Youth Must Be Served--With Respect

“Where were the grown-ups?” was the refrain heard everywhere after the massacre at Columbine High School. I know where we were: at work, busy as ever, constructing a national culture that treats adolescents with unconcealed contempt.

Teenagers are under daily assault, all right--by us, the grown-ups. We design their clothes, manufacture and sell them their guns, produce the music that functions as the soundtrack for their lives, and control every aspect of their sprawling mega-high schools. In a dazzling display of cultural power, we also produce the movies, television shows, advertising and video games that entertain them and shape their minds.

We grown-ups in the entertainment industry trumpet our ability to sway young consumers but paradoxically claim that the content of our programs has no other power over the human mind. After the massacre at Littleton, Colo., that stampeding noise you heard was the sound of entertainment executives retreating from their responsibility--except for ABC Chairman Bob Iger, who had the courage to admit, “When the finger is pointed at them about violence, they say their media has no influence; but they turn around and say just the opposite to advertisers. We should all admit our medium has an influence.”

What we have as filmmakers and television producers is a great deal more than simple influence: As we enter the 21st century, we are the dominant cultural force in this nation. Thirty years ago, our work was considered “pulp fiction.” Today, movies and television programs are studied in academia, discussed in the workplace and cited in the Congressional Record. Our influence extends far beyond our borders. A Harvard Medical School study in Fiji found that bulimia and anorexia--previously unknown among Fijians--skyrocketed after the arrival of American television in 1995. When the Sun Vista cruise liner sank near Malaysia earlier this month, 1,000 international passengers kept up their spirits by singing the song from “Titanic.”

The films we make shape minds. The movie “Top Gun” has been a phenomenal recruiting device for the Air Force and Navy--not only when it was released 13 years ago but also now, on video. We pride ourselves on being culture makers when we point to “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Schindler’s List,” but we won’t own up to our influence when it comes to the flood of mindless movies that exploit violence and other bloody spectacle--this in spite of many studies at our nation’s top universities that appear to demonstrate a link between watching violent entertainments and acting aggressively in life. (By the way, why are those ungrateful gun industry people trying to shift the blame to us when we’re giving them all that free product placement? Movies are the best thing that ever happened to weapons manufacturers.)

Stories change lives and we know it, or we wouldn’t be so passionate about writing and producing movies.

If the entertainment industry is careless about its influence on young people, it’s only because we’re embedded in a broader national culture that constantly demonstrates its disrespect toward children and adolescents, in every arena from child care to fashion.

Have you taken a young teenager shopping lately? Girls’ clothing is available in two styles: “gangsta” or “whore,” always with those two distinctive hallmarks of teen clothing--cheap fabric, poor workmanship. If your daughter’s taste runs to anything more modest than Ginger Spice’s, she might get desperate enough to do as our 12-year-old finally did: Ask for a sewing machine.

There’s no problem finding “skater” fashions. We grown-ups sell skater clothes, shoes, magazines, skateboards and use skater images to market everything from skin care products to the new animated “Tarzan” movie. What we don’t provide is a place to skateboard. All across the nation, we outlaw skaters in virtually every outdoor place where adolescents might be. When skateboarding serves commerce, it’s cool. When it serves teens, it’s illegal.

“Adults should face the fact that they don’t like adolescents,” says Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, writing for the New York Times last month. He argues persuasively that the huge, dysfunctional high schools we’ve built for our teen children exist largely to warehouse and isolate “the pubescent and hormonally active adolescent” away from the rest of us. How big are those warehouses? In New York and Los Angeles, many schools have enrollments close to 5,000. When Ruth Messinger campaigned against Rudy Giuliani for mayor, she complained about school overcrowding so severe that students were being taught in lavatories. (How much do we hate our kids?)

Between 1940 and 1990, the number of elementary and secondary public schools nationwide plummeted 69%, despite a 70% rise in U.S. population. In 1940, we had 200,000 public schools with about 28 million students; today we have 62,000 public schools, and 50 million school-age kids. To absorb all those adolescent bodies, schools have bulked up into enormous, impersonal office parks, serving students in factory-like shifts. This practice actively works against learning and promotes alienation.

“Breaking Ranks,” the report by the Carnegie Foundation and the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals, spells out a hard but obvious truth: Teenagers learn more in smaller schools, preferably no more than 600 students in a “school unit.” The report warns: If schools don’t radically change, they “will exert dwindling influence on the ability to deliver learning.”

What mega-high schools deliver instead is crowd control: security guards and metal detectors, locker searches, drug tests, few civil liberties and a curriculum that feels like a forced march through 50-minute classes covering material of questionable relevance, delivered in bite-sized pieces by overburdened and underpaid (in California, often uncredentialed) teachers--all culminating in standardized exams that help determine a student’s future earning power. Are the kids not inspired to work in this environment? Management will fix that with school uniforms and more standardized tests.

If this were our life in our workplace, we grown-ups would resort to revolution.

As a nation, we may hate teens, but we love their demographic group. Our 50 million schoolkids spend at least $50 billion each year, and everyone from movie studios to soft drink makers is in a dead heat to separate these children from their money. Why the current glut of youth-oriented TV shows? As a network executive recently explained to “Murphy Brown” creator Diane English, “Kids haven’t chosen their toothpaste for life.”

As advertisers struggle to develop brand loyalty in teens whose adolescent biology hard-wires them for fickle emotions, kids are besieged by adults urgently demanding their consumer attention. My daughters and I curled up to watch the “Daria” special on MTV a couple of Sundays ago and saw “simultaneous commercials”: While the audio sold contact-lens cleaner, the visual hawked an unrelated restaurant.

Kids can’t escape the commercial assault. Check out the new Glencoe/McGraw-Hill textbook “Mathematics: Applications and Connections,” which shoves brand names at young learners.

Sample problem: “According to the results of a test conducted by Zillions magazine, 12 out of 17 kids prefer Sony PlayStation to Sega Saturn. Suppose there are 3,400 kids in your community. Predict how many will prefer the PlayStation.”

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Movie studios seem no more thoughtful about young people than any other commercial entity.

A few years ago, when our daughters were outgrowing “The Little Mermaid,” I spoke to three movie studios about the coming need for “young adult” movies of all kinds--”Y/A” fiction for the screen, rated PG-13. Studios, being unwieldy corporate entities, don’t plan for an emerging market so much as react to demand, and their reaction time is gelatinously slow. I received no response to my suggestion, and R-rated “Scream” I and II soon filled the breach, followed by a spate of inexpensively produced teen sex comedies, the movie equivalent of the cheapo “gangsta/whore” clothes offered in teen boutiques.

Most current teen fare seems relatively harmless, but, as our 10th-grader noted: “They’re not ‘Shakespeare in Love’--we won’t be watching them in 10 years.” These movies may generate short-term box office, but their content rarely answers the real needs of adolescents.

Movies and TV give young people a place to rehearse their future autonomy. Teens need to see characters in moral dilemmas, so they can argue the issues. They need historically accurate stories that supplement their understanding of the past; and a dose of fantasy to escape the pressures of their lives, as well as the chance to enter practical worlds as yet closed to them. Above all, young people need to identify with a variety of protagonists, to privately explore different personas and “practice” the big emotions they will feel in real situations.

If those are the movies adolescents need, what do they get? Aw, you know what they get. And thanks to video, they get it over and over. Not only are the movies we make imitative of one another, but kids watch the same movies again and again, hit the rewind button to memorize their favorite moments. With DVD, teens can program the player to endlessly repeat the same scene in which the guy’s brains fly out as his head comes apart--while they’re online or on the phone with peers watching the same scene in their homes.

What is the effect of all that repetition? Jacob Riis, the 19th century social reformer, spoke of seeing “a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

And our kids really do get hammered--on one side by “The Basketball Diaries” and violent music, on the other by video games. From the Swiss psychologist-philosopher Jean Piaget we know that children learn best through play. When we design “first-person shooter” games such as “Doom” and “Quake,” we are providing a form of play in which children learn to kill human targets. How effective is this? The Air Force trains test pilots on video-game-like simulators; the only difference is that in video games the sound effects and graphics are much more real.

What adolescents could use from the game industry is a video game that simulates real driving--a driver’s education version of “Mavis Beacon,” so kids can learn safety before they get behind the wheel. What adolescents get is “Carmageddon” (Interplay Productions), in which virtual motorists rack up points by running down pedestrians, a pursuit the company ad says is “as easy as killing babies with axes.”

As filmmakers we recoil from the idea of even voluntary censorship in our industry, but I would argue that voluntary censorship is already in place. In a medium shaped by free-market forces, the 1st Amendment often seems irrelevant. When producer Julia Chasman and I wanted to film Christine Bell’s “The Perez Family,” a studio head told us bluntly, “Who wants to see a movie about a bunch of Cubans?” Here are some things you never or rarely see on film: The main character is a devout Christian (unless they’re unhinged, as in “The Apostle”); the female protagonist has more than one lover (James Bond can be promiscuous; Jane Bond, no); tragedies (no dead protagonists, “Titanic” aside); issue-oriented stories (“that’s TV”); historical movies, unless they are epics; ambiguous endings; and diseases other than cancer.

“Our choices are market-driven!” executives counter. While it’s true that what’s already popular in the marketplace tends to determine what films are produced (and which movie stars are cast), we do have some standards, folks, or Warners and Sony and Paramount et al would be making lucrative straight-to-video porn. As culture makers, we do feel some responsibility not to exploit the most base human interests.

What happened at Columbine provides what educators call “the teachable moment”--an opportunity for us to reexamine what we believe and what kind of cultural contribution we want to make. The entertainment business is jammed with people who are intelligent, well-informed, interesting, moral and politically astute. Why does so little of our work reflect who we are?

At any industry screening of a particularly good movie, the most commonly heard phrase is “How did that get made?” Given our power to influence the young people who live inside our culture, what is our responsibility? If we were the sole purveyors of food, would we forgo cancer-fighting Brussels sprouts (“no demand”) and sell only chips and candy bars? Or would we feel a civic obligation to provide nourishment as well?

If we understood that this is a time of national emergency, we would quickly limit the sheer volume of products that contribute to the culture’s atmosphere of violence and incivility. In counterbalance we’d create a wealth of movies and programs that inspire and challenge teens, cause them to think and question, that help to counter the national funk of cynicism, and show human beings solving problems without resorting to violence.

It’s our responsibility to help reverse the current negative forces--but the good news is that we know we have the power to do so. Stories and images do change lives.