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"... the studio is trying to establish the film's patriotic credibility..."
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-052002fears.story
Hollywood Shakes Off Fear of Terror Images
By DANA CALVO and ROBERT W. WELKOS
Time Staff Writers
May 20 2002
Is America ready to find terrorism entertaining again?
"The Sum of All Fears," a political thriller in which the nation and its
leaders are caught off guard by a terrorist attack, opens this month, the
first film to be released since Sept. 11 to deal so explicitly with the sort
of national trauma experienced that day.
Paramount Pictures made the $68-million movie before the attacks, but now it
must sell it to the public, and the studio is trying to establish the film's
patriotic credibility by using Washington as a launching pad.
Wednesday night, many of the same worried lawmakers who eight months ago
stood on the Capitol steps singing "God Bless America" will walk up the red
carpet at the Warner Theater for the premiere of a film that shows massive
destruction, scenes of widespread panic and images of a president flying
aboard the National Airborne Command Center in the midst of an international
crisis.
Paramount, mindful to avoid the impression that it is capitalizing on the
Sept. 11 tragedy, has taken pains to publicize the high level of support it
received from the Pentagon, which supplied Marines and helicopters for the
production. The studio is marketing the film, based on the best-selling 1991
Tom Clancy novel, as a race against the clock to prevent a nuclear disaster,
with patriotic overtones.
As a sign of how much has changed since Sept. 11, the Motion Picture Assn.
of America applied new standards it established for its "disaster images"
category to the PG-13-rated film. Jack Valenti, the MPAA head who serves as
an industry lobbyist in Washington, said TV news footage of hijacked
passenger planes flying into the World Trade Center's twin towers in New
York altered the industry's rating standards: "Ten-year-olds must have seen
those planes hitting the towers a hundred times, and bombs and violence are
all over the news from the Middle East. The movies can't be tougher than
television."
Paramount is not the only studio rolling the dice this summer and placing a
big bet that moviegoers will flock to terrorism-themed films. A week after
"The Sum of All Fears" makes its bow, Disney will release "Bad Company,"
starring Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock. That plot revolves around
terrorists planting a nuclear device in New York City's Grand Central
Station. This fall, viewers of Fox TV's "24" will see a real-time story line
about terrorism. "We won't shy away from the idea that something like 9/11
might happen," said Joel Surnow, who produces the action drama.
Immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
studios postponed the release of movies like Arnold Schwarzenegger's
"Collateral Damage," which depicted a firefighter hunting down South
American terrorists who had killed his family in a bomb blast, and the
comedy "Big Trouble," whose story line centered on smuggling an atomic bomb
onto a passenger jet.
For the most part, initial post-Sept. 11 concerns about public reaction to
those films were overblown; if viewers stayed away from "Collateral Damage"
(and they did, generally), it was attributed to the movie itself and not to
any shift in the national tolerance for big-screen violence.
"The Sum of All Fears" may be different. It goes far more directly to the
events, fears and images of the attacks, and it does so within the context
of an extremely profitable series of adaptations of Clancy books. This time
around, Ben Affleck plays CIA analyst Jack Ryan. When Harrison Ford played
the part of an older Jack Ryan, 1992's "Patriot Games" grossed more than
$173 million worldwide, and 1994's "Clear and Present Danger" pulled in more
than $212 million. When "The Sum of All Fears" is released nationwide May
31, what moviegoers may find most disturbing are images of hospital windows
being blown out, Marines pulling a bleeding president from his motorcade,
fans at the Super Bowl cheering only moments before coming under deadly
attack and a U.S. city being nearly devastated.
The movie's villains are European-based neo-Nazis who try to ignite a
nuclear war between the United States and Russia by planting an atomic bomb
in Baltimore. Affleck's character tries to alert the president as the
commander in chief prepares to launch nuclear missiles at Russia. Studio
executives say they have removed most of the gore and violence that was in
early drafts, but the film clearly is meant to rattle audiences.
"I sat ... in a panic, arms outreached toward the screen, mouth wide open,"
one amateur online reviewer wrote after seeing the film recently.
Others already know they don't want to put themselves in the position of
watching fictionalized violence. Paula Pluta watched United Airlines Flight
93 drop out of the sky Sept. 11 and crash into trees about 1,000 yards from
her home near Shanksville, Pa. The 40 passengers and crew aboard died along
with the four hijackers, and though Pluta knows some people might find a
film about terrorism entertaining, she will take a pass on "The Sum of All
Fears" or any movie in the near future that focuses on violence against
civilians.
"I couldn't go to a theater and watch a movie on terrorism because of the
effect the crash had on me," she said. "I don't want to go through it again,
in real life or in the movies."
Hollywood has a long and contradictory history of dealing with current
events, sometimes mirroring them closely and at other times offering escape
by "cranking out musicals and comedies, anything but war films," said film
historian Jan-Christopher Horak, curator of the Hollywood Entertainment
Museum.
"It will be interesting to see what happens to this film," Horak said. "We
may just be too close to it still."
Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at USC's Annenberg School
for Communication, believes that "people are walking on eggs in the creative
community, and they're trying to be sensitive, but I don't think there's a
blanket prohibition on portraying terrorism."
Bernard F. Dick, a professor of communications and English at Fairleigh
Dickinson University in New Jersey and the author of a 1985 book about
Hollywood's World War II films, thinks "The Sum of All Fears" could be a
tough sell.
"The scars on the collective psyche are never going to heal," he said. "I've
been down to ground zero [the World Trade Center site]. It's a very sobering
sight."
Yet instead of shying away from the Washington area, where 189 people died
in the attack on the Pentagon, Paramount chose to turn the capital into a
showcase for the movie.
Wednesday's premiere, which will be attended by members of both major
political parties, takes place against a backdrop of executive branch
intrigue, with revelations that President Bush received warnings in August
about airliners possibly being hijacked by operatives of Osama bin Laden's
Al Qaeda terrorist network. Democrats have criticized the White House for
not alerting the public, and their words are the first crack in the facade
of political bipartisanship over the terrorism issue in Washington since
Sept. 11.
Though it's not uncommon for films deemed to have Beltway appeal to premiere
there--1995's "The American President" and last year's "Black Hawk Down"
among them--this movie has an unusually disturbing story line for a
Washington audience.
Paramount studio chief Sherry Lansing, who took a key role in mustering a
group devoted to Hollywood-Washington collaboration after Sept. 11, has
assembled a bipartisan political and military audience to view the film
Wednesday. It first will screen today for a small gathering of the national
press corps at MPAA headquarters, where it will be introduced by Sen.
Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.).
"He sees the movie as entertainment," Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher said. "But
as things work their way into the culture of American life, Americans need
to be continually aware of the possibilities of new attacks."
Then, on Wednesday, an audience including the vice chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and the secretaries of the Navy and Air Force is confirmed
for the Washington premiere. Also attending will be Lansing, who, along with
Valenti, led a coalition after Sept. 11 that sought to brainstorm about what
pro-U.S. movie and TV projects Hollywood could develop.
The group included the heads of every major television network and movie
studio, as well as Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor. Some raised
concerns that a cozy relationship between Hollywood and the White House
would foster a climate of propaganda, but the coalition's mission has
amounted to distributing pro-U.S. films to troops overseas and their
families, and presenting USO shows.
Lansing said "The Sum of All Fears" would have been provocative even before
the terrorist strikes of last fall. "I think the film would have been
upsetting at any time," she said. "It was relevant before 9/11, and I think
now it has even more relevance."
Phil Alden Robinson said he exercised restraint in directing the picture,
favoring "implied" violence rather than straight-on gore, and had the script
changed to allow the character of the president to survive. "There are no
bodies in this movie. This movie is not about an act of violence; it was
about a response to it."
The filmmakers say they haven't had walkouts in test screenings, where they
claim an "overwhelmingly positive" response from viewers.
But producer Mace Neufeld, who also produced the earlier Clancy films, said
the Washington crowd could be another matter. "I think it will be our
toughest audience."
"What we are trying not to do is sensationalize," added studio vice chairman
Robert Friedman. "We are not trying to exploit in any way, shape or form the
sad events of 9/11."
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