By ANITA BUSCH | Monday January 20, 2014 @ 10:10am PST
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COMMENTARY: The Weinstein Company’s co-chairman Harvey Weinstein made some bold statements Friday on CNN to
Piers Morgan about backing away from violent content.
He spoke about his own children and how he no longer wanted to feel like a
hypocrite. “The change starts here,” the man who produced Quentin Tarantino’s
violent Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and D’jango Unchained
told Morgan. “It has already. For me, I can’t do it. I can’t make one movie and
say this is what I want for my kids and then just go out and be a hypocrite.”
He added that he would still make a movie like Lone Survivor, which is a
violent but accurate portrayal of our American military and their dedication to
serving this country. “I’m not going to make some crazy action movie just to
blow up people and exploit people just for the sake of making it,” he said. “I
can’t do it.” Weinstein’s statements came only days after a fatal shooting of the father of a
3-year old in a Florida theater during a screening of Lone
Survivor who was killed while texting his little girl by a supposed “good
guy with a gun,” a 71 year-old former police captain.
“The
insensitivity that the average person has now because of violence is because
people have become so used to it. It’s an obsession as well as almost an
addiction. It’s a cheap way of getting an audience, more people shot and more
explosions, but it’s at the expense of the story,” said one entertainment
marketer with 35 years of experience. “Abject violence has proven successful,
and as long as it is, it will be produced because it’s profitable. It’s the
accepted way of life rather than asking is this the right thing to do?”
The
question is, of course, how Harvey is going to reconcile being in business with
Tarantino. The filmmaker has made a lot of money for the company with violent
fare. And therein lies the conundrum that all studio heads and TV executives
face. I’ve interviewed several executives over the past few weeks and many have
said privately that they think the gun violence — especially in video games —
has gotten out of control. However, they also say they have an obligation to
their shareholders to make a profit and violence sells. There will always be
violence in movies, just as there is violence in the Bible and in the plays of
William Shakespeare. But, Weinstein is trying to tip the scales; to shift
Hollywood from glorifying violence in films, to showing the true human cost and
destructiveness of it.
The
Weinstein Company did just that when it released Fruitvale Station
last year. The film does contain gun violence, but it’s told from the point of
view of the victim of gun violence. And that, in itself, is unusual and
powerful. When Weinstein said, “The change starts here. It has already for me,”
I thought of Fruitvale. Produced by Forest Whitaker and directed by
newcomer Ryan Coogler, you come to care about this boy, see him with his little
girl, understand him as a father and a son before he is murdered. It was passed
over by the Academy this past week for Oscar noms, but it shouldn’t have been.
It did win the Producers Guild’s Stanley
Kramer Award. Stanley Kramer, of course, was the patron
saint of bringing social issues to the foreground with films such as Guess
Who’s Coming To Dinner.
Fruitvale was the first film I saw in a theater (a large screening
room) after the Aurora, CO shooting where my cousin’s daughter was among many
murdered by a gunman at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises on July 20,
2012. During the emergency room scene, I couldn’t bear it. I closed my eyes and
sobbed. The film depicts the true face of violence — a very realistic depiction
of how gun violence destroys a family. It was made for under $1M and brought in
$16.7M at the box office is and still bringing in money in its ancillary
markets.
There
are other films with a similar theme (and budget) to Fruitvale Station
looking for financing now. Building Bridges (roughly a $1M budget) tells
the true story of Ron Moore, the father of the 14-year-old boy in the Seattle
area who killed Moore’s wife and daughter before shooting himself in the head.
Moore’s son had been picked on, relentlessly bullied and was emotionally
destroyed when his best friend and protector was killed … in a school shooting,
no less. The powerful presentation trailer begins with the words: “The moments
that change our lives … are the ones we never see coming.” Screenwriter-actor
Cullen Douglas stars with Katie Strickland (Private Practice), Elizabeth
Perkins, and others from the hit ABC show Scandal – Guillermo
Diaz, Jeff Perry (who is also producing) and Tom Verica who is
directing. When I was first alerted to the presentation video, I thought it was
a documentary because Douglas’ acting was so realistic. I thought this has
to be the actual father whose family was destroyed.
People point to many reasons as to why such violence
exists in our society – poor parenting, guns being bought without sufficient
background checks, a lack of enforcement of existing gun laws, the media
making the shooters into mini-celebs, a lack of efficiency of the country’s
mental health system, and the entertainment industry – gun violence in film
and TV and video games.
It’s controversial and people disagree vehemently. But
what everyone can agree on is that, sadly, Ameria has changed. Since
Newtown, we’ve had 32 more school shootings, including at Santa Monica
College; school lockdowns across this country are now commonplace; a man
even opened fire at LAX, causing some of Hollywood’s own to scramble for
cover. (Actress Tatum O’Neal, for instance, saw the shooter and hid in a
storage room).
Most of these big-budget Hollywood pictures are full of
explosions and shoot-em-ups. One former studio head remembers how he passed
on Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. “I didn’t think it was funny to
have someone’s head blown off in a car and then picking up pieces of
someone’s brain. But when it came out in the theaters, people laughed.
And I think that is an indication of what is happening in
our society.” Indeed, Tarantino’s 1994 landmark film was a big box office
hit. In the late 1990s, some executives from the DEA came out from D.C. and
met with various studio and TV executives around town. They met with
journalists, too. I was one of them. Their mission was to end the
glorification of drugs and cigarettes in entertainment content. And in large
part, it succeeded. Studios lined up and even some directors did. In fact,
the filmmakers wouldn’t put smoking in Pearl Harbor, an era where
smoking was prevalent. However, one studio chairman said, “taking out
smoking isn’t going to hurt the profitability of a film. It’s a different
case with violence because it is action.”
VIDEO GAMES
Said another studio chairman, “The refrain I hear around
town is wait a minute, the content of movies is one thing, but these play
all over the world and there’s not the kind of violence that there is here
and they bounce the conversation over to video games.”
The evolution of video games from such innocuous
beginnings as Pong, Asteroids, and Pac-Man have morphed into
detailed 3D scenes where the player becomes part of the game and the winner
is measured by killing the most people. Blood squirts out of bodies in real
time. Today, the families of the Sandy Hook victims and other gun violence
victims are trying to get three websites to take down a video game where the
player can go into the Sandy Hook School and start shooting. It even uses
the real-life layout of the school. Video games are training grounds.
Literally. In many of these shooters’ homes, law enforcement find that these
young men have been practicing shooting on video games. Even the military
uses video games to train their soldiers.
Many parents and mental health professional believe that
children are learning the wrong conflict resolution skills from video games.
In many cases, the message these games present to children is that if you
perceive something as negative, you just kill it. The video gaming industry,
however, counters that a lot of children play violent video games and don’t
go out and kill others. This is little comfort to the parents of children
who were killed by violent video game-obsessed school shooters. As one
parent of a murdered child told me, “My child played with a violent game and
it didn’t affect him. However, another child playing the same game did
affect my son. That kid took my son’s life.”
A month after the Sandy Hook massacre, President Barack
Obama asked Congress to fund a study of the impact of violent video games on
young minds. “I will direct the Centers for Disease Control to go ahead and
study the best ways to reduce it,” he said. “We don’t benefit from
ignorance. We don’t benefit from not knowing the science of this epidemic of
violence.” Immediately afterwards, the Entertainment Software Association
(the video game arm of the entertainment industry), announced that they
would welcome a “national dialogue” about this. I called a source at the ESA
just a short time ago and asked whatever happened with that call to action?
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
When President Obama came to Hollywood in November of last
year, he met privately with the heads of the studios and the TV networks —
but according to one of the studio heads who met with him, there was no talk
about violent content. When he spoke later at Jeffrey Katzenberg’s
DreamWorks Animation, Obama said publicly that Hollywood had a “remarkable
legacy,” but also a “big responsibility.” Urging the entertainment industry
to “think long and hard” about gun violence messages in movies, the
president told an audience at DreamWorks: “We gotta make sure that we’re not
glorifying it.” He also said that violence in video games needs to be
addressed – which is about the only thing that leaders of the National Rifle
Association agree with Obama on.
I spoke to a source at the MPAA ratings and
classifications board and learned that after Newtown, the ratings board
became more aware of the “rat-a-tat-tat” in movies, but that that awareness
subsided as the news stories faded. Faded, perhaps, but not forgotten. Not
long ago, Steven Spielberg went to D.C. to talk to the MPAA about the
possibility of establishing a PG-15 rating. If adopted, it would scrap the
existing PG-13 rating and replace it with one in which parents are “strongly
cautioned” that “some material may be inappropriate for children under
15.” According to one MPAA executive, the question is: “Should there
be a PG-15 rating? Are we ready for that now?” Apparently, the nation’s
theater owners aren’t. “They don’t want to confuse the public and don’t want
to become police officers,” said one executive. “But a 15-year-old today is
different than the 15-year-old from the 1970s.”
Then again, so are the movies, which are much more violent
today. A recent study of popular movies between 1950 and 2012 found that the
level of gun violence has doubled and that gun-related violence in PG-13
movies exceeds that of the most successful R-rated movies. The MPAA rating
is but one aspect. The ratings and classifications board has traditionally
been light on violence and harder on sex. We’ve come a long way from The
Wild Bunch, director Sam Peckinpah’s seminal Western that shocked
audiences because of the graphic violence of blood splatter in slow motion
after a character was shot. “When I saw The Wild Bunch, I was
repulsed by it,” said a former studio chairman. “Sam Peckinpah’s idea was
‘I’m not going to glamorize it. I’m going to show the true side of it.’ That
was his intent.
I didn’t think at the time that it was art. I thought it
was pretty sick and bothered by it. But society has changed.”
After the Aurora theater shooting
where 12 people were killed (including my cousin’s beautiful 23 year-old
daughter) and 70 others shot (some kids with brain injuries and permanent
paralysis as these were AK-15 bullets that tumbled and turned designed for
maximum destruction to the human body), Weinstein said, “Hollywood can’t
shirk their responsibility” and said that maybe it was time that some of the
top filmmakers that made violent films sit down for a discussion. That never
happened. Now, once again, he has single-handedly brought the issue back to
the fore. Last week, I was surprised when Weinstein told Deadline that
he was producing The
Senator’s Wife with Meryl Streep, a movie that will
be no-holds-barred on the NRA and its behind-the-scenes machinations in
defeating legislation that would have expanded background checks on all gun
sales. That was only one day before he went on CNN to say, “the change
starts here.”
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN AURORA
I know people were shaken after the Aurora shooting, but
none more than those of us who experienced it personally. I have never written
about this before or talked about the details, but it’s time now. We
searched desperately for Micayla for 19 1/2 agonizing hours, only to find
out that she was lying dead on a cold theater floor the entire time after
being shot in the chest. You wonder if she suffered, how much she suffered,
how long she suffered. Her father wonders if she cried out for him. He is
haunted by the fact that there was no one there to hold her hand as she
struggled to breathe and then passed away. Micayla was a very sweet girl. An
exceptionally kind person. She loved Hello Kitty. She was accepting of – and
friends with – all races. Three weeks after Micayla was murdered, my cousin
and his wife escaped to my house in L.A. for a much-needed change of
environment. One night, as we all slept, I was awakened with a jolt. His
wife was screaming. I jumped out of bed to see if she was okay only to find
that she was completely asleep and shouting, “God help us! God help
us!” This is the face of violence that you don’t see after the news media
closes shop and moves onto the next grim story.
One of the bravest boys you will ever hear about – who was
every bit as courageous as the men depicted in Lone Survivor — was 24
year-old Alex Teves, who died a hero in the Aurora theater. This was a kid
who loved superheroes like Spiderman, went to ComicCon, loved movies,
grew up on The Lion King, and took care of his little brothers and
other kids with disabilities. On that terrible night in the Aurora theater,
when Alex saw the deranged gunman coming up the aisle, he covered his
girlfriend’s body with his own, whispering words of comfort to her until a
bullet hit him in the head. His parents, Tom and Caren Teves, now fight to
keep the names of mass shooters out of the media’s coverage so they don’t
get the notoriety they so desperately crave. Caren lost her business
and struggles with Parkinson’s disease (which is made worse by stress) and
she now tries to help other disadvantaged kids through the Alexander C.
Teves Foundation. Seven of the 12 people killed that night were in their
20s. One of the victims, little Veronica Moser-Sullivan, was only six years
old, when she was shot in the back as she ran with a brave 13 year-old up
the aisle. (Her mother, Ashley, was shot in the neck and abdomen, she was
pregnant with her second child and miscarried; she is now paralyzed from the
waist down) Veronica’s father is devastated.
The oldest among them, 51-year-old Gordon Cowden, was
murdered in front of his children and their mother who must take care of
them on one salary, one of which can’t sleep with the lights off anymore.
Rebecca Ann Wingo, 32, was a mother of two young girls. She had previously
served in the military and was helping foster children. Robert Wingo, a
wonderful father, is now on his own with one salary raising his girls.
Jonathan Blunk, 26, was a Navyman and Dad to two little ones. That salary
for his kids is also gone. John Larimer, 27, was an honorable kid an active
duty member of the United States Navy and Jesse Childress, in the Air Force
reserves, 29, all died heroes as did Matt McQuinn, 27 who was shot 9 times.
Jessica Ghawi, who helped others when the fires broke out in Colorado, was
24. Alex Sullivan, celebrating his birthday that night, was 27. And sweet
A.J. Boik who made everyone laugh and whose mother and uncle (a police
officer) are among the finest people I’ve ever meet, was only 18. These
aren’t just names to us. These are our family members. For some of us, who
lost an entire generation of our families that day, there will be no
grandchildren.
There will be no one to take care of us when we get old.
When this happens to you, once the shock wears off, you realize that your
life is nothing you recognize anymore. Your belief system changes. You can
no longer watch the same films or TV shows you once loved because they
contain so much senseless gun violence – violence that once you never
thought about, but which now is abhorrent and disgusting. You question God.
You can no longer function and lose your ability to work. You lose your
financial security. Your health fails. You fall into despair. Behind the
scenes, the Aurora families shoulder the pain for each other. And the pain
is severe; unending. Those of us who are able to function do whatever
we can because we don’t want another soul to experience the same grief and
horror. And then when you speak up after all of this to try to help others,
the families get verbal abuse and death threats and stalked by psychos. One
grieving mother had to use rubber gloves to open her mail lest she become an
anthrax victim. FBI agents have to intervene as so-called “charities” move
in to rip off the families behind the scenes (hence we all joined together
to establish the victim-based National Compassion Fund via the National
Centers for Victims of Crime in D.C). For the siblings amongst us, we lose
our best friends, and for grandparents, our lineage. Those who were injured
whose families I also came to know will never be the same again. And not one
of us thought we’d ever be put in this position. And we all know now that if
it happened to our families, it could happen to yours.
After Newtown, where 20 children and six educators were
massacred – including the school principal Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung who was
shot in the chest and died in the hallway as she bravely confronted the
gunman in an effort to save her kids – many celebrities either signed
letters or spoke out against gun violence, either through the Brady Campaign
or through Mayors Against Illegal Guns. It was a who’s who in entertainment.
There were industry executives like Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Fox chair
Peter Chernin, talent agents like CAA’s Richard Lovett, actors like Jamie
Foxx, Will Ferrell, Peter Dinklage, John Hamm, Jeremy Renner and Mark
Ruffalo (whose brother was a victim of gun violence), actresses like Cameron
Diaz, Reese Witherspoon, Carey Mulligan, Michelle Williams, Amy Poehler and
others like Judd Apatow, former SAG president Melissa Gilbert, Chris Rock,
Conan O’Brien and Jim Carrey. The question is now: Who will take the next
step and stand openly with Weinstein to start this discussion? Or will he be
left standing alone?
This week as we remember Martin Luther King, Jr., a victim
of gun violence, I am reminded of something the great civil rights leader
once said: “Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent on things that
matter.”
Is it time for all of us, no matter what industry we are
in, to begin the conversation about what can be done to stem the tide of
America’s culture of violence? It’s a national problem; shouldn’t there be a
multi-faceted, national resolution? In the wake of the horrors of
Aurora, Oak Creek and Newtown, we must recognize that we all – each and
every one of us – have a social responsibility. Isn’t there enough darkness
in the world without bringing more into it?
As Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Darkness cannot drive out
darkness; only light can do that.”
As my own father taught me before he died (he received
last rites as I held his hand, unbelievably, on the year mark of the Aurora
theater shooting), ‘if you don’t stand for something, you stand for
nothing.’ My father, who was my Atticus Finch, and I shared the same hero: Martin
Luther King, Jr. So, as we celebrate the birth of Dr. King – most will
just see it as another big box office holiday time for the industry — but my
family (and I mean my entire family from Columbine, Va Tech, Oak
Creek, NIU, Aurora, Newtown and 33 other families that come into the fold
every day) will think about this great man of peace whose life was cut short
by gun violence. And I am struck by another quote from Dr. King: “By our
readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim, by
allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the
hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing …
we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become
popular pastimes.”
And finally, I must explain something: For the parents of
murdered children who have been relentlessly hounded by the media, I allowed
them to speak off the record. I couldn’t get any of the power players I
spoke with in Hollywood to reveal themselves on the record for this story …
and that makes what Harvey Weinstein did in speaking out publicly all the
more remarkable.
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