More Than the Heat of Battle

Calendar asked Mark Bowden, the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who wrote the book on which the film “Black Hawk Down” is based, to write about his maiden experience with the Hollywood machine. Bowden is working on a screenplay based on his latest book, “Killing Pablo,” about the U.S.-assisted campaign to track down and kill Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and a new book about the Iran hostage crisis.

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I first met Jerry Bruckheimer in his Santa Monica office in January 1998. He sat behind a polished wooden desk long enough to make a good start on a bowling lane. A huge German shepherd prowled the office, and before me on the desk was a collection of colorful, expensive fountain pens.

He is a small, slender, precise man who usually dresses in dark colors. He was warmly unpretentious (despite the office). I knew of him, of course. He was the impresario of loud, upbeat, visually spectacular box-office behemoths like “Top Gun” and “The Rock,” movies that were like super comic books, and since I’d loved comic books from an early age, I’d always enjoyed them. I had just finished my book “Black Hawk Down,” which was in all but superficial ways the opposite of a Bruckheimer film. While it certainly had a lot of noise, violence and confusion, the book was serious, dark and disturbing.

Bruckheimer told me he thought this was an important story. It was something of a departure for him, he said, but in some ways it built on his strengths and experience. He told me he really wanted to make the movie, and wanted me to stay involved from beginning to end. Though I had contracted to write an original adaptation, Bruckheimer warned me that “five or six” screenwriters would ultimately work on the project, so I should not become too protective of my own version. With his help and encouragement, I did produce a script, but the bulk of the task ultimately fell to Ken Nolan.

I found him to be a young man with boundless enthusiasm and obsessive work habits. I prefer to write on a regular schedule, usually before the keyboard for several hours each morning. Nolan is a procrastinator. He will agonize over a project for weeks without writing a word, then lock himself in his office, put on movie music to set the mood, and write in a marathon burst of energy, often through several nights and days. Nolan was one of those stealth successes, writers who make a good living but whose scripts never seem to actually become films.

“Mark, this one is going to actually get made,” he told me when we first met. “I’m so excited--honest to God--if they want me to write flying monkeys into it, I’ll do it.”

He was kidding. Working from a copy of my book that he eventually turned black with fingerprints, underlining and notations, Nolan produced a script that was far more faithful to it than my script had been.

In the years since, true to Bruckheimer’s word, the script went through many drafts. It was reworked by Oscar-winning screenwriters Steve Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) and Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”). Prize-winning playwright-actor Sam Shepard, who in the film plays the American commander, Maj. Gen. William F. Garrison, reworked some of the scenes, and director Ridley Scott even resurrected some of the scenes and dialogue from my original, but the script has remained primarily Nolan’s.

We talked often by phone. We teased each other about what might happen if we actually reached for one of the fancy fountain pens in Bruckheimer’s office--”I think that’s why he keeps the dog,” Nolan said.

It was from Nolan that I first learned Scott was considering directing the film. The screenwriter lives in a house directly behind the acclaimed director, so on the day his script was delivered, Nolan could actually watch as the messenger knocked on Scott’s door and the director accepted the package.

“Ridley Scott was in the doorway holding my script in his hands,” Nolan told me on the phone that night. That the director of “Blade Runner,” “Alien,” “Thelma & Louise” and “Gladiator” might make our film seemed too good to be true. I own only about 30 films on DVD, and the four listed above are among them.

I met him in Bruckheimer’s office in September 2000. He was a fit man with a pink complexion, a short-cropped gray beard and an ever-present, massive Cuban cigar. Gruff, blunt, unassuming, profane and a delightful raconteur, Scott entertained us with stories of his travels and moviemaking, and peppered me with questions about the battle itself. Why were U.S. soldiers in Somalia? What was Aidid like? Garrison? How badly destroyed was Somalia? How did the mission get so bollixed up? He spent the better part of a weekend chewing me like the end of one of his cigars.

Scott had read my screenplay for the film and wanted to resurrect some of the scenes I had written with Somali characters. We all agreed that the movie, like the book, was primarily a story about American soldiers told through their eyes, but Scott was determined to convey that the enemy they faced that day was sophisticated and smart, and had legitimate motivations of its own.

On my next trip to L.A., just two months later, Scott had already picked a neighborhood in Rabat, Morocco, in which to shoot the film, and his art director, Arthur Max, was already constructing models of the sets--”The biggest part of directing is being able to make decisions,” Scott says.

They were ready to shoot the film just four months after that. I visited the set in April, when the Defense Department delivered on its promise to deploy real Army Rangers and pilots from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment to assist with stunts. I had spent years working to re-create in words the raid these units had made on the target house in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, and I had a vivid picture of it in my mind.

In Morocco I was able for the first time to actually witness it, the AH-6 Little Birds sweeping suddenly over a crowded street, a warning rattle of machine guns and the crowds fleeing in panic, the choppers dropping right down to the street, kicking up great storms of dust, the Delta operators leaping off benches into action. Then the bigger, more powerful Black Hawks moving in behind them, ropes dropping from the sides through the cyclone of dust, and Rangers roping suddenly to the street. It was just as I had imagined it, only much more sudden, violent and loud.

What viewers will see in the film is without question the most authentic depiction of modern soldiering ever filmed. The story adheres closely to the actual events of Oct. 3, 1993, when a task force of 160 Army Rangers and Delta Force operators sprung the raid. It shows how the force was slowed when a young Ranger lost his grip and plunged 70 feet to the dirt street, sustaining severe injuries, and how the delay gave a rallying Somali militia the time to amass in sufficient force to pin down the assaulters and shoot down two of their helicopters.

On the set in Morocco, in addition to an official Defense Department liaison officer, Bruckheimer hired two former Army officers who had served as commanders during the battle itself, Air Cmdr. Lt. Col. Tom Matthews and Delta Force Lt. Col. Lee Van Arsdale. Most of the military stunts performed in the film, from flying choppers to roping Rangers, were performed by actual members of those Army units--in some instances soldiers who had fought in the battle themselves.By the end, my own role in the project was reduced to that of gaping with wonder. As I drove to the set each day, I passed thousands of Somali extras lining up for their daily breakfast and pay. A huge swath of Rabat was cordoned off as if under military assault.

On the set, hundreds of crew members raced around intently, moving people into position, getting lights, cameras, microphones, smoke machines, wind machines and other tools of their trade in place, while actors Tom Sizemore, Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Jason Isaacs, Ewan McGregor and others lounged in the shadows, awaiting their few moments on camera that day.

For me, it was all a little hard to believe. I wandered from set to set, sometimes with Bruckheimer, who was busy shooting still photos of the various scenes. Scott coordinated all of the activity from a moving headquarters, sometimes inside a tent, sometimes in a garage off the main streets, sitting before an array of a dozen monitors, puffing his cigar, and orchestrating the placement and composition on every camera for every shot, as calm and self-assured as a factory foreman supervising a daily run of widgets.

I left the set well before shooting was finished. Once or twice over the summer, Scott’s office called to ask me to add a few lines of dialogue to key scenes, usually those dealing with the Somali characters or those where Maj. Gen. Garrison provides an occasional overview of the chaotic proceedings. Nolan was rewriting the same scenes. Scott would then mix and match from the various drafts, looking for just the right lines to flesh out the action.

I saw the film for the first time on Oct. 3, coincidentally on the eighth anniversary of the battle. Scott, Bruckheimer, executive producers Chad Oman and Mike Stenson and I sat with Joe Roth and other Revolution Studios executives in their screening room. At the end, Roth stood up and said, in so many words, “I think we ought to bring this out sooner rather than later.”

Scott has continued to tinker with the movie. For such an established director, he is surprisingly open to reactions and suggestions. He showed me a sequence of scenes days before I saw the whole movie, and, chatting with him about them afterward, I said I thought it might be interesting to reverse the order--it might have more impact. Scott promptly asked his editor, Pietro Scalia, to try it. We watched again, and Scott announced that he liked the reversed scenes better. I was alarmed. I thought, don’t listen to me, you’re Ridley Scott.

The film had been all but finished by Sept. 11, when the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon so dramatically altered the political context for stories about the U.S. military. Scott and Bruckheimer have wrestled with a text crawl at the end of the film, tying the events of October 1993 with what is happening today--the same units involved in the battle of Mogadishu are now fighting in Afghanistan. We all felt--I had written about this in the epilogue to the book--that the Mogadishu battle had prompted not just a sudden end to the mission in Somalia, but a withdrawal of American military force from the world.

The world had paid a terrible price for that, in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. Even the Sept. 11 attacks were connected, in that the Clinton administration had not forcefully enough gone after Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda after the 1999 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

For some of the early screenings, the film included text at the end that drew the connection quite literally. We all decided, finally, to delete the lines. It was better to leave such connections to the viewers’ imagination.

Ultimately, “Black Hawk Down” is a story about combat. It is about soldiers at war, any war, anywhere, anytime. Ending the film with such a stark political message was out of sync with the spirit of the project--both book and film.

For me, the project has been nothing short of astonishing. Few things could feel more satisfying than to witness so many talented people, so much intelligence and energy, invested in a project that, for me, began with an idea in my kitchen in rural Pennsylvania six years ago. The experience has been lucrative, creatively rewarding and it has given me more opportunities to work in Hollywood. To some extent it has demystified the process of filmmaking.

But I still haven’t completely shaken the voice inside my head that reminds me from time to time, with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a true fan, “You’re sitting here working on scenes with Jerry Bruckheimer and Ridley Scott.” I hope it doesn’t show too much, but I hope I never lose it.