New University Program Takes Serious Look at Entertainment (original) (raw)

January 24, 2000

By TODD S. PURDUM

OS ANGELES, Jan. 23 -- Here in the city where "entertainment" means everything from a televised freeway chase to a multimillion-dollar movie, the University of Southern California is embarking on an ambitious interdisciplinary effort to study entertainment as a defining concept of 21st-century life, in fields from law to architecture, from business to journalism, with the dual goal of prompting intellectual debate and training the next generation of media moguls.

The initiative, believed to be the first of its kind, takes a page from earlier multidepartmental programs in academia, like environmental studies, American studies and the program in history and literature at Harvard. It offers as its organizing thesis nothing less than the assertion that today, in every advanced industrial economy on earth, the largest and most important component of cultural content is entertainment.

University officials say their ultimate goal is to coordinate some 100 existing courses and add a range of new ones to examine the impact on the culture of everything from theme parks and casinos to music videos and attention-grabbing graphics in television news.

The program is the brainchild of Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at U.S.C., which houses the university's courses in journalism and communication. Dr. Kaplan, a former chief speechwriter for Vice President Walter F. Mondale and a former studio executive and screenwriter at Disney, describes the program as an effort to bring the intellectual rigor long applied to topics like politics, education and high culture to a study of the driving engine of mass culture.

"Each of those areas is supposed to have standards and hierarchies and epistemologies that stand up to the world, so journalism, for example, depends in part on understanding what it is not," said Dr. Kaplan, whose varied background includes the presidency of The Harvard Lampoon as an undergraduate, a Ph.D. from Stanford in modern thought and literature, and a screenwriting credit for the Eddie Murphy comedy "The Distinguished Gentleman."

"Entertainment's only value is do I like it, am I bored, does it keep my attention?" Dr. Kaplan said. "When you apply that to these other realms, very interesting distortions begin to happen."

The effort got under way quietly with an undergraduate survey course last fall that used texts like Neal Gabler's "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality." It is now being greatly expanded with a $5 million gift from the television producer Norman Lear, creator of cultural touchstones like "All in the Family," to start the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School. The center will sponsor seminars, conferences and scholarly writing on topics from children and media to the effects of celebrity on politics to the ownership of intellectual property and imagery in a digital age, when presidents can be inserted into fictional films and dead actors can be revived for cameos.

"I think it's an idea whose time has come," said Kevin Starr, a university professor at U.S.C. and the author of an acclaimed series of social histories of California, who is on the advisory panel for the new program. "This is an international business that profoundly affects politics, family life, intellectual life and every area of American life. The university has got to be looking at it the way the university looks at other phenomena. There's no one discipline that can contain it, and Los Angeles is ground zero for this business."

To Mr. Lear, who has used his fortune to support scores of philanthropic causes from environmental protection to civil liberties, the effort "couldn't be more timely." The power of the media broadly defined is now such, he said in an interview, "that the heads of major corporations will have more impact on the values of people worldwide than the heads of governments."

"What a time to be thinking about how we make some intelligent diagnosis," Mr. Lear added.

Neil Postman, chairman of the department of culture and communication at New York University and the author of such critical studies of the media as "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," said the efforts of the Lear Center struck him as timely and potentially valuable.

"The idea of taking what people call the entertainment culture as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea," Professor Postman said. "It's always dangerous because of the temptation -- especially in California, I imagine -- to just get a lot of movie stars and directors and producers to come and tell you how wonderful it all is. But if it's done from a critical point of view, to examine what is wrong and right with the entertainment culture and what problems it creates, then I think it's a good idea."

Geoffrey Cowan, the dean of the Annenberg School, said the goal was to bring both dispassionate criticism and firsthand knowledge to the subject. Like Dr. Kaplan, Mr. Cowan is something of a polymath. A Yale-trained lawyer who spent more than 20 years teaching communications at the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Cowan is the son of Louis G. Cowan, who created the game show "The $64,000 Question" and also served as president of the CBS television network and director of the Voice of America, a job that Mr. Cowan himself held decades later under President Clinton before coming to Annenberg three years ago.

"What Marty and I may bring to this, hopefully, is an understanding of the industry which makes us not just critics," Mr. Cowan said.

And since the new program aims in part to make the next generation of agents, entertainment lawyers and moguls think critically about their own business, he added, "The vocational and intellectual fit together very closely."

So, for example, Mr. Cowan will teach one of the eight new undergraduate courses planned for the program, "Fact and Fiction: From Journalism to the Docudrama," a study of the "historical, legal and ethical limits to the misrepresentations of fact."

Among the other elements of the program is a planned two-year faculty seminar, "Celebrity, Politics and the Public Sphere." The seminar will be led by Leo Braudy, an English professor and author of "The Frenzy of Renown," an acclaimed study of fame through the ages, and Steven J. Ross, a historian and author of "Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America."

"What I tried to do in the fame book is to avoid the horrible alternatives of throwing up your hands and saying the culture's going down the tubes, or indulging in the superficiality of it all, but instead being able to stand back and see what serious issues are intertwined with what seem to be superficial issues," Professor Braudy said. He added that he hoped the faculty seminar could help break down an academic culture that tends by its nature to be "discipline-bound and isolating."

"There's a way in which the country itself appeared on the stage of world history as this kind of ingenue country, this Cinderella nation, and immediately tried to make a name for itself," he added. "That's very interwoven in American history, and knowing that history lets you see what's going on in the present."

Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional expert at the U.S.C. law school, will lead a conference next year on how technology has affected intellectual property rights, using case studies of real situations to examine the issue with experts including producers, writers and academics.

"What makes this so exciting is that it is interdisciplinary," Professor Chemerinsky said. "It's a chance to deal with a cutting-edge legal issue, and bring to bear all the different perspectives on it, within the university community and beyond."

Dr. Kaplan said his goal was to examine such topics from every angle, eventually producing everything from Congressional testimony to discussions on the Lear Center's new Web site, entertainment.usc.edu.

"The entertainment industry could profit from more leaders who grasp its impact on society," a glossy brochure for the program says, adding, "The society could benefit from more conscience, and more critical self-consciousness, in the creative process."