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01/12/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

California lawmakers want to keep violent games away from your kids, but is a law the way to do it?

Sean Bersell>> Eighty-three percent of games are bought by parents. The majority of these games are probably being bought for children by their parents.

Val Zavala>> And then, social commentary mixed with sports, medieval legend colored by romance and innocence confirmed by DNA evidence. Our FilmWeek critics explain it all.

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> Teenagers these days spend as much time playing videogames as they do watching television and yet many of these games are packed with violence and adult content. So the state of California passed a law prohibiting the sale of violent games to minors, but why hasn't the law been implemented? Toni Guinyard has the story.

Toni Guinyard>> The video gaming industry is making billions selling games reflecting just about every theme imaginable, but the games with violent themes, the ones allowing players to chase, beat, aim, shoot and fire are often the most popular and the most criticized.

Tim Winter>> This is not like a movie or a television show where you're sitting back and watching. You're actively participating. You're actually controlling and you're taking on the role. There's this whole psychological thing that happens when you assume the role of these participants and you're murdering people for points.

Toni Guinyard>> As Executive Director of the Parents Television Council, Tim Winter is an outspoken critic of the videogame industry, an industry targeted in a new California law that would prohibit anyone under the age of eighteen from purchasing videogames depicting the killing, maiming, dismembering or the sexual assault of the image of a human being.

The law written by California Assemblyman, Leland Yee, was supposed to go into effect the first of the year, but a preliminary injunction was issued stopping its implementation until both sides, the gaming industry and the state, can argue the issue. At the heart of the argument, whether the law violates the First Amendment.

Sean Bersell>> VSDA believes very strongly that minors should not get videogames that their parents don't want them to have. But by the same token, we don't think the government should be in there telling retailers and parents what games are appropriate and which ones are not.

Toni Guinyard>> The VSDA, Video Software Dealers Association, is one of two trade groups that sued on the grounds that the law is unconstitutional. Sean Bersell is the international trade organization's Vice President, Public Affairs.

Sean Bersell>> One of the things the courts have found is that, when you have a law like this, what it does is encourage the game developers to self-censure and for retailers to self-censure and not carry these games. So what that's called is a chilling effect under the First Amendment.

Tim Winter>> We're talking about a billion dollar industry here who sees harm to their revenue streams. They're not all of a sudden First Amendment evangelists. The only time they become First Amendment evangelists is when it hurts potentially their bottom line, their profit, their stock price.

Toni Guinyard>> In terms of sales and rentals of videogames, the industry is a ten billion dollar business. Industry officials say they're doing what they can to keep the most violent and sexually explicit games out of the hands of young gamers, but some legislators and some critics say that the industry simply isn't doing enough.

Tim Winter>> There is a rating structure in place which we think is very subjective and arbitrary to begin with, but there is an attempt to have a rating system. We respect the attempt. It needs to be bolstered.

Toni Guinyard>> Winter says that too many retailers routinely sell inappropriate games to minors. Bersell says the number of minors turned away when they try to buy mature-rated games is increasing. Both men cite the same research, each putting a positive spin on the data.

Sean Bersell>> We think that that shows a good level of enforcement by video retailers. Is it where we want it to be? No. We think we can do better, but that turn-down rate has increased significantly since the year 2000.

Toni Guinyard>> Ratings started appearing on the covers of videogames after the Entertainment Software Association established a ratings board in 1994 to self-regulate the industry. A panel of three rates each game.

Sean Bersell>> "E" for Everyone, "E-10" for ten and above, "T" for Teen and that's ages thirteen and above, "M" which is Mature which is ages seventeen and above, and then there's a rating called "Adults Only" and that's for people eighteen and above. But very few games carry an "AO" or Adults Only rating.

Toni Guinyard>> According to the National Institute on Media and the Family, only eighteen videogames out of ten thousand have ever received an Adults Only rating despite the level of violence in games rated "M" for Mature.

Tim Winter>> You're murdering police officers. You see their heads explode and blood and gore go all over the place. You have these interactive exchanges with prostitutes and then, after you're done with them, you either beat her up or you urinate on the prostitute to get your money back. I mean, this is the type of content that we're talking about.

Sean Bersell>> Some of these games, are they beyond my comfort level? Yes. These are games that I would not choose to play, that I personally don't feel that a younger child should play. But these games are developed for adults. They are rated as being appropriate for adults. They are marketed to adults and we're committed to only selling them to adults.

Toni Guinyard>> One peek inside the industry's trade fair and there's little question that games are marketed to adults. This fair held at the Los Angeles Convention Center was dubbed "3-E", short for Electronics Entertainment Expo. While the target audience may be gamers over the age of seventeen, it's no secret that children a lot younger than that find ways to get their hands on mature-rated games.

Sean Bersell>> Eighty-three percent of games are bought by parents, so the majority of these games are probably being bought for children by their parents.

Toni Guinyard>> Game Dude in North Hollywood is the self-proclaimed largest videogame store in the universe.

Galen Burke>> Our goal is to have one of each of everything ever made.

[Film Clip]

Galen Burke>> There's always going to be an appropriate market for everything that's put out there, so we recognize that every game is going to have a certain segment of the population that will enjoy playing that and it is appropriate for them. We wouldn't want to deny them access to that.

Toni Guinyard>> Yet Burke welcomes implementation of the law prohibiting minors from buying adult-themed games.

Galen Burke>> We like the idea of having the stores be a backup plan for making sure that inappropriate games are not being put into inappropriate hands.

Toni Guinyard>> The store already has a strict policy about selling mature-rated games to minors. They check IDs and, in the process, anger some parents.

Galen Burke>> At first, we'd have some parents coming in and saying, "How dare you tell my child what they can or can't buy." But then usually the next day, we'll get a phone call from that parent saying, "Oh, after I left your store all upset, I sat down with the child and saw what they were playing and, boy, do I wish I'd listened to you a day before."

Toni Guinyard>> They're surprised by what's on some of the games?

Galen Burke>> Yes.

Toni Guinyard>> We met customer, Haneef Shabazz, at Game Dude shopping with a seven year old relative. He describes the law as a double-edged sword. He likes the idea --

Haneef Shabazz>> However, however, I do have a major problem with the government restricting different things that we can do. I think it should be in the home of the parents. I think the parents should know what their children are doing, maybe sit down and play the games with the children so they can see some of this stuff. I think, if parents get involved in the lives of their children, they'll stop it on their own if they have good common sense.

Toni Guinyard>> That suggestion, play the game with your child to see what your child is playing, is the one piece of advice parents nationwide may hear as legislators take on the violent videogame issue state by state. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> A four-part investigative series by the Los Angeles Times takes a critical look at the United Farm Workers. It says the UFW has strayed from its roots, has failed to improve the lives of farm workers and spends much of its time exploiting the legacy of Cesar Chavez.

Investigative reporter, Miriam Pawel, spent a year looking deep into the history and current state of the United Farm Workers. What she found was a union whose membership has dwindled and no longer makes organizing field workers a top priority. Her research began when she saw the deplorable conditions that some farm workers still live in, forty years after Cesar Chavez launched his unionizing campaign. That led her to ask where is the UFW and what is it doing or not doing?

Miriam Pawel>> A lot of farm workers have never heard of the UFW and that surprised us.

Val Zavala>> That's very surprising. Current day farm workers?

Miriam Pawel>> Absolutely. A lot of farm workers are recent immigrants and the UFW has been absent from the fields for so long that it's not really that meaningful to people anymore. That surprised us because it's the institution that is, you know, revered in many parts of the country and still has the generation that was raised boycotting grapes and learning about Cesar Chavez.

Val Zavala>> In this first part, you actually say, "the UFW leaders make excuses for their failure to organize farm workers, that they exploit his legacy, that the current UFW is a network of tax-exempt organizations that enrich friends and family." That's pretty damning kinds of statements.

Miriam Pawel>> Well, a lot of that comes in their own words in the stories. They are the ones who volunteered those explanations really initially and they are proud of much of the work they've done in areas like affordable housing for Latino immigrants and rightfully so, but it's not housing for farm workers. They have positioned themselves to be this broader Latino advocacy group.

Val Zavala>> Why don't they focus on farm workers anymore?

Miriam Pawel>> It's hard. It's hard organizing farm workers. People really need to have a passion for organizing farm workers. It is a difficult task with seasonal labor. But there are people doing organizing like that and even organizing farm workers in other parts of the country. So I think that they went, to some extent, an easier route which is that, at a time when the Latino population in the west and the southwest is burgeoning -- and they talked about this a lot -- it's easier to sort of cash in on the name and the reputation of the institution to do broader Latino advocacy.

Val Zavala>> The series explains how even Cesar Chavez, back in the 1970's, veered away from unionizing field workers and focused on the inner workings of the UFW. He would require the leadership to take part in intense encounter sessions popular in the 1970's.

Miriam Pawel>> It's called The Game. For a while, it was played every weekend at La Paz, which is the headquarters of the union east of Bakersfield in the mountains, not particularly near the fields. It was billed as a way to increase communication so that you could, in sort of an encounter group therapy, you would indict someone for bad behavior. The idea behind it was that you could come out with things that you wouldn't necessarily say to someone outside of The Game. But in reality, it was very divisive. It was very ugly.

Val Zavala>> In the lat 1970's, Chavez became increasingly suspicious of colleagues deemed disloyal.

Miriam Pawel>> Some of this did come out at the time. It's not entirely new information, but I think what we did was talk to a lot of people who were very committed to the movement. I mean, it was a very passionate group of people, many of whom expected to spend their lives working for the union, and ended up being purged and thrown out. Cesar really got to a point where --

Val Zavala>> -- he got a little paranoid almost.

Miriam Pawel>> He did, and people who were close to him like Dolores Huerta will point out that there were real threats on his life. It was a loose-knit organization that was easy to infiltrate. But just at the point in time where the union was on the verge of really being a success as a labor union per se as opposed to a social movement, Chavez moved in the direction of making it a movement rather than a union. That really altered the course and the people who are there today are the people who he put in those positions.

Val Zavala>> Now tell us more about this network of nonprofit organizations that are run very much by the family members. How did that come about? Are they doing good things?

Miriam Pawel>> Actually, a lot of those were started by Cesar Chavez. But in the beginning, they really were aimed at helping farm workers and they have also morphed into a much broader Latino advocacy role.

Val Zavala>> And what kind of things do they do? They've got a network of radio stations?

Miriam Pawel>> They have radio stations, they have affordable housing developments, they have the Chavez Foundation. They do a lot of things that sort of perpetuate and burnish the image of Cesar Chavez which in turn helps them to raise money in terms of state funds. They have millions of dollars. In one case, they've actually taken a fund that had ten million dollars in it that was money paid on behalf of farm workers years and years and years ago and are using that to support the general movement which is this network of nonprofit agencies. The nonprofits help each other. They buy services from each other. They rent from each other. So it's a family business.

Val Zavala>> The United Farm Workers responded to the Los Angeles Times on their website. Their headline reads, "LA Times Attacks Farm Workers With Lies". It calls the series "inaccurate, dishonest and untrue". It says "the UFW's commitment to organizing farm workers is unwavering" and lists a series of accomplishments including UFW contracts, legislation passed and community organizing efforts.

Miriam Pawel>> I think it's unfortunate that they've headlined their message of "LA Times Attacks Farm Workers" because nothing could be further from the truth. What we criticize and raise questions about was the UFW itself as an institution, not farm workers. It's their lack of help for farm workers that's really the issue.

Val Zavala>> The series does recount the successes of the farm worker movement, in particular how it created a generation of Latino leaders, people like Eliseo Medina who started with the farm workers as a young man, but left in the late 1970's.

Miriam Pawel>> And owes his success and his start to Cesar Chavez and the UFW, but he's not there now. It looks both at the generation of -- a lot of people have said to me that one of the true legacies of the UFW is the generation of labor leaders and activists, but they're not in the fields now and that's part of the story.

Val Zavala>> So after reading your series, clearly what the message is is the UFW today is irrelevant to the farm workers, but that doesn't mean that they're not doing good things for the Latino population, right?

Miriam Pawel>> That's right. We don't use the word irrelevant. We say that not much of what they're doing is improving the lives of farm workers. Certainly some things they do are still related to farm workers without question. It's the disparity between the need and the direction that they have taken the movement.

Val Zavala>> Miriam Pawel, thank you for all your work and thank you for taking the time to talk with us.

Miriam Pawel>> Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Val Zavala>> The four-part series on the United Farm Workers can be found on the Times website at latimes.com/UFW. And for more of the response from the UFW, you can go to their website at ufw.org.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

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Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week, "Glory Road", tells the story of the 1966 NCAA college basketball championship. What was so memorable was that Texas Western University, now the University of Texas El Paso, put on the floor five African American starters against an all-white University of Kentucky team. The film tells that story.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by Scott Foundas who's film editor for the L.A. Weekly, and Jean Oppenheimer, film critic for New Times. Scott, please start us with "Glory Road".

Scott Foundas>> Well, you know, this is a great true sports story about the coach, Don Haskins, and the 1965-66 Texas Western University minors which was an unprecedented starting lineup of seven African American players. It was a major step towards integration in college basketball. There's a great story to be told here about this moment, but this movie kind of toed a more straight and narrow line. It's an underdog story that wants to rouse the audience with this come-from-behind theme that has this championship season.

I just found that the film didn't really ever transcend that in the way that some of the fact-based sports films in recent years like "Miracle" and "Friday Night Lights" and "Remember the Titans", which is an obvious model for this picture, managed to do. The director of the film, James Gartner, comes from the world of television commercials and I felt like there was never an emotional beat in the film that lasted more than thirty seconds.

Larry Mantle>> Jean, what did you think?

Jean Oppenheimer>> Oh, I liked it a lot more than that actually and I would compare it pretty favorably with "Miracle", which I agree with Scott was a better film. I think the only problem I had with the film is that it is sort of Disney-fied. I mean, the indignities these kids had to suffer is not glossed over, but you just know that they had to experience a lot more than what was seen on the screen.

I liked Josh Lucas in the lead role and he's like the Kurt Russell character in that he was out there really just to win. He just wanted to win and the stuff that went along with it was just sort of a little bit of icing on the cake. Whereas, in some of the other sports movies we have had recently like "Coach Carter", I don't know, you don't like the lead character. So I actually liked it. The only thing I would say, though, is that you hardly ever see anybody miss a basketball and I watch a lot of professional basketball and they miss all the time.

Larry Mantle>> Our second film this week is "Tristan & Isolde". It stars James Franco, Sophia Myles and Rufus Sewell.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Well, Jean, what did you think of "Tristan & Isolde"?

Jean Oppenheimer>> Regrettably, I didn't think very much of it and it's really just because of the James Franco miscasting. Terrible. Now in the ads for the film, they say "before there was Romeo and Juliet". Actually, I think a much closer analogy is King Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot because there you have sort of the love triangle. I thought Rufus Sewell was really good as -- he's not the king, but the prince -- I don't know what he was called. I thought that the girl, Sophia Myles, was very good as Isolde.

But James Franco was so miscast. I mean, it was like, you know, he sort of looks like James Dean. He played James Dean on television. I've seen him in something where I thought he was good, but he can't carry this off and why in the world they wouldn't cast somebody British in that role is beyond me. It's not even like Franco is a big enough name to carry at the box office.

Larry Mantle>> Scott, what did you think?

Scott Foundas>> I wasn't wild about it. I think James Franco is definitely the weak link here. What is interesting about the film is that, like "Kingdom of Heaven" last year which was directed by Ridley Scott who's one of the producers of this movie, there is an attempt to do a sort of realism in depicting this period, the Dark Ages which is so often treated as fantasy when we see it in films like the King Arthur movies. So there's a certain grittiness and a certain tactile quality to the sets and the costumes and even the way that the actors behave that you haven't necessarily seen in a lot of pictures like this.

Also, Rufus Sewell does give a great performance in the supporting role which just reminds you that sometimes a mediocre picture can have one or two really outstanding elements. I think that Sophia Myles is a really talented newcomer. She's had small parts in a handful of other movies, but here she really carries this role.

Larry Mantle>> And finally, we have a documentary, "After Innocence", which takes a look at what happens after several men who've been wrongly convicted of serious crimes are released from prison.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Scott, what did you think of "After Innocence"?

Scott Foundas>> Well, I first saw this film at Sundance last year and I think it's a terrifically powerful movie about the justice system in America. As the title implies, the seven subjects of the movie who are all people who were convicted to the death penalty and then later exonerated as the result of DNA evidence. The film deals with what happens to them after that. It's not so much about the process of their exoneration as it is how they try to put their lives together after the fact and the enormous difficulties that they encounter in doing that.

One of the most compelling points the film makes is that the social services that are made available to parolees, people who actually do commit crimes and are then released, are more or less denied to people in this situation who are exonerated. The film makes that point very powerfully without ever sort of tilting into liberal outrage or the kind of outrage that you'd expect from a Michael Moore type picture. It's much cooler and level-headed. As a result, I think it makes a much stronger impact.

Larry Mantle>> Jean, what did you think of it?

Jean Oppenheimer>> I thought it was good. I think it's an important subject. I think I would have organized the documentary a little bit differently than it was done, and I want to make one minor correction to what Scott said. They weren't all on death row. A number of them were just away for like forty-five years in prison. I thought you really get a feel for these guys who are sort of in a state of shock. I mean, just having been wrongly convicted and imprisoned for so long and then when they get out and not really quite knowing what to do.

There were a few things I really would have liked to have known that I wish the documentary had gotten into. That is, why the convictions are not automatically expunged from the record? Some of the guys had the false convictions expunged. Others didn't, saying it would cost them six thousand dollars. I don't understand that. I also don't understand why, as one of the exonerated men says, that after he was finally acquitted and let out of jail that they didn't take the DNA sample and put it in the national DNA database to see maybe who did actually commit the rape, in this case, against the woman.

Larry Mantle>> Wonderful to have you with us for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by film critics, Jean Oppenheimer of New Times and Scott Foundas of the L.A. Weekly. We invite you to join us next week at this same time for the next FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> And remember that you can hear a full hour of FilmWeek every Friday morning at eleven a.m. on KPCC public radio. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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