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Arnie's movies knocked off TV
14/08/2003 07:17 - (SA)
Los Angeles - It's "hasta la vista" to television screenings of Arnold Schwarzenegger's movies in California while the action hero seeks the state's governorship, industry officials said on Wednesday.
Films such as the Terminator series, Total Recall and True Lies were effectively barred from California's public airwaves from the moment Schwarzenegger was officially certified as a candidate.
However, the Federal Communications Commission's equal-time rule does not apply to cable networks, which can show Schwarzenegger films to their hearts' content.
The National Association of Broadcasters sent a "Terminator Alert", warning California stations that screening any of his movies after he qualified to run would trigger equal-time requirements for all 135 certified candidates.
"We have no plans to show any Schwarzenegger movies until the campaign is over in October," said a source at NBC television in Los Angeles.
"Under FCC rules, if we show two hours of Arnold in Terminator, we would have to give all the other candidates the same on-air time too, which would be very tough."
California authorities said 135 candidates of the 247 who filed papers in the October 7 vote to decide whether to recall Governor Gray Davis had been certified for the ballot.
Celebrities galore
Schwarzenegger is not the only celebrity candidate.
There's a former TV child star, Gary Coleman, who shot to fame in the 1970s' sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, a watermelon-smashing comedian called Leo Gallagher, porn actress Mary Carey and a billboard queen and would-be actress called Angelyne.
"Just imagine the chaos - an airing of Total Recall followed by a two-hour Gallagher special, followed by the best of Diff'rent Strokes - it doesn't bear thinking about," quipped a network source.
Officials for the other major US television networks - ABC, CBS and Fox - also confirmed that that had no plans to show any of Schwarzenegger's films during the campaign period.
Star Trek actor George Takei, who played Mr Sulu in the first series of the sci-fi saga, ran into trouble in 1973 when he campaigned for a seat on Los Angeles City Council.
After he appeared in 17 minutes of an episode of the show, other candidates successfully demanded equal air time to match Takei's.
But media experts said the ban sparked by the equal-coverage rule - which no longer applies to news programming but appears to apply to entertainment - would have little effect on Schwarzenegger's campaign.
"People will go on seeing his movie on cable channels anyway," said Martin Kaplan, professor of communications at the University of Southern California.
"In any case he gets so much attention from the media that he is still the person most in voters' faces.
"It might be a good thing (that his films have been pulled from the major network airwaves)," he said. "They might remind people how violent his films actually are."
The 56-year-old Austrian-born former Mr Universe announced a week ago he would run and formalised his pledge when he handed in his paperwork on Saturday.
- AFP
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South Africa
