AWOL audience
“With all the gratitude and acclaim surrounding Jack Valenti’s recently announced retirement, no one dares confront the longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America over the chief mystery of his 38-year reign: What happened, Jack, to all those missing moviegoers? …
“Mr. Valenti presided over history’s most disastrous decline in the audience for feature films. In 1965 … 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million. …
“In 1966, Mr. Valenti’s Motion Picture Association of America quietly dropped its enforcement of the restrictive old Production Code that Hollywood studios had imposed on themselves since 1930. … That new freedom allowed the profligate use of obscene language strictly banned under the Production Code, the inclusion of graphic sex scenes along with near total nudity and, more vivid, sadistic violence than previously permitted in Hollywood movies. …
“In 1965, with the Production Code still in force, ’The Sound of Music’ won Best Picture of the Year; in 1969, under the new rating system, an X-rated offering about a homeless male hustler, ’Midnight Cowboy,’ earned the Oscar as the year’s finest film. Most critics, then as now, welcomed the aesthetic shift and hailed the fresh latitude in cinematic expression, but the audience voted with its feet.”
—Michael Medved, writing on “The Mystery of the Missing Moviegoers,” April 6 in the Wall Street Journal
Spring fever
“While many colleges have introduced ’gay pride week,’ Harvard University has devoted an entire month to the subject, with pride celebrations, ’a day of silence to raise awareness about the prevalence of homophobia, and a panel of sadomasochism experts.’
“’Gaypril,’ hosted by the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance on campus, began [April 5] with open-mic performances that included a ’story entitled “My First Time” about scandalous escapades with a bisexual male model in Lebanon,’ the Harvard Crimson campus newspaper reported.”
—From “Harvard celebrates ’Gaypril,’” April 7 in WorldNetDaily at www.worldnetdaily.com
American difference
“Record-breaking multitudes … have now viewed Mel Gibson’s ’The Passion of the Christ’ in every major and far-flung U.S. locale, and not one American synagogue has been torched or Jewish cemetery vandalized by the Christian faithful who have seen the movie. … Americans should be proud that the warnings by Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League of anti-Semitic outbreaks did not materialize here.
“I never had any doubts, since it has been obvious for decades that American Christianity embodies a warm and symbiotic attachment to the Jewish religion … with strong, literal emphasis on the Old Testament. …
“[H]erein lies one of the most disheartening but salient observations one is forced to make, post-’Passion,’ about many in the Jewish community: They still don’t get it. Even after more than two charmed centuries in America, they confuse contemporary America with medieval and postmedieval Europe, still not realizing how America and American Christians are a category wholly different from those of other nations, other religions and other strains of Christianity.”
—Rabbi Aryeh Spero, writing on “American Christians Don’t Threaten Jews,” April 5 in Opinion Journal at www.opinionjournal.com
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