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Family-friendly Fare on TV:
Meet a mother and find out how she copes with the challenge of finding family-friendly fare on television. Shirlee Smith's syndicated talk show reaches parents across the country. But at home with her ten-year-old daughter, house rules keep the tv turned off most weekdays. Her concern?
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Marlow [host]: So we should forget Hollywood standards or ethical standards? Just let the parents decide?
Schickel: I think that's absolutely right because every child is different and every family has different values. I think absolutely in the ideal world there would be no rating system. You would have responsible parents judging these works for their own specific children.
Zavala [host]: But are all parents responsible --
Schickel: -- of course not.
Zavala: -- and can you really expect parents to be able to fight against these multi-million dollar publicity and promotion campaigns?
Huffington: Well, primarily, it is the parents' responsibility. There's no question about that.
Zavala: Primarily.
Huffington: Primarily. There is also no question that producers, directors, actors are also parents often. So when they make decisions, they often take that into account. I mean, Guy Ross wrote in The New York Times where he talked about that. As a creative person in Hollywood, he is also somebody who has a responsibility as a parent. All these things interact. I mean, as Tom would say, you know, you make choices. A lot of factors go into these choices. Being a parent is often one of those factors.
Marlow: Tom, you have a young daughter.
Selleck: Yeah.
Marlow: Do you patrol what she sees and hears?
Selleck: I do patrol what she sees, but you can't see it all. I go by ratings. Hopefully, if I've seen a film and it's not rated in an area where it's appropriate for her, but I think it is, I'll let her see it. But we see a very small amount of material compared to what's out there, so it's very difficult as a parent.
And there's this climatic effect in an industry that very seldom anymore finds an Abby Mann script and brings it to life. They more often than not find the telephone book and get two of the biggest name actors and say that's a movie, let's fill it with sex and violence. People like that ought to be held accountable. They shouldn't be censored, but there's nothing wrong with us as a culture and a society of having problems with that and we need to express that more often.
Schickel: I do think this notion of counting up acts of sex or acts of violence is preposterous. I mean, 40,000 acts of sex, but you know, 39,000 of them, I believe, are little pecks on the cheek or holding hands or something like that. These are preposterous figures.
Mann: Well, you know what disturbs me more than anything else is the dumbing down of our culture and maybe a deep thinker like Richard can help me.
Marlow: And that's an ethical issue?
Schickel: No, I agree with you.
Mann: No, for instance, it's not only movies and television. last night I went with my best friend, Tony Bennett, to the ASCAP awards and they were honoring him, which they should, but they had 25 songs. I mean, they were ridiculous. Tony, who is very graceful, said, "there's a lot of talented people here, but why do I still like Gershwin and Porter?" (laughter)
Zavala: But in terms, again, of the ethical responsibility, should Hollywood do more than simply slap a rating on and say, okay, PG-13 and, heaven knows, they keep pushing the boundaries by the way of these ratings and saying it's up to the parents.
Selleck: What Hollywood can't do is hide behind the First Amendment and cry censorship every time they're criticized. We have this enormous privilege and we put our stuff out there, some for noble reasons, others for commercial reasons, and we need to be held accountable. We need to accept that criticism without crying censorship or God knows what.
Marlow: Criticism, but not legislation.
Selleck: Yeah. We are critical of everybody when we write scripts and perform them. We make judgments on other people, but any judgment on us seems we're much too defensive about that.
Huffington: But I think, especially when it comes to the marketing of violent content to children, I think that there was a very revealing hearing in Washington when we found out that the entertainment industry was actually deliberately marketing to under-age children. That is deceiving and that is --
Zavala: -- so where does it come from?
Schickel: But let's set aside -- I agree with you about marketing, but look, movies and, to a degree, television work in a different way than any of these people talk about. Children overhear. I mean, it's how they grow up. They overhear their parents' conversations and, yes, some movies will be, by our standards, too violent for that little kid or this little kid or it might be too sexy. But I would really not like to see a society in which children are so over-protected that they grow up to a point where they approach the world with a really truly dangerous innocence which I think --
Huffington: -- well, you don't have to worry about it. (laughter)
Schickel: I don't think you can worry about that. Not realistically.
Selleck: Well, if they're too innocent, three minutes of MTV. (laughter)
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