Networks, Movies Cutting Images of New York Skyline

A few days after terrorists obliterated the World Trade Center, entertainment companies are scrambling to remove images of the iconic twin towers from television shows, commercials, video games and album covers.

From popular network shows such as “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and “Spin City” to the video game “Microsoft Flight Simulator,” producers are taking the rare step of purging scenes that include the skyscrapers.

“Right now you want to err on the side of sensitivity or oversensitivity,” said Kevin Brockman, senior vice president of entertainment communications at ABC. He said the network, like many others, is examining “any images that may exacerbate people’s feelings of sorrow or tension.”

That includes everything from long shots of the New York skyline to close-ups of the towers. And it’s not just episodes in production that are being edited. NBC has decided to delete scenes of the towers from reruns of at least two shows, “Friends” and “Law & Order: SVU.”

Some experts who study how media influence society fear that the changes are akin to Winston Smith’s sanitizing of the past in “1984.” It may be interpreted as “denying the history of America and New York,” said Stuart Fischoff, a professor of media psychology at Cal State L.A.

Others wonder whether attempts to prevent distress among viewers may have the opposite effect.

“Maybe the absence would be just as bad as the presence,” said Leo Braudy, professor of English and cultural history at USC.

Although rare, such editing has been done in the past. After President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the producers of the 1963 film “Charade” changed Audrey Hepburn’s line “at any moment we could be assassinated” to “at any moment we could be eliminated.”

Longtime film distribution executive Tom Sherak, now a partner with Revolution Studios, said scenes of explosions were routinely spliced from movie advertisements that aired shortly after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Only within the past decade have advances in Hollywood’s computer technology made it possible to easily cut an image as large as the World Trade Center and leave the rest of the scene intact.

By Friday, entertainment and advertising companies had already taken steps to excise such images.

DaimlerChrysler, for instance, is reediting a Jeep television commercial that showed the New York skyline with the World Trade Center towers. The commercial showed the company’s new Jeep Liberty sport utility vehicle climbing the Statue of Liberty. It is being reshot with a blue-sky background.

A print version of the ad with the skyline that includes the towers may be in some magazines distributed this week. The company was able to substitute the print ad in some magazines and is trying to determine which still have the intact New York skyline version. Future print versions will be changed.

TV Show Scenes Edited

On television, opening sequences of ABC shows “Spin City” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” are being edited to remove shots of the towers, Brockman said. Other shows are still being reviewed.

At NBC, the network edited out shots of the New York skyline from a “Friends” episode that was scheduled to air Thursday night, a spokesman said. The episode was preempted by news broadcasts.

A small record label, 75 Ark, said it halted the manufacture of the cover of a new album by hip-hop duo the Coup. The cover for the album, “Party Music,” shows the twin towers with explosions in the upper stories.

In a statement, the label said the original cover artwork “was created long before the tragic events of Sept. 11.” Although pictures of the cover had been distributed to press reviewers, label executives said the “physical cover of the album has never been printed.” Release of the album has been pushed back to November.

Microsoft Corp. on Friday said it would erase the World Trade Center from the skyline of its upcoming game, “Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002,” which is due out this fall.

“We just felt it was the appropriate thing to do at this time,” said Matt Pilla, a spokesman for the Redmond, Wash., software company. “We wanted to be considerate of people’s feelings, and we didn’t want to have an image in the game that would be upsetting for anyone.”

Introduced in 1985, Microsoft’s “Flight Simulator” series is so realistic that it is used to train pilots at the FlightSafety International Academy in Vero Beach, Fla., where suspects in Tuesday’s crashes took training. Students are required to log 27 hours on the game as part of their training, learning basic navigation and running checklists.

Meanwhile, Westwood Studios in Las Vegas pulled copies of its “Red Alert 2” war simulation game because the cover depicts the New York skyline engulfed in flames, including the World Trade Center.

“Although the package graphics were developed close to a year ago, in light of recent events they are inappropriate,” said Jeff Brown, spokesman for Electronic Arts Inc., which publishes the game. Electronic Arts offered to trade existing boxes with new packaging that will not include the New York skyline.

Brown said the company will not change the game itself, which involves battle within arenas modeled after real cities including New York, where players can destroy buildings and monuments.

“Consumers understand the distinction between entertainment and reality,” Brown said. “So we’re not going to go back and change the content of our games. Editing content retrospectively would be like Tom Clancy rewriting his books.”

Times staff writers James Bates, Jeff Leeds and Reuters news service contributed to this report.