Just How Far Can (or Should) Movies Go? : The real problem is that movie mayhem is used by film makers with very little to say

Item: A recent national survey reveals that the majority of Americans think there is too much sex, violence and profanity on the screen these days and that the overall quality of films is down.

Item: During a recent Columbia Pictures Entertainment stockholders meeting, a New Jersey man rose to complain angrily about the “rotten language and explicit sex and violence” in movies and urged the leaders of the studio to take a role in cleaning up Hollywood’s act.

Item: Tom Pryor, the erstwhile editor of Daily Variety, railed against the three deadly sins in a recent Variety column, saying there “is a growing concern throughout the land over the vulgarity now commonplace on the screen under the pretext that this is how America speaks.”

Item: The movie business is booming. This summer’s box office grosses will shatter all previous records and, according to industry projections, the theatrical and video outlets for films will combine to take in more than $8 billion in 1989.

Conclusion: You can never have too much sex, violence and profanity in movies, especially bad ones.

It is axiomatic in most commercial enterprises to leave alone what is not broken, and in Hollywood, clearly the motivation to “clean up its act” is missing. Movies are hot in the leisure-time marketplace and since there is no apparent increase in quality to explain the increase in foot traffic, consumers seem to be getting exactly the amount of sex, violence and profanity they want.

The greatest irony about the current backlash to film content is the Rip Van Winkle timing of the protesters. Sexual candor, blunt language and graphic violence have been staples of mainstream Hollywood movies for more than 20 years! What have you seen lately that is as violent as Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969)? Which recent movie has dealt with sex as bluntly as Mike Nichols’ “Carnal Knowledge” (1971), or as explicitly as Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” (1973)? When has the F-word count topped that in Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), or in George Roy Hill’s “Slap Shot” (1977)?

To side with Hollywood on most issues is to risk acquiring fleas, but the rising hysteria over the graphic content of movies seems to be just one more attempt by the Morally Offended of the Reagan-Bush Era to return us all to the square roots of the Eisenhower Era, to the hot pop culture days of lava lamps and “Pillow Talk.”

The problem is not that there is too much sex, violence and profanity in movies today, but that there are too many movies that depend on those elements to sell them. Whether it’s a reflection of film makers’ limited skills or America’s sleepy apolitical mood, movies of the ‘80s have been comic strip panels--with cartoon violence and passionless romance veiling the fact that the movies don’t have anything to say.

In responding to that plaintiff Columbia Pictures stockholder two weeks ago, the studio’s chief executive officer, Victor Kaufman, said the pendulum is swinging back on sex and violence. Kaufman said the industry reacts to the “public’s needs” (he meant, of course, the public’s wants) and said that there is less graphic content in films today than there was five years ago.

The statement got a harrumph from Tom Pryor in his Variety column, and it would take a brain-damaging amount of research to prove or disprove it. But Kaufman is probably right. After we’ve heard Marlon Brando order the butter in “Last Tango in Paris,” what’s to shock us about sex? After seeing that prowler get his head caught in a bear trap in “Straw Dogs,” what’s to shock us about violence? After hearing Jack Nicholson ream a bartender in “The Last Detail,” what’s to shock us about profanity?

Film makers are showing more restraint today because they can’t top what’s gone before, and besides, the industry’s rating system--once the ally of the bolder film makers--has grown so conservative and powerful, real craziness in commercial movies is virtually impossible. Film makers now have to agree in their contracts to deliver movies with R ratings or less, a fact that has turned the ratings board into a willing censor.

When it comes to reacting to national mood swings, Hollywood moves just a little quicker than an Eric Rohmer film. But it does react, as it did in the mid-’60s when restraints on film content were, by popular demand, lifted.

Individual film makers have continued to push the envelope on content--on violence, in particular--but the general run of films of the last decade have been far less provocative than those of the decade before. In fact, like all dam burstings, it was the first wave of unrestrained film making that hurled the most power.

Flash back to those seminal days of the New Freedom in Hollywood, to the landmark films of Sex, Violence and Profanity. Scholars will debate the date of conception of the new era, but the founding fathers were directors Michelangelo Antonioni, who gave us frontal nudity in “Blow-Up” (1966), Mike Nichols, who gave playwright Edward Albee’s raw stage dialogue screen time in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), and Arthur Penn, whose balletic gun battles in “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) showed how ugly and compelling death could really be.

Those were great movies, in the same way the American Revolution was a great war. They jolted the film industry out of decades of servitude (to the oppressive Hays Code) and opened up new frontiers for daring film makers and their patron studios. Those blunt films got people away from their TV sets long enough to kick-start their hearts and arguably saved the majors from becoming mere suppliers to the networks.

The film revolution, of course, was a sign of the times. “Blow-Up” opened in American theaters at about the same time the long-banned books of Henry Miller went on sale in Boston. And when Americans went to the streets in mass to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Hollywood makes what sells (some things never change) and in the anti-Establishment frenzy of the ‘60s, explicit pop art sold.

Many of the early pictures that dropped the jaws of our elders had themes that transcended their sensational elements and engendered enthusiasm among telented, intellectually driven film makers who thrived in the new environment. Hollywood suddenly had as much to say about the lives and politics of America as the publishing world. For that blink in time, film was literature.

Without those break-through movies, Stanley Kubrick could not have made “A Clockwork Orange.” John Schlesinger could not have made “Midnight Cowboy.” John Boorman could not have done “Deliverance.” Nor could Francis Coppola have done either of “The Godfather” movies, two of Hollywood’s last masterpieces. Bob Fosse’s film career might not have occurred at all (at the loss to us of “Cabaret,” “Lenny” and “All That Jazz”).

In Hollywood’s brief, Golden Era of social and political consciousness, spanning roughly the years 1966 to 1979, Sidney Lumet (“Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network”), Robert Altman (“M*A*S*H,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”), Hal Ashby (“Shampoo,” “Coming Home”), Milos Forman (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), William Friedkin (“The French Connection,” “The Exorcist”), Alan J. Pakula (“Parallax View,” “All the President’s Men”), Martin Scorsese (“Taxi Driver”), Bob Rafelson (“Five Easy Pieces”), Roman Polanski (“Chinatown”), Michael Cimino (“The Deer Hunter”), even Woody Allen (“Annie Hall”) made their most powerful movies.

Go back and clean them up--take out all the rotten language, explicit sex and violence--and see what you’ve got.

It is interesting to hear so much grumbling about film content at the end of a decade noted for its timidity. Since George Lucas and Steven Spielberg arrived to marry old-fashioned myths and legends to state-of-the-art special effects and reap fortunes , the studios have been preoccupied with trying to repeat the examples. There have been many excessively foul-mouthed movies, and many that trivialized sex and violence. There have also been a few good films of social importance, though serious critics may have trouble finding enough to fill out their decade-end Top 10 lists.

Mostly, the ‘80s have showcased slick, anti-intellectual fantasies--whether in the form of teen-age sex comedies, slasher horror movies, science-fiction, adventure or drama. And regardless of their ratings. Fifteen years ago, an R on a film was just as likely to flag serious themes for moviegoing adults as it was to alert drooling teens to forbidden fruits. When this century is written, the film decade that the ‘80s will most resemble is, erk, the ‘50s.

So, what would those people protesting the content of today’s movies have Hollywood do, wash its mouth out with soap, then what? If the industry leaders took the polls seriously and purged all sex, violence and profanity from its movies, Warner Bros. would be facing the threat of a leveraged buy-out from Bob’s Bait Shop instead of Paramount Entertainment. You cannot withdraw from consumers what has been given, not with ticket prices escalating four bits a year. Moviegoers today expect to have as much salt in their movies as they have on their popcorn.

The real sin of the last decade is that there have not been enough smart, socially conscious movies told with whatever sex, violence and profanity was necessary, and too many that merely used those elements to pander to the tastes of the broadest audience.

The good news for those of us who agree that “they don’t make movies like they used to” is that convenient neighborhood video stores stock all the movies they used to make. If we don’t like what’s out there--either because it’s too strong, or not strong enough--we can vote with our VCRs.