Hollywood and Ethics: A View From the Campus

Former journalist-turned-producer Dale Pollock is currently the dean of the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he sponsored a conference on ethics and filmmaking. Here’s his report on what came out of the three-day “Cinethics” conference.

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We held an ethics conference and Hollywood actually showed up.

Recently in Winston-Salem, N.C., representatives from the top 15 film schools in the country gathered on the campus of the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts to discuss issues such as social responsibility for filmmakers, digital manipulation of imagery, the responsibility that makers of docudramas have to the subjects of their films, and the most basic of questions: Is Hollywood going too far in its depiction of sex and violence and its use of language?

All that really happens at these conferences is talk, of course, but the talk was enlivened this time by the presence of creative heavyweights such as producer-writer Armyan Bernstein (“Thirteen Days,” “The Hurricane”), writer-director Barry Blaustein (“The Nutty Professor I and II” and “Beyond the Mat”) and producer Sarah Pillsbury (“Desperately Seeking Susan,” “The Love Letter”).

They were joined by independent documentary filmmakers such as Elizabeth Barrett (“Stranger With a Camera,”) and Barbara Trent (“The Panama Deception”); professors of ethics and history such as Larry Blum of the University of Massachusetts and Peter Euben of the University of California at Santa Cruz, First Amendment law expert Michael Curtis from Wake Forest University, conservative documentary-maker Michael Pack (“The Fall of Newt Gingrich”), film critics such as Kenneth Turan from The Los Angeles Times and Godfrey Chesire and Armond White from the New York Press, and even a lawyer-turned-actor-turned-politician, Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who has previously starred in “The Hunt for Red October” and “In the Line of Fire.”

What did all these people have to talk about for three days of panels, screenings and breakout sessions involving students, faculty and administrators? Mostly, how Hollywood is beginning to wake up to the fact that these questions aren’t going to go away any time soon.

There was much discussion about how the economics of today’s film business are driving content to a greater degree than ever before. As movies become increasingly a global medium the emphasis is overwhelmingly on elements that sell across cultures. These tend to be, more often than not, sex and violence.

Patrick Coleman, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health and an expert in health communication issues, talked about a movie his public health agency produced in the Philippines. The goal was to get across messages concerning family planning, public health and safe sex. But by casting a Filipino action star and hiring a commercial film director, Coleman found his public health message obscured by several scenes featuring sex and violence. His film ended up as one of the top grossers and won best picture in the Philippines that year.

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Success can be measured in strange ways, we all discovered. The emphasis of the conference was not on changing Hollywood--everyone agreed that process was next to impossible. Instead, we concentrated on how to move the discussions and focus on ethical issues from the conference into film school curricula. Is it better to teach one film school class on ethics, or try to integrate ethical principles in classes on screenwriting, directing and producing? How do we get college or arts conservatory-trained filmmakers to think about the consequences of the images they create? Can we change the mind-set and behavior of nascent filmmakers before they enter the industry, and will these changes have any lasting impact?

There won’t be meaningful answers to these kinds of difficult and thought-provoking questions after a three-day conference, of course. But many of the panelists were glad someone was posing these questions, and highlighting the basic ethical dilemma facing all creative artists: Where does artistic freedom end and self-censorship begin? Does the artist have any responsibility other than to his or her art? Are there any special responsibilities or obligations for artists whose filmed images can be seen over and over again on video or DVD, in a repetition never envisioned as part of the creative process?

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The consensus, not surprisingly, was that filmmakers have to take more responsibility. Both Hollywood and independent movie-makers agreed that moving images carry a powerful punch, and that those creating these images need to have a clear understanding of what they’re doing.

Producer Pillsbury noted: “I think that filmmakers, on a broader sense, need to not only take responsibility for what they put on the screen, but for the industry in which they are working. There has been a real lack of people looking at what is really happening in Hollywood because of the concentration of media ownership.” This was a familiar theme, both from the established Hollywood producers like Pillsbury, Bernstein and Blaustein, but also from the independent filmmakers like Barrett and Trent.

Not everyone agreed on issues of content or philosophy. Pack decried the liberal bent of most Hollywood filmmakers, and the emphasis on technique rather than content. This has led, Pack maintained, to a “poverty of ideas in movies and television--and the related reliance on these things like stereotypes and repetitive use of violence and explicit sex and language.”

These sentiments, which mirror the feelings of many people in the country outside of the major media centers, engendered great debate, with the Hollywood crowd insisting on the concept of mutual responsibility.

“You have to turn yourself into an intelligent consumer,” Turan warned the audience at our one public panel on the hot button issues of sex, violence and language. “If you want good films, you have to patronize the ones that look to be good and be willing to take the chance that they’ll be bad. If you go to the bad films because everyone is talking about them, you are partly to blame.”

The concept of audience responsibility resonated with the film students too, many of whom talked about their fears of the industry that awaits them. The students, like all aspiring filmmakers, are concerned about getting their films financed and into the marketplace. What their films are about, and the impact they might have on audiences, are always a secondary consideration to getting the films themselves made.

After the first “Cinethics” conference, we hope that discussion of content and its ramifications is no longer a secondary concern. By discussing ethical behavior and principles from a variety of viewpoints, by watching films and then evaluating their very real and visceral impact on audiences, we all participated in the necessary process of shaping a dialogue on what we hope will be an ongoing and dynamic process of ethical self-evaluation.