Film festival ushers in first of many 9/11 movies

The New York Times says filmmakers are approaching movies about 9/11 carefully.

The Great New Wonderful, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tony Shalhoub and Olympia Dukakis, will open at the TriBeCa Film Festival on Friday. The movie will focus on a handful of New Yorkers affected by the World Trade Center bombing. It will not feature the falling towers, fleeing workers or Islamic terrorists.

Close behind "The Great New Wonderful" - an independent production that does not yet have a commercial release date - Hollywood producers are pursuing several sweeping projects that seek to harness directly the full dramatic potential of the cataclysmic 9/11 story: its antecedents and causes, its horrors and its aftermath.

NBC and ABC are locked in a footrace to produce the first mini-series based on the Sept. 11 commission's report. Columbia Pictures has optioned "102 Minutes," the account of the struggle for survival inside the World Trade Center by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, reporters for The New York Times. Universal Pictures is developing a screenplay about the last two Port Authority police officers pulled from ground zero alive. And the producer Scott Rudin has hired a screenwriter to adapt Jonathan Safran Foer's novel "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," told from the point of view of a precocious 9-year-old whose father was killed in the attacks.

I predict that not everyone will be pleased with the resulting films.

First there's the Universal picture, brought to you by the folks behind Erin Brokovich. The filmmakers say they intend to be scrupulously accurate:

"We learned on 'Erin Brockovich' that what you make up is never as good as what happened in real life," [Michael Shamberg] said. "We're aiming very high: that we can tell a true story that moves people, and that entertains people."

Hmm. Accurate like this? Or this?

The primary test for determining the cancer-causing potential of chemicals is called the Ames Test. It was named after Bruce Ames, now a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California. When asked about the all-important premise of the movie Erin Brockovich Professor Ames responded: “It’s really not very plausible that that little bit of chromium in the water did what it was supposed to do. The amount of chromium was just not credible.”

Professor Ames abandoned his own belief that trace amounts of chemicals cause cancer clusters when his testing revealed that about half of all natural substances include carcinogenic chemicals. Even organically grown vegetables contain carcinogens. Testing indicates that the last cup of coffee you drank contained at least 17 carcinogens and packed more cancer-causing potential than 150 gallons of the drinking water of Hinkley, California, where the enterprising Erin Brockovich launched her scare campaign.

Professor Ames points out that in order to win “cancer cluster” cases, sharp lawyers must promote trash science by narrowly focusing the jury’s attention on only one chemical, while scrupulously avoiding any mention of the much greater risks from such hazards as smoking and bad diet. “They never controlled for things like smoking and diet,” Ames said. “Nobody wants to think anything they do is their own fault.”

Second, the brains behind the NBC miniseries are seeking to "humanize" the terrorists.

Brian Grazer, co-chairman of Imagine Television, which is producing the NBC mini-series - and which has hired The Times as a consultant - said he hoped it would do for Muslims what Wolfgang Petersen's film "Das Boot" did for World War II-era Germans.

"Every approach prior to that was, the Germans were horrible," he said. "He humanized them, because they are human. That's what I'm hoping we do, that we don't demonize, that we humanize all the different sides, and so we see the seeds, and we get an understanding from each culture's point of view as to how they got to such a horrible place."

Let's hope he doesn't humanize the Islam right out of them. See here and here.

In any case, the most recent big-budget movie to deal with terrorism was 2002's Sum of All Fears ("27,000 Nuclear Weapons. One Is Missing"), based on a Tom Clancy novel of the same name. The novel had Arab terrorists setting off a nuclear device at football's Super Bowl but the movie, under pressure from Islamist organizations, features neo-Nazi terrorists. ("I hope you will be reassured," Director Phil Alden Robinson wrote in early 2001 to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, "that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs, and I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination.")

But these days even Hitler can get a sympathetic portrayal in the movies.

The film, "Max," breaks with cinematic precedent by depicting the young Hitler as an emotionally poisoned man, but nonetheless human, and even sympathetic in his longing for recognition as a struggling and impoverished artist in the postwar Munich of 1918.

We'll see.

Update: Jeff Jarvis:

He wants to "humanize all the different sides." How the hell do you humanize the evil bastards who killed 3,000 innocent fellow Americans, Glazer?

What seeds are there that make mass murder understandable or justifiable?

What point of view do you need to see that these men are evil?

And if you try to say that you're talking about the larger world of Islam, then it's Muslim bloggers who should be flaming your ass right now for presuming that these murderers are in any way representative of them as a people.

Explain yourself, Mr. Glazer.