Natural Born Copycats?

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/06/1041566356510.html

"No filmmaker, if his critics are to be believed, has quite so much blood on his hands as its director, Oliver Stone"

Oliver Stone compares the lawsuit against him to the infamous case of Dan White, the ex-cop who shot San Francisco politician Harvey Milk in 1978. "White used what was known as the Twinkie defence. He said that he had been eating too many Twinkies and that the high sugar content had prompted him to kill. And it worked! He got away with a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and served five years. But you can't blame the Twinkies in the same way that you can't scapegoat the movies. You can't blame the igniter. People can be ignited by anything. And yet, this is something we're seeing more and more of in America today. It's a culture of liability lawsuits. The whole concept of individual responsibility has been broken up and passed around."

Surely, though, he wouldn't dispute the idea that a film can influence its viewer. "Of course it can. Maybe it inspires you to change your love life, or to alter your wardrobe. But it's not a film's responsibility to tell you what the law is. And if you kill somebody, you've broken the law." - Stone

When Stanley Kubrick's movie was linked to various copycat crimes in the early 1970s, the director personally had it whipped out of circulation. "Yeah, but I think Kubrick was wrong to do that," Stone says. "If it wasn't an admission of guilt, it was at least an admission of embarrassment. I'm a big fan of Kubrick, but he was a paranoid man. He reacted to the hysteria of the mob. He crumbled when he should have stood up and defended his work."

- THE GUARDIAN