Pop Culture. Violence. Copycats. Blame? : Hollywood Debates the Responsibility Issue After Disney’s Edit of ‘The Program’

In late-18th-Century Germany, people became alarmed when young men suddenly seemed to be jumping off bridges to their deaths in unprecedented numbers, in imitation of the passionate hero of Goethe’s “Sorrows of Young Werther.”

In our own times, a Russian roulette scene in Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” has been blamed for dozens of copycat suicides. A Frenchwoman recently charged that her son learned how to make the bomb that took his life by watching an episode of “MacGyver.”

Once again, questions of accountability are being raised in connection with works of popular culture. Disney this week took the unusual step of deleting a daredevil scene from a current movie, “The Program,” after one teen-ager died trying to mimic it and two others were seriously injured. (Police in Bordentown Township, N.J., later linked a third incident and a second fatality--of a 24-year-old man--to the now-deleted scene.)

MTV has altered the content and changed the time slot of its “Beavis and Butt-head” animated series in response to charges that the characters’ pyromania led to a 2-year-old’s death.

Both measures are being applauded by some members of the entertainment community, which is now facing the threat of congressional action to curtail violence on television. But Disney’s decision--by far the more controversial of the two--is also being denounced in some quarters as an impediment to the artistic process.

“Responsible writers, directors and producers know that exploitative, gratuitous violence may be bad art and bad public policy,” Writers Guild of America, West, vice president Carl Gottlieb said in a statement. “It is equally bad policy to second-guess, censor, edit and delete scenes from films and television based on media reports of copycat behavior; once begun, where will the process end?”

Defending Disney, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said he does not foresee “any diminution of creative energy” resulting from what is a “unique” and “sad” situation. “You can’t design anything to try to make sure three young people in the entire country aren’t going to do something irrational,” Valenti said.

Whatever the moral or public-relations considerations, the law as it now stands favors filmmakers and television producers. Courts throughout the country have ruled that constitutional free-speech protections bar victims from suing in copycat situations unless the production can be shown to “incite” an immediate harm. But the U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on this issue, and some legal experts say there is no telling how the law might evolve.

In the excised scene of “The Program,” a troubled college quarterback who has had too much to drink is shown lying in the middle of a busy thoroughfare to let off steam. Traffic speeds by, barely missing him, as one by one, his buddies join him. No one is injured.

“The situation in ‘The Program’ was one that a kid could very easily duplicate,” said screenwriter Jonathan F. Lawton, who believes writers and studios should try to anticipate such reactions. In Lawton’s screenplay for “Under Siege,” the hero makes a bomb using a microwave oven. During shooting of the film, Lawton said, “we were shocked to find out how easily that could be duplicated. So we went out of our way to make it look more difficult.”

v Other writers praised Disney but warned against concluding that writers should engage in self-censorship. “I thought it was the proper and responsible thing for (Disney) to do when there is a tragedy connected to a scene,” said Jeffrey Boam (“Lethal Weapon 3”). “However, I think filmmakers should not be concerned with copycat behavior and start censoring themselves. There are a lot of people out there who have no responsibility and bad judgment.”

Los Angeles entertainment litigator Pierce O’Donnell said other studios could take their cue from Disney’s swift action. “If more producers did that, we might have less of a hue and cry for government action,” he said. Atty Gen. Janet Reno warned at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing this week that the government might have to take steps to curb television violence if the entertainment industry fails to institute its own remedies.

Families of copycat victims have sometimes taken their grievances to court. Since the U.S. Supreme Court has never issued an opinion on whether someone can be held liable for a death or injury triggered by a fictional movie or television show, each state has been free to decide the issue on its own.

In California, the key case involved a 9-year-old San Francisco girl who was gang-raped with a beer bottle in 1974 by four girls who said they got the idea from watching a similar incident enacted on the NBC drama “Born Innocent.” A judge--later upheld on appeal--dismissed an $11-million lawsuit against the network and local station on grounds that the girl’s family could not show that the program intended to incite the violent act.

“It’s impossible to imagine a TV program or a movie achieving that high standard,” said Robert S. Peck, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

In contrast to producers of fictional stories, publishers of “how-to” manuals can be held responsible for misleading instructions leading to injury or death. But Hustler magazine escaped liability after a youth hanged himself while mimicking an autoerotic technique described in an article. The judgment was upheld in a 1987 federal appeals decision in part because the magazine had not advocated the procedure. “They said, this is how you do it, but we’re telling you not to do it,” said Cornell Law School Prof. Steven Shiffrin.

In Nevada, a court did agree to hear an unusual product liability lawsuit against the rock band Judas Priest and CBS records. Families of two youths who fatally shot themselves blamed the suicides on subliminal messages contained in the group’s “Stained Class” album. Unlike movies or television shows, subliminal messages are not protected under the First Amendment, said Kenneth McKenna of Reno, the attorney for one of the families. But the judge in that case ruled in 1990 that the families failed to prove that the message caused the deaths.

Despite previous rulings in these cases, movie producers today may not want to risk litigation, said Stanford Law Prof. Marc Franklin. “There’s no Supreme Court precedent here, and each state’s got its own shot at this thing,” he said. “If you try any lawsuit in a controversial area these days, with people getting maimed or killed, you’re going to find a couple of courts somewhere around the country (that will hear the case).”

So far, Franklin said, no court has ruled on whether different standards should apply if the children harmed are very young. If such a case is ever brought, he said, producers are certain to argue that parents have a duty to more closely monitor their children’s television viewing.

“It may be that the lesson that comes out of (instances such as) ‘Beavis and Butt-head’ is that the parental obligation to control what kids watch is more onerous than parents have realized,” he said.

Times librarian Mary Edwards assisted with the research for this article.