"Relationship Between Movies and Real-Life Disasters", NPR Interview with Henry Bean

BOB EDWARDS, Morning Edition host:

Movie studios have postponed the release of several high-budget thrillers involving bombs and terrorists. Television is avoiding the same subjects, except on "The West Wing," which is rewriting an episode to include the response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But this exception
doesn't mean Hollywood isn't considering how to tell these stories. David D'Arcy reports.

DAVID D'ARCY reporting:

Hollywood producers will tell you that there's an unwritten statute of limitations on turning tragic news events into studio movies with real budgets and real stars. Edward Pressman says that even in Hollywood, the lessons of history have to be distilled over years before they can make credible films.
Pressman produced the Oliver Stone melodramas "Wall Street" and "Talk Radio."

Mr. EDWARD PRESSMAN (Producer): When Oliver did "Platoon," it took him years to assimilate what it meant to him. And, you know, it was a great movie, but I don't think it would have been the same if he had tried to do it the day he got home. I think he would have been, you know, in a straightjacket at that
point.

D'ARCY: The studios now feel ambushed by a crime that looks a lot like one of their productions, says screenwriter Henry Bean, who wrote "Internal Affairs" and directed Sundance award winner "The Believer," a thriller based on the life of a Jewish neo-Nazi.

Mr. HENRY BEAN (Screenwriter; Director): They're trying to retain a certain dignity. They're not digging yet in the rubble. You know, we're not ready to dig. Maybe we're coming to the point where we're ready to dig in the rubble, emotionally speaking.

D'ARCY: Some are not. One of them is the man who's considered the shameless master of film exploitation, Larry Cohen. Cohen directed "God Told Me To," "It's Alive!" and "The Secret Tapes of J. Edgar Hoover."(ph) But he draws the line at exploiting the events of September 11th.

Mr. LARRY COHEN (Director): I just don't believe that a picture about the attack on the World Trade Center is appropriate, at least for the next 20 or 25 years. I mean, a film about "Pearl Harbor" was acceptable when they made "Tora! Tora! Tora!" because it was probably 35 years after the attack. But there are so many people who have lost loved ones here and who would have to be suffering
the anxiety and the pain of seeing this depicted on the screen. All of us have experienced enough of this and there's no drama that could equal what we have seen with our own eyes. We weren't there at Pearl Harbor, but we witnessed this as if we were actually there. And I just don't think it needs to be
dramatized and cheapened and exploited.

D'ARCY: Hollywood actually addressed the damage done at Pearl Harbor right after the attack in the 1943 film "Gung Ho!." A special unit of Marines tours the destroyed base before the volunteers ship out to the Pacific to take revenge.

(Soundbite of "Gung Ho!")

Unidentified Man #1: Just why did you volunteer for this raider battalion?

Unidentified Man #2: My brother died at Pearl Harbor. They didn't find enough of him to bury.

Unidentified Man #1: What caused you to volunteer for this raider battalion?

Unidentified Man #3: I fought in Spain. I fought in Greece. This fight is all the same, fascism.

Unidentified Man #1: Why do you want to join this outfit?

Unidentified Man #4: My sister was caught by the Japanese in Manila. We never heard a word from here. But we read in the newspapers what they did.

Unidentified Man #1: Now what about you?

Unidentified Man #5: Three years I've been a Marine. I haven't been in a fight yet. This is my chance.

D'ARCY: The movies rallied the country to war. The studios controlled every stage of filmmaking then, from hiring actors to shooting films to showing the films in the theaters they owned. They could accelerate film production faster than the armaments industry could produce tanks, says popular culture
historian Michael Barson.

Mr. MICHAEL BARSON (Popular Culture Historian): The patriotic thing to do was to make movies like this that helped morale, which was rather low, especially at the beginning. I mean, we were in a state of shock, much as we are right this moment in a state of shock. It was something we'd never anticipated could ever happen, that a country would attack part of America. But even so, the studios also knew they would make money doing this. This is what people wanted to pay their money to see as entertainment as well.

D'ARCY: Motivating the country with movies is a different challenge today, Barson says.

Mr. BARSON: The problem facing Hollywood now is we already have made this as a movie. We made it as "Independence Day," we made it as "The Peacemaker," we made it as "The Siege." And now it's happened and it's even worse than any of our worst-case scenario fantasy films were. So where do we go from here?

D'ARCY: Screenwriter Henry Bean has some ideas. One film could be an ensemble drama looking at a range of people working in the buildings and a range of activities from good to bad, a sort of urban "Ship of Fools." Another could be a portrait of New York before the attacks.

Mr. BEAN: It would be a film about, you know, our 1920s. It's a film about how happy we were, how rich we were, all the great art shows and all the great restaurants and how trivial life was. And then suddenly this event occurs and life isn't trivial anymore.

D'ARCY: Bean says you can be sure he's not the only filmmaker thinking about how to address this subject.

Mr. BEAN: And I think for reasons that have nothing to do with decency or dignity, but purely with artistic strategy, a lot of people are thinking, 'I have to approach it obliquely. I can't make a film about the disaster itself. I can't make a film about the Islamic terrorists attacking the World Trade Center.
But I can make a film about something like that. I can make a film about the nature of America facing some kind of confrontation.'

D'ARCY: The studios will be reluctant to commit $60 million to a movie that could offend or depress anyone, or to take a serious look at the complexity of a character who could order the deaths of thousands of people. So far, neither the movie studios nor the television networks have dared to show a film about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, even though one was made. And so far, even the
made-for-TV folks have passed on the Oklahoma City bombing. But Henry Bean says we should expect some of the horrific elements of recent events to find theirway into movies.

Mr. BEAN: It's almost a truism, art is amoral. Art doesn't care about morality. Art may have to deal with morality, but art in its own marshaling of the materials given to it is only looking for art. It's looking how to make an effect, an impact. That's all it cares about. And if it uses something like the World Trade Center disaster for a thriller, it doesn't care. Now it may want to do that as honorably as possible and deal with those people and that situation with as much complexity as it can muster, but it's not doing that for any social benefit. It's doing that because that makes good art, because it wants that so
it can be as good as it can be.

D'ARCY: The public that finds the prospect of a World Trade Center movie offensive may already be accepting Bean's argument. The only ticket that's not being discounted on Broadway this week is for "The Producers," a comedy about a play about a mass murderer.

- David D'Arcy