Writer's Responsibility

Over on Steve Barnes's blog, the question of an artist's responsibilities came up. I posted a note, and decided that it was worth repeating here.

One I've wrestled with:

Broadcast Standards and Practices -- BS&P -- at the TV networks, keeps an eye on what you can or cannot say in a script. Goes back to the old Hayes Code days, and mostly comes down to sexual references, for live action.

Clever writers get around this -- Barnes has a funny story about Baywatch when he was writing for them ...

BS&P keeps a closer watch on kidvid, on the notion that what is called imitable behavior needs to be monitored. If you have a character wrapping a rope around his neck and jumping off the couch in your Saturday morning toon, it will be cut from your script. Nobody wants to see children trying that at home. Guns, knives, broken glass, mixing household chemicals, swiping Dad's scotch, babies in peril, stuff like this tends to be a big no-no. (The cartoon embedded in the movie Who Killed Roger Rabbit? was done to break all those taboos, a kind of in-joke by the writers. I recall seeing a drawing posted on the wall at the animation studio that did Batman of The Joker falling through a shattered window with a naked Harley Quinn, holding a knife and a bottle of booze, and I think there was a gun in there, too. By Bruce Timm, I think, though I might be wrong.)

Cartoon Conan can have a sword and he can smack people with the flat of it on the arse, but he isn't going to cut anybody. Most of the martial arts look like aikido, and involve throwing people, who almost always land on a mattress, pile of cardboard boxes, or a haystack without needles, so nobody gets hurt.

Blowing up robots is okay, because most kids don't have sentient bots, nor rayguns with which to shoot them.

In one episode of Batman: The Animated Show, I had Bats go up against a ninja, who used a shuriken (that little star-shaped throwing knife, if you don't know the term). They wouldn't run the episode in the U.K. because of that.

You have to take note of such things when you write for some media.

If you know how to smuggle a gun onto a plane through the metal detectors, you can write that into your novel. If you know how to easily defeat most police body armor, you can do that, too, but you have to consider how you'll feel if somebody uses your method because they read it in your book, and hijacks the jets, or mows down half the Mayberry Sheriff's Department .

I recall a sniper incident some years ago. Guy shot and killed several people from an office building rooftop. Cops rushed him, he offed himself, and in his backpack, along with a lot of ammo, they found a book about a guy who had been a sniper some years before in New Orleans, with the how-to passages underlined.

How would you like to have written that one?

I once read a pretty good book that offered, in some detail, how to shut down the L.A. freeway system. Same writer did another one showing how you could make an atomic bomb. I wouldn't have done either of those. People sometimes think I did -- the writer has a similar name.

This gets tricky, where you draw that line.

It's not your responsibility if you sell somebody a bread knife and they use it to murder half a daycare -- unless you had some idea they were planning on using the knife for something other than bread.

But as a writer, you don't know your audience, and there are a lot of loons out there ...

Food for thought.