Time for Industry Execs, and Congress, to Own Up

Trix are not good for kids. Walk down the children’s cereal aisle of your local supermarket and check out the nutritional information: Pokemon Toasted Oats has a whopping 14 grams of sugar per serving; Fruit Loops and Golden Crisp (a “wholesome” puffed wheat cereal) have 15 grams of sugar per serving. If that doesn’t put you into a diabetic coma, check out the sugar quotient in your grocery’s soft drink section.

We all know sugar is bad for kids--look at the alarming rise in diabetes that has been making headlines lately. But no one’s holding congressional hearings about it. Kids consume junk food for two reasons: because they like it and because there’s a highly profitable junk food industry that uses clever advertising to target and seduce youthful consumers.

They could be using that formidable marketing muscle to entice kids to drink milk or eat multi-grain cereal that wouldn’t rot kids’ teeth, but if your core audience is 14-year-old boys and they thrive on sugar rushes, then the big profits are in Lucky Charms, not high-fiber oatmeal.

See where I’m going here?

For the past two weeks, the entertainment industry has been in something of a sugar-rush tizzy after a stinging Federal Trade Commission report--and subsequent Senate Commerce Committee hearings--charged that the vast majority of top-selling restricted movies, video games and music were deliberately marketed to children as young as 12. The movie industry came out looking especially bad: The report found that of 44 violent, R-rated movies, 80% were marketed to children under 17.

To make matters worse, while a handful of music and video-game executives appeared at the hearings, none of the top studio executives bothered to show up, citing a variety of lame excuses. There’s no doubt that the Commerce Committee played dirty pool, giving moguls less than 48 hours to digest the report. But these are the same guys who pay $3 million for a script after an overnight peek: They can read pretty fast.

The arrogant behavior calls to mind a “West Wing” episode in which a David Geffen-esque Hollywood billionaire threatens to cancel a fund-raiser because the president hasn’t come through on a request. “Don’t screw with me,” the mogul tells a presidential aide. “I’ve been president a lot longer than he has.”

On the day of the hearings, I found DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg lunching with ex-20th Century Fox chief Bill Mechanic. When Katzenberg was teased about being on the lam, he protested--accurately as it turned out--that he’d never been invited. Not everyone had such a good explanation. The studio no-shows prompted a tongue-lashing from committee chairman Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who bluntly observed that the industry’s “hubris underscores the lack of corporate responsibility so strikingly apparent in this report.”

Thanks to their hubris, instead of having two days of bad press, they’ve had two weeks. Now they’ll be put squarely in the spotlight at a follow-up hearing Wednesday. And they should be.

Public scrutiny works, whether your product is shoddy tires--which can kill you--or distasteful entertainment, which the FTC report doesn’t even try to link to violent behavior. When Washington appeared serious about enacting punitive legislation in the wake of the Columbine shootings last year, Hollywood got the message: Studios quickly squashed a number of ultra-violent teen movies, reedited others and put a lid, at least temporarily, on the widespread display of guns in movie ads.

But there’s a much bigger--and messier--issue at work here that doesn’t lend itself to political grandstanding or show biz executive sophistry: How should an entertainment company balance the demands of profit-making versus good corporate citizenship? It’s no secret that we live in an era when the demands of Wall Street dominate entertainment company decision-making. The Oscars, Emmys and Grammys are a once-a-year gold medal for corporate responsibility. The rest of the year, we celebrate the corporate gunslingers who boost their company’s value--and we demand the heads of the losers who lag behind in profits.

In the Works: Long Overdue Changes

The new hearings--and renewed threats of legislation--have already prompted long overdue activity. The Recording Industry Assn. of America is pushing record labels to accept some sort of lyric sheet availability, so parents can read Eminem lyrics and decide whether the rapper’s “Marshall Mathers LP” belongs on the critics’ Top 10 lists or in the trash. The Directors Guild of America has called for more detailed ratings, saying controversial, adult-themed films deserve a separate rating other than an NC-17. They’re right: When “The Cell” and “Schindler’s List” get the same rating, it’s time to call the R-rating what it is: a travesty.

Last fall, studio marketing and distribution chiefs had agreed to a new policy providing consumers with more ratings information in their print and TV ads. It was a done deal until one studio got cold feet and convinced another studio to back out, believing the added information--this film is rated R for explicit violence to women who are dropped in a vat of lye by a sadistic serial killer--might make the movie something of a bull’s-eye for anti-violence crusaders.

You can bet that added information is coming now. After much discussion over the past week, expect to see the studio chiefs go before the committee with a laundry list of fresh proposals, including more R-rated movie marketing restrictions and more ratings information in movie ads. To say measures are being taken reluctantly would be an understatement. A conference call the other day between MPAA chief Jack Valenti and Hollywood marketing chiefs featured 30 minutes of acrimonious haggling before the studios agreed to the no-brainer proposal that they wouldn’t run trailers for R-rated movies before a G-rated film. Duh!

Unfortunately, changing the way movies and CDs are marketed to kids is easier said than done, since entertainment marketers aren’t the only ones guilty of winking and nodding. Take the World Wrestling Federation (please). In my neighborhood, the most loyal viewers of TV wrestling are 13-year-old boys. Yet the WWF tells advertisers that 65% of its audience is 18- to 34-year-old men, which is what’s known as the golden demographic--the hardest audience to reach for movies, sneakers or soft drinks. So if you’re advertising “Scary Movie” or “The Matrix,” you could say, “Hey, I’m going after adults, not kids.”

Songwriting Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who surely prefers oatmeal to Lucky Charms at breakfast, recently asked why record companies couldn’t put out more toe-tappin’ records by the likes of Larry Gatlin or Gladys Knight. The answer is: Follow the money.

Take the example of the Jimmy Iovine-led Interscope Records. The most successful record company of the past decade, Interscope was originally distributed by Time Warner, which sold its 50% share in the label to Universal for $200 million in 1995 after being lambasted for the preponderance of explicit lyrics by Interscope artists.

Five years later, Time Warner’s music group is considered an also-ran in the music business; Universal’s music group is hot as a pistol. Guess which music group has seven of the 20 best-selling CDs of the year, all but one carrying parental advisory stickers? Congress (and many parents) may see Eminem as a foul-mouthed purveyor of hate toward gays and women, but Wall Street isn’t complaining; investors see him as a Universal profit center.

More Honesty, Less Posturing

So the entertainment industry has a right to feel it is being judged by a double standard. Its investors demand profits while politicians demand social responsibility--at least in an election year. It would be nice if there was an easy way to bridge the gap, but there’s not. A good first step involves more honesty and less posturing on both sides.

For the politicians, that would involve owning up to their real motives. The Commerce Committee hearings aren’t simply about marketing to kids; they’re about getting rid of explicit lyrics and violent movies. As Lynne Cheney put it during her testimony: “There is a problem with the product they market no matter how they market it.”

But the entertainment business has some truth-telling to do too. Fox just finished shooting a raunchy pot comedy due out next year called “Dude, Where’s My Car.” R-rated for nonstop drug references and sexual innuendo, it’s the modern-day equivalent of a “Three Stooges” movie--only about drugs. Can the studio really pretend its cartoonish humor isn’t aimed at 14-year-old boys, just as “Me, Myself & Irene” was this year or “American Pie” the year before?

Movies are marketed to 14-year-olds because they are the entertainment industry’s most loyal and fastest-growing audience. And guess what? Kids, being 14, with their hormones raging, want something that excites them or makes them giddy with laughter. Politicians (and many parents) wish our children would live in a world without any misogynist lyrics or foul-mouthed movies, a scenario that’s about as likely to happen as ridding the supermarket of Cap’n Crunch and Cocoa Puffs.

For nearly half a century, dating back to the night Elvis scandalized parents by wiggling his hips on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” we’ve had a youth culture fueled largely by sex and rebellion. And now there’s no going back. So let’s debate the real issue: Where should personal responsibility begin and the pursuit of profits end? Call me a nutty idealist, but if the entertainment business really believes in free expression--and not just the freedom to make its year-end bonuses--then Lynne Cheney shouldn’t be the one reading Eminem’s lyrics before a congressional committee. The person reading his lyrics should be someone brave enough to defend them.