Jonathan V. Last, online editor
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THIS PAST WEEKEND marked the beginning of prestige season at the movies. The rollout of Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" will be followed in the coming weeks by "The Matrix: Revolutions," "The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King," "Cold Mountain," "The Human Stain" and other high-profile releases. What you won't see this fall--or winter, or spring, or summer for that matter--is a single movie about the war on terror.
It's a little hard to believe. Yes, we have had a small-screen documentary and the film version of a play ("The Guys"), both about Sept. 11 itself. And Showtime aired a TV original movie, "DC 9/11." But that's it. Contrast this with Hollywood's output during World War II, when it seemed like every fifth movie was about America's heroic struggle to fend off the Germans and Japanese. Clearly, something's going on here.
But it's a complicated something. When asked why Hollywood hasn't made movies about the war on terror, the first-blush answer is almost always political correctness. "Who would you have as the enemy if you made a picture about terrorism?" Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, asks. "You'd probably have Muslims, would you not? If you did, I think there would be backlash from the decent, hardworking, law-abiding Muslim community in this country."
Valenti isn't being paranoid. The last big-budget movie with terrorists was the 2002 adaptation of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears." In the novel, Arab terrorists set off a nuclear bomb at the Super
Bowl. But as soon as the book went into development in Hollywood (long before Sept. 11), the Council on American Islamic Relations sprang into action. "Before we had typed a word on paper," producer Mace Neufeld told Slate, "I was getting complaints." And, voilà! The terrorists in the movie became neo-Nazis.
If anything, the PC pressure has been upped since the war on terror began--almost a reversal of the way Hollywood operated in the early 1940s. It is difficult to imagine a movie like "G.I. Jane," "The Siege" or even "True Lies"--all of which have Middle Eastern villains--being green-lit by a studio now. "The only unorganized groups you can make as the enemy," Mr. Valenti says with a laugh, "would be the U.S. government, the police, the FBI and corporate America."
But the joke cuts both ways. If Hollywood has a PC problem with antagonists, it's got another problem with protagonists. In a movie about the war on terror, "Who's going to be the hero?" asks Lionel Chetwynd, the writer of "DC 9/11" and its producer. "The CIA? The government? Our government?"
"I mean, my goodness," he chuckles. "What an idea!"
When you stop to think about it, Chetwynd has a point. In post-Vietnam cinema, the government is almost never good, and when a government figure is heroic, as in "A Few Good Men," it's because he's a maverick fighting against a corrupt government establishment.
HYPERSENSITIVITY, however, is only one part of the story. Show business is another. "They don't believe terrorism sells," explains an old Hollywood hand. For a variety of reasons, it isn't clear that American audiences are ready to embrace war-on-terror movies. Robin Bronk, the executive director of the Creative Coalition, wonders whether it's because we already have saturation coverage from the cable news networks or because "we are still just too raw."
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