AND HERE I thought nothing could out-gross the billboards.
They weren't up for long -- studio reps said they were a "mistake" -- but one look made a lot of folks queasy: four graphic images of a terrified and abused blond for the gore-porn movie "Captivity," headlined, "Abduction," "Confinement," "Torture" and "Termination."
"Captivity" opens Friday, nearly two months late, in part because the MPAA -- which takes maidenly offense at a cinematic bare nipple but wouldn't flinch at a severed one -- responded to the hideous billboards by holding off on issuing a rating.
I wonder whether the MPAA approved the "Captivity" promotions I heard this week and looked up on the movie website -- promos as repellent in their own way as the billboards, for a different reason:
"\o7I\f7\o7nspired by the fact that over 850,000\f7 \o7are reported missing every year in the United States, many of whom are never seen again\f7.... "
Whoa, whoa, whoa -- 850,000 Americans are reported missing every year? The combined population of San Francisco and Costa Mesa, every 12 months? How have I missed bodies piling up behind Starbucks? The abandoned subdivisions? How have I overlooked hundreds of thousands of "have you seen me?" signs fluttering from every telephone pole?
And "\o7many ... \f7 \o7never seen again\f7"? Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Alien abductions!
As it turns out, the 850,000 number is accurate as far as it goes. Last year, in these United States, the feds' National Crime and Information Center's missing-persons operation entered records for 836,131 people. But the number alone is too irresistible for generating fear and profit for "Captivity's" marketers to tell you the whole story. So I will.
\o7"Many of whom are never seen again.\f7" Whoppers don't get much bigger than this one. The reason you haven't noticed San Francisco and Costa Mesa's populations disappearing every year is \o7because they haven't\f7.
In 2006, the same year the center logged 836,131 missing-persons records, it also cleared its books of 851,940 such records -- meaning that most of the 836,131 people turned up, as did others who went "missing" earlier.
Who gets reported as missing? It doesn't require a ransom note. It's people like a dementia patient who wanders away, or someone who can't be found right after a tornado. Some go absent after romantic squabbles -- they split and stay away until things blow over. Some are children kept too long by non-custodial parents. Some get reported because of simple misunderstandings.
