Is hollywood going too far ?

edpowers · July 2006

sure...i know its "a story of courage and survival"... "a tribute".... but this and that Flight 93 movie make me uncomfortable

Dabney_Soulman · July 2006

I thought the idea behind flight 93 was disgusting, a cash-in on a tragedy in which everyone died. This story really isn't too far from that however I'm sorta tempted to go see it simply cause Oliver Stone has a way of telling stories that I find fascinating (well most of the time)

a deal breaker for me is whether the main character(s) in this story survived or not. I really can't get with cashing in on the dead

edpowers · July 2006

I really can't get with cashing in on the dead

How do you feel about Schindler's List ?

soulmarcosa · July 2006

Every time someone asks "Has _________________ gone too far?," ten years later it's quaint that the question was even asked.

IMO every historical event is completely eligible for being told filmically, in writing, or whatever format works. If every true story movie/book/tv show was nixed because the people involved were upset about it, we'd never have dramatic retellings of true events at all.

Dabney_Soulman · July 2006

I really can't get with cashing in on the dead

How do you feel about Schindler's List ?

thats a real good question.

As a kid who's grandfather made sure Ithat had a deep understanding of my heritage and history I always felt sometihng odd when someone brung up the holocaust, almost like I need to remind people of the tragedy; its a strange feeling that I really don't think I can explain clearly.

Having a Jewish man make the film definitely got other Jews to take it seriously. I can't tell you how many times I saw this film back in the day both on my own and in class.

The story was one of survival, one that didn't really show a very "hollywood" type of view. It was raw, gritty, and in the end they showed the survivors.

One of the Schindler Jews had a luggage shop on Fairfax and Beverly back in the 90's, we had him come and speak to our religious day school. He was proud of the film and that alone takes any self-importance I may feel about the films protrayal.

bobbydee · July 2006

Not to discount its impact, but honesly, on the scale of human suffering historically 9-11 is fairly minor. It only seems more shocking to joe america than shindlers list/hotel rwanda/apolalypse now et al becuase its closer to home for hollywood (torch bearer of the american dream) itself, and its not set specifically in "war time".

bobbydee · July 2006

To clarify, that wasn't aimed at anyone here- more towards the news media trying to beat this up.

ako · July 2006

Every time someone asks "Has _________________ gone too far?," ten years later it's quaint that the question was even asked.

IMO every historical event is completely eligible for being told filmically, in writing, or whatever format works. If every true story movie/book/tv show was nixed because the people involved were upset about it, we'd never have dramatic retellings of true events at all.

exactly what i was gonna say.

paulnice · July 2006

He was proud of the film and that alone takes any self-importance I may feel about the films protrayal.

Every single one of the immediate family members of every victim of United 93 approved of that film.
Does that change your approach to it at all?
I ended up watching it in a hotel room in Chicago a couple weeks ago and I was completely riveted.
It was done in an ultra-realistic way which I was not expecting.
I can go either way with Stone and his films, but I liked the fact that United 93 used all unknowns and was not overly stylized in anyway.
On the other hand, from what I've seen of WTC (admittedly not much), it just feels like a Hollywood production all the way... in other words... a movie.
Whereas United 93 was a bare bones document. It tells the story of what happened in those hours. No more, no less. And that's plenty, trust me.
I didn't come away from United 93 feeling like the lives of those people were exploited or "cashed in" on at all.
Quite the opposite. Without a hint of sentimentality, the filmmakers were able to document the deeds of everyday people who most likely wound up saving the lives of many others.
And yes, they're heroes because of that.
That's not "cashing in" to me. It honors them.
And now they're immortalized in a respectful, honorable way IMO.
And that's a good thing.

EDIT:

By the way D, United 93 is just as raw and gritty and un-Hollywood as Schindler's List (one of my favorite films) if not moreso.
I implore you to see it.

paulnice · July 2006

Not to discount its impact, but honesly, on the scale of human suffering historically 9-11 is fairly minor. It only seems more shocking to joe america than shindlers list/hotel rwanda/apolalypse now et al becuase its closer to home for hollywood (torch bearer of the american dream) itself, and its not set specifically in "war time".

How humane of you to apply a scale to human suffering.

wooshie · July 2006

It's all blood being spilt, be it an american, lebanese, jewish. whatever.

Brian · July 2006

i just think it's way too soon to be making a movie about this. it's only been five years..

paulnice · July 2006

i just think it's way too soon to be making a movie about this. it's only been five years..

So don't see it. It obviously wasn't too soon for the families who signed off on it.
And just when will it be soon enough? How long should we wait before confronting what happened?
As far as I'm concerned, too many people have already moved on and changed the channel.
I think if a film was ever to be made on the subject, better to do it sooner while the feelings are still raw.
And now it's preserved forever for our kid's kids to see. That's what counts.

"Those who cannot remember the past........."

theory9 · July 2006

Why does the families signing off on the movie validate it? If one family witheld their blessing, would this mute the collective voice?

paulnice · July 2006

Why does the families signing off on the movie validate it? If one family witheld their blessing, would this mute the collective voice?

I don't know. Would it?
It's up to you to ultimately decide how you feel about it.
I can only speak for myself, but a long time friend of mine lost his life in tower 2 that day and I certainly have no problem with United 93 as a film.
The verdict is still out on the WTC film.

EDIT:
Dabney suggested that because one of the surviving Schindler Jews was "proud" of the film, it might help sway his perception of it.
I wrote about the United 93 family members in that context.

theory9 · July 2006

That's an interesting point: is telling a story more important than the considerations of the people about whom the story is about, either directly or indirectly? Schindlers Lists definitely took an underrepresented story and brought it to masses, but 9/11 is more recent, widely known and discussed. Not saying that the 9/11 stories don't deserve to be told, though.

Bsides · July 2006

You have already seen one fictionalized version of the 9/11 disaster. Its the one thats been pumped at you constantly on every cable news channel since the day it happened.

I agree with paul though, film can be a powerful medium for communication, any historical account is to some degree fictional. I dont really want to see WTC, but i cant say that im offended that its getting made either.

Junior · July 2006

Don't know whether this adds anything to the discussion but Oliver Stone had a little interview in the paper about it today.

Olive Stone Interview

Inside a flimsy temporary office on a dusty movie lot in Los Angeles, a young man sits in front of a computer displaying a three-dimensional rendering of the collapse of the World Trade Center. It was assembled by merging the blueprints for the twin towers - the before-picture, you might say - with a vast collection of measurements, including some taken with infrared laser scans from an airplane 5,000 feet above Lower Manhattan, just days after 9/11.

With a few clicks, Ron Frankel, pre-visualisation supervisor for Oliver Stone's new 9/11 film, begins to illustrate the circuitous path that five Port Authority police officers took into the trade centre's subterranean concourse, until the towers above them fell, killing three of them.
As Frankel speaks, behind his back a burly man has wandered through the door. He is Will Jimeno, one of the two officers who survived. He has been a constant presence on the movie set, scooting from here to there in a golf cart, bantering with the actor playing him and with Stone, answering questions and offering suggestions - a consultant and court jester. But he has never seen this demonstration before, he says, pulling up a chair.

Frankel, continuing with his impromptu show-and-tell, says the floor beneath Jimeno, Sergeant John McLoughlin and their three fellow officers dropped some 60 feet, creating a 90ft ravine in the underground inferno. The difference between life and death, for each of the men, was a matter of inches.

Jimeno sits quietly, absorbing what he's just seen and heard. His eyes moisten. "I didn't know this," he says. "I didn't know this. I didn't know there was a drop-off here. This is an explanation I never knew about." He pauses. "We try not to ponder on it, because we're alive. But it answers some questions. That, really, played a big part in us being here." The countless measurements taken and calculations made by scientists and government agencies helped Ground Zero rescue workers pinpoint dangerous areas in the weeks after the attacks. The data also provided a fuller historical record of how the buildings collapsed and lessons for future architects and engineers.

Only a movie budgeted as mass entertainment, though, could harness all that costly information to reconstruct the point of view of two severely injured and bewildered men, who didn't even know the twin towers had been flattened until rescuers lifted them to the surface many hours later.

Their story, and those of their families, their rescuers and the three men killed alongside them, is the subject of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, which Paramount is releasing in the US next week. A few months after Paul Greengrass's United 93 became the first 9/11 movie to enter wide theatrical release, the quandary that Paramount's executives face is a familiar one: how do you market a movie like this without offending audiences or violating the film's intentions? Carefully, of course.

In New York and New Jersey, for example, there will be no billboards or subway signs, which could otherwise hit, quite literally, too close to home. And the studio is running all of its materials by a group of survivors to avoid offending sensibilities.

Nicolas Cage, who plays the taciturn Sergeant McLoughlin (opposite Michael Pe??a as Jimeno), says the movie is not meant to entertain. "I see it as storytelling which depicts history," he says. "This is what happened. Look at it. Generation after generation goes by, they'll have United 93, and World Trade Center, to recall that history."

Whether Stone set out to make a historical drama or a dramatic history isn't entirely clear. Jimeno and McLoughlin, who have both since retired from the Port Authority, say the script and the production took very few liberties except for the sake of time compression. "It's still Hollywood," says Jimeno. "But Oliver - it's to the point where he drives me crazy, trying to get things right."

There are many people, of course, who have been driven a little crazy for other reasons by some of Stone's more controversial films such as JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon. But Stone now speaks as if his days of deliberate provocation were behind him: "I stopped," he says simply. "I stopped." His new film, he says, might go down as well in Kansas as in Boston, or, for that matter, in London or Madrid. "It's not a political film," he insists. "Why can't I stay on message for once in a while? Why do I have to take detours all the time?"

He said he just wants to depict the plain facts of what happened on September 11. "It seems to me that the event was mythologised by both political sides into something that they used for political gain," he says. "And I think one of the benefits of this movie is that it reminds us of what actually happened that day, in a very realistic sense.

"We show people being killed, and we show people who are not killed, and the fine line that divides them. How many men saved those two lives? Hundreds. These guys went into that twisted mass, and it very clearly could've fallen down on them, and struggled all night for hours to get them out."

Crash director Paul Haggis is now making an adaptation of Richard Clarke's book on the causes of 9/11, Against All Enemies. Asked if that weren't the kind of film he might once have tried to tackle, Stone first scoffs: "I couldn't do it. I'd be burned alive." Then he adds: "This is not a political film. That's the mantra they handed me."

Stone says he particularly owes his producers, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher, for taking a chance on him at a time when he had gone cold in Hollywood after a string of commercial and critical disappointments culminating in the epic Alexander in 2004."Alexander was cold-turkeyed in this town," he says, "I think unfairly, but it was, and I took a hit. Nobody's your friend, nobody wants to talk to you."

Stone came forward asking to direct World Trade Center about a year ago. He decided it would require a different approach from, say, JFK. "The Kennedy assassination was 40 years ago, and look at the heat there, a tremendous amount of heat," he says. "I was trying to give an alternative version of what I thought might have happened, but it wasn't understood. It was taken very literally.

"This is a fresh wound, and it had to be cauterised in a certain way. This is a very specific story. The details are the details are the details."

The details that led to the movie's making began in April 2004, when Andrea Berloff, a screenwriter, pitched a story about Jimeno's and McLoughlin's "transformation in the hole" to producers Sher and Shamberg. Berloff was candid about two things: "I didn't want to see the planes hit the buildings. We've seen enough of that footage forever. It's not adding anything new at this point. I also said I don't know how to end the movie, because there are 10 endings to the story. What happened to John and Will in that hospital could be a movie unto itself. Will flatlined twice, and was still there on Halloween. And John was read his last rites twice."

Berloff and Shamberg headed to New York to meet the two officers and their families, and to visit both the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where the men had once patrolled, and Ground Zero. Despite the nearly three years that had elapsed, both families remained emotionally raw. "Within 20 minutes of starting to talk, they were losing it," says Berloff. "We all just sat and cried together for a week."

The actors aimed for accuracy in different ways. Nicolas Cage says he focused on getting McLoughlin's New York accent right, and spent time in a sense deprivation tank to get a hint of the fear and claustrophobia you might experience after hours immob ile and in pain in the dark. Michael Pe??a all but moved in with Jimeno. Maggie Gyllenhaal, playing Jimeno's wife, had her own problems to solve. Earlier in the year, at the Tribeca film festival, she said of 9/11: "America has done reprehensible things and is responsible in some way." She apologised publicly, then met privately with the Jimenos, offering to withdraw if they objected to her involvement. "We started to get into politics a little bit, and Will said, 'I don't care what your politics are'," says Gyllenhaal.

With Jimeno and McLoughlin vouching for the film-makers, more rescuers asked to be included, meaning not only that dozens of uniformed New York officers would fly to Los Angeles to re-enact the rescue of the two men, but that there were more sources of information to replace Berloff's best guesses with vivid memories.

Some of the film's most fictitious-seeming moments are authentic. Jimeno's account of his ordeal included a Castaneda-like vision in which Jesus appeared with a water bottle in his hand. Or there's a dissolute paramedic with a lapsed licence who redeems himself as he digs to reach Jimeno. And a former marine who leaves his job as a suburban accountant, rushes to church, then dons his pressed battle fatigues, stops at a barbershop for a high-and-tight, heads downtown past barricades saying he's needed and winds up tiptoeing through the perilous heap calling out "United States Marines" until Jimeno hears him and responds. Stone says he is adding a note at the end of the film, revealing that the marine, David Karnes, re-enlisted and served two tours of duty in Iraq, because test audiences believed he was a Hollywood invention.

Reality can be just as gushingly sentimental as the sappiest movie, Stone acknowledges, especially when the storytellers are uniformed officers in New York who lived through 9/11. And particularly when it comes to Jimeno and McLoughlin, who have struggled with the awkwardness of being singled out as heroes when so many others died similarly doing their duty, and when so many more rescued them.

"I say there is heroism," Stone says. "Here you see this image of these poor men approaching the tower, with no equipment, and they don't know what the hell they're doing, and they're going up into this inferno, they're like babies. You feel saddened, you feel sorry for them. They don't have a chance."

This is going to be hard for people, says Cage. "Unlike Platoon, where most of us don't know what it's like to be in the jungle, the audience has lived through 9/11. We all walk into buildings every day, and we were there, and we saw it on TV, so this is going to be very cathartic."

"It's not about the World Trade Center, really. It's about any man or woman faced with the end of their lives, and how they survive," Stone says. "I did it for a reason. I did it because emotionally it hit me. I loved the simplicity and modesty of this movie.

"I hope the movie does well, even if they say 'in spite of Oliver Stone'."

I'm not a major fan of Stone's work but it's interesting to see his desire for viewers to take the work on it's own merits and not to view the film as an Oliver Stone production.

Flomotion · July 2006

i just think it's way too soon to be making a movie about this. it's only been five years..

I agree. It may be cathartic for the victims and their families but I suspect this movie was greenlighted because it conmbines all the standard dramatic and emotional elements of an action film with a theme that was universally familiar. Good box office formula but I'm not sure it makes any valuable contribution to our perspective of 9/11. And I can't take Cage seriously these days after all the shit movies he's been in over recent years.

batmon · July 2006

Good box office formula but I'm not sure it makes any valuable contribution to our perspective of 9/11.

You dont think there's a large group of dummies here in America that will adopt this film's perspective?

kitchenknight · July 2006

Good box office formula but I'm not sure it makes any valuable contribution to our perspective of 9/11.

You dont think there's a large group of dummies here in America that will adopt this film's perspective?

You know, I got suuuuper heated in the "United 93," thread a few months back, but I gotta say this, or I will barf.

I hate the judgement we pass on people who might want to see this movie. I hate when the Religious Zealots on the Right tell me what I can/cannot watch, and I hate hearing Lefties/Strutters/Whoever say that anyone who wants to see a 9/11 movie is a dummie.

Be your own viewer, critic, and censor. And don't tell me what to watch and not to watch. Or, you are just as bad as them.

paulnice · July 2006

You dont think there's a large group of dummies here in America that will adopt this film's perspective?

And just what exactly is "this film's perspective"?

Mike_Bell · July 2006

Be your viewer, critic, and censor. And don't tell me what to watch and not to watch.

I don't see why it's so hard to follow this train of thought.

theory9 · July 2006

Be your viewer, critic, and censor. And don't tell me what to watch and not to watch.

I don't see why it's so hard ~~to follow this train of thought~~ for people to think for themselves.

batmon · July 2006

Im not calling anyone who wants to see this movie a dummy at all. But I'm sure there will be a percentage of watchers who will take it for fact. No different from the JFK/MalcomX/Doors films. The media is powerful.

kitchenknight · July 2006

Im not calling anyone who wants to see this movie a dummy at all. But I'm sure there will be a percentage of watchers who will take it for fact. No different from the JFK/MalcomX/Doors films. The media is powerful.

You are absolutely right. But, that is no reason not to make it.

batmon · July 2006

Im not calling anyone who wants to see this movie a dummy at all. But I'm sure there will be a percentage of watchers who will take it for fact. No different from the JFK/MalcomX/Doors films. The media is powerful.

You are absolutely right. But, that is no reason not to make it.

Did I ever say that the movie doesnt have to be made? They were making WW2 movies while WW2 was still on. I'm just warning against brainwashing, even if thats not the films intent.

kitchenknight · July 2006

Im not calling anyone who wants to see this movie a dummy at all. But I'm sure there will be a percentage of watchers who will take it for fact. No different from the JFK/MalcomX/Doors films. The media is powerful.

You are absolutely right. But, that is no reason not to make it.

Did I ever say that the movie doesnt have to be made? They were making WW2 movies while WW2 was still on. I'm just warning against brainwashing, even if thats not the films intent.

Fair enough.

deej · July 2006

I donno the combination of "Oliver Stone" and "National Tragedy" sound like the formula for heavy-handed terrible garbage. If you've seen "Mississippi Burning" you know how bad this guy is.

DjArcadian · July 2006

I donno the combination of "Oliver Stone" and "National Tragedy" sound like the formula for heavy-handed terrible garbage. If you've seen "Mississippi Burning" you know how bad this guy is.

How was he involved with Mississippi Burning?

deej · July 2006

ahh my bad, wrong heavy handed historical mess.

Choose another of his at random.

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Is hollywood going too far ?

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