As I sat in the theater, much of the quiet elation I felt stemmed from the thought that I had foiled Warner Bros.’ earnest effort to protect moviegoers from random violence. Only later did I discover that Warner Bros. had in fact not been engaged in this effort, and that my behavior at the theater that night, far from being a sophisticated act of cultural subversion, had instead been simply boorish.

The reason for my confusion was simple: “187″ opened nationwide on a Wednesday, while the vast majority of movies open on Fridays. In and of itself, that might seem merely odd. But “187″ is a bleaker version of “The Blackboard Jungle” that tells the story of an inner-city high school teacher’s vain attempt to remain sane in the face of classroom violence, an incompetent and uncaring bureaucracy and a criminal justice system that will not protect the good. In other words, it’s what the industry calls an “urban film,” which means that young black and Latino males are expected to make up a sizable percentage of its audience. (This, even though young black and Latino males are the film’s nightmarish villains.) And what’s curious about “urban films” is that a disproportionate number of them open on Wednesdays.

This shift from Fridays to Wednesdays is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back, as far as I can tell, only to 1993 — though it’s only in recent years that the practice has become institutionalized. Studios made the shift after a series of films — including “New Jack City” and “Boyz N the Hood” — had openings marred by shootings and other violence. Most of the shootings took place outside the theaters, but more than once shots were exchanged while the movie was playing. And these were Glocks being fired, not Super-Squirters.

The actual number of incidents seems to have been relatively small — no more than a total of 20 — but exhibitors were concerned enough to demand changes before they would continue to show these films. Since in most cases the violence erupted after people weren’t able to get into sold-out shows, the answer the studios came up with was to diffuse the crowds by opening the movies a couple days earlier. The true Tupac fanatics could go on Wednesday, and by Friday all the tension would have dissipated.

“This all started with ‘New Jack City,’ which is when the first real violence occurred,” says a studio executive who asked to remain anonymous. “The theater owners wanted us to do something to tone down the crowds. This way we essentially spread the opening out over a few days. You get a couple extra days not competing against bigger films, and there’s not as much potential for violence. And it’s worked. Everyone seems happy with the arrangement.”

The arrangement seems to be what you might call an open secret. Everyone knows about it — after all, if the film opens on Wednesday, you can’t exactly hide it — but no one really talks about it. And there has been very little press coverage of the story, either, which is interesting given the fact that what we’re really talking about is an effort to decide when films will open based on what kind of people the studios imagine will be going to see them.

What’s most intriguing about this whole phenomenon, in fact, are the fine distinctions studios evidently draw in deciding what qualifies as an “urban” movie. This year, for instance, the Tupac Shakur-Tim Roth film “Gridlock’d,” Ice Cube’s “Dangerous Ground,” the romantic comedy “Love Jones” and “187″ all opened on Wednesdays. But “Rosewood,” John Singleton’s movie about a black town burned to the ground by racists, opened on a Friday. And “Hoodlum,” which is about a mob war in Harlem in the 1920s, is going to open on a Friday later this month. Period pieces, apparently, do not incite crowds to violence.

One rule that appears rather inflexible is that big stars get the Friday opening, as evidenced by Michelle Pfeiffer’s “Dangerous Minds” and Denzel Washington’s “Devil in a Blue Dress” (although “Devil” was also protected by the period-piece rule). Aside from that, studios are forced to make careful — or arbitrary, depending on your perspective — delineations. Both “Fled” and “Bulletproof,” two black/white buddy films chock-full of violence and drugs, were given Friday slots. So, too, was the satire “Don’t Be a Menace,” though one might have thought that being made fun of generally made people more, not less, likely to resort to violence. But “Set It Off,” which was about a gang of female bank robbers, opened on a Wednesday, as did John Singleton’s campus epic “Higher Learning.”

The two best “urban” films of this decade both opened on Wednesday, since in this as in so much else Hollywood distinguishes movies by genre and not by quality. “Menace II Society” was one of the very first Wednesday films, while Boaz Yakim’s “Fresh,” which hardly anyone saw until it came out on video, was the first Wednesday film by a non-black director.

Needless to say, there’s something viscerally unappealing about the segmentation of movie audiences in this way. In a sense, it’s a very basic expression of the niche marketing and narrowcasting that’s come to play such a crucial role in modern mass media, and although its purpose is to defuse violence, it’s difficult not to imagine a little bit of “if they want to shoot each other, let them do it when fewer people are around” thinking in all this. But it’s hard to argue with the results. Although there were shootings when “Set It Off” opened, in all other cases, peace has reigned. In any case, there’s clearly nothing set in stone about the Friday opening. Movies used to open on Wednesdays. And one could easily imagine a scenario in which art films would open on Monday nights (since art-house lovers generally don’t have full-time jobs), action films on Fridays, romantic comedies on Saturdays, children’s films on Sunday afternoon and so on. None of us would ever have to see anyone who didn’t share our taste. What a wonderful world it would be.

Meanwhile, there’s a strange coda to this story. While “urban” films do open on Wednesdays, that is apparently not why “187″ opened on July 30. “We thought the picture was going to do well critically, so the reason we opened it on a Wednesday was to be able to showcase our positive reviews properly on the two biggest days of the week,” says Don Buckley, senior vice president of theatrical marketing and new media. Buckley said — convincingly — that he had never heard of the urban-Wednesday rule, and insisted that the Wednesday opening was just a way of getting “187″ some extra attention it might not have found in the “extremely cluttered” summer-film environment. He also pointed out that “Wild America,” a movie starring that kid from “Home Improvement,” opened earlier this month on a Wednesday. “Wild America” presumably had a very small number of “urban” viewers. (You can understand the chagrin I felt when contemplating my behavior in the theater that night.)

Of course, the fact that “187,” a film about urban violence, just happened to open on a Wednesday, when all other films about urban violence open, is a coincidence of rather monumental proportions. But isn’t that why we call them coincidences?

About the only thing you won’t be able find, in fact, is a true-crime magazine. No True Detective, no Headquarters Detective, no True Police Cases. Nothing. If you live in New York and want to read about the “Lust of the Goliath Rapist” or the “Oriental Coed Who Was Killed — Twice,” you’re out of luck. And it isn’t just this newsstand, either. As far as I can tell, there’s nowhere in Manhattan where you can buy a copy of what you might call “pulp fact.” Considering that this is a city with a seemingly bottomless appetite for both crime and kitsch, the void is rather eerie.

Fifty years ago, the story would have been very different. In the years immediately after World War II, as many as 250 true-crime magazines were being published. Bearing titles like Police Gazette, Master Detective and Police Story, these magazines offered up tales of murder and mayhem that pitted dogged cops against hard-nosed and brutal killers. While the more polished and stylized narratives of magazines like Black Mask featured private detectives stuck in the noirish world of shadowy motives and ambiguous morality, true-crime narratives avoided interiority, favoring instead violent action and nuts-and-bolts crime-solving narratives. (The same distinction can be made between noir films, like “Out of the Past” and “The Big Sleep,” and crime films like “The Naked City” or “Detective Story.”) True-crime prose was purple, to be sure, but at its best it was also lean and fierce.

The heyday of the true-crime magazine lasted but a short while. By the 1950s, most of these magazines had begun to disappear, pushed aside by the mainstreaming of the glossies, the growth of suburbia and, presumably, by the impact of television. Still, a sizable number of them did survive, and at the beginning of this decade one would have been able to find three or four titles on sale in New York City. Only in the last few years has true-crime disappeared from the urban landscape.

As it happens, though, true-crime magazines haven’t disappeared everywhere. The genre isn’t exactly thriving but Globe Communications still publishes six titles: Detective Files, Detective Dragnet, True Police Cases (“the magazine lawmen read”), Startling Detective, Headquarters Detective and Detective Cases. As I learned from a curious conversation with an assistant in Globe’s distribution department — during which she tried to convince me that any number of different New York towns were on the outskirts of Manhattan — these magazines tend to be sold in small cities and rural suburbs and towns. Many Wal-Marts carry them.

In that respect, today’s audience for true-crime magazines is but an exaggerated version of that of the 1930s and 1940s. While True Detective and the like once had a large urban readership, their core audience was always in the small towns and rural communities, where so many of the stories in these magazines take place. “There was always a real gap between the Black Mask-style magazines and the true-crimes,” says Marc Gerald, who abandoned graduate school in order to edit True Detective during the mid-1980s. “Black Mask had a more sophisticated, urban audience, but the true-crime magazines appealed from the start to rural readers. They were always more countrified.” City readers may want to read about crime — just look at any daily tabloid — but apparently not about true crime.

Still, it’s not just urban readers who have abandoned these magazines. At the time Gerald took over True Detective, there were 11 different true-crime titles in print. Six were published by Globe and five by RJH Publications, which had been a pulp publisher since the 1930s. Even then, the combined circulation of RJH’s magazines was under a half million. And last year Globe bought RJH’s five titles and closed them down, leaving its magazines a captive but shrinking market.

What’s odd about all this is that the public fascination with psychopathic violence — preferably sexualized — seems as powerful as ever. Bookstores have fully stocked true-crime sections. Hollywood continues to produce films about serial killers and mass murderers with startling regularity. And true-crime television shows are not only a genre in their own right, but have effected important changes in the nature of television news, both in terms of the use of “dramatic re-enactments” and in terms of the topics covered. What was the O.J. trial, after all, but a true-crime story brought to life? And why, given a culture enamored of violence — or at least of representations of violence — are true-crime magazines struggling to stay afloat?

In a sense, though, the question provides its own answer. If you can find true-crime everywhere you look, it’s not clear why you would look to these magazines first. The competition offered by television alone would seem to be deadly, since TV specializes in precisely those qualities that distinguished true-crime narratives from their noir cousins: action, titillation and the illusion of reality. (The tag line on a recent issue of Detective Files — “The Naked Truth: No TV Censors” — testifies to the pressure the magazines are feeling.) At the same time, true-crime books are able to offer even more lovingly detailed crime-scene descriptions and more satisfyingly cathartic narratives, while newspapers have — of course — the overwhelming virtue of timeliness. When Andrew Cunanan is on every front page in America for three or four days running, tales of murder from 1993 start to lose some of their pizzazz.

All of that is undoubtedly true. But I’m convinced that true-crime magazines would be flourishing if not for one thing: They’re not interesting to read.

Though my search of Manhattan newsstands turned up empty, a very helpful publicist at Globe Communications sent me copies of each of the six titles Globe currently publishes. I found myself deluged with stories of rape and murder, sex in exchange for murder, murder in the pursuit of sex and so on, almost all of which featured criminals who seemed to do their best to make it easy for the police to find them. The stories have sleepy leads like, “It was just past midnight on Saturday, September 5, 1992 …” Words like “mistress” and “lawmen” and sentences like, “In his experience, no woman leaves her purse without good cause” make the prose feel comfortingly anachronistic, but the occasional intrusion of psychosexual jargon keeps one from sinking fully into the illusion that these magazines are providing a 1930s take on 1990s events. In a sense, it feels as if the magazines don’t know what era they or their readers are in.

There are other, more obvious problems. The insistent focus on sexual violence grates quickly, especially given the often too-loving depictions of the crimes. At the same time, the fact that so many of the murders are sexualized means that the criminals all end up inhabiting a psychological terrain so far outside the mainstream that our fascination with them feels purely voyeuristic. And the fact that the narratives of these pointedly extreme cases invariably end with more general invocations of the need for tough measures against criminals of all sorts is all a bit too reminiscent of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. I don’t expect true-crime magazines to spend more time examining the social roots of violent crime. But their use of the murderer-rapist as a synecdoche for criminals as a whole is both troubling and unconvincing. After a few days with these magazines, I long for tales of Willie Sutton or John Dillinger. I long for “Reservoir Dogs” or “Heat.”

In this sense, of course, the true-crime magazines are part of a broader cultural construction of criminals as fundamentally alien beings, as individuals who are, in their essence, different. The problem is that while this approach may make for an interesting movie, it can do so only because film lends itself to suspense in a way that the true-crime magazine story does not. And since, to judge by the cases in these magazines, most psychotic killers are not particularly good at covering their tracks, the paragraphs detailing the actual detective work end up reading more like descriptions of household chores than anything else. True-crime would be a more vibrant genre if there were more professional criminals and fewer Boston Strangler wannabes in the pages of these magazines.

At the same time, some of the most interesting products of American culture of the last 30 years — “In Cold Blood,” “The Executioner’s Song,” “Badlands” — have been about fundamentally unmotivated murders. What’s interesting about these works, though, is that in them it’s the crimes — not the criminals — that seem alien, the crimes that represent the point at which interpretation breaks down, the point at which you find yourself doing something for no good reason at all. These works suggest not that we’re all killers inside, but that even killers are not killers. Until suddenly they are.

Oddly, then, true-crime magazines end up explaining not enough and yet too much, especially since sexual “perversion” ends up being the cause of most of the violence. They permit us to cordon off the criminals even while we luxuriate in their exploits. And, unfortunately, they do so with narratives that lag and prose that does not bite. And it’s this, I suppose, that’s the most grievous of all their sins. There are no Hitchcocks and there are no Jim Thompsons writing for the true-crime magazines, or if there are I haven’t found them. Perhaps they’re all working for “America’s Most Wanted.”

With his simultaneous acknowledgment of the impossibility of reconciling oneself to an untimely death and his insistence that remembering is a necessary and valuable project, Schama aptly described the mood of the service as a whole. Dorris’ friends adopted a tone that might be termed celebratorily mournful, capturing the full weight of Dorris’ absence by talking about the pleasure they had taken in his presence.

Even as they remembered their friend, the speakers challenged — in some cases subtly and in others more explicitly — the wave of bad press and scandal that followed Dorris’ suicide. It’s almost certainly true that one memorial service is very much like another. Grief may be always original, but the words we use to express it are not. But this service seemed different, as much a reaffirmation of Dorris and of his friends’ faith in him as it was a memorial.

The Michael Dorris who emerged from his friends’ recollections was, unsurprisingly, a complicated figure. A committed activist and a serious novelist whose early work, in particular, was well-received critically, Dorris was also a man obsessed with the business of buying and selling books. Bill Shinker, his publisher at HarperCollins, described Dorris as “a dream author” who could, nevertheless, be “maddening as hell to work with.” For Shinker, Dorris was at once a “real operator,” a man who served as his own agent, publicist and marketing director, and someone who retained “a naive, even childlike quality about him” long after he had become famous.

More tellingly, the speakers at the service stressed Dorris’ thirst for human contact, his appetite for conversation and exchange. They described a man who needed people, perhaps, too much. Kate Wimmer, a producer at ABC’s “20/20″ who met Dorris while producing a segment on fetal alcohol syndrome (the subject of Dorris’ book “The Broken Cord”), said of him, “He needed talk the way others of us need food or need air.” What Wimmer left unspoken was the question, “What happens to someone who needs talk when the person he most wants to talk to leaves him?” Schama answered that question: “I think in the end he could not imagine a life without the woman he loved best of all.” Dorris’ wife, Louise Erdrich, left him almost a year before the suicide and had custody of their children.

Schama, the evening’s most eloquent and moving speaker, spoke most explicitly to the responsibility he felt for Dorris’ decision. “I curse my sluggish obtuseness, my cowardly laziness,” he said. While Schama described Dorris as a man of “incredible douceur,” he did not shy from the torment that must have racked Dorris at the end of his life. In those last months, Schama said simply, Dorris “was certainly in deep water.”

Erdrich did not attend the service, but a letter from her was read. In it she wrote of her attempts to figure out how to speak to “our children” about their father’s death, and suggested that each time the story was told it came out differently. “His death,” she wrote, “leaves us gasping.”

Hovering over the service, of course, was the specter of the barrage of negative stories that filled the pages of the national press in the weeks after Dorris’ suicide, stories that included allegations of child abuse, revelations about Erdrich’s decision to end their marriage and rumors about other scandals in Dorris’ past. ( Salon ran a story about these charges and rumors.) If Dorris’ suicide was, as some have suggested, an attempt to spare his family the ordeal of public examination, it obviously failed. But those who spoke on Tuesday were resolute in their insistence that recent press accounts offered only a reductionist and distorted picture of their friend’s life. Schama was visibly upset at the idea that Dorris, whom he described as “trying to find the good or at least the saving complexity” in things others had long since abandoned, should have “his innocence called into question.” Erdrich, meanwhile, suggested simply that Dorris’ existence added up to “much more than the notoriety and confusion of the last few months.”

The strongest attack on the media came from Bob Edwards, a reporter for National Public Radio who befriended Dorris after meeting him on an early book tour (curiously enough, Edwards and Dorris had also gone to the same high school). “In the last month, there have been more positive words printed about Timothy McVeigh than about Michael Dorris,” Edwards said. He labeled the recent stories “fiction,” while blasting “the media buzzards and the lawyer buzzards” who were circling over Dorris’ grave. As a counter to “the man the revisionists have invented,” he offered a vivid picture of a man invested in the minutiae of the everyday, a man dedicated to his family, a man who “loved everything about being a writer.”

One might say that Dorris’ suicide stands as mute testimony to the fact that the picture was more complicated than that. But one suspects that enough has been written about Dorris’ shadow side. On this day, for his friends, it was a time for remembering something different.

Given Murdoch’s record as a purveyor of tabloid television and of vaguely titillating sexual content, News Corp. and IFE may seem to be a strange match. (Murdoch, after all, is the man who introduced the Page Three girls to Britain and “Studs” to the U.S.) From a business point of view, though, there’s a certain logic behind Murdoch’s decision to acquire IFE. News Corp. wants to break Disney’s tight grip on the market for children’s and family entertainment, and the Family Channel will provide an outlet for all the programming created by Fox Kids Worldwide. In a larger sense, the fact that the Family Channel is on nearly every cable system in America — could the audience for old episodes of “The Waltons” and “Rescue 911″ really be that large? — means that Murdoch won’t have to beg cable companies to air his shows, as he’s had to do for Fox’s 24-hour news channel. And since Murdoch has given up on his satellite-TV hopes, having his own cable channel has become even more crucial. Bart Simpson and John-Boy, together at last.

More than that, though, Robertson’s brand of cultural conservatism and Murdoch’s aren’t so very different. Murdoch’s hostility to feminism and gay rights, while not perhaps on par with Robertson’s equation of feminists with satanic witches, is well-established. His tabloid newspapers mine the same veins of cultural conservatism and hostility to modernity that Robertson’s preaching does. And even the sleazy programs on Fox are generally self-conscious about their sleaziness and rather open about the fact that respectable people would never act the way their characters do. (Even if respectable people like to watch people act that way.) Fox, you might say, is the dark side of the Family Channel. But both roam the same cultural terrain.

Still it’s probably a mistake to analyze the particular strategy behind any of Murdoch’s acquisitions too closely because the most fundamental truth about him is that he is a creature of enormous appetite. Since the early 1970s, Murdoch has bought and sold (and in some cases bought again) Elle, the Star, Metromedia, Fox, the London Times, the New York Post, the Daily Racing Form, the Village Voice, TV Guide, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Boston Herald and New York magazine. He started Mirabella and Premiere. He started a paper in the former East Germany called Super! which spent most of its time attacking the “Wessies” for their decadent and greedy ways. (It folded.) Hell, for that matter, he brought Lotto to New York state, partnering with a company called Mathematica Inc. to win the operating concession in 1977. If it’s printed or televised, Murdoch has probably tried to buy it. In that sense, IFE is just the latest course in his endless media banquet.

Murdoch’s image in the popular mind — make that the popular journalistic mind — is of a right-wing tyrant who buys up newspapers and television stations in order to transform them into instruments of his ideological purposes. But the record is actually more complicated than that. Nearly every newspaper he’s acquired has shifted noticeably and quickly to the right. (The New York Post after Murdoch, to take just one example, bears essentially no resemblance to the paper run by Dorothy Schiff, and not just because of the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headlines.) Murdoch has made no pretenses about his desire to shape the editorial content of the businesses he acquires. What’s the point of buying something, he’s said more than once, if you have no say in how it’s run?

Still, given his reputation, there are remarkably few stories of Murdoch actually intervening to spike stories or programs. At Fox, Murdoch presided over cultural ascendancy of “The Simpsons,” which in every sense — its bleak view of capitalism, its critique of religion and its casual depiction of gay characters as mainstream — assaulted his own worldview. And when he owned the Village Voice, Murdoch interfered not at all, even when Jack Newfield and Alexander Cockburn were devoting their weekly columns to slagging the new, unimproved Post, which Murdoch had just acquired. There’s no question that Murdoch has helped shift the media landscape to the right, but when other voices have proven popular — which is to say, profitable — he’s been more than willing to let them speak.

What Murdoch hasn’t been willing to do, though, is bring any substance to his self-proclaimed populism, and this is what is most troubling about him. For someone who has always billed himself as a maverick, challenging the establishment and bucking the edicts of the chattering classes in favor of the hoi polloi, Murdoch has shown himself more than happy to cater to the powers that be. While he certainly has been terrifically gutsy as an entrepreneur, in every other sense he seems to have chosen the path of least resistance.

A committed leftist who kept a bust of Lenin on his mantle as a young man, Murdoch turned to the right sometime in the 1970s, but his reasons for doing so remain opaque. He became an ardent supporter of Thatcherism at a time when Labor could not have been weaker, and an ardent Reaganaut when the supply-siders were riding high. Then, in 1997, he suddenly discovered the virtues of Tony Blair. Although he has spoken eloquently on the “unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes” posed by free airwaves, he dropped BBC World News from his Star TV satellite system when the Chinese government complained about a BBC documentary on Mao, and since then News Corp. has poured $3 million into a joint Internet venture with the People’s Daily Newspaper, the Chinese equivalent of Pravda. His $4 million book bribe to Newt Gingrich at a time when Gingrich was at the peak of his power was, then, just par for the course.

There’s been no more emblematic — and egregious — example of how thoroughly Murdoch has become part of the establishment than the United Jewish Appeal’s decision to name him Humanitarian of the Year. What, exactly, Murdoch has done to earn the label “humanitarian” (aside from giving lots of money to the UJA) remains a mystery. But then, Henry Kissinger, a man many regard as a war criminal, was chosen to give Murdoch the award, so perhaps the UJA was trying to see how far words can be tortured before they lose all meaning.

That Murdoch has been able to portray himself as a tribune of the masses while amassing a $3.2 billion fortune and sucking up to the powerful is a testament to the complete erosion of genuine populism over the last decade and a half. It’s also a testament to his own success in convincing people that you can hate privilege without hating the concentration of wealth. Murdoch has been a key figure in the shaping of a purely cultural populism, one divorced from any real idea of class or of economics. It’s an impressive feat, and one that was crucial to the success of both Reagan and Thatcher. An essential part of this project, of course, has been the rhetoric of “family values” and the conjuring up of a mythic past when the community was whole and everyone knew right from wrong. Throughout his career, Murdoch has played on these themes, recognizing the possibilities they offered for profit and for political influence, and in that sense the Family Channel — where everyone seems to live in a soft yellow glow — and Murdoch are a perfect fit.