To drive almost anywhere here this week is to run a
gantlet of advertising for movies about killing.
Posters for Warner Brothers’ film “The Reaping,” about
deadly plagues, and the torture-filled “Captivity,”
from After Dark Films and Lionsgate, appear on bus
shelters on Pico Boulevard between two elementary
schools. A fright puppet from Universal’s “Dead
Silence” peers menacingly from a construction-site
wall by a children’s center in Santa Monica. A few
blocks away, a large billboard promoting Sony
Pictures’ “Perfect Stranger” 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 association’s major studio members, and a
flourishing Web culture that has driven big openings
in the last three years for harshly violent films like
“Saw” or “Hostel” 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
“Captivity” 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 association’s 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 “Captivity,” the
association had disapproved of the material and is now
considering disciplinary measures.
“I’m very, very troubled by this particular case,” Dan
Glickman, the trade group’s chief executive, said
Thursday about the “Captivity” billboards. “I can tell
you this issue will not go unnoticed.”
He added that complaint levels to the association
about selling violence to youth “by and large have
been very low.” 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 genre’s current
flourishing to October 2004. The first of Lionsgate’s
“Saw” 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 Hollywood’s 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 “The Hills Have Eyes 2” with
an evening showing of “Dodgeball,” rated PG-13, on FX.
The ad identified “Hills,” 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
Atomic’s chief operating officer, said the R rating
was missing because it takes about two days to alter a
television spot.
“We are M.P.A.A. signatories, and we do follow their
rules,” said Mr. Hegeman. He pointed out that
“Dodgeball” 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: “Can anyone suggest a
good torture-esk movie?”) 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.
“The horror site skews a little more toward the
younger ones,” 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 “Sublime,” 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 “a lot of
MySpace craziness,” 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
parent’s 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 “Saw II” 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
“mystery shoppers” 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
studios’ 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. “It’s obviously something we’re taking a look
at, but in terms of its being a substantial problem,
it’s not,” he said.
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