Changed Forever? No, Two Months

If you drove past 20th Century Fox in October, you might have seen the giant billboard at the entrance to the studio that showed two firemen raising the American flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center.

But the billboard’s been painted over--it now touts the Farrelly brothers comedy “Shallow Hal.” Last week “Extra” opened with the breathless teaser: “Brad Pitt: Bare Chested and Baring His Soul!” Variety was crammed with tales of Harry Potter mania and Jennifer Lopez casting news. My phone has been ringing off the hook with studio marketers touting their films’ Oscar chances while bad-mouthing their rivals’ movies.

Whew! Hollywood is back to normal again.

Or is it?

Like the news media and Madison Avenue--in fact, like the country itself--the movie industry has been wrestling with a tangle of conflicting currents and mixed messages. People go to movies to escape! Patriotism sells! Go have fun! Be alert for terrorists! Nothing has changed! Everything has changed! Even studio marketing experts, who make a living out of figuring out audience tastes, have had a hard time reading the national mood.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the media made their customary rush to judgment, pronouncing the world of entertainment forever altered, led by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s much-quoted proclamation, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.”

Movies about terrorism were yanked from studio production slates. “America the Beautiful” was sung everywhere from baseball parks to the Broadway stage of “The Producers.” MTV’s “Total Request Live” host Carson Daly donned an FDNY cap and the video network aired a celebrity-filled special on the terrorist attacks. The hush of patriotic sobriety hung in the air. Dan Rather held David Letterman’s hand and wept. Sly Stallone, Al Pacino and Adam Sandler manned the phones, taking donations during the “America: A Tribute to Heroes” telethon.

After the terrorist attacks, conventional wisdom held that audiences would shun entertainment laden with violence, snarkiness or any other pre-Sept. 11 frivolity. Smart-aleck cynicism was out. Self-searching was in. As it turned out, the country was simply going through a period of national grieving. Innocent people had died, and a war against terrorism had begun. But even mourners eventually get on with their lives. The show must go on. As George Bush said at the end of September: “Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life.”

In Hollywood, you could almost hear a sigh of relief. (The day after Bush’s speech, Michael Eisner sent out a gleeful e-mail to Disney staffers calling the president “our newest cheerleader.”) People were going to the movies again. In fact, the fall box-office numbers are significantly over last year’s, with the business on track for a record year. Moreover, people are going to exactly the same kind of movies they went to before the terrorist attacks.

Hollywood market research guru Joe Farrell polled moviegoers after the terrorist attacks and found that their movie preferences hadn’t changed. Soon the same studios that were postponing terrorist films in September were moving up military films like “Behind Enemy Lines” and “Black Hawk Down.” Fox, which made “Behind Enemy Lines,” test-screened the film last month to gauge audience receptivity. The movie, which had been tested before Sept. 11, did even better the second time around.

“Training Day,” a violent thriller about a corrupt L.A. cop, will end up being a $75-million hit. Audiences have also flocked to see family fare (“Monsters, Inc.”), sentimental sci-fi drama (“K-PAX”) and romantic comedy (“Serendipity”). The true sign that the industry’s heart-tugging, we’re-all-in-this-togetherness was over: When MGM blamed the poor opening of “Bandits” on older moviegoers staying home to watch anthrax-scare news coverage, studio rivals hooted with derision.

After a much-publicized FBI warning, studio lots have heightened security, but it’s hard to find anyone who still believes in the “Hollywood is forever changed” rhetoric that made the rounds in the emotion-charged days immediately after Sept. 11. As USA Television chief David Kissinger, in a rare display of executive candor, told the New York Times: “People need to be excused for anything we said.... We were blithering, terror-stricken and shocked, and we shouldn’t be held accountable for much of what we said.”

The truth is that when times are bad, people find solace in going to the movies. Hollywood broke box-office records during the Depression, and it hit new attendance highs during World War II. Think of it this way: Did the terrorist attacks prompt you to start wearing different clothes or stop eating at your favorite restaurant? Movies are a visceral experience, not an intellectual pastime, or more of us would have gone to see “Pollock” instead of “The Mummy Returns.”

As a culture, our entertainment tastes are too deeply ingrained to be altered by one cataclysmic event. Like it or not, the visceral kick of action-hero exploits has become part of our collective pop subconscious. Is it any wonder that some New Yorkers, asked to describe the first moments of the World Trade Center attack, said it was like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie?

This doesn’t mean that change won’t occur at deeper levels than weekend box-office accounting. I’ve talked to screenwriters who are eager to tell stories with more substance. But they still have to persuade someone to make them. If you’re an executive in Hollywood, part of your job is to keep your ear to the ground--it’s good business to give customers what they want. The difference is that the movie industry’s customers aren’t only in Denver and Des Moines. They’re in Berlin, Tokyo and Bogota. “The Mummy,” which did $155 million in domestic box-office, took in $257 million overseas. Movies have become a global, one-size-fits-all business.

That’s one reason not to expect a lot of movies to deal directly with home-front themes, since moviegoers in Madrid and Mexico City, to say nothing of Cairo or Jakarta, view the terrorist attacks and our military response in a very different light than people in Syracuse or Sacramento. Most of the current studio ideas fit pretty neatly into the action-adventure mold, focusing on projects where the heroes could be the metaphoric equivalent of the courageous New York firemen or the passengers of United Flight 93 who apparently overwhelmed the hijackers, preventing untold more destruction.

A week after the terrorist attacks, Disney’s Eisner went over his development slate with his top executives. The discussion turned to “The Alamo,” the stirring saga of a band of outnumbered Texans who fought to the death against a massive Mexican army. The project had been plodding along, but Eis-ner urged immediate action, wanting to know if the movie could be in theaters next summer. It won’t happen that quickly, but Eisner’s enthusiasm put the movie on a fast track: The studio has hired John Sayles to rewrite the script, with Ron Howard on board to direct.

Even though the film is set in 1836, the events seem very relevant today. “It’s not about patriotism so much as about individuals who take a stand,” says Brian Grazer, the film’s producer. “It’s about how Americans struggled to survive. You could say it reminds us of who we are.”

Writers who’ve been in meetings with top Warner Bros. production executives say the studio is looking for a modern-day “Rambo” saga, believing the country is eager to see a hero triumph over great adversity. I had lunch with another studio production chief last week who said he’d like to see a new “Dirty Harry-type” hero, believing that moviegoers today have a thirst for a revenge fantasy where good triumphs over evil.

These projects wouldn’t arrive until 2003. Hollywood is still busy making films that were put into motion long before Sept. 11. The movie business, sad to say, rarely reflects our culture’s transforming events, in part because studios are largely focused on creating easily digestible franchise movies, in part because there’s usually a two-year lag between a film’s origin and its arrival in theaters.

So don’t expect much urgent reflection from Hollywood. The studio lots may be full of SUVs flying American flags, but the movies that’ll pay the bills next year are “Spiderman,” “The Scorpion King” and “Star Wars Episode II: The Attack of the Clones.” Even in our new Age of Anthrax, escapism is still king.

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The Big Picture runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.