Hollywood's Summer: Just Kidding

By RICHARD CORLISS

Danny, the fatherless boy in Arnold Schwarzenegger's new Last Action Hero, is living the dream of any lonely young movie fan. He has been blasted magically through the screen to co-star in a new action film with Jack Slater, his favorite hero and budding father figure. But there are differences between reel life and real life. The boy writes a certain word on a piece of paper and asks the man to say it out loud. Jack declines the challenge, and Danny knows why. "You can't," the lad crows. "You can't possibly say it! Because this movie is PG-13."

Last Action Hero is indeed PG-13, the movie industry parental-guidance rating that strongly cautions parents of children under 13. Many people may be colorfully killed in a PG-13 picture, and certain expletives may be uttered -- but not the one Danny wrote. If it were, Last Action Hero might be given the restricted R rating (no unescorted person under 17 allowed), theoretically eliminating the huge sector of movie addicts like Danny. A survey by David Davis of Paul Kagan Associates showed that from 1984 to 1991, PG-rated films were twice as likely as R-rated films to earn $60 million at the box office, and three times as likely to earn $100 million. For action movies with blockbuster eyes, the R has nearly become the dread X. Cliffhanger, the R- rated Sylvester Stallone thriller, earned a cozy $50 million in its first 17 days. But, says TriStar boss Mike Medavoy, "would I have preferred a PG-13 on that movie? You bet."

Does Steven Spielberg tailor his action movies to PG-13 specifications? You bet. His Jurassic Park, with many a rampaging dinosaur and a bit of parenting on the side, skirted the R and strutted to a record B.O. pace of $81.7 million in its first week. Naturally, Universal Pictures' Tom Pollock is ecstatic. He's also pleased to display surveys indicating that only 2% of parents deemed the film too scary for their kids. "We are gearing ourselves toward younger movies," he says. "There's a demographic bulge called the baby boomlet: the baby boomers and their children, ranging from three to 12 years old. That means you'll see more movies for adults, more movies for families and fewer movies aimed solely at teenagers." Sorry, Danny.

And hooray for Hollywood, do-gooders might cheer. Whether from conviction or calculation, the town is born-again nice. Nearly extinct this summer are the killer thrillers, with their stark violence, sleazy sex, punk vocabulary -- and R ratings. Taking their place is the children's film, in which kids and grownups take reassuring life lessons. At heart these PG movies are After School Specials for the kids, and after-work seminars for dads. It's Father's Day all summer, and the Kidding of America all year long.

Listen, all, to the imaginary testimony of a few summer-movie Dads Anonymous. They sound like Hollywood moguls swearing off R-rated rotgut for the 12-step program of PG uplift.

< Michael J. Fox in Life with Mikey: "I'm a show-biz agent, down on his pluck. I hope to make my fortune, and remake my life, with the help of a brash urchin who could be someone's beautiful daughter."

Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle: "I'm a grieving widower who needs romantic rehab. Fortunately, I have a live-in therapist -- my eight-year-old son. He'll call an agony talk show, make many women sob over his concern for my depression and arrange a love with the perfect stranger."

Walter Matthau in Dennis the Menace: "I'm an old codger named Mr. Wilson, and the little blond kid next door drives me nuts. Baby-sitting Dennis is like having to listen to MTV at top volume. But he will foil a thief, retrieve the stolen booty and make me a better human being. G.D. that kid!"

Ben Kingsley in Searching for Bobby Fischer: "I'm a reclusive chess master, isolated from human feeling. But I'll tutor a seven-year-old chess prodigy who's as cute as a Keane portrait. He will win my heart and teach me how to love life."

John Lynch in The Secret Garden: "I'm a reclusive grieving widower who blames my sickly son for the death of his beautiful mother. But he and I will be shown the light by my niece, and we will all celebrate life's joys in my spacious backyard."

Mel Gibson in The Man Without a Face: "I'm a reclusive griever whose disfigured face and mysterious past have isolated me from human feeling. But I'll tutor a fatherless 12-year-old boy so he gets into a prep school. I will learn much in return."

Willy in Free Willy: "I'm an orca whale, moody over being separated from my family. But I will teach, and learn from, a fatherless 12-year-old boy . . ."

And so it goes, in Made in America, Rookie of the Year, FatherHood: men who get some remedial humanizing, '90s-style, from kids. In this week's Sleepless in Seattle, an eight-year-old explains some mystery to his dad. "The reason I know this," the child says, "is because I'm younger and purer and therefore more in touch with cosmic forces." This is a joke, but in Hollywood there are no jokes.

Was there ever a bad child in the world -- a spiteful, stubborn, domineering sapper of his parents' spirit? There is rarely one in a Hollywood movie, especially this summer, with its flock of appealing, natural child actors -- persuasive emblems of wisdom and innocence. They help sell the idea behind these films: that childhood is a state we are supposed to attain, not grow out of. It is the new, regressive Quest theme: adults aspiring to be kids.

Hollywood did not need a Body by Jake workout to get its movies into PG shape; it required no Marianne Williamson exhortation to spur it to reunite the nuclear family onscreen. The industry simply looked at the numbers. Family movies can be made cheaply and can reap deeply. "In addition to selling the ticket to the young child," says producer Scott Rudin (The Addams Family, Sister Act, Searching for Bobby Fischer), "you also sell tickets to five of his friends and three of their parents. For the same marketing dollar, the quantity of purchase is much higher. And kids are a loyal audience. I've seen kids walk out, buy another ticket and go back in. The repeat business is unbelievable."

The industry also looked, as it always has, to former successes and past masters. The all-time Top Three hits -- E.T., Star Wars and Home Alone -- had similar story lines: a boy, fatherless or momentarily so, goes on a quest, defends his turf and befriends an older man. It is no surprise that the sires of these films have been the New Hollywood's surest swamis: Spielberg, George Lucas and John Hughes. Home Alone alone stoked the current PG trend. "You could say it helped expose the sheer size of this market," Hughes says modestly. It cost $18 million and grossed $285 million in North America. And box office is just the beginning. Certain G or PG films -- Disney cartoons, for example -- can make zillions more in the video sell-through market.

Hughes wrote Home Alone, he says, "because I didn't like the animated films I was taking my kids to. I'd stand out in the lobby with the other dads saying, 'Jeez, when is this going to let out so I can run to the hardware store?' I felt I should make a film so that someone in my situation -- a father -- could be amused at the same time his kids were."

Well, it worked, this story of a cute blond boy (Macaulay Culkin, the onscreen key to Home Alone's popularity), abandoned by his parents, who triumphantly foils a housebreaking criminal and wins the love of the crusty codger who lives next door. (It worked so well that Hughes Xeroxed the plot for Dennis the Menace.) It worked, Hughes believes, because "successful movies tend to reflect the opposite of American life. The more ugly and violent the streets become, the more people want to escape that reality."

Escape, for grownup moviegoers of a certain age, was when the archetypal cinema couple was Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, making silent-movie love more eloquent than poetry, or Tracy and Hepburn, turning sass into starlight. But that was long ago, when Hollywood was in its swoonily romantic adolescence. Now it is in its second childhood. The moguls have climbed back into their treehouse (NO GIRLS ALLOWED) to initiate their new holy couple: Any Male Star and Any Cute Kid.

"As the baby-boom generation gets older," says Ivan Reitman, who made his rep on R-rated comedies (Meatballs, Stripes) and whose latest hit is the PG- 13, non-kid comedy Dave, "there's a sense of greater maturity and taking more responsibility in the work we do. We have children and families. We worry about different things." And so we tell bedtime fables to our children and ourselves: little-engine-that-could movies that say everybody is exceptional. Maybe that's the kind of emotional cheerleading America needs. Maybe that's what passes for maturity.

Rudin insists that "the family film isn't a new trend. It's everybody catching on to an old trend. Studio executives now are between 35 and 45, and they all have kids between eight and 15. And they have nothing to do on the weekends. Movies reflect the people who make them, or the people who pay to make them. That's why everybody now wants to make Free Willy 14 times."

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.

Which is exactly what American children have savored, with no verifiable scars, since the days of Pinocchio and the Road Runner. It's likely that the mayhem in Jurassic Park and Last Action Hero is more upsetting to protective parents than to seen-it-all kids. At least, that is the impression one gets from the stars in Hollywood's new infant infantry. Life with Mikey's Christina Vidal, 11, saw Casualties of War, the brutal melodrama about a rape in Vietnam, and "sure, it was too intense for some kids under 11. But it depends ; on how mature or smart you are. If you're smart, you won't be influenced too much by a movie." Mason (Dennis) Gamble observes that "Terminator 2 was probably too violent for most kids my age" -- he's 7 -- "but I liked it a lot, especially the robots."

Seattle's Malinger claims that his favorite films are Cape Fear, Hot Shots! and Friday the 13th. "Some PG movies can be good," he avers; "others can be really boring and childish, like they were made for five-year-olds." And Joseph Mazzello, who gets chased by raptors and jolted off an electrified fence in Jurassic Park, says, "Violence can be scary for some kids while others don't mind it -- they think it's funny." Everyone is his own movie critic. Everybody is someone else's censor.

In the new movies, as in moviemaking and moviegoing, adults have ceded power to their young. As gruff Mr. Wilson finally recognizes in Dennis the Menace, "Kids are kids. You have to play by their rules." If that is so, then their rules deserve an R, for Restrictive. To please the new kidocracy, Hollywood may renounce sniggering sex scenes, as long as filmmakers are allowed to investigate the complicated sexual feelings to which no one over the age of PG-13 is immune. The industry can tone down the violence, especially the toonish torture of Lethal Weapon comic-book films, as long as films can still show what all viewers of news shows know: that life, here and around the world, is full of pain. Oh, and movies can put a douser on the spew of obscenities -- anyway, who goes to a movie for the dirty words?

But it is infantile to surrender to the Kidding of American movies. If the country thinks that this is how children and the rest of us should be entertained and enlightened, America is kidding itself.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: NO CREDIT

CAPTION: ON A PG SPREE

The 10 top-grossing films released in the past three years included only two that were rated R

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles