Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
A Way to Kill Kill Bill?
By Tom Smith


The Easterbrook Donnybrook, as Mickey Kaus calls it, will probably wind down soon. It may be worth recalling what got it started--Greg Easterbrook's outrage at the level of violence in the new Quentin Tarantino movie Kill Bill.

Easterbrook was presumably trying to put pressure on Michael Eisner and the other folks at Disney to reconsider the distribution of such ultra-violent fare. I haven't seen the movie myself. I'm not sure whether I will or not. I generally don't mind violence in movies, if it's appropriate, as in Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List. Making violence seem fun, though, contributes to the cultural degradation that Hollywood seems, for reasons I don't fully understand, to want to actively promote, at least if it is profitable to do so, and sometimes even if it isn't.

What is to be done? One technique that I am not aware being used before, or at least not much, against violence in movies is the filing of shareholder proxy resolutions that would be put before the shareholders of Disney and other studios. If may have been done before, I'm not sure, but it certainly could work as a way to get the attention of top management in the entertainment industry. All it takes is a shareholder who holds a fairly minimal dollar value of shares in the target company, and a resolution crafted to avoid various objections the directors can put up to stop it. Typically, a resolution is drafted requesting the Board of Directors appoint a special committee to study some topic of concern. In this case, a resolution requesting study of the potential impact of a movie with the level of violence in Kill Bill might be appropriate.

These resolutions never pass, but that does not mean management does not really hate them. If the resolution qualifies for inclusion in the corporation's proxy statement, it means the target company, Disney in this case, has to send out, at corporate expense, the resolution plus a brief supporting statement, to every shareholder of the company, all over the world. For a company that spends millions nourishing its corporate image, this is most unwelcome to say the least. Moreover, it means every institutional shareholder, which maps pretty well on to the power structure of the US, has to consider how to vote its shares on this resolution. So the trustees of CalPers, Harvard, the Ford Foundation, etc, etc. etc. down to the American Kennel Association, will have to consider, how do they want to vote on the Kill Bill resolution? That means they have to think, for at least a moment, Just how bad is this movie? You can start to appreciate why companies hate these things so much.

Filing these resolutions is pretty easy. A group I belonged to as an undergraduate filed some resolutions against various big corporations regarding investment in South Africa (yes, I was an undergraduate leftist. You grow.) and we did all the work ourselves. For some reason, social conservatives and others on the right have rarely used this technique. It has long been a favorite of left-wing activists. Unlike perhaps some in the corporate law area, I see nothing wrong with shareholders getting the board of a company to ask themselves whether they really want to be, for example, selling particularly harmful violence (if that's what it is). The technique is susceptible to abuse, but I don't think complaining about a super-violent movie would be an abuse. It's better than showing up with swords and chopping their heads off.

posted by thomas at 10/20/2003 02:17:00 PM