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| Translating September 11 into entertainment
NEW YORK, Sept 5 (AFP) - Barely two months after the September 11 attacks, US television network CBS revealed it was considering a a comedy series about a man and woman whose spouses died in the World Trade Center. At the time, CBS President Leslie Moonves told the Los Angeles Times that television "shouldn't run away" from the subject of the attacks. "You want relevance when it's appropriate," he said. BizVantage – A Net clipping service that learns what you need: for business, investment or technology. In the end, the concept stalled at the pre-script stage, but, two years later, September 11 and it's "appropriate" treatment by the entertainment industry remains a deeply sensitive and controversial issue. Given Hollywood's track record of committing recent traumas to celluloid, it seems unlikely that Tinseltown will accord September 11 the same 29-year gap that came between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the 1970 film of the event, "Tora, Tora, Tora." But while some movies, notably Spike Lee's "25th Hour" with its images of Ground Zero, have incorporated the symbolism of the attacks, a full-length feature film with September 11 as the topic still seems a long way off. The closest attempt will broadcast on Sunday -- a two-hour docudrama, "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," starring Timothy Bottoms as President George W. Bush. The film, which dramatizes how the president and his staff spent September 11 and the days after, has been frowned on in some quarters for exploiting the tragedy for political ends. Hollywood's initial reaction to the attacks was one of hyper-sensitivity and anxiety, resulting in a clutch of movies being re-edited, rescheduled or even cancelled altogether. The blockbuster Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle "Collateral Damage" had its planned 2001 release postponed for one year because of its terrorism-related plot line. "I think one of the major problems that the movie industry now faces ... is that the reality of events on September 11 so overshadowed and engaged this nation, that any attempt to come close to, or duplicate, or re-enact a similar scenario is going to look pretty foolish and pathetic," said the film's screenwriter Terry George. US distributors are just as wary as the producers. A movie called "September 11" -- an omnibus of 11 shorts assembled by French television producer Alain Brigand -- debuted in September 2002 on the international film festival circuit, but only managed a limited US release in July this year. Television's response has been mixed, with some fictional shows, especially comedy series, dumping entire scripts. An episode of "Friends" that made fun of an airline bomb threat was cut, and "Spin City" -- a comedy about a fictional New York City mayor -- avoided the subject altogether. "We could never, as a sitcom, handle this in a real authentic way that would be satisfying to us or America," the show's co-producer Michelle Nader told the New York Times. Unlike the sitcoms, dramas like the mafia show "The Sopranos" did feel comfortable enough to have characters make isolated references to September 11. The White House drama, "The West Wing," aired a specially written episode on terrorism, while "Third Watch," a show about New York firefighters and police officers, wove the events directly into its plot lines. And there are signs, as a second year passes, that television treatment of September 11 and its aftermath is finding a new edge. "Whoopi," a prime-time sitcom starring Oscar-winner Whoopi Goldberg that debuts on NBC next week, derives much of its humour from the character of a wisecracking Iranian handyman and his experiences of racial profiling in an America where people of Middle East descent are treated with suspicion. "Post 9/11 we have to talk about it, and we have to deal with how we're feeling," Goldberg responded to criticisms of the material. "Because there's no other way to get beyond it, if you don't then begin to turn it into something that people can deal with from their perspective," she said. Even the music industry, despite its traditional mantle of rebelliousness, has trod warily around the subject of September 11. Bruce Sprinsteen's 9/11-inspired "The Rising" album with its combination of mourning and gritty optimism, was well-received, but the criticism heaped on Steve Earle's album "Jerusalem" by some sections of the US media showed the limits of mainstream comfort levels. Objections focused on one track on the album "John Walker's Blues" -- a sympathetic take on John Walker Lindh, an American member of the Taliban now in a US jail -- and especially the line "Every tower ever built tumbles," using the World Trade Center as a metaphor for the eventual collapse of US hegemony. Radio host Steve Gill said the song put Earle "in the same category as Jane Fonda, John Walker and all those people who hate America." If the entertainment industry has shied away from direct treatment of September 11, it has also backtracked on assurances by those in the business that the attacks would mark a dramatic shift in the content of movies, music and television. After the initial, knee-jerk changes in programming, the industry slowly drifted back into old habits with, as one newspaper columnist put it, "Jennifer Lopez's buttocks restored to their natural place" in the pop culture order. "There's a sense that nobody has a real sense of the history of these things. So when something happens, they expect that it's all happening for the first time and it's going to make all these fundamental changes," said Robert Thompson, professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University. "Bad things happen and it puts American habits on hold. But eventually those appetites come back." gh/tw/jkb US-attacks-2years-culture
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