Bullets Over Hollywood

By ADAM COHEN

Miramax and the Catholic League have been brawling for months over Dogma, a film about holy men behaving badly, which will hit theaters later this year. But even as the filmmakers invoke artistic freedom to defend Dogma's edgy religious scenes, they are quietly considering whether to re-edit other scenes, including one in which a pair of pistol-packing angels, played by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, bullet-spray a board meeting at a large corporation, and another in which they have massacred a group outside a church. "There's definitely the question of Columbine to consider," says director Kevin Smith.

A chill has settled over Hollywood on the subject of violence. Washington's attacks hit a fever pitch last week, as Republican Congressman Henry Hyde blasted "toxically poisoning" entertainment and tried but failed to get an amendment passed making it a crime to expose children to violent movies. Hollywood lobbyists continue to attack such efforts as a violation of the industry's First Amendment rights. Nevertheless, the Columbine High School shootings and the national kids-and-violence conversation it set off have left Hollywood in an unusually reflective mood.

At pitch meetings and script sessions, in agents' offices and at poolside, the talk is of how many shooting sprees and explosions are too many and how much psychotic knife slashing is more than enough. Scripts are quietly being buried or reworked, movie websites reviewed and ad campaigns rejiggered. "Littleton had an effect on everybody," says Michael Pressman, new executive producer of CBS's Chicago Hope. "People are reeling creatively."

There have been a few highly publicized retreats. The WB network pulled the season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer last month because it had Buffy and her pals squaring off with a 60-ft. serpent at a high school graduation. No guns and no fatalities, but the network was still worried that it would be Exhibit A if anyone in a cap and gown were injured anywhere in the country. (The show has been rescheduled for next month.) And the Bravo cable network yanked Teen Sniper School, a guess-you-had-to-be-there satirical segment on Michael Moore's show The Awful Truth that imagined students being given course credit for learning to shoot.

There's even more punch pulling going on behind the scenes. Warner Bros. has turned down a chance to be a partner with Disney on Gangs of New York, a Martin Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio historical drama in development, in part because of its violent subject matter, sources close to the production say. (Warner Bros. declined comment.) And Disney executive vice president Rob Moore told TIME that the studio will proceed with the movie only if the script's violence is toned down. Sony has been in angst mode for months over its Jeff Bridges-Tim Robbins movie Arlington Road. The paranoia-fueled tale of a man who thinks his next-door neighbors are terrorists, scheduled for release on May 14, was bumped back to July 9 largely because of Columbine, says a marketing source close to the studio. Sony denies it, saying it was just trying to avoid entering a box-office Pod race with The Phantom Menace. Then there's Fight Club, a bare-knuckle-boxing drama starring Brad Pitt that's been roundhoused from its planned Aug. 6 release date and moved to the fall. Fox says the film needs more editing and would face too much competition, but there's no doubt that a little more distance from the Littleton shootings cannot hurt.

Disney Studios chairman Joe Roth says the climate is affecting production of projects like Gone in 60 Seconds, a Nicolas Cage car-theft action pic being made by Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of bone crunchers like Con Air and The Rock. Bruckheimer "is being careful that it's not overly violent, that there's enough humor in it, and there's a dramatic and clear moral message," says Roth. "We didn't not make the picture, but there's more conversation about its specific content."

If nothing else, a title change can help. Miramax was planning to go with Killing Mrs. Tingle, a dark teen comedy about a student's plot to get revenge on her teacher for a bad grade. But after a teacher was killed in Littleton, the studio renamed it Teaching Mrs. Tingle, and it's being billed as more of a lighthearted kidnapping-and-physical-abuse caper. Forrest Gump producer Wendy Finerman has expressed qualms, insiders say, about the violent content in Sugar and Spice and Semiautomatics, in which a high school cheerleader becomes pregnant with the star quarterback's child and turns to crime to support herself. The film has been retitled simply Sugar and Spice. And an Ellen Barkin comedy originally called Crime and Punishment in High School is now in production under the not quite so catchy name Untitled '99.

Movie marketing departments are also toning down their act, keeping guns out of the advertising artwork and playing down violence. "We're thinking about it up front at the sketch stage, long before we execute," says Tony Seiniger, whose Beverly Hills ad firm does work for several top studios. He says his clients are thinking hard about whether actors who are popular with kids should pose with weapons. "Everybody's aware that there's a definite responsibility, the same way we don't have people smoking in ads anymore."

The Motion Picture Association of America, which runs the industry's voluntary rating system, already bans ads in which guns are pointed at heads, and its president, Jack Valenti, says the standards may get tougher. Likely to get the most scrutiny: thrillers and action movies. "There's a difference between a Dracula-type film and one in which a guy splatters AK-47s all over the place," says Valenti.

Much of this activity is clearly a response to the anti-Hollywood climate in Washington. Although Hyde's amendment lost, the House did pass a "sense of Congress" resolution accusing the entertainment industry of including "pointless acts of brutality" in movies and TV. Hollywood is likely to be an even more tempting target during the presidential race. But filmmakers and TV producers are often parents too, and their new sense of responsibility may also be directed by conscience. When Arnold Schwarzenegger was approached to star in End of Days, about the devil coming to earth in human form at the millennium, he wasn't sure he should appear in the violent and potentially religiously offensive film. He says he went ahead only after meeting with his family priest and getting his approval.

Still, Hollywood isn't about to stop making violent movies or TV shows. Scream 3 is scheduled to start shooting soon (though it's rumored the violence will be toned down), and New Line Cinema is planning to pit Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger against Friday the 13th's Jason in another gorefest. At a cable-TV convention in Chicago last week, media-industry leaders insisted that their companies are being scapegoated for larger societal woes. "The same motion pictures that are distributed in the U.S. are distributed in Canada and England," said Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, "and the kids don't kill each other as a result of seeing those movies."

--Reported by Kim Masters, Jeanne McDowell and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Kim Masters, Jeanne McDowell and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles