Charge of the Indecency Squad

[thehefner]

From aintitcool.com:

"Today, the FCC notified broadcasters that fines for “indecent” material would be increased up to ten times.
Previously, the maximum fine for “indecency” was $32,500 per occurrence. That fine can now be as high as $325,000. This fine does not apply to cable or satellite broadcasters. Alarmingly, the measure does not specify what “indecency” actually is.
From AP:

"This is a victory for children and families," said Senate sponsor Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan. The higher fines were needed, he said, "in a world saturated with violent and explicit media."

A while back, I conducted an interview with HowardTV’s Doug Goodstein, in which we discussed the probability that regulation of this nature might compel creators and producers to move towards less policed outlets to tell their stories – perhaps even to iN Demand services (where Stern’s television component can now be seen). I wonder if today’s news will push such folk further away from networks – towards cable and beyond?"

*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*

Y'know, it's a real eye-opener to watch reruns of IN LIVING COLOR, a show which ran on regular ol' non-cable Fox, and to hear it frequently bleeped out. Think about that. What was perfectly fine to say on TV little over ten years ago is "bad" now. On cable TV. While in Europe, content on basic TV is aired mostly unedited and uncensored.

Comments

[gore-whore-5.livejournal.com]

I heard a radio ad where some guy said "Frankly my dear, I don't give a darn." wtf. My grandparents went on their first date to that movie. And now some schmuck has defiled the most famous Clark Gable line ever.

Hulk smash!

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Exactly! I heard that very ad. Clearly, we are living in the Bizarro World. But not the fun kind, where Abe Lincoln shot Booth and hamburgers eat people.

[gore-whore-5.livejournal.com]

Oh how I long for the other Bizarro World. [sigh]

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

I can't tell you how happy this makes me.

Seriously.

The networks are an incredible waste. They use an immensely valuable resource, spectrum, basically for free, and there's absolutely no way to take it from them and use it more productively. The technology they use is stunningly wasteful, which means that there are so few of them that they can only create lowest-common-denominator crap, and can't take any risks or exhibit much real intelligence. They take this free resource and cram it full of commercials, gradually increasing them as our tolerance increases, until now 1 minute in 4 isn't programming at all, but simply profit for them, free money. And because there's no competition, the fools who produce this crap are in their jobs forever.

Digital TV will fix a few of these problems, but most of them remain. So anything that forces these idiots out of business is OK by me. The more they drive the viewers to Internet-based TV or god forbid _books_, the happier I am.

[gore-whore-5.livejournal.com]

Good point. I gave up TV about a year ago. Even though I miss my South Park, I wasn't a ritual watcher anyway and I can watch the seasons on DVD. I'm so glad that I'm not subjected to that crap anymore. Looking back, I can't believe the shit I'd let myself watch. [coughAmerica's Next Top Modelcough]

I hope the intelligent creative types will find an outlet for their shows.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Now that's thinking progressively, and I like it. Very, very good points.

Now if we can just somehow get money behind the quality projects being produced elsewhere...

And hey, with the rising lack of movie attendance, maybe people finally are slowly drifting back to books. That's my sincerest hope, but I ain't holdin' my breath.

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

Sadly, there are economies of scale. People keep pushing things like YouTube as alternate means of distribution, but the kinds of shows that you can produce on a trivial budget are pretty limited. You couldn't make Firefly or Lost without having a few million saved up before you cast a single actor. Even a cheap show like South Park costs tens of thousands per episode.

That's where the networks excel: they've got a really wide distribution (they hit every home in America) and tremendous popularity (everybody knows ABC, Fox, NBC, CBS). And they've got a true broadcast, so they really do make them "free". (Well, free plus commercials, which are partly used to advertise their own shows.) That gives them the sort of bully pulpit to spend $10 million on the Lost pilot and say, "I know damn well you're at least going to look at it."

They may lose the bet, but at least they're reasonably sure people will come play. Put it on Google Video and God knows if anybody will find out about it. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. That's fine if you're cranking something out with unpaid actors and a super-8 video cam. It's totally different if you want to build an entire Serenity in one piece on a giant sound stage (in a place near enough to Hollywood that you can actually get talented actors to work on the show when it's done.)

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

The movies, I admit, I totally don't get. Tremendous technology is now readily affordable, but a "cheap" movie these days is $40 million. You'd have thought that with everybody in Hollywood trying to get everybody else to read their goddamn script, the good ones would bubble up. But they don't.

Actually, I've never been quite sure: when they say a movie "cost" $100 million, does that include the marketing campaign? Making Clerks is cheap; actually trying to get somebody to watch it is expensive. Look at the Rude Mechanicals for an example; we've depended on word-of-mouth and that barely covers $2,000 in expenses. If it were the movie Clerks we'd be taking a bath.

Supposedly the indie movies were supposed to save us, but instead most theaters seem to stock 8 screens of the random summer crud, and they're complaining that they can't get anything better. Presumably it's because nobody wants to spend $10 million on a marketing campaign for a Sundance film that cost $60,000 to make unless they know damn well they've got something special.

It's not like indie movies are on average any better than Hollywood pictures; most of them are crap. But you'd think that somebody would be smart enough to say, "Hey, that's a good thing, I'm sure I can make money with that." Do 2 or 3 of those and people will keep coming.

I love movie theaters. I don't really mind paying $9 to see a film in way, way higher resolution even than HDTV. I think that movies are often wasted on DVD. But damn, I want something good.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Something good, yes, and something other than remakes and sequels. Where has creativity gone? Or is it just that the folks in power are willfully ignoring the creative and opting instead for the (I suppose) commercially safer route of remakes and sequels? It's true, 95% (I'm being generous by some standards) of everything is crap, but as you point out, there is quality out there. Last summer was filled with some pretty damn good movies, if I recall correctly. Quality shouldn't be that hard to find, should it?

Ach, but at this point, I'm just rambling over some well-tread ground already. And I agree, I love movie theatres too. If I ever get stinkin' rich, you bet I'm gonna build one onto my house!

[little-dinosaur.livejournal.com]

You know, I heard that in Soviet Russia, children corrupt televisions.

And how come TV, comics and videogames can corrupt the minds of the youth and bring the Senate down on everyone's heads, but not books? I read "Dracula" when I was nine and wow. Nothing I ever saw on TV scared me after that. And I mean, like the average six-year-old doesn't know the word "fuck". My uncle taught me "fuck" when I was three because he thought it was funny, and I turned out okay. Kids need "explicit" television to teach them to swear creatively and grammatically!
It is funny how things have changed. If I'm not mistaken, they say "shit" in the Transformers movie, which presumably was for children, and that was twenty-something years ago.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Yakov Smirnoff jokes will never get old. Never.

Oh, you'll be happy to know that America is all about book bannings, even today! *headdesk some more*

Of course, it occurs to me that the fact that the average six year old knows the word "fuck" is probably just further justification for the conservatives as to exactly what's wrong with the world today.

[frumple.livejournal.com]

Love the icon!

BTW, Heffie please email me at docjeffy (at) mac (dot) com. I need to ask you something.

[kali921.livejournal.com]

To quote Jenny Sparks: "Okay. Okay."

I worked at an independent/college radio station for nine years as a DJ and producer (I started very, very young) at UC Berkeley.

To say I'm very, very familiar with this issue would be a gross understatment, like saying that Galactus occasionally feels a mild pang of hunger and politely asks for the cosmic menu.

Under Reagan the FCC became to be an aggressively political bureaucracy, specifically charged with clamping down on what the right wing considers to be "indecency." This policy creep has been going on for over twenty years, hon.

Just ONE of those FCC fines can totally bankrupt a college or independent station that operates without paid personnel on a shoestring budget. Just one of those fines could shut down KALX, a world-renowned college station, and the one where I worked, for at least a year.

The FCC under conservative administrations greatly exceeds all previous mandates in trying to legislate morality. Period. And it impinges on our freedom of speech. It infringes on what music you hear, the programming content of independent media outlets, and everything else you can possibly think of that is transmitted electronically or through the printing press.

(Let's not forget that Colin Powell's son is in charge of the FCC.)

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know full well this has been going on for twenty years. But it's just that in the past 40 or so of those years we've been seeing remarkable ups and downs over the years between the clamping down and loosening up. And then it seems that with Janet Jackson's fucking boob, BAM! the floodgates opened. Or shut, depending on how you want to take this damn metaphor.

Thank god for the internet, I suppose. Just as long as art can actually still reach the masses... or rather, so long as the masses still know where to look for art.

[kali921.livejournal.com]

THAT ICON.

HAHAHA!

*cue twilight zone theme*

[mirthical.livejournal.com]

you know what? suddenly Bizarro world sounds a whole lot like Soviet Russia.

I bet hamburgers totally eat people in Soviet Russia. We already know that "in Soviet Russia, job blows you!"