The Devil Made Me Do IT

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Nation.

William Parrish, a ridiculously rich media tycoon (a seventy-fiveacre countrymanor, helicopter to work, platinum trinkets for party favors and so on) who re-examines his life after a visit from the Grim Reaper. Bronfinan and Meyer thought it was a terrificmovie

and were stunned when the rest of the country was just bored by Parrish’spersonal crisis. This time the message from moviegoers was simple: Maybe there is such a thing as having too much money after all.

ME DO IT

THE

FORD PINTO OF

IS by ere’s the scenario: Someone makes a movie or television show that depicts an especially gruesome and innovative act of violence. Shortly thereafter-sometimes within days-headlines announce that some deeply disturbed group of kids has mimicked the celluloid crime almost exactly. Sincethe seventies,movies and TV shows have served as primers for raping a schoolgirl with a broomstick playing Russian roulette Deer at least twenty-five reported copycat deaths); strapping a toddler splattered with blue paint to the railroad tracks Play 3); and squirting gasoline into a subway booth and incinerating the man inside

and its makers in a suit that civil libertarians are now watching closely Edmondson and Darrus each dropped a stupefying eight and a half tabs of acid apiece on March 5,1995, and then set off for her parents’ vacation cabin. There they picked up her father’s .38 Smith & Wesson and watched Killers, a film they had already seen multiple times, usually when they were tripping. The next day they started driving east. Along the way, Darms allegedly began fantasizingabout murdering people. According to Edmondson, he wanted to seize an isolated farmhouse, kill all the occupants and then drive off, just like Mickey and Mallory in Killers. Instead, the couple stopped in Hernando, Mississippi, pulled up to a local cotton gin, and Ben Although the hypodermic-needle theory of media effectswent in with the gun. He shot and killed the manager, William the notion that Hollywood injects an unsuspecting populace with Savage. They drove west to Louisiana, where Sarah went into a convenience store and shot Patsy Byers, turning the clerk into a toxin and produces an instant infection-has been discredited a quadriplegic. (Byers subsequently died of cancer.) The crimes for at least sixty years among communicationsscholars and legal went unsolved for three months until police got an anonymous experts, it gains renewed if brief legitimacy in cases like these. tip linking the two to the murders; they were eventually tried, Uneasy about charges of liability and brand image, studios have convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. sometimes re-edited films to cut scenes that kids were imiThe twist in this case came when John Grisham, who tating. Stanley Kubrick banned his own film in Britain after a series of copycat assaults were used to practice law in Mississippi and knew Bill Savage, linked to the infamous ‘‘Sings in the Rain“ rape scene. But learned that the suspects may have been inspired by Stone’s > and Oxfilm. Furious, he urged in in the courts it has been virtually impossible to prove that a & ,\ :/ (of which he is part owner) that Stone particular movie caused a particular crime. cya, Is that about to change? No recent movie has drawn more and Time Warner be subject to a new kind of charge: a product-liability suit alleging that the film was not charges that it inspired real-life mayhem ,than Oliver Stone’s speech but a product that had caused injury, just like breast imKillers. In murder cases from Paris to Utah to Massachusetts, young people who watched the movie dozens plants or cigarettes. (The irony that Grisham, who has made of times and said things like “I’m a natural born killer!” upon millions by selling books and movies with titles like to their arrest suggested that Stone’s intention-to produce a Kill, was suddenly prissy about screen violence has not been satiric look at the American media’s cynical exploitation of lost on Stone.) This didn’t go anywhere-4risham’s ploy was ‘‘preposterous” violence to maximize profits-had been turned upside down. and “a nonstarter,” according to noted First Amendment attorney These viewers weren’t seeing biting social commentary; they Martin Garbus-but one of Patsy Byers’s attorneys, Joseph Simpconservatives like Bob Dole singled saw a how-to manual. out Stone’s film for particularly vehement attack, while letting son, filed civil suit on other grounds. Initially the targets were unironic bloodfests slide, or worse, celebrating them as great Edmondson and Darrus, but then Simpsonadded Stone and Time Warner as defendants, arguing that they “hew.. .or should have family fare, as Dole did with known” that the film would incite violence. The case was disBut it was the 1995 shooting spree of Sarah Edmondson, niece of Oklahoma’s attorney general and daughter of a district court missed when it first went to court in January of 1997. But last judge, and her boyfiiend, Ben D m s , that embroiled the movie May, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Louisiana, allowedthe Byers suit to be reinstated. In October the Louisiana Supreme Court declined to hear the case, so it went to the US Su.L at preme Court, where Stone and Time Warner, backed by an amicus of Listening In: Radio and the American brief endorsedby the Writers Guild ofAmerica,West, the Motion Imagination, will be by Booh.

,

April 5/12,1999

.

Picture Association of America, the National Association of Broadcasters’and dozens of others, urged a swift dismissal. On March 8, without comment,the Court denied the Time Warner appeal, allowing the case to go to trial in Amite, Louisiana.The Byers team of attorneys, led by Simpson,is now free to depose witnesses and seek any other evidence that might support their case. At stake here is whether a movie like Naticral Born Killers is the kind of speech that lacks First Amendment protection. The Byers family lawyers are hoping to show that Stone’s film falls into the category of unprotected speech as outlined in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). The requirements for meeting the Brandenbuvg exception are high: Plaintiffs must prove that the speech was intended to produce “imminent lawless action” and that the producers of the speech knew that the speech was indeed likely to produce such behavior. “It is impossible to believe that the plaintiffs will discover anythmg that will prove that Stone wanted to produce lawlessness,” notes First Amendment authority Floyd Abrams. Joseph Simpson admits that Stone “is never going to admit that he intended to cause these murders.” But Simpson cites a quote from the New York Times in 1996 in which Stone said “the most pacifisticpeople in the world said they came out ofthis movie and wanted to kill somebody.” In other words, says Simpson, “it looks like he knew people wouldkill” after seeingthe film. What has alarmed some observers is that the appeals court ruling came three weeks after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Paladin Press, publisher of a little self-help book titled Hit Man: Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, which hoped to have a civil case against the publisher thrown out of court. A manual on how to bump someone off, Hit Man provided crucial instructions to James Perry, who was hired by Lawrence Horn to kill his ex-wife, their 8-year-oldparaplegic son and his nurse. At Perry’s trial, prosecutors itemized twenty-two points of similarity between the book and the crime. The case against Paladin goes to US district court this May. No lawsuit alleging that books or similar works have produced violent behavior has ever been successful, but some attorneys think this might be the exception.

p:: - *, ‘7 he Paladin case is quite different from that against Natural

.:/ Bom Killers, but both feed a desire-even, apparently, in ,-

E,

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The Nation.

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some courts-to make more material, causal connections ., ,i >! between speech and subsequent criminal behavior. “There .isno way Natural Bom Killers can be rationally viewed as similar to the hit-man book,” maintains Abrams. Nonetheless, Garbus warns that if Paladin loses, it could be “the break in the dike” that starts to erode free-speech protections. Another informed source womes about the “easy syllogisms that could be applied between the two cases.” Could Stone and Time Warner lose? A source close to the case imagined such a scenario. “Suppose you have an innocent woman with kids who is grievously injure4 a defendant with deep pockets like Time Warner, a famous director and a cultural orientation in a state like Louisiana where people believe there’s too much violence and exploitation in the media. It wouldn’t be surpesing for Louisianajudges to have a skeptical view of Time Warner’s defense.” Whatever the outcome of this case, the very incidence of such lawsuits could have a chilling effect on 6” freedom of expression. And in an environment ,

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52

The Nation.

of increased public concern about the effects of violence in the media, Garbus worries that litigation against filmmakers and TV producers will increase. He is especially concerned about the number of attacksby DonaldWildmon, head of the right-wing American Family Association, who has targeted W P D Blue, the NEA and ads for female hygiene products. Many progressives feel themselves in a moral no-man’s land, adamant defenders of free speech who are also alarmed by the corrosive effect of the onslaught of media violence-especially what George Gerbner has called “happy violence,” in which the hero blows someone’s guts out while cracking a witty bon mot. According to Professor L. Rowel1 Huesmann at the University of Michigan, an expert on the relationbetween violence in the media and aggression, the data are incontrovertible: Study after study demonstrates that increased exposure to violent media fare increases the risk of aggressive behavior. Huesmann is not arguing

ADril5/12,1999

that one particular media text would cause someone to act in a particular way. Rather, it is the consumption of violent media fare over time, within a broader culture of violence, that desensitizes people to violence and socializes them to behave aggressively. However, it is also true that, as Abrams puts it, “in order to protect the First Amendment rights of everyone, you even have to include speech that has some potential for doing h a , lest we lose too much speech which is too valuable.” Although Natural Born Killers was not everybody’s favorite movie, it is indeed a pathetic comment on our culture that a film so clearly designed to excoriate the media for its glorification of violence and its addiction to gory fare has become the focus of attack while all those scores of other films, with their wisecracking, bazookatoting buddies, are what most Americans happily send their kids off to see every weekend of the year, when they’re not readily available on television at home. 4

FOR MR. RIGHT RUNNING THE

IN

CORN p]am It. .

wood denizens.After a sessionfeaturing supply-sideguru Arthur So says sixties-radical-turned-eighties-conservative Laffer, Stanley K. Sheinbaum, a prominent LA liberal, chastised j;$ David Horowitz, with a chuckle,when asked to describe the attendees for flirting with Reaganism. “Sheinbaum pointed 222 conservativepolitical activity in Hollywood. It’s a boast his finger and said, ‘You are consorting with people who ran the and a lament.A decade ago, Horowitztook it upon himself to chalHollywood blacklist. I know whoyou are and I know where you work,’ ” Chetwynd recalls. “It was chilling. No one came back. lenge the political atmosphere of this strongholdof liberalism. For years, he had been decrying The Left-in his a well-oiled, A lot of people said, ‘I’m with you, but don’t tell anyone.’” coherent and influential movement deserving capital letters-and (Sheinbaum vaguely remembers the event but does not recall its power in the media and academia. Setting his sights on Holly- .being openly hostile.) wood, as if a right-y4ng nudzh could alter the tenor of Tinseltown, After that, Chetwynd, who was born in Britain and raised was amark of Horowitz’s hubris. But he has had a dash of success. in Canada, backed away from electoral politics. Following the There is now an organized, if small, conservative outfit in town. 1987 release of his film The Hanoi Hilton, a movie about AmeriIt has no discernible influence on the product of Hollywood, can‘POWs that conservatives embraced, Horowitz sought out no noticeable impact on electoral or issue-orientedpolitics. But Chetwynd. It took Horowitz severalyears to persuade Chetwynd about once a month, Horowitz pulls together a couple of hundred to saddle up for his effort to breakThe Left’s hold on Hollywood. right-of-center people from the entertainment industry and elseM e r Clinton won in 1992, Chetwynd was willing to take another where to hear a speaker from the world of politics-say, George stab at corralling Hollywood’s cons. “I had had nightmares about Will or Newt Gingrich. This group gathers at a fancy hotel, the Sheinbaum episode,” Chetwynd, 55, says. “But I felt that if schmoozes and listens. It does not raise money or agitate for we cannot have an alternative view here, it’s bad for the Republic. conservative causes or candidates.~Itmerely offers a haven for We create the popular culture here, and there’s no political debate Hollywooders who don’t fit the liberal Democrat stereotype. In in Hollywood? That cannot be healthy.” a community where only a few actually bother with politics and The two set up the Wednesday Morning Club in the office that fewer do anything that can be considered right of center, the 60houses Horowitz’s think tank,the Center for the Study of Popular year-old Horowitz has created a cell of his own-with cocktails. Culture. (In 1997the center received $500,000 from right-wing To open the Hollywood front in his crusade against The Left, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.) Horowitz and Chetwynd reHorowitz formed the Wednesday Morning Club, a group that now cruited actor Tom Selleck, entertainment power-lawyer Bruce has about 170 members. The group was established the morning Ramer (who represents Steven Spielberg) and writer-producer Bob Gale for the steering committee. Soon the club was after Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992-hence the name-but its origins stretchback to 1980.That year, Lionel Clietwynd, an accomdrawingA-list politicos, mainly Republicans,as speakers. &* *i plished screenwriter(TheApprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz),was Occasionally a star or two were present at the :,~ working with the Ronald Reagan campaign and hosting meetings events, but sometimes Pat Sajalc was the most yp where Reagan boosters talked up their candidate before Hollyrecognizable face. Last April, Texas Governor

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