Making a film is a sacred privilege.
The ability to make a film is an honor bestowed by fate upon a privileged few.
Film has the power to entertain and amuse, to lead and enlighten, to evoke the greatest and most noble attributes of the human being, to celebrate life and the human condition, which is why given the gifts and talent to be able to make a film is one of life’s rarest privileges, and because the power film has to shape lives and create a culture, it is no wonder that filmmaking is truly a sacred art.
Going to a movie, a good movie, is like catching a dream in the dark. And a great movie makes you come out, no matter what your problems, feeling ten feet tall.
Being allowed to make a movie, to create one of these dreams in the dark that can change millions of people’s lives all over the world, or at least make them laugh, and for a few hours relieve their loneliness and pain, is truly Deo Imatatio, to imitate God, for only God can make our dreams, and every artist who is the least bit conscious knows that it is not he or she who creates the works of art, but some unknown Daimon, some divine creative power inside that seizes hold of the artist/filmmaker, and creates that specific piece of art, creates that particular film through the filmmaker, who can only stand back and look upon that film that came out of them in awe, can only say with wonder, “My God, when I was 15 I had no idea that was in me.”
In every sense of the word, creating a film out of nothing, out of a void, is as close as man can get to the Divine act of Creation – except, of course, for a woman giving birth to a child – but as every filmmaker knows, giving birth to a film is, in its own very real way, to give birth to a child, a child that will live on long after the filmmaker has passed over.
From the beginning of time religions and myths have served as a mental therapy for the sufferings of mankind, such as hunger, poverty, war, disease, old age and death. Today, films are the inheritors of that tradition, and, whether we are aware of it or not, create the myths we live by, good and bad.
Take the universal Hero Myth, for example, which from time immemorial has played the role of a central healing myth of every culture everywhere, shows the picture of a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and enemies of all kind, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. Movie after movie portrays this same archetype, in the form of these same serpents and monsters, even today, and instead of the Hero fighting serpents, monsters and demons being something relegated to fairytales from the distant past, one need only look to the Star Wars series and dozens of other films from King Kong to Alien to see how these same monsters and demons still fill our movie screens today. When one understands the true nature of our human psyche, of our unconscious psyche, one readily understands what these instincts are, what they represent in the human psyche, and why they, in these archetypal forms, still fill our screens and thrill us today, and why the Star Wars series are so successful beyond comprehension that they defy all logical explanation and leave the rationalists and the critics bewildered.
From time man crawled out of the caves, these powerful Heroes and Heroines were worshiped with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, and depicted in some sort of dramatic narration or ritual repetition of sacred ceremonies which gripped the audience with numinous emotions and exalted the participants to identification with the Hero. Just as movies do today.
If we look at the power of identification through the eyes of the believer, we can understand how the ordinary man and woman becomes gripped, freed from their impotence and misery, and raised to an almost super-human status, at least for the time being, and often, they are sustained by such a conviction for a long time. The initiation process created by this kind of identification through drama produces a lasting impression, and if powerful enough may even create a permanent attitude that gives a certain form and style to the life of the individual, and the life of a society.
So powerful is the ability of film to change the world and the individuals in it, that film will change the world one way or another, for better or for worse, whether we are aware of it or not.
Next to parents, films are the most powerful influence in shaping an individual’s life, the way a person walks and talks, the clothes a person wears, the behavior, attitudes, and ideas one believes are cool and knowingly or unknowingly imitates in real life, as well as the morals, ethics and attitudes one adopts, acts out and lives by, are all influenced by film with an incredibly pervasive power.
Shortly, I will show that with a minimal understanding of how the human psyche is created, developed, and functions, and how it is damaged and healed, it is easy to see how films, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not, play a powerful role in developing the human psyche, especially the conscious personality and the way the conscious personality develops its ego, it’s intellect, and it’s will.
All of which brings me to the pathetic state of filmmaking today, wherein people holding the reins of power to decide what films filmmakers will be allowed to make and what films people will be allowed to see, with a few exceptions, no longer know how to make films people want to see – over 9 out of 10 films made by the major studios every year are rejected by American audiences. The result is that in a desperate attempt to generate some kind of profits in order to save their jobs, studio heads pander to producing films that pander to the lowest and most base among the weakest and the most vulnerable among us, and have turned our industry from the sacred art of filmmaking into a business that poisons and destroys children for profit.
Ironically, just from a pure business profit standpoint, it is not these sleazy whore-and-gore movies that make significant or huge profits. All of the films grossing $200, $300, even $400 million or more at the US box office alone are love stories, PG-13 films or better, while films like 8mm $36M, Basketball Diaries $2.2M, and the incredibly sick film, The Cell $61M, meager profits at best, and not nearly enough go cover all the films that failed.
More on this in a moment when we will show what the real reason is that studios make those films.
There are two decisive questions that must be answered in the debate about whether or not entertainment and media violence, especially films, cause violence in our society:
- Do films have the power to influence human beliefs, attitudes and behavior?
The answer is, as you will see, films have such an unbelievable power to influence human beliefs and behavior that it is impossible for films not to.
- Is violence in films and the media a major cause of violence in the world today?
The answer, as you will see, is absolutely! So much power does violence in films and the media have to evoke violence within every individual who experiences it, and to cause that violence to be acted out in a large percentage of those people, that it is impossible for violence in entertainment not to cause violence in society.
Let us first look at the awesome power of films to influence human behavior, and then we will present the overwhelming evidence that entertainment violence is a major cause of violence in our homes, our community, and the world today. Then we will examine in depth the role of parents in creating violence and the “Freedom of Speech”/First Amendment issue.
Above all, we will explore the terrible tragedy that has happened in the film industry, that has reduced the art of making films from its rightful place as one of the most noble of arts, and the one with the most power to enrich, ennoble, enlighten, and bring laughter and hope to the masses, to becoming an industry in which, with a few exceptions, dealmakers who have no idea how to make a film churn out sick, perverted, gore, violence and sexual brutality, simply to make some kind of money and keep their jobs.
We will show – and prepare for a shock – that these films do not make money. The huge money making films, the films that do $200, $300 and even $600 million at the US box office alone are all love stories. All of the All-Time Box Office Champion films in the US are PG-13 love story films. The blood and gore, excessive violence movies don’t even come within light years of generating these kind of grosses. (8 mm, The Cell, Basketball Diaries)
So why does Hollywood continue to poison our children when it is not even the way to make meaningful profits?
We will show you the real reason Hollywood makes these films and in the process has destroyed one of the great industries and art forms in the world. It’s time for us filmmakers to take Hollywood back!
Can films really change the world, for better or for worse?
Do films really have the power to influence what we think and do, what we wear and buy? Some quick examples:
Less than 1% of all businesses in America, even those that have been in business 25-50 years, are able to generate $2 billion in sales a year. The movie, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, generated $2 billion in sales in ONLY two months.
When Jennifer Beals in Flashdance cut off the neckband of her sweatshirt and let it fall off of one shoulder, it was impossible to walk down the street and not see a dozen women from 15-50 wearing the same off the shoulder sweatshirt.
When Farrah Fawcett came out with her new hairdo on the original Charlie’s Angels TV series, and then Jennifer Aniston came out with her new 'do on Friends, ten million women went to their beauty salons the following week for a similar cut.
In the 1930’s when Clark Gable didn’t wear an undershirt in It Happened One Night, the underwear industry plummeted, just as the pajama industry plummeted when Marilyn Monroe revealed she didn’t wear pajamas but slept naked. (Later I will talk more about Gable and Monroe and their role as two of the all-time film gods and goddesses, including what I discovered about Marilyn the day I sat with her in the Actor’s Studio.)
At the height of the popularity of the Morphin' Power Rangers, it was impossible to visit a playground or a mall without seeing an endless number of five and six year old children playfully karate chopping each other.
Edward Bernays, one of the legendary founders of public relations and spin control, as well as Freud’s nephew, discovered that movies were the most powerful way to get women to smoke, by making it appear that smoking was extremely chic and sophisticated.
Giant corporations and Madison Avenue marketing geniuses do not waste anytime debating whether or not films have the power to influence people’s lifestyles, especially what people think, what their buying habits are, and what the ad people want people to think is the chi-chi thing to buy. They know the power of film to sell and influence, which is why they were caught a few years back giving stars like Stallone $500,000 and more just to have their product appear in the film however innocuously, a product placement service that Delores and I have had great experience with in our films, and which is even more prevalent today.
On a more serious vein, films powerfully impact racial and religious attitudes towards another race or nationality. During World War II, films made every American see the Japanese and the Germans as the most heinous of monsters, barely human, yet, just a few years later when the Germans and Japanese were the most financially powerful countries outside of the US, they became our best friends and we couldn’t sell our properties fast enough to these people films had made us believe were Satanic monsters, including some of our most precious landmarks.
At the same time films were a godsend for the people back home, who had to endure the agony of being separated from their loved ones for two, three, and four years, and living in the constant state of terror that the next piece of mail would begin with the dreaded words, “We regret to inform you ...,” and they would never see their husband, or son, or father again. “Films kept us going,” said our neighbor across the street who had lost one son in Germany, “they showed us to never give up hope.”
Hope was also what films gave people who lived through the horrible depression of the 30’s. Both Delores and I recall our parents saying that it was films that relieved the fear and pain and made you laugh or come out feeling things would turn out all right, that there was still something you could do.
But don’t parents shape our attitudes and morals more powerfully than films? And how about Religion? Certainly that’s a far more powerful influence.
Of course parents are the most important shaper of the child’s fragile formative psyche. The child’s whole life will be determined by both the conscious and the unconscious psychology of the parents. As CG Jung put it, “The child is the unconscious battleground of the parents.” Which raises the question, “What parents?” Who are the parents? Are they healthy and responsible? Are there one or two of them? Are they present or absent? Or are they dysfunctional, emotionally unstable, seriously neurotic and dysfunctional, or one of the “holics” (alcoholic, drugasholic, etc.)?
Later on in the section “What parents?”, we will show in-depth the fallacy of the “...it’s the parent’s responsibility” argument which assumes all children live in a Father Knows Best/Ozzie and Harriet type family where there is deep respect and trust and love between the children and these wise, understanding and caring parents who know best. We will examine depth who these parents are that the experts always refer to, and the widely different home environments children are raised in today. The results will shock you and demonstrate clearly that tens of millions of children in this country either do not have parents who are responsible and care, from the parents seen regularly on the talk shows, such as Jerry Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael, Jenny Jones, et al, parents whose behavior makes you wonder if they have six toes, to the upstanding affluent parents of the murderers of Columbine, from the millions of latchkey left-alone-at-home children under ten years of age -- and prepare for another surprise -- these are not just the victims of poverty where heroic single moms have to leave them alone because they can’t afford childcare or are working two jobs just to put food on the table, but the largest single group of these latchkey children come from the most affluent parents in our society who could clearly afford quality child care.
Or are we talking about Herb Kohl’s “36 children.” Herb Kohl wrote a classic book on children in the early 70’s. A middle class, white graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Herb decided to do something good, so he took a job as a teacher in Harlem. Of the 36 children in his 3rd grade class, 18 had never seen their father, and their mothers were often absent, working cleaning our toilets in homes or in hotels, some on the nightshift. Of the remaining 18, 15 knew who their father was, and some could occasionally point him out sitting with the other drunks and drug dealers on the corner. Only 3 had fathers living at home. Are we talking about these parents?
There is another very important way that films are even more powerful than parents. While parents have the greatest influence in shaping an individual’s life, films are the overwhelming force that shapes our culture and our subcultures, and this is especially true for pre-teens and teens during the time that teenagers go through the normal rebellion that every child goes through against their parents’ authority and mores. Films, along with the peer group the teen is trying to be accepted by, have a crucial impact and influence in shaping the child’s life, and of course, the influence of films during this phase of life over children who have dysfunctional adults as parents, and live in a constant state of conflict, is even greater.
We go more deeply into the role of parents later.
But how about Religion? Doesn’t religion shape our morals far more powerfully than film?
For the true believer the answer is yes, though the problem is finding the believer who truly acts out his religious beliefs in his daily life. As Abraham Lincoln, a profoundly religious man and one of America’s greatest mystics, said when asked why he didn’t join a church, “Show me the man who practices what his church teaches, and behaves in the way he says he believes, and I will join that church tomorrow.”
The psychological definition of God is the Supreme Value. Most human beings have one God they believe in in their Persona and with their intellect, in their conscious life, but secretly in the unconscious they have a different God they worship, a different Supreme Value, which is the only way one can explain how Protestants and Catholics, both devout believers in Christ as the Prince of Peace, God who incarnated in man in order to bring peace to earth and gave to His followers as his most sacred instruction, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” can endlessly slaughter each other, including each other’s women and children, all in the name of the same Christ/God. It is only by understanding that the Supreme Value, the true God that one unknowingly worships in his unconscious, is the controlling factor in religion, is it possible to explain how dedicated priests, ministers and rabbis, from the Archbishop in New Mexico to Jimmy Swaggert, etc., can sincerely believe in God in one part of their life, and then molest children or solicit prostitutes in another part of their life.
This is terribly relevant to the power of films in shaping people’s lives, especially children, preteens and teens. Except for those few who, by the grace of God, have a deep religious commitment guiding their lives, the Supreme Value guiding most children during these formative years is the Value or Need to be accepted, to belong, to be somebody, to be loved, and during this phase where fulfilling this Supreme Need, this Supreme Value, is the all-controlling, dominating Need of the child’s psyche, it is the peer group, and the films and music that the peer group finds cool and admires, that are far and away the most powerful influences shaping the young person’s morals, beliefs, and attitudes. Even in homes where there is a basically healthy relationship between a child and the parents, there is a constant struggle for the parents to uphold the beliefs, attitudes, and morals of the child against the awesome power of the films the peer group chooses to be influenced and live by. Especially those films that excessively advocate the use of drugs, smoking and drinking, not to mention excessive sexual behavior and violence.
How badly have the people who have the power to decide what films we filmmakers will be able to make, and what films people will be able to see, destroyed the film business and the magnificent art of making film? How much have their films contributed to debasing human beings and human behavior instead of elevating human behavior and celebrating the greatness of the human being?
We will explore this in-depth in the section “The Rise and Fall of the Hollywood Empires.” For now, let me give you a quick indication of the tragic mess that the filmmaking business has become., and this mess goes far beyond the serious problem of making excessively violent and sexually degrading films.
The mess they have created goes right to the heart of Hollywood as a business – a profit making business. The dealmakers who, with a few exceptions, have never made a film, and have no idea how to make a film, have even less of an idea of how to make films people want to see. Ultimately the success of every business depends upon providing a product or service people want to buy, and the people running the studios for the last decade have proven conclusively that they have no idea how to make films people want to see, which is why profit margins of the film studios are either extremely low, or non-existent.
Prepare yourself for another big surprise! American audiences rejected over 93 out of every 100 films made by the major studios. That is nothing less than an astonishing failure, and the only way studios keep their doors open is because of the large amounts of money that can be generated from other ancillary markets around the world. If the studios had to live or die by what films are supposed to do – attract audiences to the theaters – their massive failure of films at the box office, especially the US box office, would see virtually every one of them go out of business within a year or two. (We will give you complete box office figures in the Rise and Fall Section.)
This massive failure to be able to make films people want to see is why the average life span of a studio head is two and a half years (the same as an NFL running back), why virtually every theater chain in America is either in bankruptcy, or heading towards it (except Sumner Redstone’s run brilliantly by his sister), and why, in a desperate attempt to generate some grosses, studio heads resort to making these not only excessively violent and sexually brutalizing films, but really bad films, poorly made, that pander to kids and appeal only on a moronic level.
Not a week goes by that I don’t have someone say to me, “Why don’t they make films like they used to? Why don’t they make films like the old black and whites?” The answer is, they can’t. They don’t know how. And because they don’t know how they can’t make films that make money or run their studios profitably.
Ironically the people who should be more up in arms over the studios trying to pass off this kind of trash as movies should be the investors, the Wall Street bankers, not parents and politicians.
Sleeze films do not make money. Not real money! Yes, made for pennies and buying opening week grosses, some of them make money, but do not throw off any truly significant profits, and certainly not enough profits to offset the huge losses on all the other films the studios make that audiences stay away from in droves. It is the investment banks who should be holding hearings as to what went wrong with the studios. How did they degenerate from filmmaking companies who produced wonderful films of grandeur to this pathetic state the film industry and the art of film making is in today?
When was the last time there was a film out there that you really wanted to see? Delores and I love to go to films. We love to go out on Friday or Saturday night, have something to eat, and take in a film. I can’t tell you how many weekends we had to throw up our hands because there was nothing to see. I can tell you in the year 2000 there were only six weekends where there was at least one picture we wanted to see, and only 2 of those weekends were there two pictures we thought we would really enjoy seeing. Mention this to your friends or at work, and you’ll get the same example.
Even if you have a great film, a script that anyone who knew the 9 reasons people go to a movie could see would gross over $200 million at the US box office alone, unless you’re Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, you can’t get it made in Hollywood today because the people who have the power to greenlight a film, the power to finance the film, have no idea what it is that the American people want to see, that will make it a break out commercial hit. Wendy Finerman and her partner spent 11 years trying to get some studio to finance Forrest Gump, and it wasn’t until Sherry Lansing at Paramount, herself a real filmmaker, gave it the green light that Wendy was able to get it made. What did Forrest Gump, this beautiful love story, do? Over $300 million in the US alone.
There always will be those brilliant filmmakers who tower above the industry suffocating them, from the 1920’s until today, and against all odds, sometimes overwhelming odds, create magnificent pictures. This is true even today, when, with a few exceptions, the studios are not run by gifted filmmakers and truly great producers, like the Zanucks, the Thalbergs, the Warners, the Selznicks, the Cohens, the Goldwins and the Meyers. They are run by weak executives desperate to keep their jobs and stay on the A-list at any cost. (Peter Guber, the former head of Sony, used to receive 140 phone calls a day. The day after he got fired, he received only 1.) As a result, the industry has sunk to an abysmal all time low in its ability to make films people want to see, and has systematically defiled and degraded the art of filmmaking and the value of film to create a culture as no other generation of studio heads has ever done.
Instead of celebrating human life, today’s films celebrate the taking of human life, and not just casually taking life, but glorify doing it with a sadistic cruelty and the bloodiest torture and body count these sick minds can imagine or conjure up, creating an attitude about film that not only pervades the studio corridors of power, but has spread to those who write about film, including our most reputable critics.
Let me give you an example by looking at who Roger Ebert picks as the greatest film director of the 20th century, which is the same as of all time, Martin Scorsese.
Let me preface this example by saying up front that I deeply admire and respect Roger. He is as intelligent and knowledgeable as film critics come. He was very kind to Delores and I when we made the Born Losers. AIP, who was distributing the film we made by ourselves, could not get either Delores, who produced the film, or I, who starred in it, an interview anywhere with anyone. I took a photo of Delores going over a script on the beach with our leading lady, Elizabeth James, with both of them in their bikinis. I wrote on the picture, “Which one is the producer and which one is the star?” Roger was kind enough to interview Delores immediately, and, while she was in his office being interviewed, Irv Kupcinet, who had a popular television talk show at the time, walked by, saw Delores and said, “I’m not leaving here until you agree to be on my show.” As a result of Roger’s kindness, we began to get some publicity for the Born Losers, and so I write this with a great deal of lingering gratitude and affection for Roger.
In addition, I also choose Roger because I think he is the very best at his profession today, as sensitive and intelligent as anyone writing or criticizing films. Which is why Roger’s selection of Scorsese is so revealing about the horrible state that films have fallen to today.
A look at Martin Scorsese’s greatest films compared with the films of other directors shows clearly how the sacred art of filmmaking has degenerated into the art of hatred, meanness and violence, which make up the body of Scorsese’s work.
Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, New York, New York, Raging Bull, King of Comedy, After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, Good Fellas, Cape Fear, and Casino – all for the most part excessively angry, violent, full of hate, and glorify disrespect for life, and for the most part forgettable, if not already forgotten.
Now, let’s look at the films of some of the directors Ebert passed over, and compare them with Scorsese’s body of work, both as to quality and content.
George Stevens: Gunga Din, Penny Serenade, Woman of the Year, A Place in the Sun, I Remember Mama, Shane, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Giant.
David Lean: Blythe Spirit, Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Hobson’s Choice, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Laurence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago.
Ilia Kazan: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gentleman’s Agreement, Panic in the Streets, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, A Face in the Crowd, Splendor in the Grass.
William Wiler: Dead End, Jezabelle, Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of our Lives, The Heiress, Detective Story, Roman Holiday, The Desperate Hours, The Big Country, Ben Hur, The Children’s Hour, Funny Girl.
William Wellman: Wings (The first Academy Award winning picture), The Public Enemy, Call of the Wild, A Star is Born, Beau Geste, The Oxbow Incident, Battleground, The High and the Mighty.
That’s just for starters. It doesn’t even take into account George Lucas, and the most incredibly successful director that ever lived, Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg is a filmmaker from another planet. He makes films regularly out of that Transpersonal Center that the rest of us filmmakers can only dream about doing. He is to film what Tiger Woods is to golf, and Michael Jordan was to basketball. Here are some of his films:
Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, The Extraterrestrial, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Color Purple, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, The Lost World, and Saving Private Ryan.
The point is simple, the films that these men made, and there are many other great directors I have left off, are magnificent films, classics, of a quality that you have to go out of your way to find today, if at all. These are films people poured out to see because they celebrated human life, not trashed it. The celebrated love, not trashed it. They were true works of art in the fullest sense of that word. Instead of trashing the Hero Myth, which is indispensable not only for young people but for all of us, they honored it.
A quick comparison will show the difference between today’s films and the films Hollywood used to make on a regular basis. (I will go into this much deeper in the section on Why Hollywood is no longer able to make these films: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood.) Let us compare one of this year’s major box office hits, The Gladiator, with the film it clearly, but not very successfully, tried to imitate, Ben Hur.
The Gladiator was made by one of the premiere quality film studios in the world today, Dreamworks, headed up by Steven Spielberg, Jeff Katzenberg, and David Geffen. These men know film, yet Gladiator, one of the top 10 box office successes of the year, was light years from being a Ben Hur, both in quality and in the desirability of people to see it. Ben Hur, with no excessive blood or gore in its violent moments, will live forever, Gladiator which filled the screen with gratuitous and unnecessary blood and gore, will not. For example, the cutting off of the ostrich’s head who then runs around the arena spouting blood had absolutely no value to the picture. It did not make one single moviegoer like the film more, or sell one more ticket than they would have sold if they cut out these four seconds of film. But in today’s whore-and-gore mentality, even these high quality filmmakers felt they had to leave it in.
There are many more reasons why The Gladiator was no where near being the quality film Ben Hur was, starting with the relationship that developed between Ben Hur and his lifelong closest friend, Masala, and then showing us how the lust for power twisted and warped Masala into becoming the most evil of men. That was great writing. That’s how to make a great film, but making those kind of films, with a few very rare exceptions, is a lost art today. Today the only way filmmakers can get a reaction from the audience is to stick a two foot long erect penis in one ear and out the other. In itself, a sad commentary on where the art of making films has gone.
Let us look in detail at the problems outlined in this overview, starting with the key question in the entertainment violence debate:
Is excessive violence in films and other media a major cause of stirring up violence within the individual , and does entertainment violence cause the violence stirred within individuals to be acted out on other individuals?
In short, is entertainment/media violence a major cause of violence in society today?
The answer, as you will see, is not just yes, but an absolute yes! It is impossible for violence in entertainment and other media not to cause violence within individuals and society.
Does sex in entertainment evoke sexual responses within the individual, or more specifically, does sexual dysfunction and sexual brutality in films and the media cause sexual dysfunction and sexual brutality within the individual and is it a major cause of sexual dysfunction and sexual brutality in society today?
Again, the answer is yes! Absolutely!
Do films have the power to influence human beliefs, attitudes, and behavior?
Again, as you will see, because of the nature of the human being and the way our psyche functions, it is impossible for films not to influence individuals, and our culture and subculture.
The next section will explore the role of parents in causing violence within the individual and society. I will show why the parent is far and away the most powerful influence on how the child's psyche is developed, and what the child will become. I will also show that mentally healthy, responsible parents who care and have healthy trusting relationships with their children, including spending the appropriate amount of time with their children, are now in a minority. And what to do about the child whose parent, or parents, are violent, or have abandoned them to foster homes.
In the next section we will explore the role Religion has in forming beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, and examine the power of religious beliefs to withstand the overwhelmingly powerful influence of films and other media.
Then we will carefully examine the First Amendment/Freedom of Speech issue, what is legitimate protection of our Constitutional Freedom of Speech, and what are phony arguments falsely clothed as free speech arguments solely for the purpose of being allowed to continue to destroy children for profit, just as the tobacco companies tried to do.
Then we will examine the real reasons why these sociopathic films and other media are increasingly being produced and marketed. We will show what has caused the studios and the art of filmmaking to become such an all-time low. We will show why Hollywood is no longer capable of consistently making pictures people want to see, and expose the fallacy that the reason Hollywood makes these films is to make money. On the contrary, the films that become box office h its and generate real profits are love stories. The films that audiences flock to see are love stories containing the Hero Myth, not anti-Hero movies filled with hate and violence.
Most important of all, we will show, in detail, what can be done to end this destruction of our culture, and especially our children.
We will present two solutions:
- What filmmakers can do to take back the art of making films from those who now control what films we can make.
- To give back to the parents the power to make studios produce films they want to se and they want their children to see.
Let us begin by presenting the overwhelming psychological proof that it is impossible for violence and sexual brutality in films and the media not to cause major violence in society.
