Hollywood: Ground Zero

Who pulled the trigger? The guessing game--or finger pointing--begins, predictably, after each tragedy. Equally predictable are the targets of blame--the media, the NRA, poor parenting, the devil. For days or weeks it’s front-page news. Indignation blossoms and withers into cant.

Then it’s gone. Some new outrage muscles in. The caravan moves on.

But what about this time? Because of the body count, accretion, the images, or something, this time feels different. The Littleton, Colo., shooting has the feel of a galvanizing event.

“Maybe it’s because it’s an upper-middle-class white school,” said horror film director John Carpenter. “But [youth violence] is going to be a hot issue, like the bombing in Oklahoma City. . . . People are going to start questioning everything about the culture of youth and violence in America.”

President Clinton, who was pressed by some members of Congress after the Colorado shooting to summon Hollywood executives to the White House, on Friday said he was inviting a broad cross-section of leaders--from government, the clergy, the entertainment, firearms and Internet industries--to the White House on May 10 to “unite in action” against school violence.

And two lawmakers, Reps. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Dan Burton (R-Ind.), have called on the U.S. attorney general for an updated study on media and violence.

These rumblings have caused concern in Hollywood, as well as among opponents of gun control. Everyone is clamoring that something be done. But they worry that it may be the wrong something.

“Whenever people historically have been confronted with a situation that is inexplicable, they want to find rational explanations for what are essentially irrational deeds,” said Bryan Turner, president and CEO of Priority Records, which specializes in rap.

“We’re living with [violence] all around us,” said Irwin Winkler, producer of more than 40 movies including “Raging Bull” and “GoodFellas.” “The easiest thing is to target one group and say the entertainment industry is filling our airwaves with all this garbage when it’s really all around us in every possible form.”

“We are a convenient target,” said television producer Ken Kaufman. “However, I believe that any kind of formal governmental censorship would injure society much more than these occasional horrifying tragic incidents.”

When killers go on a rampage dressed like a popular movie’s hero, it’s an easy guess what influenced their fashion. But did movies help cause the rampage? Social scientists’ debates may never end. But it’s a sure thing movies didn’t supply the weapons.

“The reason is easy: It’s the guns, stupid,” said Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, echoing the sentiments of many interviewees.

But that does not clear the movies of blame, say others in the industry, who don’t feel the media take its responsibility seriously enough.

Entertainers and media moguls who say their product has no role in youth violence are either “idiots” or acting out of self-interest, said Chuck D. of the socially conscious rap group Public Enemy.

“With the privilege of creative freedom there must come responsibility, and not simple lip service,” said Ken Wales, a veteran filmmaker and producer of the 1994-95 CBS series “Christy.” “It must be action, and action means making good choices.”

“No one can say what percentage of blame goes to the media versus the people who make the video games versus the parents,” said Paris Barclay, a director and producer on ABC’s “NYPD Blue.” “We all share some responsibility.

“When people see violence on television it does have an inuring impact,” Barclay said, arguing that television shows and movies should take pains to examine the causes of violence and show its repercussions.

After the shooting, politicians were quick to note the similarities between the acts of the so-called Trench Coat Mafia and a scene in the 1995 film “The Basketball Diaries.” And the Littleton tragedy is only the latest in a series of violent acts that bear similarities to scenes in movies.

A lawsuit is pending in one of them: A family is suing director Oliver Stone, Time Warner and others involved in making the movie “Natural Born Killers,” contending that it incited a young couple to go on a murderous rampage in Louisiana and Mississippi in 1995. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March that the lawsuit could go forward. Stone’s movie, a satire on the media’s glorification of violence, has become a lightning rod by politicians who criticize it as irresponsible.

Tolerance of Violence Reaching Its Limits?

The incidents add up in the public mind, said Moctesuma Esparza, who produced the movie “Selena.” “All of this is cumulative,” he said. “I think society in general is moving toward a direction where our tolerance of violence is reaching a limit.”

Studio executives are loath to speak publicly on this issue--nearly every one of them, along with a large number of producers, directors, actors and musicians, turned down requests for interviews. One top executive who has spoken out is Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin, who in a previously scheduled speech before the Hollywood Radio and Television Society on Tuesday, called for an end to the “proliferation of guns,” and condemned politicians who he said have used the Colorado tragedy to grandstand about the effect of the media on American values.

But views on media violence are as varied--and passionate--in Hollywood as they are in the nation at large.

“This is the first time ever that I have started to ask myself, ‘Will this country survive?’ ” said Martha Williamson, executive producer of “Touched by an Angel” and creator and executive producer of “Promised Land,” both on CBS. “I’ve never asked that question before. I always felt that we could make the world better.”

But that, really, is the question: Are images and sounds capable of changing the world--of changing human consciousness--for good or for ill? Are audiences, like characters in a science-fiction movie, at the mercy of the fantasies that get piped into their skulls? Do artists wield such power?

Some think so. And some are troubled enough by the work they have produced that they’ve taken the action Wales says is required: They’ve vowed to forswear trafficking in violent images. They don’t yet constitute a groundswell, but it’s an indication that the industry is undergoing a period of soul-searching that predates Littleton.

“Images implant themselves inside people’s brains and have a psychological effect upon them,” said special effects director Nicholas Brooks, who helped develop some of the technology used in the movie “The Matrix” and was part of the team that won a visual effects Oscar this year for “What Dreams May Come.”

For the latter movie he helped create a beautiful vision of heaven. But before he got the job, he said, he’d planned to quit the business because the scenes of carnage and violence he was called on to create sickened him.

“In every film I worked on in the United States, violence was abundant,” said Brooks, who immigrated from England a decade ago. “And there was no balance to the violence, no sense of remorse or showing of the consequences. I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”

The last straw, he said, was “Eraser,” the 1996 Arnold Schwarzenegger action-thriller described in one movie guide as “indefensible on any artistic level, but lots of fun.”

In the music world, the rap group the Beastie Boys not only rethought their views on violence, they’ve reworked their past creations to reflect their new attitudes.

“When I was younger, I felt like I could say anything and it was funny,” Beastie member Adam Yauch told Rolling Stone magazine earlier this year. “I’ve started to realize that what I say and do does effect everybody around us.”

But if artists were starting to reevaluate their societal responsibilities before, the shootings in Littleton have caused an increase in introspection.

“When you’re watching the news and are horrified, as the rest of the nation is, and pundits get on [television] and say, with some real consistency, ‘Oh, it’s the TV they watch, it’s the movies they see,’ as a television person it does affect me,” said Ted Harbert, former ABC Entertainment chief and now an executive at DreamWorks SKG. “While I don’t really agree that you can blame TV or movies in any way for these incidents, I look inward and say, ‘Is there anything I’m doing to contribute to this?’ ” But he adds: “To me all roads lead back to the parents.

“Healthy kids can handle violent movies and television. Unhealthy kids can’t.”

Views are mixed on how much creators of television shows and other entertainment should take the unhealthy into account.

“When a movie of mine is viewed by 31 million people at one time, I have a responsibility as a person to make sure that the content of that movie is not going to influence people in the wrong way,” said Craig Anderson, producer of such CBS TV movies as “The Hallmark Hall of Fame: The Piano” and “The Staircase.”

Winkler has a different perspective. He was in Paris promoting “At First Sight,” the Val Kilmer-Mira Sorvino movie, when the massacre occurred.

“This is certainly not to excuse the violence that exists on TV and films and on the Internet. But the truth is that wherever you go in Europe, there are American films and TV shows that are just as popular as at home. And you don’t have that sense of violence in any other place other than America. . . . They don’t have guns. So they don’t have kids going through schools on [a] terrible rampage.”

Rick Rubin, a record producer who has worked with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys, said he thinks criticism of the industry is misguided. His responsibility, he said, is to “support great art.”

“The arts reflect what is going on in our culture,” he said. “The arts don’t control the culture. . . . The reason that music is violent today and the reason that it appeals to people and resonates with people is that’s what the world is like today. . . . All artists try to do is talk about what they see around them and the lives they are living.”

Rolling Stone editor Wenner agreed: “Before the Los Angeles riots, the mainstream media was not documenting the level of rage in the black community, but rap music was,” he said. “No music called anybody to [riot], but that music told us the truth of what was going on out there.”

Defying the chorus sentiments of his peers, Chuck D., of the seminal rap group Public Enemy, said music, television, film and video games “absolutely” affect the world view, growth and behavior of young people, especially if their parents are ill-equipped to act as filters.

“We’re living in a time of mass images and if a kid’s reality is not being realized, fantasy and reality blur together,” the rapper said. “And that can lead to life imitating art.”

Interestingly, many people who defend the content of their own art are quick to criticize others, or at least to acknowledge that some popular art violates their personal definition of what is responsible. TV producer Robert Singer also draws the line at video games.

“I am appalled by the games that are out there,” he says. “Because I think that that puts the gun or the weapon right in someone’s hands, and the result is right there, and you score points for killing people.”

And while contending that violent art merely reflects reality and so shouldn’t be condemned, Rubin said that personally he doesn’t like certain movies. “I don’t go to the movies that often because of [the violence],” he said. “I would never tell anyone that they shouldn’t be doing it or want to censor it. It’s not what I enjoy, though.”

A Personal Connection to Littleton Tragedy

Despite the graphic impact of TV images from Littleton--despite the anger or sorrow or despair it all evoked--most Americans viewed the event from a safe emotional distance. They weren’t personally affected. Most had never heard of Littleton, Colo.

But not Williamson. The executive producer of inspirational shows grew up in Denver, less than 10 miles away from Littleton, which she knows well.

Her shows teach moral lessons, but, she says, “I am trying very hard to practice what I broadcast these days. Which is, how will I find it in my heart to forgive . . . what these [parents and their sons] have done to my hometown and to my country?”

An episode aired on “Promised Land” last year in which a trench-coated youth shot up a school. Last week, a show involving the shooting of a kid who wanted to get out of a gang was pulled from the air because of the shooting.

“He ends up getting shot on the school premises at a Denver school,” Williamson said of the postponed episode. “You couldn’t call it an upbeat message, but it dealt very positively with the responsibilities of parents. . . . It was not elevated, it was not glorified. What we showed were the damages, the consequences.

“There is no question in my mind that television influences what children do. . . . Everything you see, whether you call it instantly to mind, consciously or not, stays in your brain. And I remember images that I saw as a child. And I remember the images of Vietnam as clearly as I remember the images of ‘Mary Tyler Moore.’

“If parents consider it an inconvenience to sit with their children and watch--or direct-- what their children are watching, then what are they doing being parents? Why bother having children if you don’t want the responsibility?”

But though Williamson is critical of neglectful parents, she doesn’t let the media off the hook.

“There is no one more responsible for the future of our country than the people who are feeding the minds of our children: the network executives. There, I said it. And filmmakers. . . . And the music definitely. And it’s crazy because music gets into people’s heads. And the lyrics and the words become a litany or a mantra.”

In 1992, when Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” caused an uproar, Time Warner halted its distribution of the song on Sire Records. And in 1995, Time Warner sold its interest in the label that produced much of the company’s “gangsta” rap, Interscope. Movie producer Lauren Shuler-Donner thinks that was a display of responsibility: “There is a line, and Warner came up to that line and did the right action.”

But how do you balance responsibility to shareholders against the public good?

“Everybody has choices,” said Esparza, the movie producer. “We all have a choice as to how we make a profit. There are issues of societal good that impact all of us. In my opinion it’s a cop-out to say that responsibility to shareholders dictates our actions to ensure profits.”

Greed is what is fueling excessive media violence, Williamson said. “It’s about people saying, ‘I can make some money doing family television but I can make a lot more money appealing to the basest element in humanity. . . .”

“You reap what you sow,” she said. “If a shareholder makes a choice for violence for a short-term gain in their stock portfolio over the long-term investment in the future of this country, you get what you deserve. Sure they’ll have plenty of money in a lousy world 20 years from now. And that’s terrifying to me.”

David E. Salzman, executive producer of Fox’s “Mad TV,” who created or was executive producer of more than 20 series when he was president of Lorimar Telepictures, agrees that there is too much violence in the media, but he maintains that producers generally are well-intentioned.

“No one produces violent content out of a sense of obligation to shareholders,” he said.

Rush Limbaugh, the syndicated radio talk-show host who was widely blamed for stoking the hatred that inspires anti-government activists such as the ones who bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, said the media is inflating its importance if it thinks it bears responsibility.

Placing the Blame on ‘Two Evil Kids’

“People in the media think that they’re front and center in people’s lives and as such, when anything happens, they have to have played a role in it,” he said. “Most people are just going around living their lives. Media, the effect it has on most people, is more subliminal than overt.

“These kids clearly had it on their minds to do what they wanted to do for a long time. They have demonstrated over the course of years a tendency to this. And to say that any one movie or video game made them snap is to, I think, camouflage and mask what’s really the problem. And that is, you just had a case here of two really evil kids. And instead we want to . . . blame society at large.”

Carpenter, the horror film director whose work was blamed years ago for a killing in England said to be inspired by his movie “Halloween,” fears that all of this will lead to censorship of the media.

“This is a moan I’ve heard since I was a kid,” he said. “I first heard about it in relation to comic books. . . . Then in the late ‘50s it was the violence in foreign films--the neo-realists films with their non-Hollywood endings. We went through Elvis and rock ‘n’ roll music. And on and on and on it goes.

“It’s a basic compulsion in human beings to censor,” he said. “We’ve always had it.”

But Brooks, the special effects director who has personally renounced his role in making violent movies, said that the massacre--as horrible as it was--came at a time when Hollywood is questioning which way it wants to go.

“People now aren’t eagerly awaiting the violent action films as they used to,” he said. “We’ve reached the saturation point. Inside the industry there is confusion about what stories are going to sell tickets.”

The self-examination spurred by the massacre, he said, is coming at a time when it can have maximum impact.

Times staff writers Kevin Baxter, Geoff Boucher, Paul Brownfield, Robert Hilburn, Susan King, Judith Michaelson, Amy Wallace, Robert Welkos and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez contributed to this story.

*

Video Violence

Video games are drawing fire for desensitizing teenagers to violence. A Section