson was quoted in Stanley Karnow’s not necessarily great book as saying, ‘Just let me get elected and then you can have your war.’ ” The quotes from Chief Justice Earl Warren, Stone adds, were taken from a transcript of an interview Warren had had with Jack Ruby. “I didn’t put anything in Warren’s mouth.”
But the movie does put words in people’s mouths, I assert.
“In the suppositions, I put things in Oswald’s mouth,” Stone says.
The movie leaves the clear implication that Lyndon Johnson was part of a conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy. Does Stone think that questioning this implication is “bourgeois morality”?
“In a sense, it is,” he says. “It’s a description of what Barthes called ‘context.’ It is a form of censorship. I’m not saying it’s necessarily an evil one. Understand what I’m saying, because I don’t want to be misquoted on that.”
This is being tape-recorded, I respond.
“Then you better check it,” says the director, who seems to make no connection between his desire to be quoted correctly and his own flexible use of the words of others. Somehow, Stone sees his own practice as artistic freedom, yet if a journalist doctored quotes it would be an outrage. But Stone, at least, has a rationale, however odd it may be. “It is a restriction and it is a form of censorship to demand of history a fact-only basis, because history is subject to interpretation, and reinterpretation,” he asserts. “And the facts are often in dispute.”
Stone believes that the movie-ratings system—a voluntary system—amounts to a form of censorship. “There is a natural law of ethics that operates as a money law,” he says. “There is an economic ethics where if you don’t make an R rating you get the NC-17, and you get kind of frozen out of the theater business. They’re all afraid of that. What is necessary therefore to turn that around is to have a very strong and striking and original NC-17 movie that cleans up and does a tremendous amount of business and excites the world and becomes the next Clockwork Orange, or whatever, that breaks the barriers.… I think Midnight Cowboy got an X in 1969, and it was a powerful and original movie.”
Does Stone oppose any and all ratings systems for movies?
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I think the ratings system is a consumer label that is put on the package to deal with an age-old fear from the nineteen-twenties, of Hollywood being satanic and taking over the minds of the young.”
The man who perhaps more than any other influences the minds of the young is Michael Eisner, the chairman of Disney, and he agonizes very little about morality or violence in films. While he has not made many violent movies, Eisner says of studios that do, “It’s not a moral issue. I’m glad they do it. It brings people to the movie theaters.”
Eisner bristles when asked: What wouldn’t you do?
“I believe there is nothing you should not be allowed to do,” he says. “I don’t believe, strongly, that government has any right to be involved in anything, or almost anything,” related to entertainment. Seated behind a vast blond-wood desk and beside a giant model of Mickey Mouse in an office whose picture window helps convey the feeling of a luxurious chalet, Eisner makes clear that he’s “not interested” in “gratuitously violent movies,” and he rarely made violent or even action-adventure movies when he and Barry Diller ran Paramount Studios.
What does Eisner say to Bill Clinton and others who urge Hollywood to tone down the sex and violence, and who quote from more than three thousand studies showing that television affects the behavior and attitudes of viewers—particularly young viewers?
“There are studies that show the opposite, too,” he says. “That it’s a release from built-in tension. I do not think the president of the United States has an obligation to encourage censorship. There’s nothing wrong with him expressing his opinion. I don’t disagree with that.”
Why is Eisner raising the specter of censorship? Even when Dan Quayle criticized Murphy Brown last May, he was not advocating censorship.
“The majority of people don’t want the government to tell the writers of Murphy Brown what to write,” Eisner says. “I’ll tell you what I am offended by. I’m offended by those who get on a platform and berate Hollywood for violence in the movies, on the one hand, and ignore the proliferation of handguns—something that they could do something about—on the other. That hypocrisy really annoys me.”
What about the assertion that people in Hollywood don’t think about the social consequences of what they do?
“What is Hollywood?” Eisner responds heatedly. “I personally think that I’m very responsible. And I think our company is very responsible.”
Does Eisner agree with a producer who said he would not allow his ten-year-old to see any of the movies he made?
“I would never make a movie that I would not allow my ten-year-old to go to,” he says. “I find that disingenuous. Now, maybe ten is not the line. Maybe it should be twelve or thirteen.”
Would he encourage a child of ten—or thirteen—to see Disney’s violent and scary The Hand That Rocks the Cradle?
“To me, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was a complete fantasy,” Eisner says. “It was a fantasy. It ended up being pro-social, in that there was a whole re-look at the question of leaving your children with people who haven’t given you decent references. That was a silly movie. A fun movie.”
Does Eisner see a distinction between real and cartoon violence?
“I don’t think that anybody thinks that movies like The Terminator are real,” he says. “I’m not sure that they don’t relieve pressure more than they create it. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t want to sit in judgment. I don’t think about it that much.” Eisner does get upset, however, “when Hollywood is lumped together in a homogenized group. I object when they depict everybody as kind of striving for that last dollar. It’s very easy to hide your own lack of action by blaming some film producer who’s made some action movie that doesn’t fulfill all the moral criteria that a perfect society would dictate. That’s an easy shot.”
The producer who says he wouldn’t let his ten-year-old see any of his movies is Martin Bregman, who has produced such films as Sea of Love, Scarface, Serpico, and The Seduction of Joe Tynan. Bregman works in Manhattan, in an office overflowing with movie scripts. He speaks in the accents of the streets of New York, on which he was raised. Like Larry Gordon, he’s an independent filmmaker.
What won’t you do?
Bregman glances at a table beside his desk, where there are photographs of his family, and says, “I have a ten-year-old daughter. She’s never seen any of my movies. I have no complaint with the R rating. I don’t let my kids see any R-rated film.”
Asked for an example of a film he wouldn’t make, he says, “A film that extolls the virtue of crime. I don’t want to knock any studios, but there are things that would be personally offensive to me. I wouldn’t do a film that denigrates any particular group. I wouldn’t do what I wouldn’t do in my life.”
Are there movies he’s made, scenes he’s shot, that he regrets?
“The whole movie? No,” he says. “I don’t think there is a movie that I have been involved in that I wouldn’t redo a small piece or some sections of it. But I’m not unusual.”
What about Scarface, which received an R rating because of its violence?
“Scarface was always conceived as an opera,” Bregman says. “Always conceived as larger than life.” Directed by Brian de Palma and scripted by Oliver Stone, the film is not particularly violent, certainly when compared with contemporary films like Lethal Weapon. The gory scene in Scarface where a drug dealer gets tortured with a chain saw is imagined, not seen, as blood splatters a bathroom. Since this movie is about pathological drug dealers, Bregman assumes that for an audience to feel the characters they must feel their madness.
Still, Bregman, like others in the movie business, is torn by contradictory impulses. As a moviemaker, he believes that the voluntary ratings system is a form of censorship. “I don’t like someone telling me what I can say,” he says. As a parent, however, he welcomes it. “If there were no ratings, I’d first have to go see each movie before allowing my daughter to go,” he says. On the one hand, Bregman continues, he thinks the influence of film violence is overstated and believes the entertainment industry is blamed when responsibility properly rests with the family. On the other hand—he lifts a copy of a glossy international film magazine thick with advertisements, points to the full-page ads that beckon viewers with violence and sex, and says, “There are a lot of irresponsible people out there. Warner Brothers, Disney, they all make them. They make these films to make money.”
There are those who say that Columbia Pictures’ Lethal Weapon is too violent and might pollute the minds of kids. Mark Canton, who has been the chairman of Columbia since 1991, is not among them. In Canton’s grand office, he is surrounded by bouquets of fresh pink and white and yellow flowers, framed photos of Redford and Stallone, and posters of movies he’s made. He was born in Bayside, Queens, forty years ago, and New York still flavors his speech. He is wearing a cream-colored double-breasted suit, which he keeps buttoned.
Canton speaks grandly of movies, the way a De Mille or Selznick might. “Unless we continually reshape the future, continually reinvent and create original stories and new things, the audience isn’t going to show up,” he says. “… What wouldn’t I do? So far I haven’t found it out. All I know is that in my heart I wouldn’t do what I’ve already done—do it again, the same way. And that even goes for a sequel. That I wouldn’t do.”
You won’t do sequels?
“Oh, I will do sequels. But I won’t do sequels that are the same as the movie that made you want to make a sequel.” He mentions the most successful sequel in years, Lethal Weapon 2, which he bought when he was at Warner Brothers. “The original movie grossed sixty-three million in theaters,” he says. “Lethal Weapon 2 grossed a hundred and forty-eight million.… The message was bigger. The likability was bigger. The entertainment factor was bigger and better.”
He speaks of his movies as if they were art, with sweeping narratives and profound messages. “It is true that I would not want to make movies that are socially irresponsible and that could cause real harm,” he says. “I approach each day by thinking that the art form, that the opportunities that lie within the process of making a movie are almost limitless.… Often, movies anticipate what society is about rather than merely reflecting what it’s about. You end up on both sides of that equation. I think that by and large there are several messages in the first Lethal Weapon. Dick”—Richard Donner, the director—“had a little thing about ‘Don’t eat tuna.’ And he got that in. And there was also a message about condoms, which he got in. There were lots of messages within the drama, and that is part of the reason people felt it was very accessible to the real world. So I think if you can have stories, and I think Lethal is one of them, in which the bond, the relationship between the cops and Danny’s family, and Mel as a loner, was such that you have an emotional connection—when you have that, you succeed. When you have movies that are violence for violence’s sake, you don’t succeed.”
So what won’t Canton do?
“I would not consciously involve us in any motion picture that I really felt was without any logical component to the story, any redeeming overt value.”
So what movies does he think went over the edge?
Canton declines to name any. Instead, he retreats to the high ground, saying that he senses—and that Columbia’s research confirms this—that “PG movies, by far, have become more popular.” Perhaps this is why the new Arnold Schwarzenegger feature, Last Action Hero, is more like a James Bond movie, without blood, without graphic violence or language. “I believe there is starting to be a turn toward the family movie,” Canton says, calling it a “new mood” in Hollywood. Yet a moment later he interjects, “What I don’t like, what I won’t allow myself to be, is censored by the critics—the Michael Medveds.”
Hollywood has a “bias for the bizarre,” Medved wrote in his 1992 book Hollywood vs. America, which catalogues one gory detail after another in mass-marketed films, videos, and records—episodes in which performers drink urine, rip toenails out with pliers, and torture women. Why is it “censorship” if a movie critic and author like Medved urges—as he does, and as Canton seemed to be doing at one point in our conversation—that moviemakers think more about the consequences of what they put on the screen?
Canton replies by flashing his liberal badge. “We were the people in the sixties who were advocating peace,” he says. “We were out there. We worked at the social issues. And we are the responsible citizens and leaders now. I believe we know how to manage ourselves.” He becomes heated. “I think of a guy like Michael Medved,” he says, “and I watch this guy in Texas on television who’s decided that he’s Jesus Christ … and ten to fifteen people are dead around him.”
What does cult leader David Koresh, who killed four federal agents when they stormed his Waco, Texas, compound, have to do with Michael Medved?
Canton slows his motor, and says, “It’s dangerous for anyone to be so set in their ways that they feel that anything that’s outside of something that has specific rules is irresponsible and unsafe.”
A small studio that has managed itself well, both making money and producing or distributing quality movies, is Miramax Films, which was recently acquired by Disney. Miramax’s output includes The Crying Game, Cinema Paradiso, My Left Foot, The Grifters, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Passion Fish, Reservoir Dogs, and Enchanted April. Miramax is the creation of two brothers from Queens, Harvey and Robert Weinstein, who, as boys, went to see every Fellini and Visconti film and argued for hours afterward about what the filmmaker meant. Miramax’s offices in Tribeca, in lower Manhattan, help explain why they make movies so cheaply. There is no aquarium-size fish tank, such as one finds at Warner Brothers, no sleek blond-wood walls and desks and reflecting pool, as at Disney, no stained-glass windows and fresh flowers, as at Columbia. Miramax’s offices look like those of a college newspaper, with metal desks jammed together and mountains of papers strewn about. And Harvey Weinstein looks like a delicatessen owner—unshaven, smoking constantly, his belly bulging under a short-sleeved green knit shirt.
What won’t you do?
“I wouldn’t put violence for violence’s sake on a movie screen,” he says. But, he adds, the subject is more complicated than that. For instance, his wife found Reservoir Dogs excessively violent and walked out when Miramax screened it. “It was too real,” he says. “It wasn’t cartoon violence.” Still, Weinstein feels that the movie accurately depicts the banality of the lives of six small-time hoods with hair-trigger tempers. To his wife, it was gruesome; he thought it was art. “At the end of the day, it’s back to your own personal taste,” he says. “Is Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven art, or is it gratuitous violence? I thought it was a great film. Yet I know a lot of women who felt it was gratuitous violence.”
What else wouldn’t he do?
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t want to do things to inspire criminal activity. On a prejudice level, I don’t want to do anything to encourage racism of any sort.” He is not troubled by the ratings system. “I understand the need for it. Children are involved. You have to let children and parents know.” The censorship Weinstein worries most about is not the ratings system, or politicians who criticize Hollywood, or the political correctness that Murdoch complains about. Rather, it is the homogenization of “a company town where ideas tend to get mingled” and where high-overhead studios search frantically for formulas or “the idea or flavor of the month” and end up putting material through the same Cuisinart, thus failing to do what he says a good movie must: “It takes you to a place you’ve never been to before.”
As the mother of a six-year-old boy, Deborah Winger gets livid when she hears that Oliver Stone calls movie ratings a form of censorship. “That’s bullshit!” the actress exclaims in a telephone interview. “He gets to do whatever he wants. We just want to let people know by some code what it is, so they can decide whether to take their six-year-old or not. Where’s his conscience?”
Unlike Stone, Winger finds “gratuitous violence” and kinky sex in too many movies. Like Murdoch, she has not always lived up to her professed standards. But her attitude changed when her son, Noah, was born. “I don’t have any nannies, or anything,” says Winger, who left Los Angeles to bring up her son alone in upstate New York. “So when I go out to the movies I usually have to go see something he can see, unless I have a night out. But when I want to see something that’s going to entertain me as well, I find it sort of startling.” She scans the small boxes in movie ads, searching for PG ratings. She worries about violence. She worries about foul language. She worries about explicit sex. As an actress in search of interesting roles, she saw these ratings as a threat. Now that she is a parent, she sees them as a guide.
Sometimes she won’t let Noah see films that carry a PG-13 label. “I wouldn’t let him see Home Alone,” she says. “I hate films where the parents are idiots.” She also hated the joy that the son, played by MacCauley Culkin, took in committing acts of violence. “I took Noah to see A River Runs Through It, which was great,” she says. “But, my God, getting him through the coming attractions—I had to throw a body block!”
What won’t Debra Winger do?
“Gratuitous violence, to me, is not entertaining,” she answers. “A lot of people can file it as pure entertainment. I have not been without violent moments in my films, but they’re limited, and they’re very specific. And, even then, it’s my least favorite thing. I mean, somebody blowing away fifteen people in the first reel!”
Besides gratuitously violent movies, what else won’t Deborah Winger do?
“Gratuitous sex, though that may be an oxymoron! I think ‘gratuitous’ is the key word. I like things that are integral.”
Does she have a theory as to why Hollywood makes so many movies with gratuitous sex or violence?
“It’s cheap, and it appeals to the lowest, the basest, part of a human being.… I’m not putting down Arnold Schwarzenegger, but let him say one stupid line and it’s a formula now. I’m not saying every film has to be an art film. But when you look at Errol Flynn in the original Robin Hood, the dialogue is fantastic. It’s witty. It’s really action-packed. It’s adventurous. It’s romantic. And it moves.”
Why do so many Hollywood figures get defensive about what they view as censorship?
“They’re all killers,” she says. “They go from being devoted to their families to being killers. They’re cutthroat. When I talk to them about their kids, this is where I find a big defensiveness comes up. They’re doing things out in the world that are very, very questionable. And they’re all these sort of liberal Democrats. It’s all very confusing. It’s almost as if they never paused and looked at the whole picture. I see people who go along and their kids are gathered like assets—you know, ‘I have three children now.’ ” In Winger’s view, Hollywood itself, with its insularity and its comfortable way of life, shields people from reality, and that may explain why there is a disjunction between the movies made and the individuals who make them. “I’m a strong believer in adversity, and, with the weather out there being what it is, and everybody with three cars, and everything there for you, it’s sort of tragic, in a weird way,” she says. “There’s no feeling of how the world really works.”
Steven Seagal writes, produces, and stars in the kind of violent action adventures that Deborah Winger shields her son from. A former martial-arts instructor, Seagal has now starred in five popular films, often playing the role of an avenger who takes the law into his own hands to crush the forces of darkness. The violence can be gruesome. In Marked for Death, for example, a film made by Murdoch’s studio, Seagal cuts off and holds up the head of a drug-dealing Rastafarian. Seagal is currently casting for a movie he is making for Warner Brothers, and works out of a bungalow on the studio’s Burbank lot. For a visitor he affects a solemn mien, moving languidly, speaking in a sweet, almost Michael Jackson-like purr. He is wearing a double-breasted blazer over a dark shirt buttoned at the collar. His dark hair is swept straight back into a short ponytail.
What won’t you do?
“The no-no’s for me certainly include making pictures that are simply exploitive. I’ve been forced to make movies that I didn’t care for, and tried to turn them into something that they originally weren’t. And I’m finally getting the power in my career to make the kind of movies that I want to make.” He mentions Hard to Kill as a film he “didn’t want to make,” as if he had been forced to make it. The film was “about nothing,” he says, and was “a piece of shit.”
Does he worry about the impact of the violence in his films?
“Absolutely,” he says. “The only thing I can say is that I get thousands and thousands of letters from all over the world—I guess probably hundreds of thousands.” Most of those who write look upon him “as a positive role model,” he says. “So I must be doing something in my films to give that impression. I never did violence in any of my pictures that was unjustifiable.” He defends the vigilante roles he has played, saying, “The judicial system is very flawed, and it’s very seldom that the bad guys get their comeuppance.”
Is he concerned that his movies might encourage vigilantism?
“No,” he answers, “because I think history has sort of proven that if people were more rebellious in their thought the system would have to change for the better, because it’s not working. History has proven that people are so complacent that they are being slowly devastated by urban life the way it is.”
Michael Ovitz, who is the chairman of the Creative Artists Agency, one of the three major Hollywood talent agencies, was once one of Seagal’s martial-arts students. Though Ovitz doesn’t run a studio, or make movies or television shows, or write books and screenplays, he represents many of the most influential people who do, including Seagal. There is about Ovitz none of the flamboyance usually associated with Hollywood—no shirt opened to the navel, no sunglasses, no sneakers or high fives. His manner is earnest, his tie is always fixed tight, his short sandy hair is neatly parted, and a slight gap between his two front teeth lends him a boyish appearance. In his imposing office, divided into a seating area with an oversized L-shaped couch and a work area with an antique desk with fastidiously arranged notepads and piles of paper, visitors are surrounded by the African sculptures and modern art that Ovitz avidly collects.
There is a widespread belief in the Hollywood colony that Ovitz doesn’t talk to the press. In fact, he talks to many reporters but usually insists on not being quoted. On my visit, he stares disapprovingly at the tape recorder, saying he prefers not to have his words preserved. Then he relents, and sits quietly, rarely using his arms to gesture.
What wouldn’t Michael Ovitz do?
“Let me start by telling you how we operate on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “We have meetings every single day. All of the projects—incoming rights materials, ideas, newspaper stories, magazine articles—are reviewed.” He mentions the saga of Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco. “In the context of one of those meetings,” he says, “it came to my attention that we were offered by the lawyer for one of the principals the rights to put it together as a movie or a television movie. And I declined to get involved. I really thought that it was not something that this company should associate itself with. Now, by the way, three networks did movies on it. And reasonable men differ. I’m not sitting here passing judgment.”
Why did he make that choice?
“I was just exceedingly uncomfortable with the whole story and the reality of it—the tabloid reality of it. That’s not to say that some of the fiction that we get involved with is better or worse.”
What other projects would CAA decline to represent?
“I can’t say in a blanket statement like that,” Ovitz replies. “I would never comment on creative people’s work. It’s not our job to do anything but advise and attempt to be almost pre-editors for them. It’s not our job to tell creative people what not to do—unless we think it’s morally reprehensible. These are not legal, or even ethical, issues. We are the agents, not the principals. We’re not a studio.”
What about Madonna’s Sex book, which many critics dismissed as pornographic? Did Ovitz have qualms about representing the book?
“I think she is brilliant,” he says. “I have to tell you that. So I have a personal bias. Whether I agree or disagree with the content of what she does is not relevant. That’s a personal issue. When she described the book to us, I thought the whole concept was quite well thought out. The idea of a book being sealed, so it took on a certain taboo, if you will—I’m using her words.” He says that CAA represented Madonna on the basis of her oral description of the book: “This was her vision. I had no sense at all of what the content of the book was going to be like. It covered a subject that’s as old as the hills, just in a different way. This is a woman who consistently reinvents herself every year. That doesn’t happen by accident. I think she’s really smart. Did I agree with all the pictures in there? It’s not relevant. I didn’t know what was in her mind. I only had a vague sense of it when she laid it out for us.”
Ovitz has three young children. Would he let them read the book?
Ovitz hesitated, seemingly embarrassed by the question. “I’m not going to get into it,” he says. “I don’t believe that anyone’s forced to go see anything. No one was forced to go see Madonna’s book, by the way. And it was in a sealed cover. In order to see it, you had to buy it. Or see somebody else’s. That’s a personal choice. It’s like going to see movies. It’s self-choice.”
Does he believe that violence has an impact on audiences, particularly kids?
“Yes and no,” Ovitz replies. He says that seeing a violent film is a question of choice, and the violence in movies is often “not real.” He continues, “People aren’t really getting killed. When you were a kid people said, ‘Let’s make believe.’ ”
Asked again if he thought movie violence had impact, he says, “I absolutely think it has an impact on kids. It becomes a framework on which children build. I remember all the things of my childhood. They’ve been my framework for my own value system, and I grew up in the fifties in Los Angeles.”
Ovitz believes the movie business corrects its excesses, and that if there are too many violent and too few PG movies, the situation will change. Yet he also believes that what drives the rush for action-adventure movies is the need to top the other guy with slam-dunk special effects, with novelty, with huge hits that can help subsidize other pictures. Then he veers off and says, “I don’t believe this has to be a business of hits. I believe it is possible to have a very mixed business. I think Warner Brothers has proven that very nicely. Warners has had its share of hits, but nowhere near what a lot of other companies have. It’s hit a lot of singles and doubles. It has a real mix of movies, and it’s to be complimented for it. The same company can do Driving Miss Daisy and JFK and Batman and Lethal Weapon.”
Of course, Batman Returns is a grimly violent film, and the body count in Lethal Weapon rivals that of the Vietnam War. But Ovitz still believes that Warners is special, because it has been managed by Robert A. Daly, its chairman, and his president, Terry Semel, for more than a decade, whereas most studios change their management far more often. “In a lot of companies, there’s an enormous amount of turmoil and turnover,” Ovitz says. “And what that creates is short-term thinking.… That instability creates bad product.”
Few producers turned out more product or made more money in the eighties than Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Together, they produced such box-office blockbusters as Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, and Flashdance. Today they make their home at the Walt Disney Studios, where they have a number of film projects in various stages of development. The partners’ personalities differ, as is signaled by their choice of drinks at the bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Simpson, the more voluble and flamboyant of the duo, with blondish hair that cascades in his face, orders a martini. Bruckheimer, who is rail-thin, wears a short beard, and defers to his partner to answer questions first, orders a Coca-Cola. However, they think as one about the kind of movies they wish to make.
What won’t Simpson and Bruckheimer do?
One no-no, says Simpson, is this: “We’ve never had a principal character in our movies that smokes.” Nor, he adds, are they comfortable with “gratuitous violence,” because “I believe the excessive amount of violence on television and in movies contributes to the plethora of violence on our streets.”
The partners, particularly Simpson, who grew up in Alaska, see themselves as renegades, as not part of the politically correct Hollywood culture. They share Murdoch’s concern that self-censorship is the greatest menace. “This town reminds me of the most cliquish high-school environment,” says Simpson. “It’s people trying to take the appropriate moral high ground: ‘How could you not be for this concept. It’s the right thing.’ This is a town that engages in its own political censorship.” Where Simpson and Bruckheimer join the Hollywood chorus—and diverge from Murdoch—is that they fear the heavy hand of the government censor. Asked about President Clinton’s critique of violence, Simpson says, “I don’t want anyone to tell me how to run my life.… We’re here to tell the truth.”
Who said anything about censorship?
“Clinton is president of the U.S.,” Simpson explains. “Our franchise is popcorn. I don’t fear censorship from Clinton. I think he’s a sane man. But there are people in Washington who don’t want to see the word ‘fuck’ in movies.”
Hollywood may traffic in violent movies, but it doesn’t traffic in public criticism of fellow members of the colony. Few executives speak on the record of actual movies they wouldn’t have made or actual performances they wouldn’t have produced. Music executive and movie producer David Geffen (who sold his Geffen Records to MCA in 1990) is an exception. When Geffen is asked, What won’t you do? he answers instantly: “Rather than talk about what I wouldn’t do in the abstract, I wouldn’t put out the Geto Boys record or Andrew Dice Clay.” These performers, he says, “celebrated murder” or were “homophobic.” (Geffen did produce albums by Guns N’ Roses that were widely regarded as containing homophobic material.) Unlike Time Warner, Geffen says, he would not produce an album by Ice-T: “I’m not going to put out a record about killing policemen.”
What would Geffen say to those who claim that he threatens artistic freedom?
“They’re free to make these records,” he says. “And other companies are free to distribute them. I’m not going to do it. I’m not saying they don’t have the right to do this. I’m simply saying I have the right not to sell them. It’s about responsibility. It’s not about artistic freedom or censorship.”
Geffen, who dresses Hollywood casual in T-shirts and jeans, who is a devout liberal and a billionaire who regularly jets between New York and Los Angeles on his private Gulfstream, nevertheless enjoys going against the grain of the Hollywood colony. He believes Hollywood is an often silly town, populated by executives who too rarely read or reflect. He dares defend Tipper Gore, who was denounced as a censor, or worse, when she proposed that records be voluntarily labeled. “I agree with that,” Geffen says. “Labeling is not an infringement on anybody’s rights. It comes off with the plastic cover. This is about giving parents a way to be responsible with their children.”
Aside from questions of personal taste, does he believe music or pictures can do harm?
“There’s no question they do,” he says one Sunday morning over a bowl of hot oatmeal at E.A.T., a food emporium on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “To this very day, Stanley Kubrick has not allowed Clockwork Orange to be distributed in England because he lives there. The normal person will not become violent from a movie. But there are people who are encouraged by things they read, things they hear or see.” He is a fervent political supporter of Bill Clinton and agrees with his criticism of Hollywood.
Geffen is quick to emphasize that he does not advocate censorship—that he believes “there are a great many people” in Hollywood “who really do care” and think about quality. But he also believes that the limitations—and the excesses—of the entertainment business spring from the weaknesses of the people in charge. “Too many people who are involved in the world of making movies don’t read, don’t have a sense of the written word,” he says. “They have no sense of story, and so they’re not burdened by seeing a movie that has no story. They have one overriding concern: Will it make money?”
The director James L. Brooks is burdened by a quality that seems foreign to, say, Oliver Stone: ambivalence. He has written and directed Broadcast News and Terms of Endearment, He is executive producer of The Simpsons on the Fox network and was a co-writer of such television classics as Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Yet when Brooks is asked “What won’t you do?” he answers, “I’m confused. There’s almost nothing I can say that I could not contradict. There’s no question in my mind that as the parent of two young children, I have to wait a long time to find movies I can take them to. Yet the movie I’m making now—I’ll Do Anything—I wouldn’t take my kids to.”
Brooks concurs with the belief of Oliver Stone and Michael Eisner that any strictures would place a ceiling on his imagination. Yet he applauds the Federal Communications Commission’s recent announcement that it will more strictly police the content of Saturday-morning cartoons. “We wouldn’t question it for a second if the government moved against drunk driving,” he says.
But Brooks comes back to the gray areas. A different standard should apply to comedy, he says, because the implicit message is “We’re kidding.” So the no-no’s on The Simpsons, he says, tend to be “ ‘Oh, come on. Not another magic joke!’ ” In making this popular show, Brooks says, “The number one rule is ‘It’s got to be funny.’ One rule that I’m not confused about is that Bart Simpson has to be a role model. I don’t believe that. Once we were told, ‘Mary Tyler Moore has to be a model for feminism.’ That’s bizarre. You don’t write Bart Simpson or Mary Tyler Moore to be what children want to be or should be. They’re characters.”
The creators of The Simpsons meet regularly, he says, and if they err, it is usually “on the side of bad taste. It’s the nature of our show.… The kid is brash, the family is dysfunctional. I hope we don’t do that so we lose Marge’s good heart. We have a self-righteous good neighbor who drives Homer crazy. The guy’s a good man. Somebody’s going to tell us one day in a book what the show’s about.”
Sometimes, as Larry Gordon learned with The Warriors, it’s impossible to anticipate audience reaction. Should a filmmaker think about how the audience may respond? No, says John Landis, who worries that such thinking contains the seeds of censorship.
At forty-two, Landis has directed thirteen feature-length movies, many of which have fared better with audiences than with critics, including National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, and Three Amigos. He has also directed two Michael Jackson videos. In discussing one of these videos—Black or White, made in 1991—Landis inadvertently provides ammunition to those who claim Hollywood indulges itself too much and thinks too little of consequences. In making this eleven-minute video, Landis recalls, Michael Jackson looked at some footage and said, “It’s not dazzling enough.”
The last half of the video “was basically an improvisation,” Landis says. The video was being shot outdoors in downtown Los Angeles, and Jackson had the idea of letting the music and his mood take him where they would. The intensity mounted. As Jackson danced, he noticed a garbage can, and, impulsively, he grabbed it and heaved it into a store window, shattering the glass. He picked up a crowbar and smashed up a parked car. The violence was unscripted. Landis liked it. “Any Saturday-morning cartoon show has more violence than that,” he says.
But then Jackson further indulged himself, grabbing his crotch and simulating masturbation. He rubbed or squeezed or pulled down the zipper of his fly a total of thirteen times. The choreographer applauded, mentioning that Madonna and Prince did this as well. Jackson saw this as an act of liberation from accepted norms.
At first, Landis was uneasy. “I pointed out that it’s not Michael,” he recalls. But Jackson felt that this was “what he wanted to do,” Landis says, and he went along. At least, it was a bold attempt at self-expression, he says, adding, “Who’s to say that’s a bad thing?”
Thousands of parents said it was a bad thing. The public furor prompted Jackson to apologize and Landis to quickly sanitize the video. (Today, Landis notes, MTV airs the original, uncut version of the video.)
What wouldn’t John Landis do?
“Off the top of my head, I couldn’t give you a strict Islamic code,” he says. “It depends on the context.” As a general rule, doing a film about a rape was always a no-no—until he saw The Accused, with Jodie Foster, and glimpsed that it could be done in a meaningful way.
Landis has no trouble with the movie-rating system, believing that it was established “to prevent government censorship” and pointing out that “the MPAA doesn’t say to you, ‘You can’t do this.’ ” However, like Oliver Stone and others, he seems to believe that censorship is a real danger to Hollywood. “Right now in America, people are taking Huckleberry Finn off bookshelves,” he says. When asked about Dan Quayle’s criticism of Hollywood’s “cultural elite,” he says, “The last time I heard that was in Berlin!”
Tom Freston had final say on whether MTV aired the Michael Jackson video. For the past thirteen years, he has run the MTV network, which now reaches fifty-seven million American homes and two hundred and fifteen million worldwide. Another twenty-five million homes are reached though Nickelodeon, the children’s channel Freston also oversees. About 90 percent of MTV’s audience is between the ages of twelve and thirty-four. Although he is considerably older, at forty-seven, than his core audience, Tom Freston doesn’t fit the stereotype of a CEO. With a thatch of brown hair flopping on his forehead and his tie askew, he plops onto a couch as the TV set behind him blares an MTV report of a Calvin Klein fashion show, with bare-chested young men swaying down the fashion runway, thumbs stuck in their Calvin jeans.
Freston rears his head back to collect his thoughts, then rests his chin on clasped fists and says, “The cardinal sin has always been, I think, in television, to do anything that really affronts anyone’s religious beliefs. That has been the cardinal sin. We saw that recently with Sinéad O’Connor”—the singer tore up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live. “We have standards in place for MTV and Nickelodeon that are all the standard no-no’s. You know, gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence.”
What’s an example of gratuitous violence or sex?
“Gratuitous violence is violence for the sake of violence,” says Freston. “There doesn’t seem any reason for it to exist other than to shock. The person who inflicts the violence largely goes unpunished, either directly or by inference.” He hastens to add that neither MTV nor Nickelodeon is “a green vegetables network,” nor do they carry only “goodie-goodie programming.”
He describes MTV’s screening mechanism, which is a miniature version of the broadcast-standards departments of the big three television networks. Profanity and nudity are not allowed on MTV or most cable networks, he says.
Do MTV’s broadcast standards operate by some set formula, or are subjective judgments made on a case-by-case basis?
“It’s a bunch of people that sit there and stuff comes in and they’ll look at it. They’ll say, ‘This is questionable. This is no. This is fine.’ And if it’s questionable they’ll generally go over it with the programming person and they have discussions. Because it’s usually discussions about gray issues.… We did a video once for Cher where she was dancing around some battleship in a rather scanty outfit and we heard loud and clear from our viewers. We had tons of callers who complained about it. It was unsuitable for young children, who happened to be in the room even though it wasn’t meant for young children. So basically we wouldn’t air something like that until ten P.M. or eleven P.M.”
What about the MTV videos with young women who simulate fellatio, or the dance partners who grind and squeeze each other’s buttocks?
“There’s an inference of sex,” says Freston. “You won’t see any actual sex.” In any case, he carefully adds, “We don’t make the videos, so we don’t control what is in them.”
So he ducks responsibility?
No, Freston says. “We turned down Madonna’s Justify My Love, because there was nudity in it. We did not run it. She ended up going on Nightline, which I find particularly interesting because [it] was rated the highest Nightline episode since they went on the air. Better than the Iranian hostage crisis!”
Now that MTV is a brand name, and President Clinton has said it helped him get elected, does this power make Freston think more about the nature of MTV’s responsibility?
“We think about it a lot,” he says. “We know we have a big responsibility.” Yet Freston describes another, sometimes contradictory, responsibility, to his business. Rock and roll, “which is our sort of major currency,” he says, is “this rebellious art form that’s anti-authority, anti-establishment.… You want to be somewhat true to the notion and soul of rock and roll being sort of not an establishment art form. Does that mean you have to be irresponsible? I don’t think so. I think, actually, if you listen to a lot of the lyrics of the rock-and-roll music, there are probably more prosocial messages buried in their lyrics about hope and love and transcendence than a lot of other stuff that’s being put out.”
As chairman and CEO for a dozen years of one of the world’s five largest companies, General Electric, Jack Welch is a man of ferocious energy. Uncomfortable in a chair, he paces his office, offering staccato replies to most questions. Yet he slows and settles into a leather chair in his conference room on the fifty-third floor of 30 Rockefeller Center when asked: What wouldn’t you allow NBC to do?
“I’m not the right person to ask this,” Welch says, noting that GE owns but does not run the network. “I think Bob Wright [president of NBC] is clearly the right person to ask this. The one thing I think you can’t do, you can’t in any way violate … standards of integrity.… You can’t shade the truth.”
Asked for an example, Welch immediately cites Dateline, the NBC News magazine show that recently was caught doctoring and sensationalizing the fiery crash of a GM truck. “But that wasn’t a Jack Welch or GE decision,” he says. “That was an NBC decision to do that. You can’t do that.”
What of other shows—such as the Amy Fisher/Joey Buttafuoco soap operas that NBC and ABC and CBS rushed to make? “I didn’t watch it on any one of the three of them,” he says, later adding, “I’m not into programming like [Michael] Eisner is and other people are. That’s their business. It’s not my business. It’s Bob Wright’s business. It’s the station general managers’ business. They’ve got to operate within licenses. They’ve got to operate within a certain set of standards. I presume they do that.”
As a parent or a citizen, I ask, does Welch find himself blanching at what he sees on his network, including teasers for a series on teenage sex that WNBC was promoting as we spoke?
“I don’t watch those shows,” Welch says. “I’m never home at six P.M. for the news.” What Welch watches regularly on television, he says, is the morning shows, particularly on CNN, when he exercises, and the weekend news, particularly on Sunday mornings. (This is one reason GE is a big advertiser on NBC’s Meet the Press and ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley.) But with Bob Wright and Donald Ohlmeyer, whom he and Wright recently installed as president of NBC Entertainment in California, Welch feels he has delegated well. “I have, in Bob Wright, the CEO of this business,” he says. “In this Dateline thing, for example, Bob Wright made me feel very proud of him, very proud of his behavior. He looked at it. He said, ‘Jack, we’ve got an issue, we’ve got to deal with it straight up.’ Absolutely. I think Bob Wright has good taste. I think he watches a lot of television. He does have kids. He has wonderful values.”
Was there a dichotomy between Jack Welch as citizen, father, friend and Jack Welch as businessman, whose network and stations air programs and promotions that he wouldn’t want his own young kids to watch?
“I think Larry Tisch [CBS] and Dan Burke [ABC] have different answers to this,” he says. “Tisch and Burke are CEOs of their own networks. It is absolutely their job to be sensitive to taste questions. If I got a number of complaints about this, I would have to look into it. But I delegate to Bob Wright the responsibility. Just like it’s not my job to build appliances. This is the job of the CEO of the business.”
Since January of this year, the key decision-maker for all entertainment programs that appear on NBC is Don Ohlmeyer, a successful Hollywood producer and before that an Emmy Award-winning producer for NBC and for ABC’s Monday Night Football. A burly, friendly man who chain-smokes Marlboros and wears a crew-neck sweater and a gold ring on each hand, Ohlmeyer assumed command of a network that has recently fallen into third place in the three-network ratings race. He works out of a makeshift office at NBC’s squat red-brick entertainment complex in Burbank.
“I wouldn’t put on a program I wouldn’t want my kids to see. I always think that’s a pretty good rule of thumb,” he says.
What about NBC’s Amy Fisher movie?
“It’s how you handle it,” he says. (The movie aired before he joined the network.) “Television is a very democratic medium. If people like what you put on, they’ll watch. If they don’t, they won’t. Now, you have to make some determinations. If you put on a live execution, you’d probably do a ninety share. But is that the kind of thing you should put on television? No, I wouldn’t put it on! I think what’s unfortunate is what’s happening to television. If you dropped down from the moon and just watched television from three in the afternoon through access [8:00 P.M.], you would think that everybody in this country was either a cross-dresser, had murdered somebody, had a child that was molested, was a transvestite—it’s unbelievable! It’s like four and a half hours a day of the National Enquirer. The public has a mammoth appetite for it. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best use for television.”
Is Ohlmeyer saying that he considers it his job to resist the public’s appetite?
“Yeah, sometimes you have to. But,” he adds, softening the declaration, “it’s also my obligation to try and give people as much of what they want as I’m comfortable giving them.” A network, he says, must offer a varied menu, much as a newspaper does with a front page, editorials, gossip columns, cartoons “and a whole potpourri of things. Not necessarily any one of them defines you. Taken as a whole, it defines you.”
So what are his programming rules?
One, he says, is to keep his nine-year-old son in mind, and if he airs something he wouldn’t want his son to watch, it should run later in the evening, probably around ten o’clock. Second: “We’re also in a business that doesn’t want to deliver all sorts of programs that advertisers don’t want to be in.”
Bottom line, what won’t Don Ohlmeyer put on NBC?
“What makes the question difficult to answer is that I don’t want to contradict myself in six months,” he says. He pauses, then adds, “I would not have put on Geraldo Rivera and Satanism.… I’d try not to put on something that was intentionally divisive.” Ohlmeyer declines to cite specific examples, except to mention “certain talk shows.”
Ohlmeyer has two goals, and they’re somewhat contradictory: “We have to hold on to moments where television is more than a merchandising medium. I’d like to think network TV would put on The Civil War. But I can’t do that when we’re in third place.”
Ted Harbert is president of the entertainment division of ABC, which in May 1993 finished the season in second place behind CBS in the network-ratings race. Like Ohlmeyer, he has held his present job only a short while—he was promoted in January 1993 from executive vice president for all prime-time entertainment for ABC. Unlike Ohlmeyer, he has spent his career at one network, having joined ABC one year after he graduated magna cum laude from Boston University seventeen years ago. A handsome man, Harbert works in a Century City office building in Los Angeles, in a lovely corner office dominated by a vast brown-leather couch. There is a single television set. A bookcase fills an entire wall; it contains few books but does display a framed photograph of his daughter, Emily, who is three and one-half years old, and whose pretty face is at Harbert’s eye level when he sits in his leather chair.
What won’t Harbert do?
After a long pause, Harbert says that he recently refused to approve a made-for-TV movie—“I don’t want to name it, because it would be unfair to the producer,” he says. But he will say this: It was about nothing but “titillation.” He was convinced that it would “get a big number,” he says. Still, he refused to make it, because he felt that doing so would be “pandering to the audience.”
Why, then, did ABC broadcast an Amy Fisher movie?
“Good question,” he says, before conceding that the networks have no reason to be proud of their Amy Fisher movies. “Yet that’s not the full analysis,” Harbert says. The real question, he says, is this: Why did more than a hundred million people watch these three movies? “Part of me—I’m not sure how big a part of me, probably a small part of me—was hoping that after NBC put on the first one the audience would say, ‘OK, I’ve seen my Amy Fisher story.… I’m not gonna watch.’ This would be a good message to network television if the audience said, ‘One’s enough!’ ”
Why are viewers so eager for these stories?
“My perception is that Americans don’t talk to each other very much,” Harbert says. “People used to sit on the back fence and talk to each other. They’d sit on the front porch and neighbors would talk. Television has replaced the back fence. Americans love to gossip. It’s just something that’s part of who we are. We get our gossip from television.… Americans now use made-for-TV movies as a way to look in their neighbors’ window. That being the case, then what’s the programmers’ decision about whether or not to do Amy Fisher?”
What’s Ted Harbert’s decision about what he won’t do?
He points to the picture of his daughter, Emily, and mentions that a son, William, was born in April. “Emily’s entrance into the world totally changed the way I look at television,” he says. “I have a massive problem, a personal problem, with violence now on television. I am working very hard to minimize the amount of violence on our air. Frankly, I think we already do a pretty good job of it.”
Why did the arrival of a daughter alter his thinking as a programmer?
“Because when she sits there in front of the TV with me, if a promo comes on that I would never let her sit there and watch, or if something comes on that is violent, or the news comes on and she looks at it and this look of bewilderment comes across her face—‘What is that man doing, Daddy?’—I don’t have a very good answer.”
ABC recently broadcast a movie, Between Love and Hate, that ends with a youth firing six bullets into his former lover. Harbert’s defense is that a network, like a newspaper, offers choices. “I’m a firm believer that there is adult time, and adults get to watch adult programs,” he says. “And adults can handle that kind of television. Children can’t. This will sound like a paradox, but I don’t believe we have to program the network and absolve the parents of responsibility, as if it were our problem and not the parents’ problem. Parents have to be responsible for what their kids watch.”
Parents might agree with Harbert, while also stressing the responsibility of Hollywood programmers for what they produce. Many Hollywood figures lead two lives—a truth they avoid by complaining about government censorship, or by shifting responsibility from themselves to parents. “We all know they’re good citizens,” observes Grant Tinker, the founder of the MTM Enterprises studio and the former chairman of NBC. “They give generously. They’re good parents. Then, on the lot, they make creative decisions for the wrong reasons—to save their job. They are schizophrenics.”
Of all the pieces in this collection, this one is a personal favorite. I arranged the interviews by telling each prospective participant that I was surveying leading figures in the entertainment/information business. I said on the phone that I would ask each participant the same question, but I did not say what this question was, and from the shallow way most responded, my guess is that they were surprised. The question—What won’t you do?—provoked an inordinate amount of squirming, as individuals strove to justify what they do. I had a sense that few had given a moment’s thought to the disjunction between their business and their personal selves. So they resorted to denouncing critics as proponents of censorship. They were exposed, embarrassed; Michael Ovitz phoned after the piece appeared to complain that he had thought we were speaking off the record—despite the debate we had had in his office about the tape recorder! This was just another reminder of the power of shame—witness the role peer pressure and sneers played in reducing smoking.
But shame often passes quickly, particularly when it conflicts with profits. Don Ohlmeyer may say he programs for his nine-year-old, but he soon scheduled at 8:00 P.M.—a time when his kid could watch—a show, Friends, that, however funny and skillfully written and acted, dwells on a single theme he probably doesn’t want his preteen exposed to: sex. Similarly, as we will next see in a portrait of software giant Viacom, its chairman, Sumner Redstone, yearns for a less salacious press—yet owns one of the most salacious tabloid TV shows, and pushes for more.