Here is the article...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/movies/24horr.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
LOS ANGELES, March 23 To drive almost anywhere here this week is to run a
gantlet of advertising for movies about killing.
Posters for Warner Brothers¹ film ³The Reaping,² about deadly plagues, and
the torture-filled ³Captivity,² from After Dark Films and Lionsgate, appear
on bus shelters on Pico Boulevard between two elementary schools. A fright
puppet from Universal¹s ³Dead Silence² peers menacingly from a
construction-site wall by a children¹s center in Santa Monica. A few blocks
away, a large billboard promoting Sony Pictures¹ ³Perfect Stranger²
overlooks the campus of the Crossroads School, the daytime home for the
offspring of many in the film industry.
All rated R for violence, among other traits, the films belong to what has
become an annual winter-spring crop of horror and suspense. But the harvest
is trickier than usual this year, as Hollywood braces for a new government
review of the marketing of violent entertainment to the young.
The Federal Trade Commission is putting the final touches on a follow-up to
its September 2000 report on the marketing to children of violent movies,
music and video games. The first such assessment in three years, it will
examine the selling practices of a mainstream entertainment industry that in
the interim has become increasingly dependent on abductions, maimings,
decapitations and other mayhem once kept away from studio slates.
Seven years ago the film industry narrowly avoided federal regulation of its
advertising practices, as politicians, in the wake of the Columbine High
School killings, called executives before a Congressional committee but
eventually agreed to let Hollywood police itself.
The effectiveness of the resulting marketing guidelines is now being tested
by rougher movies, competitors not bound by strictures that apply to the
trade association¹s major studio members, and a flourishing Web culture that
has driven big openings in the last three years for harshly violent films
like ³Saw² or ³Hostel² without much concern about the age of viewers.
If the new study were to find that the industry has violated or has outgrown
its voluntary standards, it might kick the issue back into the political
arena ahead of a presidential election. There it could trigger fresh calls
for regulation, or even kill a gory source of relatively easy money.
Earlier this week, After Dark and Lionsgate scrambled to contain the
public-relations damage after a Los Angeles Times columnist quoted several
young students objecting to an especially gruesome billboard for ³Captivity²
near their middle school. After Dark, which is expected to release the film
on May 18 with Lionsgate, quickly agreed to pull part of its ad campaign.
After Dark executives and a lawyer representing the company did not return
telephone calls seeking comment.
Neither After Dark nor Lionsgate is a member of the Motion Picture
Association of America, which represents the major studios. Such nonmember
companies are not bound by the association¹s promise to keep ads away from
television shows, magazines and Web sites for which 35 percent or more of
the audience is under 17. But they do agree to use approved advertising
materials for any film that is submitted to the group for rating. In the
case of ³Captivity,² the association had disapproved of the material and is
now considering disciplinary measures.
³I¹m very, very troubled by this particular case,² Dan Glickman, the trade
group¹s chief executive, said Thursday about the ³Captivity² billboards. ³I
can tell you this issue will not go unnoticed.²
He added that complaint levels to the association about selling violence to
youth ³by and large have been very low.² Nonetheless, he said, the group has
been fine-tuning its own standards, while exploring technology that will
help it keep the young from being marketed to on the Internet.
Horror aficionados date the genre¹s current flourishing to October 2004. The
first of Lionsgate¹s ³Saw² movies, about a demonically inventive serial
killer, opened to a surprisingly strong $18 million on its first weekend,
though it lacked an expensive cast or a pedigreed filmmaker. Sequels,
imitators and close cousins soon followed. Most of the major studios and
some independents, notably Lionsgate, quickly ginned up cheap fright fare
for release mainly in the first quarter of the year, then again in the fall,
in the spaces between summer blockbusters and classier Oscar aspirants.
While generally careful to observe the letter of their agreement not to
directly solicit the young in selling violent movies, some of Hollywood¹s
big studios have had close shaves with the rules of late. Fox Atomic, a
division formed by Fox Searchlight to cultivate the late-teenage and
early-adult audience, on March 6 placed an ad for its film ³The Hills Have
Eyes 2² with an evening showing of ³Dodgeball,² rated PG-13, on FX.
The ad identified ³Hills,² about National Guard trainees brutally murdered
by mutants, as being not yet rated, though film association guidelines call
for the disclosure of ratings in ads, and the company had accepted an R
rating the day before. John Hegeman, Fox Atomic¹s chief operating officer,
said the R rating was missing because it takes about two days to alter a
television spot.
³We are M.P.A.A. signatories, and we do follow their rules,² said Mr.
Hegeman. He pointed out that ³Dodgeball² on that evening attracted an
audience about 71 percent of which was 18 and over.
Yet things become murkier when studios which often attempt to block the
underage from visiting their official sites for R-rated fare deal with
Bloody-disgusting.com, Arrow in the Head (joblo.com/arrow), Fangoria.com, or
any of another dozen such Web sites. (Bloody-disgusting, for example,
includes chat forums that address such questions as: ³Can anyone suggest a
good torture-esk movie?²) Hollywood companies commonly buy advertising on
such sites. Perhaps more effectively, they also open the doors for set
visits, early viewings, promotional contests and anything that will attract
fans.
The operators of several such sites said they had no way of knowing how many
of their visitors were under 17, but believed the numbers were substantial.
³The horror site skews a little more toward the younger ones,² said Berge
Garabedian, founder of the Joblo.com film site and its associated Arrow in
the Head horror section, which this week carried a banner ad for an unrated
DVD of ³Sublime,² about gruesome murder in a hospital, from Warner Home
Video. Mr. Garabedian said he tried to block visitors under 15 from
discussion boards in order to eliminate ³a lot of MySpace craziness,² but
thought a considerable share of his Arrow in the Head visitors to be in the
13-to-18-year-old age range. (A Warner representative said the studio
believed fewer than 4 percent of the visitors to Joblo.com were teenagers,
based on information provided by the agency that places it ads, but had no
figures for the smaller Arrow in the Head site.)
Whether such underage visitors are actually seeing R-rated horror in
theaters or on DVDs without a parent¹s presence is unclear. Both film
association and studio executives said they could not provide the number for
young viewers for their films, an exercise that could be complicated by a
tendency of underage respondents to misrepresent their ages in exit polls.
But a study last fall by Experian Simmons Research found that 12 percent of
respondents between the ages of 12 and 17 reported watching ³Saw II² in
theaters, while 12 percent said they had seen the film on DVD, and 26
percent reported viewing any horror in theaters.
In its 2004 report, the Federal Trade Commission said that in 36 percent of
their attempts, its underage ³mystery shoppers² were able to buy a movie
ticket without an age check in theaters, down somewhat from about half in
2000. Meanwhile 81 percent of the young buyers obtained R-rated DVDs without
a check.
Bracing for the next report, the National Association of Theater Owners last
fall provided the commission with a detailed description of its efforts to
keep the unaccompanied young out of violent fare. But at the same time, the
theater owners strongly criticized the studios¹ home entertainment divisions
for promoting versions of some of the same movies on DVD as being unrated
and uncensored.
According to Mr. Glickman, the number of such DVDs is small. ³It¹s obviously
something we¹re taking a look at, but in terms of its being a substantial
problem, it¹s not,² he said.
> From: Danny Steward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Reply-To: Danny Steward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 10:42:38 -0700
> To: MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
> Subject: [MOPO] In the NY Times today...
>
>
> From Today's Headines in the NY Times on line is this header story in the
> Arts section, and all on a poster near you! Is the Congress, itself a
> hotbed of horror and corruption, about to create a new form of censorship.
>
> Danny / Seattle
> ________________________________
>
> Government to Take a Hard Look at Horror
> By MICHAEL CIEPLY
> Torture, murder and deadly plagues, all making their way to a theater near
> you. And all being advertised on a poster near you.
>
> Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com
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