Writers are talking. Who´s responsible? What can we do to help? But the talk remains private. Meanwhile, politicians and media critics decry what they term our "culture of violence." Although most movies and television programs are benign entertainment, emotions become facts in an election year. Isn´t it wiser to be proactive than reactive? In this special section, award-winning writers examine their conscience, exploring controversial issues that have become the industry´s front line of debate.

 


Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 ©1991
Tri-Star Pictures, Inc. All rights reserved.
Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in
Lethal Weapon, Copyright ©1989
Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved.
 
  

Confessions of a Violent Movie Writer
 

Written By William Mastrosimone

Sitting at Natural Born Killers in a packed house, kids cheered every shot, stab, kick. They weren´t seeing social commentary. They were drunken Roman citizens watching humans thrown to the beasts in the Colosseum. A short time later, sitting at Pulp Fiction, they rolled in the aisles when the gun went off accidentally and the kid was killed in the back seat of the car, fouling the upholstery. They weren´t seeing black comedy. They were loving the total freedom of these two men to rove about with guns, killing for fun. Something snapped in me back then in ´94 and I began to feel a sense of shame about belonging to the Hollywood community. And those movies were tame compared to others. But for me a saturation point had been reached. A line was crossed between artistry and social responsibility.

 

Thirty-three years ago next month, Eagle Scout Charles Whitman, 24, an expert marksman and marine, killed his wife and mother. Then he carried ammunition, shotguns, rifles, Spam sandwiches and water to the roof of a 27-story clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin, where he was a junior. He shot 46 people in 90 minutes, killing 16 before he was killed... The psychiatrist he had begun seeing observed that Mr. Whitman said he was "thinking about going up on the tower and shooting people."
Those feelings of shame grew into a play entitled Like Totally Weird, and then a screenplay by the same title. In the course of rewriting it, school shootings began in towns across America: Moses Lake, Bethel, Pearl, Paducah, Jonesboro, Edinboro, Pomona, Fayetteville, Onalaska, Springfield. A plague of kids killing kids in unlikely places spread over the country. I began to collect newspaper articles to study the killers. One thing became clear: these kids were not psychotics. They were normal kids living our fantasies.  

Three days after the Springfield killing in ´98, as my family sat around the dinner table, one of my kids casually mentioned that upon entering English class, he and his friends saw that someone had written on the blackboard: "I´m going to kill everyone in this class. And the teacher, too." The blackboard phantom was soon discovered and suspended, but peace of mind in our sleepy little town in the foothills of Mt. Rainier was hard to come by. Like other parents, my wife and I realized that our kids are no longer safe, and that even though the blackboard phantom said it was all a joke, we understood that he was imitating another fantasy similiar to that of the Paducah killer who imitated a movie. The Jonesboro killers were obviously acting out some kind of military fantasy. Sadly, it became eminently reasonable to assume there is a potential killer in every school.

The potential kid killer lives in isolation, in a state where realities are distorted and exaggerated. His most potent fantasy is that of revenge on those who reject him. He looks for ways to sustain his fantasy, for a jump-start of his imagination. Movies, video games, Marilyn Manson do just fine.

 

"We sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that´s the way it´s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They´re crazy."
 

-From Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky

I made lots of high-minded excuses for myself that night. A man attempts to rape a woman and is thrown into a fireplace and tortured by her in Extremities. In The Beast, a Soviet tank is used to execute a rebel. In The Burning Season [co-written], a man is set on fire and his Amazonian village forced to watch. I would like to think that my brand of violence is justified. But maybe the potential killer makes no fine distinction. Maybe violence is violence is violence. Maybe in looking for answers to alleviate his pain of being a "nobody," he takes his movie idol as a role model, merging life and art.  

It was then I began to see that my shame was an epiphany about the pervasive and profound effect we writers have on the world. It was then that my shame became a pain in the pit of my stomach. Like Oedipus, I had been seeking the cause of the plague upon my land, not knowing that the culprit was myself.

Unable to sleep that night, Arthur Miller´s words kept going through my head: "Tragedy is a play about the chickens coming home to roost." America´s chickens had come home to roost. Inevitably, hubris triggers Nemesis. By morning, I had the first draft of a play entitled Bang Bang You´re Dead, intended to be performed by school kids as a tool for students to confront the potential killer in the audience. I brought it to the attention of Springfield drama teacher Mike Fisher. He brought it to his students who had been in the cafeteria when bullets began flying. Some of them were wounded.

Thus began an odyssey that has changed me forever. We quietly rehearsed during the mostly peaceful year, launching our world premiere in Eugene, Oregon, at which time we announced that the play would be posted on the Internet royalty-free for any student production (www.bangbangyouredead.com).

A week later, Littleton happened. Five weeks later, Heritage High School in Georgia happened.

I was not surprised by Littleton. But I was nauseated by Hollywood´s knee-jerk state of denial. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times told me that he could not find one writer in all of Hollywood to talk about violence. Wave after wave of copycat bomb threats closed hundreds of schools across the country. Another body dropped in a Canadian school. Kids in trenchcoats seemed to multiply. A sixth-grade boy shot three kids on the playground with a BB gun. Lawsuits were pointing the sword of blind Justice at Hollywood. Amid such madness, the purveyors of fantasy get a sudden case of laryngitis. We heard from the apologists but not the greenlight people.

Hollywood silence has become strident.

 

"There´s a way to help insure that new faces and pocketbooks will continue to patronize your business: Use the schools. This is where most of your potential down-the-line shooters and hunters now are... Schools are an opportunity. Grasp it."
 

-A trade publication of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, designed for gun manufacturers; as reported by bob herbert, The New York Times 5/2/99

Hollywood extremists say we have no responsibility. Outside extremists say that it´s all our fault. I myself am looking for the truth between those indefensible positions. And there are hundreds of laboratory and real-life studies that have to give pause to any writer with a functioning conscience. These studies are not theories. They are scientific fact. Like it or not, there is a correlation between violent entertainment and violent behavior. The evidence is overwhelming that increased viewing of violence leads to increased acceptance of aggressive behavior.  

No, a movie does not make a kid go out and kill; but the accumulation of violent entertainment over a span of years predisposes a kid to be indifferent to violence against others, and to see violence as a first, not a last, resort.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (On Killing) has shown that violent video games made the Paducah killer a world-class marksman, even though he never fired a real gun until the day he walked into school and killed three girls.

There´s a new video game out. The advertising goes: "Kill your friends without guilt." The package allows you to scan your yearbook into your computer and morph the heads of your friends and enemies onto the video targets. Anybody want to defend this game?

The debate is over.

If, as writers, we are not convinced that the post-Littleton copycat bomb threats reveal our movie audience to be filled with troubled kids looking for inspiration, we are either mindless or heartless. If conscience is not part of our product, then we are no different than the cigarette companies who lied for decades that there is no cause and effect between smoke and cancer. We might also be compared to the gun manufacturers who proclaim that 98 percent of people who own guns don´t commit crimes or kill anyone. Many in Hollywood echo the National Rifle Association defense, that most people who watch violent movies don´t go on rampages.

As the intelligentsia, we have a responsibility. Those who think that to hold back would cramp their style should note that some of the best movies ever made were spawned under Hayes Office censorship. If Hitchcock felt straitjacketed, he never let on. We are all bound by a social contract wherein we agree to stop at red lights, if not to safeguard other lives, then for our own survival. Some of our own are speeding through the red lights, drunk on the freedom and benefits of The Biz, leaving a trail of dead kids behind.

If we continue to ignore the possibility that we may be part of the lethal alchemy of kids killing kids, if we continue to pander to the worst instincts and call it "holding a mirror up to society," if we continue to devalue human life and call it "First Amendment rights," we shall reap the whirlwind, feel a public backlash, and see our freedoms curtailed. We will be known to history as the sell-out generation. Hollywood will stand for the Roman Colosseum, a horror chamber where endless ways of killing were invented to please packed audiences, and we will come to foretell the fall of an empire.

I apportion blame everywhere:

Kids must treat everyone politely, no matter how freaky. (The Littleton killers said, "This is what you get for the way you treated us.")

Parents must learn from the Paducah parents of murdered kids: "Love your kids enough to find out what´s going on in their lives. Love them enough to say no to them."

Schools must set up anonymous tip lines so harassment by or of freaks can be reported.

The media must remember that, to a troubled mind, any publicity is good publicity, and then do what the Chicago Sun-Times did: report Littleton but bury it in the back pages, thus depriving the unknown wannabe of the attention he craves.

The President must treat this matter as if there were a terrorist organization roaming the country killing kids at random. He must understand that kids are the country´s greatest self-interest, and prosecute this cause with the same energy and determination that is shown in dropping bombs on far-flung places. The President should enlist the best and brightest minds and give this matter the same urgency of the Manhattan Project and demand a solution on his desk by September 1.

Hollywood and corporate America must search their souls. Get out of your ivory tower and acknowledge you are part of a society. Stop seeing kids as an income. Kids today are the most exploited generation in history, not in body, but in mind and spirit. The science of demographics knows how to manipulate the levers of the psyche to move masses of people. There is a core of writers, producers, and actors who are traffickers in gratuitous violence-the crack dealers of fantasy-who feel they must "push the envelope," as they say.

 

"None of us is looking to have government get involved here, but if the entertainment industry doesn´t begin to self-control and eliminate some of the ultra- violent(material)... believe me there will be attempts by government to do it."

-Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), The Los Angeles Times 5/8/99

I offer this litmus test: If an act of violence is without remorse or consequences and uses human suffering for "entertainment," it´s wrong. No troubled kid who sees Saving Private Ryan finds inspiration to go out and kill; he sees people sacrificing their lives for a greater good. What can you say of Freddy and Jason? We must balance our rights with the right of kids to die of natural causes.  

We can still explore the human condition. The subject matter need not change; only our techniques have to change. If we are not willing to make that sacrifice, we are no better than that creep who walked away when he saw his best friend molest and murder that young girl in a Nevada casino. It´s going to take key people to reverse the trend, but first it´s going to take those of us on the bottom of the totem pole to put our scripts where our consciences are and refuse to be a tool of the exploiters among us.

Focus off the Academy Awards, and focus on the Humanitas Awards, Hollywood´s only real claim to a soul. (When I attended the Humanitas Award ceremony four years ago, there was not one reporter, not one camera, no one to comment on my new necktie.)

Some of our own feel blameless because they feel no shame. I say they´re beyond the pale.

I have come to this point after a five-year journey, from feeling ashamed of my profession while watching movies, to the world premiere of Bang Bang You´re Dead when I, as a Hollywood writer, came face-to-face with parents who lost kids to violence in Bethel, Alaska...Jonesboro, Arkansas...Paducah, Kentucky...Springfield, Oregon.... All words failed me in a crowded lobby when the father of a boy who still had a bullet in his spine poked a finger in my chest and said, "´Bout time you people caught on."

I do not regret the course I have taken. At bottom, it´s a spiritual battle between exploiters and nurturers of kids, between the elitist mentality and those of us who feel we´re all connected, and that we as artists are part of-not on top of-society. I have turned down work that I deemed unworthy. I will probably lose more work for speaking my mind. But what I have, along with Mike Fisher and the Springfield High School kids, is the knowledge that our play has been downloaded 10,000 times from the Web site, and that many of those downloads will turn into thousands of shoestring school productions. We also have the testimony of a girl in Eugene who came backstage with a tear-streaked face to tell us that she had made up her mind to kill herself, but seeing the play made her believe in life once more, and she thanked us all for saving her life. That´s a story I can take home to my kids. Or anybody else´s kids. And that´s what matters to me now.

 


 

William Mastrosimone´s Web site www.bangbangyouredead.com provides free transcripts of his play, available for production if performed without charge. He will be a panelist at the Writers Guild Foundation´s Words Into Pictures seminar, held June 4-6.