FILM CRITIC LAMBASTS HOLLYWOOD'S PERCEPTIONS

Hollywood has created a dark, despairing world perceived to be real but it's a world unlike anything you can find in America, said film critic and author Michael Medved.

Medved spoke Wednesday at Academic Auditorium on the Southeast Missouri State University campus. His visit was sponsored by the university's student government, the Young America's Foundation and KZIM. About 200 people attended the lecture.

"The most violent ghetto in America is not in South Los Angeles," Medved said. "It's on prime time."

The two biggest lies in Hollywood are that movies reflect reality and that moviemakers create films that people want to see, he added. "I'll show you why both lines are lies, irresponsible lies."

If Hollywood movies and prime time television programs reflected real life then the entire village where Jessica Fletcher of "Murder She Wrote" lives would have been wiped out in just a few episodes, he said.

Medved asked if anyone in the audience had ever witnessed a murder. No one had.

But at least seven of the 300 television characters on prime time shows are murdered each night,

"At this rate, you wouldn't need zero population growth because you'd have zero growth," he said. "In 50 days time, the whole country would be dead and the last one alive could turn off the TV."

Another issue exaggerated through television is sexuality.

Television depicts teenagers as collections of raging hormones. It doesn't reflect the 700,000 teenagers who pledged to refrain from sexual activity until marriage, Medved said.

Movies like "Seven," "Just Cause," and "Copycat" also depicted crazed, Christian serial killers but Medved doesn't know any crazed, Christian serial killers, he said.

"Hollywood shows a world more depressing, more dysfunctional and more despairing than the real world of America," Medved said.

The real world will only be seen on the big screen when Americans take control of what they watch, he said. People should watch less television and control their spending at the box office, he added.

"Boycotts won't work, letter writing won't work," Medved said, adding that the answer is less confrontation and more communication with the Hollywood movie moguls.

Many of the biggest money-making movies of the last two years weren't recognized at the Oscars, but they were hits with the public, he said.

Medved lives in southern California and co-hosts "Sneak Previews," a movie review program on PBS and is the best-selling author of "Hollywood vs. America."