OUR LOVE-HATE AFFAIR WITH HOLLYWOOD

The way the larger world regards the world of the movies is the absolute, ultimate love-hate relationship.

The love of movies and the adoration of stars is the most fragile veneer since eggshells. And the tainted material within is an angry compound of mistrust, contempt and resentment.

Let the beloved star impatiently push away the autograph book or the camera and he or she is transformed on the spot into an overpaid no-talent stuck-up creep who probably lies and steals. The love and the hate wear the same shirt in the bleachers at the premiere or the Oscars.

The moguls and the producers have rarely had an image you’d want to tell your mother about, and the trappings of movie wealth excite both awe and a kind of combustible envy. The sight of the stretched-out limo with the blacked-out windows inspires parallel urges to be inside as a passenger, or to re-tailor the hood with a sledgehammer.

You might scour the universe to identify an industrial accident that has had the attention and the relentless prosecution of the John Landis-”Twilight Zone” case.

The case begins in horror at the deaths of a popular star and two children, heightened by the widely shared if unvoiced conviction that no art is worth the taking of a life, human or animal, or the reckless maiming of a life, human or animal.

Yet this was also Hollywood , seemingly caught in the act of living by its own rules, indifferent to the codes ordinary men and women are guided by. The public responses to the tragedy, and the zeal of the prosecution, unquestionably reflect that deep and ancient ambivalence toward the movies and the people who make them.

In their heyday, the great studios had the clout to persuade justice to turn a blind eye to the peccadilloes of their stars. Yet Hollywood history is also strewn with prosecutions brought with an eye on the headlines and a twin notion that Hollywood should be brought to justice and made an example of.

Everybody remembers that Fatty Arbuckle was indicted for murder; not quite everybody remembers he was acquitted, but his career destroyed anyway. The picture of Robert Mitchum sweeping out his cell after being busted for marijuana possession years ago was the jokey side of making Hollywood an example.

The bad publicity attending the Arbuckle case had its effects: a sort of conspicuous show of moral belt-tightening in the industry and a readiness for such subsequent developments as the formation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and, after many a fitful start, the adoption of the Hays Code.

It’s hard not to feel that justice has been served and the jury system vindicated by the acquittals in the “Twilight Zone” case. A tragic accident is still an accident. But it is also obvious that the tragedy and the prosecution will have a chastening if not quite a chilling effect on the industry.

The root problem is that in stunts and special effects, more begets more, working inevitably toward larger and more spectacular detonations, more convincing decapitations and disembowelings, higher leaps, bloodier brawls, screechier car chases, realer “realism,” which is what Landis was after.

It’s the pride of the professional stunt and effects men to create the illusion of danger amid conditions of safety. But despite the new technologies, the margins of safety get narrower and the consequences of human error more deadly.

The competitive pressure to be spectacular is not about to go away. But it may be that the grisly footage of the “Twilight Zone” crash, and the ghostly images of Vic Morrow and the children, will stay in memory and inform those moments of deliberation about what will work, what won’t, and what’s not worth the human risk.

The memories will also serve as a prickly reminder that the movies--Hollywood is the symbol but the truth is worldwide--stride a narrow path between love and hate, fascination and revulsion. They live by the consent of the entertained. It was ever so, and it’s not less so in a far more sophisticated day.