MOVIES - April 20, 1989

The Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled that Paramount Pictures and a movie theater can’t be held responsible for the death of a teen-ager stabbed by a young man who had just seen “The Warriors,” a 1979 film about city gangs. The victim’s family sued Paramount and Saxon Theater Corp., seeking damages for wrongful death. But the high court upheld a lower court’s dismissal of the suit on the grounds that the movie-maker and theater company had no “special relationship” to the dead youth and therefore had no duty to protect him from his attacker. “Although the film is rife with violent scenes, it does not at any point exhort, urge, entreat, solicit or overtly advocate or encourage unlawful or violent activity on the part of viewers,” Justice Francis O’Connor wrote. William Yakubowicz filed the lawsuit in 1981 on behalf of his dead son, Martin, 16. The youth was stabbed Feb. 15, 1979, at a subway station several miles from the theater by Michael Barrett, who had watched two showings of “The Warriors.”