CHILDREN, MEDIA GATHERING : CONFERENCE ADDRESSES SENSITIVE TV ISSUES

With equal time and fervor, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist who has served as an adviser on several television movies, took on both the entertainment industry and his own profession Wednesday, for thinking they are “experts” outside their own territories.

On the last day of the “Children and Media” conference at the Ambassador Hotel, conference chairman Stan Katz, an adviser on the ABC-TV movie “Something About Amelia,” also criticized television news for “butchering.” He said various conference participants had been interviewed for “up to 30 minutes” Monday but when they looked at TV that night, they found their remarks were “chopped up into little pieces. Sometimes the one sentence that’s put on TV is the least important thing.”

With the exception of such television movies as “Amelia,” which dealt with incest, and “Adam,” the true story of a missing child, Katz said that “television often oversimplifies complex problems into a simple resolution with a simple answer.”

At the same time, he cautioned that airing of such films as “The Burning Bed,” the Farrah Fawcett movie about wife-beating, can lead to copycat situations.

Katz criticized entertainment figures for often thinking that they are “experts about every social issue.” He cited the appearance Monday of actresses Jane Fonda, Sissy Spacek and Jessica Lange, who played distressed farm wives in theatrical and TV films and offered sometimes tearful testimony before a Democratic congressional task force.

He also leveled the same sort of criticism against mental health professionals.

“Where do we get off thinking we know how to make movies?” Katz asked. “We know nothing about the complex technicalities. We have not taken one class. We know virtually nothing, except that we are consumers.”

Katz, who has been advising the media on psychological problems since 1978 when he consulted on ABC’s “When She Was Bad,” a television movie about child abuse, also advised his peers that when they do take on media projects they should be prepared to drop everything and be on the set at 6:30 in the morning because a day lost can cost “thousands of dollars.”

Citing the excuses that producers sometimes use for not bringing in psychology professionals, Katz noted with a degree of humor: “My favorite is, ‘I’ve been in therapy before. I know about these problems.’ Or, ‘I have a friend who is a psychologist and I can chat with him over lunch.’ ”

Katz also criticized producers who have spent $5 million or $6 million on a production for being reluctant about even paying $1,000 for the consultant’s fee. “They’ll pay $1,000 a week for hair dressers. . . .”

But Al Burton, executive producer/consultant for Universal Television, who was in the audience, said he wanted to straighten out the matter. “Hair dressers on the set get $1,375 a week straight time,” he said.

On a more serious note, after Katz had chided the industry for having more than one consultant on a project, another audience member said there was a good reason for that. Identifying herself only as a network broadcast-standards representative, she said: “As you know, you frequently disagree with each other. We’re trying to get a consensus and a sense of balance.”

Later, in a panel on “Portrayals of Child Maltreatment and Social Problems,” Deborah Aal, president of Leonard Goldberg Productions, who had been the supervising executive on “Amelia,” thanked Katz and other psychology consultants. “You people are welcome in our medium, “ she said.

On another issue, Aal, who last year was an NBC executive producer, said she had developed a two-hour script on the subject of AIDS but she told the panel it will be “very interesting to see if the movie is produced.” She said that while network executives appear to be happy with the treatment there were certain “corporate concerns” about dealing with the subject at all, fearing it would hurt advertising.

Linda Otto, of the Landsburg Co. and the producer of “Adam,” said that as far as television’s treatment of important social issues is concerned, “we’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg.”