ABC Stands By Its 9/11 Story -- Almost

Walt Disney Co.’s ABC is forging ahead with plans to air a miniseries starting Sunday despite controversy over its efforts to dramatize -- and some say unfairly politicize -- the events leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Producers said late Friday that they had finished making minor edits to “The Path to 9/11” amid a firestorm of protests from leading Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who warned that telecasting “right-wing political propaganda” might violate the terms of ABC’s government-mandated broadcast license.

Critics say that, among other things, the film fabricates scenes and unfairly blames the Clinton administration for failing to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The network, for its part, has urged critics to withhold judgment until the final version airs.

Whatever viewers ultimately see, it’s clear that the five-hour $40-million docudrama, highlighting years of intelligence failures and political bickering before the attacks, has detonated an election-year bomb that’s reverberating from Hollywood to Capitol Hill.

The movie is also threatening the bipartisan work of the Sept. 11 commission, whose Republican chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, served as a paid consultant on the project and has played a key role in ABC’s public-relations campaign.

At least two other commission members -- former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste and Jamie S. Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general under President Clinton -- have vehemently criticized the miniseries project. And two former Clinton officials, Madeleine Albright and Samuel “Sandy” Berger, expressed dismay with Kean’s involvement. Clinton spokesman Jay Carson called ABC’s actions “despicable” and said the film was “indisputably wrong.”

Kean, in an interview Friday, continued to defend the movie as a “first-class project,” adding that although the filmmakers took the recent criticisms seriously and made adjustments when warranted, much of the hostile reaction was political grandstanding from partisans who had seen little if any of the film. “That’s the blogosphere, frankly,” Kean said of the controversy.

The situation was further complicated Friday, when ABC and other networks agreed to carry live a 15-minute speech from President Bush on Monday night, the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. This speech will air at 9 p.m. Eastern time, forcing ABC to interrupt Part 2 of the miniseries in many markets, including New York and Chicago.

The sharp partisan divide over the miniseries has been seized upon in recent days by radio talk show hosts, bloggers, columnists and the like, so much so that the rancor has largely overshadowed the film’s critical reception, which has been mixed.

The flap also underscores the challenges docudramas face in such a hyper-politicized environment. In 2003, supporters of President Reagan were incensed by a CBS movie that fictionalized scenes and put words into Reagan’s mouth. CBS yanked “The Reagans” before its airdate and moved it to a much-less-watched sister network, the pay cable outlet Showtime.

Indeed, many conservatives have complained that Democrats have a selective memory. They point out that Democrats seemed unconcerned about Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which pilloried the Bush administration for its response to the terrorist attacks. (Then-Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner, saying he wanted the company to avoid political controversy, declined to release that film; it obtained another distributor.) Conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh recently labeled Clinton and Democrats as “just a bunch of thin-skinned bullies now trying to pressure ABC.”

When ABC announced “Path to 9/11” last summer, executives seemed to expect a groundbreaking movie that could garner high ratings, even if they did not anticipate the political uproar.

Steve McPherson, the network’s entertainment chief, compared the project to ABC’s 1983 TV movie “The Day After,” which examined the aftermath of a nuclear strike in middle America. “That was such an important movie for a lot of people, and it wasn’t about entertainment,” McPherson told the trade paper Daily Variety. “It was about putting out a message, and this [‘Path to 9/11’] falls into the vein of things you do because you think they can be valuable.”

But the network may have at least inadvertently politicized the Sept. 11 film by hiring writer-producer Cyrus Nowrasteh, a politically conservative Iranian American Muslim.

In an interview last month with FrontPage Magazine, Nowrasteh, whose writing credentials include TNT’s acclaimed miniseries “Into the West,” said the ABC film would be unsparing in its view of anti-terrorism during the Clinton years. “The 9/11 report details the Clinton’s administration’s response -- or lack of response -- to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests,” Nowrasteh said. “The worst example is the response to the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen where 17 American sailors were killed. There simply was no response. Nothing.”

Former Clinton aides have disputed Nowrasteh’s characterization of the report and the administration’s reaction to the Cole bombing.

An Aug. 23 screening of the ABC miniseries at the National Press Club in Washington proved a turning point. More than 200 people attended, including Kean, the producers and many family members of Sept. 11 victims. The producers showed only the first half, and a DVD of the entire film was given to guests on the way out. Al Felzenberg, press secretary for the Sept. 11 commission, said that afterward there was “a lot of emotion in the room.” “It was very gripping,” he added.

Others were outraged.

“There were significant deviations from our report,” said Ben-Veniste, who attended the event. During a question-and-answer period after the screening, he added, “I questioned why ABC would fictionalize events that were set forth with great care. We didn’t get satisfactory answers.”

By the middle of this week, Democratic protests clustered around two main areas. The film, they said, falsely claims that former national security advisor Berger and former Secretary of State Albright blocked CIA and military efforts to kill Bin Laden in the late 1990s.

Moreover, critics say, “Path to 9/11” is wrong to suggest that Clinton was too preoccupied with the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal to focus on combating terrorism.

Because ABC has apparently made many edits to the film in recent weeks, it’s impossible to say how much if any of this material will survive in the version that is to air Sunday and Monday.

But Leo Braudy, a professor and cultural historian at USC, said he believed the dust-up stemmed from the fact that “there is no narrative that everyone accepts about 9/11.”

“The 9/11 commission comes out with one narrative, which no one reads. Then movies take a piece of it -- there’s ‘United 93’ and ‘World Trade Center.’ The Bush administration is pushing its own narrative of the meaning of 9/11 as justification for its policies. And now a miniseries comes into being that creates a narrative in a semi-documentary, fictionalized manner, which is very persuasive.

“Suddenly people who felt they know what really happened are being preempted by this fiction. Naturally they are going to be upset about it,” he said. “Narrative creates closure.”

Braudy wonders whether Americans are ready to see movies on the terrorist attacks: “I don’t think we have enough historical distance.”

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scott.collins@latimes.com

tina.daunt@latimes.com

Times staff writer Johanna Neuman in Washington contributed to this report. Collins writes the Channel Island blog and column.