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Project Aimed at Teen-Agers Polarizes Experts : Would Movie Deter or Cause Suicides?

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Times Staff Writer

The subject is teen-age suicide. And an Agoura film maker who has produced a $237,000 educational film on the issue for the state is accusing officials of trying to kill the movie.

Department of Mental Health administrators have ordered producer Jerry Naylor to surrender all prints of the 28-minute film, “Give Yourself a Chance for Life,” so it can be destroyed. State officials argue that the film contains a graphic suicide scene that could provoke troubled teen-agers to take their own lives.

Naylor--a former singer for the legendary rock ‘n’ roll group “The Crickets”--has refused to give up the film. He contends that the movie should be shown in every high school in the state because “it can save lives” of despondent teen-agers.

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“It’s censorship, direct censorship,” Naylor said Friday. “If I sincerely believed this film was ‘a lethal weapon,’ as they call it, or that it would cause one person to kill himself, I’d never want it shown. I’m not giving up.”

Dr. Dennis (Michael) O’Connor, director of the Department of Mental Health, says he’s not giving in.

‘Medical Ethics’

“My mind will never change on that film,” O’Connor said. “This is a matter of medical ethics, not artistic content. Medical and clinical people I’ve shown the film to unanimously told me they thought the film was dangerous, that people might get the wrong idea when they see it.”

A dispute has been building for two years over release of the movie.

Mental health officials acknowledge that they hired Naylor in 1985 through a competitive bidding process to produce the film as a classroom teaching tool. The goal of the film was to alert teen-agers and teachers to suicide signals and to let youngsters know that there are alternatives other than death to dealing with depression.

Mental health officials contend that their contract with Naylor gives them total control over the content and use of the film, however.

Naylor said the movie was made with a state-approved script under the scene-by-scene supervision of Department of Mental Health officials. But he says he owns the film--not the state--because the state has not paid him the final $34,000 of the contract.

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No Final Bill

State officials counter that the only reason they have not paid Naylor is because he refuses to send them his final bill.

The state attorney general’s office has repeatedly ordered Naylor to relinquish the film, scripts and videotape copies. The next step, according to lawyers for the Department of Justice, is to take Naylor to court.

“I would not call it censorship,” said Paula L. Gibson, a lawyer for the state attorney general’s office. “The contract gives the state control of the film. The Department of Mental Health owns the film and should be allowed to do with it what it wants. There are plenty of films made in Hollywood that don’t get to the public screen. That’s the way it goes.”

Offered to Buy Back Film

Naylor said he has offered to buy back the film, remove all identification with the state of California and release the state from potential liability, then market the movie himself. He said a national syndicator and the Home Box Office cable TV network have expressed interest in it.

According to Naylor, the film does not graphically depict suicide. He said a dreamlike hanging scene involving the film’s main character was toned down during the shooting of the movie.

Instead of showing actor Bill Allen tying a noose and tossing it over a rafter, an abbreviated scene using shadows is shown instead, he said.

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“Every step was done to the approval of the state,” Naylor said. “Even the music.”

Naylor said he tried to make a rock music-punctuated movie that was slick enough to appeal to teen-agers who grew up with MTV without resorting to a shocking suicide death scene.

He said the script was prepared with the help of seven consultants who are experts on teen-age suicide. One of the consultants was hand-picked by O’Connor, Naylor said.

The script was reviewed by several professional psychological groups, and the final version was approved by Charlotte P. Ross, executive director of the Youth Suicide National Center in Washington, Naylor said.

When Ross suggested that the state issue a classroom study guide to go with the film, she was hired to write one for $30,000, according to Naylor.

The state’s representative on the set during the filming was Dean R. Owen, chief of the Office of Public Communications for the Department of Mental Health, who served as executive producer.

Journal Reports

Owen said the film was nearing completion in late 1986 when he and others working on it were rocked by reports in the New England Journal of Medicine that linked increases in teen-age suicides to television news reports and movies about suicide.

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At the time, researchers Madelyn S. Gould of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Dr. David Shaffer of Columbia University termed the issue “a matter of some urgency because the presumptive evidence suggests that fictional presentations of suicide may have a lethal effect.”

State officials initially stood by their film, although the studies pushed them into toning down the hanging scene and adding an epilogue in which Allen steps out of character and tells of his own best friend’s killing himself, Naylor said.

“All the new changes were again approved all the way through the governor’s office. The film was finished down to printing of labels. It was all done through the approval process,” Naylor said.

Unexpectedly, however, “Dr. O’Connor said, ‘I’m not going to release this film. I want it shredded. I want all evidence of it shredded--all footage, all scripts.’ Michael O’Connor had a group of psychiatrists and psychologists review it. Their conclusion was it was a lethal weapon, like handing a kid a gun.”

O’Connor acknowledged that a shredding machine may be in the film’s future. “Maybe that’s what I will do,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I won’t do: I won’t show it to anybody.”

O’Connor recalled that the New England Journal reports “sent a chill up my spine.”

‘What Do You Think?’

“I brought together a panel of medical and clinical people. I put them in a room and let them watch it and said, ‘What do you think?’ They unanimously told me they thought the film was dangerous.

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“Given that medical, moral and legal dilemma . . . why should I as a bureaucrat risk one life I don’t have to?”

“Give Yourself a Chance for Life” has divided suicide experts who have viewed it.

Ross, whose national suicide-prevention organization is now based in San Mateo, said she has “strong concerns about the film,” ranking it second from the bottom of some 150 films on the subject that she has seen. “I would feel very unhappy and uncomfortable, personally, if that film goes out,” she said.

She said the revised hanging scene remains too suggestive.

Not so, said Michael L. Peck, a Westwood psychologist who also was a consultant on production of the film.

Labeling the movie as too graphic “is the biggest nonsense I’ve ever heard,” Peck said. He rated it as being “in the upper range of excellence” of the 100 or so teen-age suicide films that he is familiar with. “Nervousness by the state Department of Mental Health is what we’re talking about. I’d even say gutlessness.”

Several of the film’s other consultants--who received review videotapes of the film from Naylor--scoffed at suggestions that the movie gives instructions on how to commit suicide.

‘No One Has Died Yet’

“I’ve shown it to high school and college students, and no one has died yet,” said Rick Loya, who teaches health classes at Huntington Park High School and teacher training at Cal State Long Beach and is executive secretary of the California Assn. of School Health Educators.

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“It’s almost criminal that the state won’t use the film.”

Loya said he believes that the film should be screened in classroom settings, where teachers can prepare students for it and lead group discussions about it afterward.

Marvin Brown, dean of guidance services at Culver City High School, said he has shown the film to high school classes and PTA groups with no negative effect.

“I just don’t understand the state’s thinking. The film deals with the issues honestly. It tells kids that better days will occur. . . . I think they understand that perfectly.”

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