(4 of 5)
Some studio bosses worry about missing the next big wave -- if the Kindly Kid genre is a wave and not a wash. Others may feel responsibility for young viewers, especially those in their own family; they don't want their five- year-olds on a couch two decades from now telling a psychiatrist, "It was those R-rated thrillers my daddy green-lighted that warped my life." It may be that a few moguls are hitting their midlife-crisis stride. They're tired of making vicious junk that passes for adventure. They'll feel better if they make innocuous junk that passes for humanism.
But what about those benighted creative types who don't want to make family films? Will the studios still finance their work? J.F. Lawton wrote Pretty Woman and Under Siege, both rated R, both worldwide hits. He recently did a PG-13 rewrite of Damon Wayans' spoof Blankman. "There was a scene where some gangsters come in and shoot people," he says. "We changed it so they shot at the ceiling and the people ran out of the room." Now Lawton is wrangling over his script for The Adventures of Fartman, starring Howard Stern, America's top radio ranter. "We didn't hold back," Lawton says. "There's a lot of nudity, some harsh language, a lesbian love scene, and the main character works for an underground sex magazine. We told New Line Cinema the plot, and they said, 'Yeah, it sounds great. But can't we make it PG-13?' " Lawton and Stern are looking for a less fretful sponsor.
The agitation over Fartman indicates Hollywood's bottom line under all the fine talk about making good films for kids. Richard Heffner, head of the industry's ratings board, appreciates this distinction. "There is some feeling that producers are looking to make more PG or PG-13 films," he observes. "I don't think that's quite true. It's truer to say that they are looking to get PG or PG-13 ratings. They don't want to make the film that most parents would consider appropriate. They're just interested in getting the rating."
In his 1992 book Hollywood vs. America, critic Michael Medved sounded a shrill warning to the movies to clean up their act. He feels vindicated by the new tendency to softer movies, yet he is not quite satisfied. "Most people do not understand the difference between PG and PG-13," Medved claims. "We should call the PG-13 rating R-13, which would be much more reflective of what it is."
O.K., so what movies are bad for kids? "By day, children use their imagination to create things," says David Kirschner, producer of both the G- rated Once Upon a Forest and the R-rated killer-doll Child's Play series. "Then by night they have very dark visions about what's under their bed and in their closet." Jurassic Park exploits that passive dark side: that moment, just after your mom shuts off the lights, when a T. rex leaps out of its wall poster and into your fevered R.E.M.s. And Last Action Hero taps the aggressive impulse: to engineer the apocalyptic collision of every toy car in the playroom. The two films may talk the parenting game, but what they show is the Big Scare and the Big Crash.