Paul D. Miller on Tue, 25 Sep 2001 12:07:16 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> New Look for Entertainment in a Terror-Conscious World |
New Look for Entertainment in a Terror-Conscious World September 24, 2001 By JOHN LELAND and PETER MARKS For executives at MGM, the release of a forthcoming movie called "Gangster" is problematic. It has action and suspense, mobsters and international terrorists. Once this was the stuff of box office dreams. But the tragedy of Sept. 11 changed all that. Now the makers of "Gangster" and dozens of other films, television shows, plays, books, musical recordings and video games are trying to find their places in a shifting cultural landscape. The self-scrutiny is unprecedented in scale, sweeping aside hundreds of millions of dollars in projects that may no longer seem appropriate. Like the calls to curb violence in popular entertainment after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, the reaction may be helpful in the short term. But creators and producers are just beginning to grapple with more difficult, long-range questions of what the public will want once the initial shock from the terrorist attacks wears off. Many in the industry admit that they do not know where the boundaries of taste and consumer tolerance now lie, much less where they will be in a year or two. In the short run there are immediate questions. After such tragedy and insecurity, conveyed in vivid television images, is it responsible - or commercially viable - to deal in fantasy violence or the romance of the outlaw? In a climate of mourning and fear, is there a place for humor and escapism, fashion and pleasure? "People realize that it is not the time to move forward with the frivolous, exploitative action films," said David Ladd, an independent producer and former MGM executive. "There has been a certain complacency, I believe, in the audience, to be titillated by a certain kind of movie, whether it's on the comedy side or the action side, and I believe that this incident has made everyone a lot more thoughtful." The new piety strikes an odd note: taste is not what some of these people do best. Industries that have robustly defended depictions of mindless carnage or the degradation of women are suddenly drawing the line in seemingly arbitrary ways, policing even incidental references to the World Trade Center. All fields of culture are feeling the uncertainty. Playwrights and novelists are reassessing their subjects. Fashion houses, architects and industrial designers, buffeted by both the tragedy and the sinking economy, are rethinking the role of irony, luxury and security. "That sort of ironic, hip attitude is going to have to undergo revision," said Jonathan Galassi, the publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "Any sort of sense of cynicism and self- absorption - nobody is going to be interested in that." Rock and rap performers, who have been sliding into gaudy irrelevance, are hoping to re-engage the public. "Music was in a very stagnant place before the attack," said Antonio Reid, president and chief executive of Arista Records. "We have good records but not meaningful records. Maybe the attack will jolt writers to speak to the times we're living in." First, though, the businesses are scrambling not to offend. Studios have put off the openings of action films like Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Collateral Damage" and a Tim Allen comedy, "Big Trouble," which involves a bomb on an airplane. Television series are holding back episodes that are now viewed as cutting too close to the bone. And television writers are reformulating pitches for next season. Bryce Zabel, chairman-elect of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and a longtime television writer and producer, said he had been scheduled to pitch an idea last week to the USA Networks for a mini- series called "World War III." "Obviously this show died when the victims died," he said. Now he is reaching for story ideas from the heart. "Maybe more character-oriented, something to do with romance or fantasy," he said. Even an artist as respected as Stephen Sondheim is not immune. The Roundabout Theater Company has withdrawn plans for a Broadway revival of Mr. Sondheim's 1991 musical, "Assassins," because it portrays the killers of American presidents. The McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., has pulled from its season a dark 25-year-old play by Richard Nelson, "Vienna Notes," which has references to a terrorist act. There is a daunting momentum to such caution. On an MTV message board, a viewer described the singer Alicia Keys as "the bomb," a vernacular compliment. "Someone said, `Take that off,' " said Judy McGrath, president of MTV Group. Even the World Wrestling Federation has shown a new sensitivity, decking its performances with American flags and removing a theme song called "Bodies." (It's about dancers, not corpses.) "We're in a gray area in terms of what's right and wrong," said Stuart Snyder, the company's chief operations officer. This self-policing threatens to yield a culture of blandness, leading some to conclude that cultural comfort food is all the nation may be willing to stomach. "We're going to go right back to Doris Day movies, I can feel it in the bones of the country," said Robert Brustein, a theater director and a critic for The New Republic. "It's escapism." Comedians and satirists already feel the squeeze; after the tragedy, being funny almost seems treasonous, said Steve Levitan, creator of "Just Shoot Me," an NBC sitcom. "And when you laugh at something, you feel guilty." Even the unmodulated speech of the Internet is tempering its sarcasm. Last spring Modern Humorist, a satirical Internet magazine, published "My First Presidentiary," a savage paperback sendup of President Bush. This week on its Web site it posted the sort of heartfelt message that might have once been used to sell war bonds. "You probably wouldn't guess that the creeps behind Modern Humorist are the sort who wave flags and sing `America the Beautiful' with strangers in the streets," wrote the editors, Michael Colton and John Aboud. "But that is what we have been doing, in unity with others." Television viewers watched last week as one wiseacre talk show host after another engaged in a kind of public purging. "I'm sorry to do this to you; it's another entertainment show beginning with an overwrought speech of a shaken host," the comedian Jon Stewart said on "The Daily Show," which returned on Thursday after more than a week off. Eventually the late-night hosts will move on from grief; by the end of the week, David Letterman was beginning to joke around, but only in the gentlest ways. "It's not that irony is dead," said Mr. Aboud. "It's just that feelings and honesty are in." But others are resisting a retreat to softness. George Steel, who heads Columbia University's Miller Theater, a haven for adventurous contemporary music, had second thoughts about opening the season on Friday with "Blood on the Floor," a raw, jazz-infused work. In the end he decided that music lovers could make up their own minds. "To cancel it or replace it with something more palatable would be to infantalize the audience," he said. Tony Kushner, the Tony-winning playwright of "Angels in America," has a new play, "Homebody/Kabul," about a family's search for an Englishwoman lost in Afghanistan. It is scheduled to begin performances in late November at the New York Theater Workshop, whose artistic director, James Nicola, said he had every intention of proceeding. "It is all the more important now to be thinking about Afghanistan, to explore what we don't know about it and why we don't know what we don't know," Mr. Kushner said. It is not clear whether any of the current foment will prove substantive or lasting. "There'll still be explosions and violence in movies," said Edward Zwick, who directed the 1998 film "The Siege," about terrorists in New York. "It's naÔve to think otherwise." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/24/arts/24POP.html?ex=1002353996&ei=1&e n=5682e8b0e6cf0ba3 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at alyson@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ============================================================================ Port:status>OPEN wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid Subliminal Kid Inc. 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