HOLLYWOOD EXPLORES DRUG ISSUE

Hollywood may be getting tough on drugs, but its creative community is not about to compromise creativity and personal freedom as part of the effort.

At the end of a daylong substance abuse conference Saturday sponsored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the scales seemed to be nearly balanced between the commitment to entertain on one side and social and moral responsibility on the other:

--Pre-employment drug testing was favored by some during the sessions at the Sheraton Premiere Hotel, including National Football League and Los Angeles Dodgers drug consultant Forest S. Tennant Jr. and actor Stacy Keach, who served a jail sentence on drug charges in 1985, but CBS vice president Earl (Kim) LeMasters and several producers decried it as unfair or as a violation of privacy.

--Beer and wine ads were hit hard by drug research expert Larry Wallack, but actor Tom Selleck--who said he turned down at least $3 million to be a beer spokesman--defended a performer’s right to appear in them.

--Producers such as Gary David Goldberg (“Family Ties”), Michael Mann (“Miami Vice,” “Crime Story”) and Barney Rosenzweig (“Cagney & Lacey”) acknowledged the influence of their shows and the need to act responsibly, but they are also committed to good drama or comedy.

Academy president Richard Frank, who is also president of Walt Disney Studios, said privately that the major studios and production companies are trying to get tougher about drugs on the set as well as on-screen.

Every studio head in town is at least thinking about drug testing in some form, he said, though they may not want to “look you in the eye and say it.”

Tennant, who is executive director of Community Health Projects Inc., which operates six substance abuse clinics statewide, said that drug use in the TV and film industry is “very high.” Though celebrity addicts receive the most publicity, there are at least 10 times as many drug abusers admitted to his clinics in the non-performing ranks of the show business community, he said.

But Frank, while acknowledging that drug testing “probably” would never happen in Hollywood, said that the days of the star drug-user being coddled are over. The studios are prepared for the “short-term economic loss” they’ll suffer when they’ll “have to fire a star who is using drugs.”

Is the fight against drugs being led from the top echelons of Hollywood, as Tennant said it is in the NFL?

Frank said that it was. Referring to the two-dozen studio chiefs and production company owners who met privately on Friday with First Lady Nancy Reagan to discuss the drug issue, he said that, had a urine test been administered, “I guarantee you, you would have had 100% of the people passing.”

Rosenzweig on Saturday suggested that the networks themselves may inadvertently contribute to drug use. Orders for fall series, he noted, are typically delayed so long that exhausting, 12-hour workdays are required of cast and crew alike.

But Keach, a reformed cocaine user, said in a subsequent panel that blaming long hours of work “is a cop-out. That’s a great justification for continuing to use drugs, but it’s not necessarily how you get started. I got started at parties.”

Keach said he had “no objection whatsoever” to routine, pre-employment drug testing. But random testing, he said, is “dangerous.” If the latter practice is allowed--thereby handing employers an excuse to fire people for a variety of covert reasons--”we are going to start hearing the Nazis around the corner,” Keach said.

Depending on who was speaking, the TV-makers gathered Saturday said that they would be constrained by any anti-drug effort that required either too much fiction or too much reality in their work.

“We’re doing drama, we’re not doing real life,” Rosenzweig said. He added, however, that writers and producers need “to introduce consequences” to potentially imitative acts such as drug or alcohol abuse.

Goldberg, creator of the lone comedy show represented Saturday, said: “What makes me nervous is when we begin to portray situations that are not in any way related to reality. It’s very important to be creatively honest.” Too, his particular show, he added, must always be funny, not preachy.

“Perfect people aren’t very interesting dramatically, so you have to portray people with flaws,” Selleck said. “I do think we strike a balance.”

Mann dismissed altogether the notion that a specific scene or action on-screen directly affects a viewer. “The morality play assumption doesn’t apply,” he said. Instead, he added, viewers are affected “systemically” by hours and hours of viewing.

Those positions don’t necessarily dispute the rationale for the effort by the TV academy, which has budgeted $100,000 for such drug awareness events.

“If six months from now, everybody says, ‘Oh, I see the change (on TV),’ we’ll have failed,” academy president Frank said. “All shows would be the same and preachy.

“If, on the other hand, you look at shows and see that people’s values are different,” the effort will have been successful, he said.

In an opening speech before the 350 academy and guild members in attendance, Frank characterized the creators of TV entertainment as drug “enablers.” That’s the same term, he said, that drug counselors use for family members of an addict who don’t overtly support the drug habit but “enable” it to continue by refusing to accept that the problem exists.

As an example of the kind of remedies the academy would like to see, he proposed an episode of “The Cosby Show” in which Dr. Cliff Huxtable (Cosby) is called upon to counsel a pregnant woman who likes to drink. “Immediately, (several) million people will gain an understanding of the problem,” Frank said.