Hollywood Cast as the Heavy as Congress Debates Violence

If Hollywood were in control of this production, the cavalry would have come riding to the rescue by now. But this isn’t a shoot-’em-up Western, it is Congress. And the entertainment industry is not directing the battle scene, it is taking the arrows.

One of the best politically connected industries in the world has been under assault all week from official Washington over its violent products. But when the going got tough, powerful Hollywood had few friends behind it.

“If this had been about alcohol, the senators from Kentucky would have been down there screaming. If this had been about tobacco, we would have heard from the senators from Virginia. But this was about the entertainment industry--the hometown industry. Where were the senators from California?” one studio advocate asked.

If Wednesday’s unanimous Senate vote calling for a federal investigation of the industry was a referendum on Hollywood’s political status, the news was bad. Even Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer--both California Democrats, both beneficiaries of entertainment’s campaign largess--deserted the hometown industry.

Today, Hollywood will remain in the headlines: President Clinton is expected to start his day, in his weekly radio address, scolding the media for excessive violence and end it at a glitzy fund-raiser thrown by entertainment mogul David Geffen that is expected to pull $2 million into Democratic coffers.

The immediate cause for Hollywood’s travails is the anguish touched off by the high school massacre last month in Colorado, and concerns that violent images helped fuel it. Yet it’s too early to tell just how deep and lasting the political fall-out will be.

But despite its deep pockets, Hollywood is heading, poorly armed and hobbled, into an open-ended season as the target of congressional committees, investigations and grass-roots pressure to clean up the violence. Tinsel Town is now in the company of guns, alcohol and Big Tobacco as a manufacturer of social vice and a threat to children.

Wednesday’s vote sought not only an investigation by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission of the marketing of movies, music and video games but also a National Institutes of Health study on children and media violence and a voluntary return to a broadcasters’ code of conduct. All of those provisions were most unwelcomed by an industry that is one of the richest and most powerful in the world, not to mention the top employer in the L.A. area.

But for Feinstein, it was hardly a difficult call.

“I want to represent the industry, and I will and I have. But I can’t condone this growing culture of violence,” she said. “They don’t want any action from Congress, they want a commission to study it. Well, we’re past commissions to study. This is as definitive an action as these senators have ever taken, that says the time has come for the entertainment industry to take action and do something about it.”

The Democrats have long been the party most friendly to liberal-leaning Hollywood, and that loyalty very often pivots on money. According to the Campaign Study Group, entertainment interests gave $8.5 million to Democratic committees in 1998, with scads more flowing to individual lawmakers. While most went to Democrats, the GOP was scarcely ignored; entertainment contributions to Republican committees more than doubled after the party took control of Congress in 1994, from $2.6 million to $6.3 million, the Virginia-based research firm found.

Yet some of the biggest recipients of Hollywood’s generosity had no trouble taking it to task after the massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School. Boxer and Feinstein were the first and third top beneficiaries of entertainment cash since 1991, at $760,000 and $550,000, respectively.

And one of the most dramatic proposals of the week, to ban violence from daytime and prime time television entirely, was brought by a Democrat, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, who was fifth on the list of top recipients of entertainment industry donations. “It’s an ugly political climate. Democrats are scrambling for cover,” one top film industry aide in Los Angeles said. “They are looking for a way to appear to be doing something so they are not open to attack when they run for reelection.”

Still, Hollywood was hardly friendless. The Hollings amendment failed Thursday, 60-39 against, with Boxer one of his staunchest critics: “I worry about . . . giving the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] or any other agency or, frankly, any senator the power to decide what show goes on what time. It’s very subjective. It’s a path I think we should avoid.”

Industry lobbyists worked hard behind the scenes to kill the provision, though they chose not to contest the violence study.

The amendment’s demise suggests Congress is content to nip at the edges of Hollywood’s conscience without stepping full-fledged into the center of the regulation firestorm.

But even that victory was mixed. Feinstein supported the amendment that would have banished violent programming when children might be watching. That split among hometown senators indicates Hollywood, which has long thought itself invincible from government restraint, may be on shakier ground than it thinks.

Even industry insiders concede that some of the ultraviolent film clips and grisly video game ads displayed in hearing rooms on Capitol Hill last week are hard to defend.

“We don’t make it that easy for Democrats to stand up,” said one Washington-based industry source. “Out of 600 films made, you can find clips from ‘Basketball Diaries’ and ‘Natural Born Killers’ that will look bad every time you show them.”

While the 1st Amendment is a powerful shield for creative freedoms, there is more than one way to skin a political cat. And Washington has been working overtime since Columbine in search of ways to curb Hollywood’s excesses, including an idea floated on Capitol Hill to ban filming of violent movies on federal land.

Unlike lobbies with effective grass-roots organizations, such as the National Rifle Assn., Hollywood can be politically vulnerable, its interests weakly represented in all but a few lawmakers’ districts, said Jennifer Perry of the Los Angeles-based Children’s Action Network, a group that works with producers and directors to improve programming.

“They are the easiest target in the world, and that’s why they come in for a drubbing every once in a while. You can take a pretty big swipe at them and they don’t hit back as hard,” Perry said, hastening to add, “I do think there needs to be some responsibility taken there.” Hollywood’s creative minds are far from immune to calls for more wholesome content--a process that is often accelerated once they have children of their own, Perry said. Sometimes Hollywood’s taste-makers take those steps under their own power. In recent years, for instance, actors, directors and writers have helped marginalize on-screen cigarette smoking by characters likely to be admired by younger viewers, she noted.

Industry representatives have been at pains to portray Hollywood’s leaders as earnest, well-intentioned and soul-searching. But on some issues--and violence may be one of them--the entertainment industry’s collective will may be weak. In a freewheeling marketplace in which excitement and violence have such a powerful box-office pull, some industry observers caution that it will be hard to be the first to pull back without assurances that others will do the same.

Here, say some, a prod from Washington may be useful. It would not be the first time in recent years that the fear of regulatory action has spurred consensus, however grudging, within the industry.

In 1990, Congress passed the Children’s Television Act, mandating the creation of better programming. Amid initial resistance by television programmers, the FCC in 1993 issued rules requiring all television stations to air, as a condition of licensing, three hours daily of “educational children’s television.”

Today, executives and producers of children’s television are working together on guidelines for educational programming for kids.

“I’m not saying the best way to get people to the table is to hold a stick over their head,” said Perry. “But there are instances where the industry has come together to develop standards.”

There were already signs that Hollywood is bending. Disneyland has announced it pulled 30 violent video arcade games from the amusement park and two hotels.