Bad Imitation.

An Oliver Stone movie finds murderous admirers.

Mr. Schweizer is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-author of Disney: The Mouse Betrayed (Regnery).

ON the night of March 5, 1995, two teenagers, Sarah Edmondson and Ben Darrus, spent the night together in a Tahlequah, Oklahoma, cabin watching movies and consuming LSD tabs. Actually, they watched only one movie that night, over and over again: Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone's 1994 film about two serial murderers, Mickey and Mallory, who become celebrities. Ben loved the film and had already seen it several times.

Early the next morning, they hit the road in Sarah's Nissan Maxima with a loaded .38 revolver. As they cruised the highway, according to Sarah, Ben began to talk about recreating scenes from the film by randomly killing people, just like the characters Mickey and Mallory. A few days later, on the afternoon of March 7, near Hernando, Mississippi, the two pulled up to a cotton mill. Ben entered the office and shot Bill Savage twice in the head at point-blank range. He took some money, jumped in the car, and they headed back down the highway. As Sarah tells it, the killing animated Ben: "It was as if he was fantasizing from the movie," she later told police.

The next day, around midnight, the two pulled off Interstate 55 and into the parking lot of a Time Saver store in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. This time it was Sarah who got out, entered the store with gun in hand, and shot store cashier Patsy Byers. At first Sarah ran from the store frightened, but then returned to extract money from the till. As Patsy lay on the floor bleeding, Sarah said, "Poor ol' thing. You're not dead yet." (Byers survived the shooting.)

Though other movies have prompted copy-cat crimes, Natural Born Killers is in a class by itself. The film has apparently played a role in more than a dozen murders. In a suburb of Paris, two shotgun-toting French students-a 19-year-old girl and her 22-year-old boyfriend-led police on a car chase that ended in the deaths of five, including the boyfriend. The two reportedly loved the movie, and the girl's one comment to police mimicked exactly Mickey's declaration about his own actions in the movie: "It's fate."

In 1994, a 14-year-old boy accused of decapitating a 13-year-old girl in Texas reportedly told police he wanted to be "famous like the natural-born killers." In Utah, a teenager became so obsessed with the movie he shaved his head and wore tinted granny glasses like Mickey, the main character, and allegedly murdered his stepmother and half-sister. A Georgia teenager accused of shooting to death an 82-year-old Florida man shouted at television cameras, "I'm a natural-born killer!" Four other Georgians in their twenties were charged with killing a truck driver and fleeing in his vehicle after watching the movie 19 times. And in Massachusetts, in 1995, three youths ages 18 to 20 were accused of killing an old man, stabbing him 27 times: "Haven't you ever seen Natural Born Killers before?" one bragged to his girlfriend.

For their part, Ben Darrus and Sarah Edmondson are expected to spend a long time behind bars. But the family of Patsy Byers believes Oliver Stone and Warner Brothers (which distributed Natural Born Killers) also have something to answer for. The family has filed a civil lawsuit against Edmondson (Darrus has no money) and everyone associated with the making and distribution of the film. The suit accuses Stone and Warner Brothers of "distributing a film which they knew or should have known would cause and inspire people to commit crimes."

Similar lawsuits have been filed in the past and gone nowhere, with courts always finding for the defendant, citing First Amendment protections. In January 1997, when district judge Robert Morrison heard the Byers case, he came to the same conclusion. But the Louisiana Court of Appeals reversed Morrison, ruling that the Byers case has merit. Judge Brady Fitzsimmons of Louisiana's First Circuit took Hollywood to task in his opinion, chastising "those who would, for profit or other motive, intentionally assist and encourage crime and then shamelessly seek refuge in the sanctuary of the First Amendment." The Louisiana Supreme Court is expected to decide soon whether it will hear the case.

To win the case, the Byers family must demonstrate that Natural Born Killers was a "contributing factor" in the shooting. According to Louisiana law, if several parties are found liable but have unequal assets, the richer parties can be made to pay a disproportionate share of the damages. But they will also need to prove that Stone and Warner Brothers knew that the film was likely to lead to violence.

The brief submitted by attorneys to Judge Fitzsimmons, leading to the reversal, is a mix of legal precedent and social commentary. Six times they quote from Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gommorah to make their case. They quote Bork as saying, for example, "The pleasures the viewers of such material get from watching a thousand rape scenes or child kidnappings is not worth one actual rape or kidnapping." Yet Bork himself is not buying the legal reasoning behind the case. "I don't think litigation is the way to solve this problem," he says. "It creates a dangerous precedent. If we want to clean up Hollywood, we should push for industry standards like the old Hayes Commission."

Still, the Byers case has Hollywood good and scared. Los Angeles attorney Robert Vanderet has filed an amicus brief in Louisiana on behalf of a variety of Hollywood titans asking the State Supreme Court to turn down the case. The amicus was signed by the Motion Picture Association of America, the National Cable Television Association, the National Association of Broadcasters, the Recording Industry Association of America, NBC, CBS, and Fox.

"I have never seen the widespread concern in Hollywood that I'm seeing now with the Byers case," says Vanderet, who has represented numerous performers, such as Ozzie Osbourne, in similar suits. "If the plaintiffs win, our libraries will become legal minefields. You could sue the library if your child read Shakespeare's Hamlet and later on committed suicide. The implications are enormous."

The plaintiffs contend that Natural Born Killers-Mickey and Mallory kill 52 people in the course of a three-week road trip-is anything but Shakespeare. They argue that Ben and Sarah did not have a violent past and that strong parallels exist between the film and the Byers shooting. In Natural Born Killers, Mickey and Mallory are tormented by demons and are forced to commit many of their heinous murders because evil forces propel them. According to Edmondson, she saw a "demon" when she saw Patsy Byers that night. And there is also evidence that Stone knew the power of the film's message. On April 14, 1996, he described audience reaction to the New York Times in words he probably now regrets: "The most pacifistic people in the world said they came out of this movie and wanted to kill somebody."

But none of this should be enough to convict Oliver Stone. He made a gruesome and immoral film, for which he deserves public obloquy, but not legal liability. And even if all the Natural Born Killers-connected slayings would have occurred anyway, Stone should at least feel a twinge of conscience that his work found such a ready home in the fervid imaginations of murderers-in-waiting. If not, it is some consolation that the same legal system that makes cigarette and gun manufacturers tremble has temporarily struck a little fear in the heart of Oliver Stone.