“Film is a powerful medium. Film is a drug. Film is a potential hallucinogen. It goes into your eye. It goes into your brain. It stimulates. And it’s a dangerous thing. It can be a very subversive thing.”—Oliver Stone, director of Platoon, JFK, and Natural Born Killers.
“My kids, I don’t like them to watch that much television. We’re focusing on reading, a lot of reading. They are allowed about three-and-a-half hours of television per week.… I can actually see the difference when they watch too much television in terms of their education…. their attention span, their behavior.”—Actor Tom Cruise
“I knew my mother loved me, but she never expressed it, so I learned about love from the movies.”—Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, whose adult-entertainment empire includes erotic films
“The most powerful nations are not those who have bombs, but those who control the media. That’s where the battle is being fought; that is how you control people’s minds.”—Spike Lee, the filmmaker behind Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X
“Violence gets marketed like apple pie. It is sold to boys as cool, and if you come out and speak against it, then you are uncool. I’m not outraged at the game, I’m upset at the way that these games are marketed to children.”—Daphne White, founder of the Lion & Lamb Project, on Grand Theft Auto 3 and other violent video games
“Who determines what normal is? We need to determine it by the Word of God. We need to know what our Creator [thinks]. The One who made us knows what’s best. Not MTV, you know—not the media of today. We need to pick up our Bibles and find out for ourselves how we’re meant to be living.”—Phil Joel, bass player, The Newsboys
“I love children, but certain kids are too young to see these films. A 4-year-old came up to me once, and her dad told her, ‘Honey, do what Mini-Me does in the movie,’ and she flipped me off! That’s just not right.”—Austin Powers co-star Verne Troyer
“[Movie characters’] ideals become our ideals. Their thoughts become standards of our thinking and language. Their style of dress and movement are seen on the streets of our nation. And their moments of triumph and defeat become our successes and our failures.”—Actress/director Jodi Foster (Panic Room, Silence of the Lambs, Contact)
“A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star onscreen is a gun aimed at a 12- or 14-year-old.… The gun will go off when the kid is an adult. We in Hollywood know the gun will go off, yet we hide behind a smoke screen of phrases like ‘creative freedom’ and ‘artistic expression.’—screenwriter Joe Esterhas (Basic Instinct, Sliver, Jade)
“America has a real strong Puritan ethic. I don’t like it. Pushing the edge of broadcast standards is something I’ve always done. Broadcast standards simply are whatever they’ll finally let you do. That becomes the new standard.”—Steven Bochco, director/writer/producer (NYPD Blues, Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law).
“All I do is say I’m 13 and I get 20 to 40 contacts. They go right for the kill and start asking me what I’m wearing. I think to myself, I have to get these creeps to the police before they meet a real kid.”—Julie Posey, private investigator and creator of Pedowatch.org
“You know that everything we’re exposed to influences us.… Those [violent] films influence us, and the TV programs we see influence us. The weaker your family is, the more they influence you.… The problems with families in our cities are catastrophic—but when you put violent programs [before] people who haven’t had a lot of love in their lives, who are angry anyway, it’s like pouring gasoline on the fire.”—billionaire media mogul Ted Turner
“What planet are you from that you think that a horror movie is all right for a little child? I think it’s child abuse.” —Halloween queen Jamie Lee Curtis [Extra Daily News, 7/12/02]
