Attacks Prompt Writers to Choose Words Carefully

Few world events have ever affected Hollywood as immediately as those of Sept. 11, from the instant postponement of overly topical films to the total reassessment of years of development slates. A new kind of moral questioning seems to gnaw at even some of the most jaded studio executives, as they try to grapple with the question not only of what American audiences want, but what they would feel comfortable making.

For screenwriters, the question has even more immediacy. In Hollywood, they’re often on the front line of a changing culture. In today’s climate, they have to anticipate mercurial studio taste, while at the same time process the unsettling events as human beings and artists. Recently, The Times gathered a panel of seven top screenwriters--men and women whose films have not only earned billions of dollars, but constitute some of the prominent cultural artifacts of the last decade, from “Independence Day” to “The Lion King,” “Armageddon” to “Men in Black.”

Like most Americans, they were jittery. Jokes, about box cutters and pygmy-sized movie stars who might be dragooned into military service, were quickly followed by pleas to delete the humor from the record. Few brought answers, although many brought questions, and divisive opinion about whether the events of Sept. 11 and the new war against terrorism had irrevocably changed Hollywood, or was simply a momentary roadblock on the craven march to bigger box office.

Of the seven, John Ridley (“Three Kings”) was in New York when the planes hit and spent hours looking for a sister who worked next door to the towers but who emerged unscathed. Jonathan Hensleigh, who was a Wall Street lawyer before he wrote “Armageddon,” knew four people who died. Hensleigh, as well as Paul Attanasio (“Quiz Show”), writer-director Gary Ross (“Pleasantville”), Linda Woolverton (“The Lion King”), Ed Solomon (“Men in Black”), and writer-producer Dean Devlin (“Independence Day”) experienced the events on TV.

Four say they already have had projects significantly revamped, canceled or shelved indefinitely because of the terrorist attacks.

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Times: How have recent events directly affected your work life?

Devlin: There are three projects we were developing that went from the top of the list right into the file cabinet. It was like the next morning, and we walked to our development slate and went “Nope. Nope. Nope.”

Hensleigh: I’m working on a picture that already has a release date. I’ve had to alter some of the story line. It was for Disney. What I had suggested to the studio was that they make some of the bad guys members of the United States intelligence community. When this happened, I called up the studio executives and we went over it. I said, “I don’t think an actor will want to play this part, and I don’t think that Michael Eisner will want to make the movie.”

Times: There’s practically a genre of pictures where government operatives are the villains. Is that kind of picture viable now?

Ridley: I was doing a miniseries at ABC about Wen Ho Lee, which is a true story about this Asian American who was basically railroaded by the FBI. We were ready to go. After Sept. 11, it’s officially on hold but it’s basically dead because the story is: the FBI and government conspired against this guy, largely. The feeling is now even in real life, or in the approximation of real life--a docudrama--you can’t talk about how the government has done these bad things. It’s weird. I understand the need to support our country; at the same time, when something they really did to somebody is being muzzled, you’re walking a fine line.

Solomon: A lot of these are very temporary or temporal changes. Until the dust really settles, it’s really hard to tell what the long-term affects will be.

Ross: I think there have been some fundamental changes. I think before this event people were working cynically backwards from what the audience wanted. Basically, we would feed them sugar water and they would consume it. Now people have gotten in touch with things that are pretty fundamental about their belief systems and the depths of what they feel. And that’s definitely going to be reflected in the culture.

If you have a entire audience or marketplace who are feeling deeply, they may require us to feel deeply in the kind of movies we make.

Attanasio: It’s all about tone, which is why it’s hard to analyze, or why it’s hard for studio people to get a handle on it. I don’t think it is about subject matter. I think people will still go to a cop movie, but they’re going to want to see a cop movie that’s like “French Connection.” Jokey violence is going to be hard to sell.

Times: Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, proclaimed in the New York Times that irony was dead. Is that true?

Woolverton: I think that cynicism is dead, which I cheer for. I don’t know about irony.

Ridley: There are two parts to these events. One is the terrorist attack on America. Now we’re moving to the second level, which is the war. Now, there are things that should be and need to be said. I’m more concerned that [because] of the Sept. 11 attack, we’re all going to be shushed. That’s a bad thing because there are a lot of aspects to what’s happening. The fact that we bomb these people during the night and send them food during the day, it seems like an odd way to conduct war.

Attanasio: Now we’re bombing them during the day also.

Ridley: We’re trying to confuse them. The concept that we can sit in this room and have a discussion or joke about it, but Bill Maher can’t go on TV, is a little disconcerting. What’s frightening to me about our culture is not being able to say, “It’s horrible, but let’s talk about it.”

Solomon: That’s the value of irony and cynicism. It’s a kind of distancing mechanism, yet it allows you to put things in perspective. Certainly, people are not losing their senses of humor. In fact, I would argue a sense of humor is crucial these days. What’s really dead is smug self-referential solipsism.

Ridley: I think corporate marketing has grabbed on to these events. We watched football on Saturday. There was a commercial from GM. We’re not going to let anybody take our freedom away so we’re offering 0% financing. (Laughter from the panel.)

Attanasio: I think there’s a strong case that what Gary is talking about is 100% wishful thinking. And that nothing’s going to change.

Solomon: Yet how we go about our work is much different from how a studio goes about their work. The studio is struggling to figure out what people want. They were doing the same thing [before Sept. 11]. Now they’re just more confused. But we as writers, we just keep trying to tell stories. The world changes and we change with it.

Attanasio: If [the studios] are truly confused about what the public wants, then it will be a good thing. That was essentially the moment that the studios reached in the late ‘60s, and they kind of gave over the keys [to the artists] and you had a great flowering of film culture. Then they clamped down in 1977 and [said], “Now we know again what audiences want.” That has lasted for 24 years. So it would be wonderful if they really were confused.

Hensleigh: I think it’s definitely wishful thinking. I think the studios won’t be confused. They’ll look at what was successful this summer and duplicate it. And will continue to do so until it fails. I don’t think the studios are going to stand up and say, “We want deeper, more meaningful stories.”

Devlin: This is one of the few times where the fact that the studios are owned by conglomerates is actually a good thing. Now they’re concerned with their corporate image. They have a forced morality that’s tough for them.

Personally, for me, I think what we do is tell bedtime stories. Sometimes they’re deep and sometimes they’re fluff. It’s a service--not a very important service--but a service nonetheless. I think that during a time of great of duress, sometimes people want to take a two-hour break and go watch a movie.

Sometimes it’s to get this visceral release of seeing an action picture where they get to win, because they’re feeling oppressed because they don’t get to win. I was so shocked the week after the event when I looked at the video rentals--all the movies about terrorists were renting through the roof.

Times: Have events changed your view on the kind of terror you might put up on screen?

Ridley: The one thing I saw that I don’t think you get much in movies or television is the consequences of violence. You see the stunt men blown up and you cut away. You don’t see the people being pulled out of the rubble.

Ross: I think that our feeling of invulnerability as a culture has changed. People have a sense of their own mortality and fragility of life.

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Solomon: It’s exactly that sense of invulnerability that allowed for the glib expressions of violence. Violence as a punch line. Comedy is all context, and the context has changed. I don’t think people will find certain things as funny.

Hensleigh: There are a whole number of things that I would not put into films that I’ve put into films in the past. I’ve done violence as a punch line a number of times. Christ, look at my films. There’s a thing in “Die Hard [With a Vengeance]” where Bruce Willis shoots the terrorist [thief posing as a terrorist] in an ultra-violent way and then makes a joke about Santa Claus, and it was one of the big highlights of the films when it was exhibited. It got a big laugh. I don’t know if it would get the same laugh now, and I certainly wouldn’t write it into a film.

Woolverton: You could, however, walk into Michael Eisner and you pitch him an idea that involves themes we haven’t been able to touch in the last 10 years: patriotism, anything with Americana.

Hensleigh: What about “Pearl Harbor,” or the “Patriot”?

Devlin (who produced the “Patriot”): I wasn’t allowed to put a flag in the ad [for “The Patriot”]. Everyone was like, “Oh no, that’s a huge negative.”

Attanasio: Everyone ‘s talking about the Sept. 11 event like it’s over. I think that’s not at all true. We’re now on a wartime footing. It’s going to be years and years, and we’re going to feel different when we start seeing our guys having their heads cut off on CNN. If you look at the way life has changed in Israel, which has been under siege by terrorists for years, life there is really grim.

Devlin: I have this irrational need to resist the change. Part of me feels that every time I’m doing something differently, they’ve won. They’ve terrorized me. Part of me wants to say, “No. You’ve done a horrible thing and you’re not going to affect me.”

Woolverton: In terms of sea changes in the way I feel, I’ve been trying to get away from writing family films because I’m always cast there. Yet I feel this responsibility. I know my daughter, and other children, they don’t know how to feel safe. My daughter hasn’t slept in a month. She’s 10. Now I ‘m thinking: Why am I turning my back on the kind of thing I do really well, at a time that maybe I can give kids help?

Solomon: Personally, I feel as though I’ve been completely changed. I feel a a lot of things your daughter feels. Tell her to call me at 3 a.m. We’re up.

Ridley: I wish that I had been fundamentally changed by this event. But I was temporarily changed. My sister works [near the World Trade Center]. I was in New York. There were five or six hours where I couldn’t find my sister. When the tower collapsed, denial got put away and I said, well some member of my family is dead. For a couple of days I was a changed man. But I don’t think I would ever change that much. I look at what I started writing after this event--it’s my typical, dark, cynical, ironic storytelling. That’s what I do.

Times: Could you make a movie that deals with these events head-on?

Attanasio: You can do “Measure for Measure” with Osama bin Laden.

Devlin: I was filled with that desire to want to make a movie and I know I never could. Let’s face it. On that fourth plane, we want to know what actually happened there. Did they actually overthrow these guys? There’s the catharsis of being there with them and of doing something when nothing else could be done. At the same time, I wouldn’t make the movie because I’d be too worried about all the land mines.

Attanasio: “Black Hawk Down” is very similar to that.

Solomon: There have been some minor changes. It’s now “Black Hawk Up.” Very positive.

Ridley: “Third Watch” [of which he’s a producer] is a show about cops and firemen in New York. The person in charge wanted to do a show about that day. Everybody else was like, who cares about these fictional characters who aren’t going to die? Who wants to see the stars of our show, sitting around talking about their friends who don’t exist?

Several people quit over this. There was truly this feeling that we were trying to get ratings out of this horribly tragic event, and there were other people who were like, “Oh no, we’re going to really bring this home to America.” There’s nothing to be brought home anymore!