A Major Academic Look at How Show Business Affects Real Life

An important university effort to study the impact of entertainment--on law, politics, the economy and the morality and ethics of society today--is starting up at the University of Southern California.

The Norman Lear Center, launched with initial funding of more than $5 million from the television producer who is its namesake, will broadly examine entertainment as its many forms converge, from movies to the Internet, and its ownership and values span the globe.

The center will call on USC’s schools of law, politics, business, literature, international relations and others to study questions of intellectual property and legal rights in the Internet Age; globalization and copyright ownership; and the evolution of popular entertainment and its impact on culture and politics.

“How is copyright affected in the age of MP3? How are values affected in an age of pervasive entertainment?” asks Martin Kaplan, director of the Lear Center.

The center is being launched amid concern over extremes of show business content, from a televised broadcast of an assisted suicide to “snuff” films to child pornography on the Internet.

Also there is concern for changing values, as reflected in the recent program where women vied to marry a reputed multimillionaire on camera. That show will not be repeated but other reality shows are in the works. “Next season there is a Dutch show coming called ‘Survivor,’ in which people are stranded on a desert island and the audience votes on who gets to be rescued and who stays behind,” Kaplan says.

Entertainment, of course, is not an academic interest for this region. It is the industry that employs, directly and indirectly, close to 1 million in Southern California and generates at least $30 billion in annual revenue for the region’s economy.

Changing technology only adds to the numbers. The convergence of movies, television and music with digital computing and the Internet is responsible for bringing more than $7 billion a year in venture capital to Southern California.

So the opening of the Lear Center is timely. And it can play a historic role, elevating the intellectual status of Los Angeles and the surrounding region. As academic centers of the East, from Boston to Washington, have framed issues of culture as expressed in print media and book publishing, so Los Angeles can take its place as the intellectual capital of global entertainment--a colossus feared as often as loved these days.

“The founding fathers said an informed electorate is necessary for the functioning of democracy,” says Norman Lear, award-winning producer, writer, director and founder of People for the American Way and other efforts to promote the civic good. Lear is explaining why he donated $5.07 million--matched by $175,000 in seed money from USC--to fund the entertainment center.

He is worried that entertainment values have trivialized news and information on television. “Endless programs on this Cuban boy [Elian Gonzalez] that explain nothing of larger issues,” Lear laments.

So the Lear Center has called on USC professors of literature and history to lead a two-year study of “Celebrity, Politics and the Public Sphere” as one of four initial research areas.

Concerns about trivialization--sound bites and commercials instead of political discussion and serious debate--are not new. They formed the basis of the 1984 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” by Neil Postman, who delivered two chapters of his book originally as lectures at the Annenberg School for Communication.

But with new technologies, entertainment has become pervasive. “Some 4,000 messages come across your radar screen every day, trying to grab and hold attention,” says Kaplan, a former production executive and film writer for Walt Disney Co. and speech writer for Walter Mondale as vice president and 1984 presidential candidate.

Yet the very number of ads indicates that the advertising industry itself is bewildered. Audiences that once were reachable through network television long ago divided into smaller units with cable TV. Now, possibly, audiences and readerships are being splintered by the Internet into markets of separate individuals. How do advertisers reach a crowd of one?

“Ownership of Creative Property in a Digital Age” is another Lear research area. USC’s schools of law and fine arts and the Artists Rights Foundation will lead the research into a major issue for lawyers, businesses and producers of creative content.

The problem simply stated is how copyrights and revenues can be protected when all creative work can be digitized, transmitted electronically and copied instantly around the world, writes Christopher Murray, a partner of Los Angeles law firm O’Melveny & Myers and coauthor of “Digital Dilemma,” a book just published by the National Academy of Sciences.

“Entertainment Goes Global” will be the subject of a three-year research project in which the Lear Center will delve into issues of international trade, copyrights and cultural impacts of foreign entertainment.

And “Understanding Edutainment” will be the fourth area of initial inquiry, with USC’s schools of engineering and education examining the potential and the risks of using entertainment methods in teaching. An example of a problem, says Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the Annenberg School, is that “Sesame Street” years ago spurred kids to read by using techniques of advertising but “did it also shorten attention spans for other sustained work?” The Lear Center will study that and other issues such as distance learning.

Such broad research will make the center unique among U.S. universities, says Kevin Starr, California state librarian, author of five volumes of history of the state and a USC professor of policy.

“There are hundreds of courses on film technique and history” at UCLA and schools all over the country, Starr notes. “But this center brings another level of scholarship to entertainment,” and to Southern California, its world center. It’s the right place and the right time.