Hollywood's Decency Epidemic

The title of Greg Beato piece in Reason...

On May 3, at the Wilshire Theater in Beverly Hills, there won’t be a single shamelessly naked trophy in the house. The 2008 CAMIE Awards will be celebrating “Character And Morality In Entertainment,” and in contrast to the disturbingly androgynous and probably bisexual Oscar, the CAMIE statuette is clad in a wholesome dress that leaves everything to the imagination except a beguiling flash of patinated bronze ankle. But don’t be getting any ideas, fresh guy! According to CAMIE’s creators, she is “a lovely and modest young woman.”

...in 2001 Dr. Glen Griffin, a retired pediatrician and abstinence advocate from Salt Lake City, organized the first CAMIEs. The event was held at lunchtime, in a local park...

In 2005 the CAMIE Awards migrated to Los Angeles, and the production has been growing quickly ever since. Each year, it honors five theatrical and five made-for-TV movies that feature “positive role models who build character, overcome adversity, correct unwise choices, strengthen families, live moral lives and solve life’s problems with integrity and perseverance.” And each year, more and more industry types show up to pay tribute to technicolor virtue and inoffensiveness....

Of the 20 movies that got the widest circulation in 2007, only two were rated R. From 2005 to 2007, during the traditional summer movie season—the first weekend of May through Labor Day—only 40 R-rated movies and zero NC-17 movies opened up in 500 or more theaters....

In a column touting the October 2007 release of the animated movie The Ten Commandments, the conservative pundit Janice Shaw Crouse noted that only two of the top 20 grossing movies of 2005 had an R rating....

While the Internet has shown us that Hollywood will never out-sleaze a Wichita housewife with a members-only website, or out-mayhem the grassroots auteurs behind Ghetto Fights #3, the Industry does its best to keep pace. It regularly convinces dewy ingenues like Natalie Portman and Anne Hathaway that they will not be taken seriously as artists until they prove their nipples can act too. It gives Sylvester Stallone $50 million to see how many decapitations he can simulate in 91 minutes. And that’s exactly why so many of us will always love Hollywood.

But the choice is no longer between frontal nudity and disembodied heads. When the aforementioned Ten Commandments opened on 830 screens yet ended up grossing less than $1 million in its four-week run, it was actually great news for decency advocates. Apparently there is so much wholesome programming out there that the audience for such stuff can afford to be a little choosy....