PublicIt's hardly surprising that I sometimes struggle with questions of film ethics – meaning, in this case,
production ethics rather than simply what appears on screen in the end product. Professional specialists in it write academic papers, even entire books in which they struggle with them. But it's a subject I find fascinating and difficult at the same time. For a start, what we
now think is excellent ethics may well not be seen that way in 50 years' time. But even allowing for that, consider:
1. I regret to say I am convinced that actual, straight-up-and-down abuses are more numerous than we'd like to think – look how many cases the Weinstein affair revealed – and, as I know from my own research about Sandra Peabody's mistreatment making
The Last House on the Left, sometimes even severe abuse can be hidden in plain sight for many years and still not widely taken seriously. But look how long it took for the abuses on (to name but three)
Last Tango in Paris,
The Birds, and even
The Wizard of Oz to move from industry whispers to established fact. Decades in every case.
2. Even once we remove malice from the equation, there's the sliding scale that runs from encouragement to pressure to soft coercion to hard coercion. To take a film I've covered recently, I've never seen
The Evil Dead's Betsy Baker say or even imply she was coerced into agreeing to
the chainsaw scene, the scene that I find impossible to accept as reasonable risk even for 20-year-olds in the woods almost 50 years ago. Baker has said she agreed to do it "for the scene", which can be a red-flag phrase, but in this case the agreement seems real. But should she have been
allowed to say yes to something as dangerous as that?
3. Then there's
Stagecoach. It's a Western made in 1939 about 1880, which is like making a film today about 1967 in that plenty of people were still alive who remembered the year when it was set. It contains two almost universal problems with old Westerns: poor representation of Native Americans and poor treatment of performing horses. In a film made the same year,
Jesse James, a horse may (sources differ) have been made to leap over a steep drop to its death. To what extent should that complicate our relationship with such films today?
4. A director can have a deservedly good reputation for professionalism and their films can still prompt concern for cast and crew's safety. John Carpenter rejected the abusiveness of some other low-budget 1970s horror directors when he and Debra Hill made
Halloween. That's worth a great deal. But a few years later he started his studio career with
The Thing. Today that film is widely admired for its practical effects – but some of those would be vetoed on sight by a safety co-ordinator today, while
Rob Bottin literally worked himself into hospital.
5. In the 1969 British film
Kes, there is a scene where schoolboys are caned on the hand. There is good evidence that the production had told the boys that director Ken Loach would call cut just before the cane actually hit them. He didn't. Loach
seemed less than sympathetic when interviewed about this years later, as well as falsely telling the young lead his screen kestrel would be killed for real. This is child cruelty. Of course there are far more serious examples out there, but "it's Ken Loach" should not be a magic shield. We had enough of that with Hitchcock.
Of course, being the human I am, I am not always perfectly aligned in my personal behaviour over these films with where I "should" be if I were fully playing by the rules of ethics. I refuse to watch
Last Tango in Paris, but I own a copy of
The Wizard of Oz. I know in my head that "non-physical cruelty" on set is so easy that in the power-imbalance-heavy world of cinema it must happen much more often than we'd like – but suspension of disbelief is of course a key part of acting. And on and on and on. Here endeth the rambling, at least for now!
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loganberrybunny
