Now some views on what contemporary film and t.v. programs convey about American values. You'll hear from television producer Norman Lear, actor and filmmaker Sydney Pollack and author Nora Ephron. This event was part of last months annual Ideas Festival hosted by the Aspen Institute. Its fifty minutes. And finally after what I think you all will agree has been a fascinating and diverse day, and as we wait for the good lord to dry things out slightly, the rain to stop, we have our final panel. And to introduce it is one of the most talented, smartest, creative people in the media and writing and literature today, my friend, my former fellow journalist, the novelist and radio host Kurt Anderson. Thank you, Walter. Um, and it is my pleasure to just as they march up, not the penguins, but these geniuses here, Sydney Pollack, Norman Lear and Nora Ephron. And in the interest of one American value that I think we all hold dear, which is pragmatism, we're gonna try to get you out of here more or less on time. Its up to us to make it up so I'm gonna dispense with some of the formalities. I, these people literally need no introduction and there is always IMDb if you need introductions, but... We're talking about "American values", not I want to hasten to add, given the last fascinating and inspiring talk, "American Virtue" necessarily. Um, I think television and film always reflects American values for better and for worse, intentionally and unintentionally, from Birth of a Nation to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to American Idol and America's Next Top Model. Those all reflect American values, I believe, so I think its up to these folks to explain to us what parts of the American character, what piece of American values aren't and are being shown and embodied effectively in entertainment and art visually? And should filmmakers and television producers consciously try to make television shows and movies that are more virtuous that display our best values for the sake of ourselves and our children and grandchildren and people abroad, so they don't think that all we do is perhaps, "America's Next Top Model"? Um, Sam Goldwyn, the movie tycoon, famously said that you should call Western Union if you want to send a message, rather than use movies to do so. I want to ask each of you, um, if when you are dreaming up, doing all that is required to get a television show made or a movie made, are values the moral, political, philosophical take away part of what you think about or does that just come at the end, oh, yeah, happy ending. Or do you, is their a conscious part of the writing, creative process that is about trying to embody values and virtues? Norman, I'll start with you. Uh, yes, no and perhaps. I don't know the writer that doesn't sit down at least at the start who isn't thinking about something he/she wishes to say. Some comment on something, something that comes out of some deep passion. Uh, and then there are situations with the thing, writers perhaps, who are struggling to support two kids to keep another one in college and are answering the call to do something that the studio believes in for entirely different reasons, entirely different values and rushed to do that out of the need to do that. But I think for the most part, people I've known who write and direct, the caring part of them, the concerned part of them always wants to be dealing with that creatively. Sydney? Do you start off wanting to? I think that would, speaking for myself, be a terrible mistake on my part. I, I, I think if I were producing a picture, I might, if I were involved in a way where I wasn't trying to find some part of my own unconscious thats the most important part to me to work with, I might very well. I think the difficulty in this discussion is that it isn't, it isn't, it just isn't as controllable as words are. It really isn't. Something else is going on when you create or tell a story and in someway, and I hope this doesn't sound like a cop out, you really have to trust that your own virtues, if you have them, are going to come out. Its a kind of (unidentified) test doing a movie. You can't hide who you are and that gets revealed in some way. Yes of course, you reflect on it and you say, am I doing something bad here? Am I making a film that I can't stand behind morally. Yeah, you know that unconsciously, but I think if you start from the premise of doing good, you're gonna make an eat your spinach movie. You're got make, you're gonna preach. Its not my job to preach. It really isn't. Its the bishop's job who was just here and did it so beautifully. I try to get to you in a completely different way. I try to move you by making you become one of the characters in the film I'm making and I have to believe that if you experience the world through those characters eyes, something good is gonna happen, because you've changed your point of view to some other point of view but in the long run, thats gonna lead to some sort of compassion in a way, but I don't think you can start with that. Nora, Nora, you wrote early on in your film career Silkwood, which certainly was a movie a distinct political message since then... What was it? The message? We'll talk afterwards and I'll fill you in. That big corporations are tend toward the evil and want to protect themselves and will do anything to do so including commit evil acts. Well, I think one of the interesting things when you make a political movie and one of the the things I'm always interested in is when Hollywood gets blamed for things which I think it does out of all proportion to its affect on anything, because if Hollywood had any real affect, George Bush would not be president, but (applause), but one of the things that interested me and discouraged me after Silkwood, because that is certainly one of the things its about, is that most movies are about exactly the same thing and I think you've heard me say this because we've done this before in some way or another, but they're all about an appealing character strives against great odds to achieve a worthwhile goal. That is the plot of 98% of all movies that are made so that in the end, emotionally and sometimes even intellectually, Rambo and Silkwood are exactly the same movie and... Although the question becomes worthwhile and when we're talking about values. I understand that, I'm just saying that its interesting that when you make a movie that you hope will tell something about um the carelessness of American industry and doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference, you wonder about that. In any case, I was drawn to that movie not because of my values, but because I thought it would be an interesting thing to write because there was a moment, because it had been written about badly by journalists on both sides of it and Alice Arlen who wrote it together, saw a way of writing about this woman that was more complicated and was basically a short commitment in our lives that turned into a wonderful movie, so it was great. But I didn't come to it in terms of... Exposing (unidentified). You know, blah, blah, blah. Um, but I would like to say anecdotally that every so often and I want to say I forget the name, I used to forget the name of this movie even before I got older, the one with Michael Douglas and Glenn Close, yes, Rabbit in the Pot. Rabbit in the Pot, its called, that's right Fatal Attraction. Fatal Attraction. They asked me to rewrite that movie and my values surfaced and it cost me about four years college tuition and thats one of the reasons that I always forget the name of the movie, cause I really did say to the producer, I can't rewrite this movie, because its not. Women don't kill men, men kill women. So I had this, this horrible, costly feminist moment and I will never have one again. I wanna to, so you've paid you dues. Norman? I just want to take issue with both my colleagues here in the sense that knowing their careers and what they've elected to do, they have always elected to do something that matters, each of them. Oh that is not true. Well as I recollect, as I look at your career. And when you talk about Silkwood and you talk about its, from your point of view, what did it matter. I had a grandfather who uh, I was standing at a lake with one time and I was throwing rocks in the lake, I must have been about nine years old and he said, "You know Norman, every time you throw that rock, a rock in the lake, it raises the level of the water". And so I'm a nine-year old kid, I'm looking to see, I'm throwing a big rock, another big rock and I'm waiting for the water to rise and he said, "No you're never going to see that". And I don't know whether he intended for me to get this lesson at all, but years later, uh, you know when I heard him in my mind say, "What you get for it is the ripple". And that's what we get, is the ripple. And I know you got ripples or I got ripples anyway, from Silkwood. It was a hell of a piece of work, it had a lot to say and you get a ripple. You don't get to see that water rise. Thanks. So you are a preacher? Here I go. I also felt that the producer in me, that it was time for a musical interlude and so... Red sails in the sunset... I won't do anymore. Well done. Um, speaking of more than a ripple, I would say a small wave anyway, there was of course All in the Family, which was the great example of (applause)... Thank you. And I'll mention Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, just so they can applaud again, but um, but All in the Family was this enormous example of a big popular cultural phenomenon that was about values and the struggle to find values at this volatile moment of the late '70's, or early '70 which were effectively the late '60's continued. Do you, as you've watched television shows go on and off the air in the last 25 years, do you see worthy successors to what you were trying to do with that show? I see worthy successors all over the place and just to repeat, you know, I'm asked all the time, you know, or told the show accomplished so much and for me, and this is honest to God and Bishop Jakes, uh, what I got was the ripple. People told me the family talked afterwards, that's all. The Judeo-Christian ethic hasn't changed anything in terms of race relations, religion, intolerance and you know, that one can visibly see and my little half hour situation, comedy certainly didn't either, but I did learn that people talked about it. You mention it now, I might have mentioned Silkwood if you hadn't. Out of Africa too for that matter and the character you wished other people would seek to emulate. I just feel good today, I guess. Well, but isn't it the case that suddenly this character Archie Bunker, which represented lot of lots of real Americans, could say things that weren't be said in the public airwaves before that. Yeah, but they were being said in school yards everywhere. And now they're being said on Fox. Oh on Fox! On Fox. I mean one of the things I was thinking about is that we all had such benevolent feelings toward Archie because we actually thought when we saw that show, that that was on the way out and that's why it was such a wonderful, I mean its not one of the only reasons, its a great show, um, and by the way, I think there is only one plot of a television show too. And that is? We are family. But, but I think, I wonder if that show were on the air and as wonderful as it was, whether it wouldn't seem as funny to us who now realize that the country has a lot more of that then we ever dreamt twenty years ago. I guess the question behind is.. Thirty years ago, how many years ago? Yeah, no, thirty years ago. Does America really ever take a, and this is what the media ought to be helping us do, take a real good look at us, help us look at ourselves seriously. What, why, who are we when we look in the mirror culturally and I'm not sure the media does the greatest job at that. It, All in the Family was entertainment. Sydney, uh, around the same time as All in the Family uh, during that part of your career, you were making these extraordinary films that were in a big explicit way, I think, dealing with American values like They Shoot Horses and The Way We Were and Three Days of the Condor and Absence of Malice, um, which were four of many great films you made. It, did it, was there a moment when it became more difficult to either find an audience or convince a studio that films like that deserve to be made? Oh yeah. I mean its almost impossible. Those films have moved into the independent world now, I mean they're not any longer what major studios look for as what they call their "tent pole" films. I mean it was standard operating procedure in the seventies and eighties to tell any story that you felt was worth telling with actors that were good actors you didn't have any problem as we say, pitching it to the studio. You, you would get indulged and then turned down today if I came in and tried to sell any studio half of those films that you mentioned They Shoot Horses, Don't They, the guy, one of them is going to get get killed in the end, come on, I mean any of those things, but you could probably raise independent financing for films like that now. Well, you could be George Clooney, I guess, who gets to make them. That's right, there's somebody like George whose gonna use their celebrity to make something they believe in like that and take a big cut in pay, then those things will get done. Look at the films last year that were nominated for Academy, a lot of them were away from "tent pole", you know, studio films Crash, Brokeback Mountain. Yeah, all of those movies were, had at least one foot in the independent film world. Do, we have gone through an incredible transformation in television in the last twenty years simply in the sheer amount of programming that is feeding into every home in America for better and for worse. Again, its a golden age if you look at HBO and if you look at part of Fox its a golden age, The Simpsons, I would point out And 24. And 24 which certainly embodies, don't we agree American values that are relatively Absolutely if they won't talk to you, torture them. Um, I'm saying, American values, not virtues. Um, do, do to the degree where people are, always default to, what about the kids? Are kids today getting a better or worse values education in America from sitting in front of television, than they did when I was a kid or when you were younger? Well I think kids are sitting in front of their computers and they're watching some television on their computers and, and I'm completely fascinated by what that means and I don't think, and I don't think it has anything to do with content. I think we get very confused here. My own feeling is that the, that I lived through a period where the answer to almost every question about what was wrong with America was television. Um, by which people were talking about the medium itself and I think we have forgotten that the medium itself is truly interesting and with the Internet, all this clicking and linking and I'm bored and I'm going to the next thing and I'm this and I'm this, this to me concerns me way more about kids than what they're watching on any of these media, because I think as any of you know if you got hooked on solitaire when you got your first computer and felt your brain frying between your eyes, it changes your brain. When you spend four hours just, when you come home and your loved one is waiting for you and you don't even go into the room where they are, when you sit down at the computer to see if you got email from a stranger. Um, you know this is interesting stuff. Although it is, the "zombification" that my own parents complained about when I would stare simply... I don't know about that, because we may not have kids that are zombies, but there are zombie kids out there. There really are. Do you guys, Sydney and Norman, watch television or are, is it a very selective thing. Do you sit and watch shows every week or all the time? I could not live without TiVo, or I could not live with television without TiVo, because we don't make appointments with the tube. We'll watch Jon Stewart before we fall asleep, invariably. And the shows we watch, we watch at hours that are convenient for us, but we don't sit down, except perhaps for 24, but sometimes we've had to watch by TiVo three in a row. Isn't that interesting that liberals watch this rough, tough right-wing show, 24. Sydney, you want to make it three? I, I, I stopped being as much a television watcher as I once was. I do watch on a selected basis, but I'm not a, I don't have the habit that I had 20 years ago where I really was kind of addicted to certain shows and waited for them week after week. I find that I don't do that that much anymore. Nora I think, made a really provocative point early on that I'm gonna get back to which is for all of the talk of culture war and violent movies can do this to ruin our society or pro- social movies can do this to help thing. What is your basic feeling about film and television being able to move the needle one way or the other in terms of the health or goodness of society. Well, there's no, in my mind there is no question that it has a very strong effect on how people see the world, whether the result of it literally moves a society, I mean I am of the belief that there has been a lot of talk today of politics and about the Cold War and the end of the Cold War. I think the exportation of popular culture was as much an instrument of winning the Cold War as anything military that went on. It does affect how people see the world in some way. You can't feel something without thinking something. Or you can't think about feeling something, lets put it that way. Its impossible, you don't have control over it when you've moved the way you do. Images don't signal their strategy the way words do. You can figure out that somebody is trying to change your mind when you're spoken to or when you read, but that's not necessarily true with an image. Images work without you being aware of them working in some way. So I don't think there is any question that it has an effect. If you asked me to measure it I couldn't. If you asked me to tell you what the affect is, I couldn't, but is it a powerful tool in the changing and swaying of people's minds? I think absolutely. So when people get all up in arms left, right, Ann Coulter, Michael Moore about that then that's a fight worth having, because cultural products can really change behavior, you think? I think they do and I think that, ya have a big responsibility when you're given a bully pulpit like that. Somebody gives you what used to be seventy, eighty, ninety a hundred million dollars to make a film that's gonna go all over the world, there is apart of you that realizes that you have the ability to influence people. So speaking of a bully pulpit, Hillary Clinton has used hers in the last year or so and we're gonna get beyond television and film... I just want to say one thing about that though. I don't, I'm just finding it hard, it seems to be that you use the word "reflect" at the beginning and I think that's way more accurate. I see very little out there that is meant to change and to me, of course I come from the world of romantic comedy, but there's no question you can get people to change their eye ware in if Meg Ryan is wearing a particularly attractive pair of glasses in a movie, but its hard for me to see any real, I can't point to a change in the society that I can... I can't tell you the change, but I know its gotta affect how they feel or how they perceive it. Its interesting how little political effect there is and when Ann Coulter and those guys say Hollywood, I think its a code word like Willie Horton. I think... For Jews? For... I think its a code word for Jews, absolutely. You can see a big change in society in the attraction of celebrities, just the whole celebrity nonsense that goes on. I don't know how many magazines are utterly devoted to it, television shows utterly devoted to it, but uh, we have 11 year old twin daughters and we have to talk to them a lot to, to make them understand that what they're, what they tend to want to watch about celebrities or what the covers of the magazines or so forth have nothing to do with the real world any more than reality television has to do with real human behavior. Does a film, does a show, do we think that like Will and Grace have the affect of accustoming millions of Americans to the idea of likable gay men or does it have also the simultaneous opposite affect of making people all upset about gay marriage? There is no doubt in my mind that way the African American shows we dealt with made people much more accustomed to having black actors in their homes, in their parlors talking about what they were talking about and so forth, the same thing would have to be true common sensically of Will and Grace and familiarity with gay people. Is the, the, I know this is slightly beyond our, our brief I guess because all of you are, are mainly fictional filmmakers, your beautiful film about Frank Gehry aside, um, but (applause), but does the melting and bleeding of entertainment and into news and vice versa make the clear depiction of American values harder to get across in news. Is that a mainly bad thing you think the kind of lets turn news into entertainment in terms of reflecting a certain kind of American value that indeed everything amounts to entertainment in the end? What do you mean? Well I mean that if to the degree that news is presented increasingly as a form of entertainment. Are you talking about cable shout at one another things? What music beds on network news documentaries and the sweetening in toward entertainment of what used to be a straighter form of information provision. Is, is that, does that tell kids or young people that there is no difference between fact and entertainment and you know clear, clear news values and entertainment value. Well I don't think kids get their news from television if they get it anywhere. Um, I mean we've seen that today in a number of panels. I mean my kids, I have one kid who reads a newspaper and one who doesn't and they're both very smart about, they both watch the Daily Show, I have to say that, but I think that fewer and fewer people, you know that, what we think of as the news its not, I mean its like past tense as they say in charades, um, and I watched Katie and Bob yesterday, Couric and Schieffer. Yeah and I thought, well I'll turn it on the first two nights, I will, but then I'll just go back to getting my news off the Internet all day long and watching Hardball, which by the way I have while having a massage and I recommend it highly. The other thing in addition to "the kids" that we are meant to worry about, there is, and its a a real issue for the last twenty years especially as we've exported American movies and American television shows abroad and that becomes a significant driver of, of the way people around the other 5.8 billion of earthlings think of us. Is that a, is that a mostly bad thing or a mostly good thing, how, how our movies and t.v. have made the rest of the world think about us. Sydney? Is what a good thing or bad thing, precisely? Is the presentation of America through movies and television what we would like the rest of the world to consider America to be? I don't feel qualified to answer that. You can answer that. I won't present myself as qualified to answer it, but I go back to where, of what it all derives. The studios that make the major motion pictures are owned by giant corporations today. Television for the most part, not for the most part, just about all of it, is owned by giant corporations. Their need is what drives most of they content. Their need, their public corporations is for a profit statement this quarter larger than the last, which I would suggest is at the expense of every other value, that is the significance in your value. There is nothing in nature that suggests anything can grow forever, but stupidly we insist corporately that this must happen, quarter by quarter there must be.. it drives all the content on television with the exception of those that happily, luckily, for the audiences sake, have content that really mirrors, the values we tell ourselves we believe in, not the values when you talk about American values, it seems to me that most significant value is that quarterly, is the quarterly profit statement that drives that engines for all major media. I'm wondering if we think though that, I remember once being in Europe and every city I went to I would turn on the television in the hotel room and a rerun of Baywatch was on and I began to think to what degree is America's Baywatch the message that's sent by your industry. Our industry? Oh, I don't know, I don't know. You know last night after we saw Sydney's movie, I hope I'm probably speaking out of turn, but I saw Justice Breyer and we're old friends, I'm proud to say that I dated him once and we were talking about Frank Gehry and he said to me that he didn't really know about Gehry's buildings, he loved the movie, was kind of worried about them and I started laughing and he said, "why are you laughing?" And I said, "You're worried about Frank Gehry, I'm worried about the Supreme Court". Um, so you know I feel that the culture is in much better hands including whoever made Baywatch than the people in the White House, so don't blame us, you know. No, I once accused a right-winger who was telling me I should worry more about violent television of yelling theater in a crowded fire and uh, there is something to that I think that this is as significant as it can be as Sydney says that television and movies can indeed affect behavior in the hierarchy of important concerns is perhaps not the highest. I think we are about ready to take questions uh, if people want to rise and ask them.
Watch Now
