Hollywood Shakes Off Fear of Terror Images

Is America ready to find terrorism entertaining again?

“The Sum of All Fears,” a political thriller in which the nation and its leaders are caught off guard by a terrorist attack, opens this month, the first film to be released since Sept. 11 to deal so explicitly with the sort of national trauma experienced that day.

Paramount Pictures made the $68-million movie before the attacks, but now it must sell it to the public, and the studio is trying to establish the film’s patriotic credibility by using Washington as a launching pad.

Wednesday night, many of the same worried lawmakers who eight months ago stood on the Capitol steps singing “God Bless America” will walk up the red carpet at the Warner Theater for the premiere of a film that shows massive destruction, scenes of widespread panic and images of a president flying aboard the National Airborne Command Center in the midst of an international crisis.

Paramount, mindful to avoid the impression that it is capitalizing on the Sept. 11 tragedy, has taken pains to publicize the high level of support it received from the Pentagon, which supplied Marines and helicopters for the production. The studio is marketing the film, based on the best-selling 1991 Tom Clancy novel, as a race against the clock to prevent a nuclear disaster, with patriotic overtones.

As a sign of how much has changed since Sept. 11, the Motion Picture Assn. of America applied new standards it established for its “disaster images” category to the PG-13-rated film. Jack Valenti, the MPAA head who serves as an industry lobbyist in Washington, said TV news footage of hijacked passenger planes flying into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York altered the industry’s rating standards: “Ten-year-olds must have seen those planes hitting the towers a hundred times, and bombs and violence are all over the news from the Middle East. The movies can’t be tougher than television.”

Paramount is not the only studio rolling the dice this summer and placing a big bet that moviegoers will flock to terrorism-themed films. A week after “The Sum of All Fears” makes its bow, Disney will release “Bad Company,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock. That plot revolves around terrorists planting a nuclear device in New York City’s Grand Central Station. This fall, viewers of Fox TV’s “24” will see a real-time story line about terrorism. “We won’t shy away from the idea that something like 9/11 might happen,” said Joel Surnow, who produces the action drama.

Immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, studios postponed the release of movies like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Collateral Damage,” which depicted a firefighter hunting down South American terrorists who had killed his family in a bomb blast, and the comedy “Big Trouble,” whose story line centered on smuggling an atomic bomb onto a passenger jet.

For the most part, initial post-Sept. 11 concerns about public reaction to those films were overblown; if viewers stayed away from “Collateral Damage” (and they did, generally), it was attributed to the movie itself and not to any shift in the national tolerance for big-screen violence.

“The Sum of All Fears” may be different. It goes far more directly to the events, fears and images of the attacks, and it does so within the context of an extremely profitable series of adaptations of Clancy books. This time around, Ben Affleck plays CIA analyst Jack Ryan. When Harrison Ford played the part of an older Jack Ryan, 1992’s “Patriot Games” grossed more than $173 million worldwide, and 1994’s “Clear and Present Danger” pulled in more than $212 million. When “The Sum of All Fears” is released nationwide May 31, what moviegoers may find most disturbing are images of hospital windows being blown out, Marines pulling a bleeding president from his motorcade, fans at the Super Bowl cheering only moments before coming under deadly attack and a U.S. city being nearly devastated.

The movie’s villains are European-based neo-Nazis who try to ignite a nuclear war between the United States and Russia by planting an atomic bomb in Baltimore. Affleck’s character tries to alert the president as the commander in chief prepares to launch nuclear missiles at Russia. Studio executives say they have removed most of the gore and violence that was in early drafts, but the film clearly is meant to rattle audiences.

“I sat ... in a panic, arms outreached toward the screen, mouth wide open,” one amateur online reviewer wrote after seeing the film recently.

Others already know they don’t want to put themselves in the position of watching fictionalized violence. Paula Pluta watched United Airlines Flight 93 drop out of the sky Sept. 11 and crash into trees about 1,000 yards from her home near Shanksville, Pa. The 40 passengers and crew aboard died along with the four hijackers, and though Pluta knows some people might find a film about terrorism entertaining, she will take a pass on “The Sum of All Fears” or any movie in the near future that focuses on violence against civilians.

“I couldn’t go to a theater and watch a movie on terrorism because of the effect the crash had on me,” she said. “I don’t want to go through it again, in real life or in the movies.”

Hollywood has a long and contradictory history of dealing with current events, sometimes mirroring them closely and at other times offering escape by “cranking out musicals and comedies, anything but war films,” said film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, curator of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum.

“It will be interesting to see what happens to this film,” Horak said. “We may just be too close to it still.”

Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, believes that “people are walking on eggs in the creative community, and they’re trying to be sensitive, but I don’t think there’s a blanket prohibition on portraying terrorism.”

Bernard F. Dick, a professor of communications and English at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and the author of a 1985 book about Hollywood’s World War II films, thinks “The Sum of All Fears” could be a tough sell.

“The scars on the collective psyche are never going to heal,” he said. “I’ve been down to ground zero [the World Trade Center site]. It’s a very sobering sight.”

Yet instead of shying away from the Washington area, where 189 people died in the attack on the Pentagon, Paramount chose to turn the capital into a showcase for the movie.

Wednesday’s premiere, which will be attended by members of both major political parties, takes place against a backdrop of executive branch intrigue, with revelations that President Bush received warnings in August about airliners possibly being hijacked by operatives of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network. Democrats have criticized the White House for not alerting the public, and their words are the first crack in the facade of political bipartisanship over the terrorism issue in Washington since Sept. 11.

Though it’s not uncommon for films deemed to have Beltway appeal to premiere there--1995’s “The American President” and last year’s “Black Hawk Down” among them--this movie has an unusually disturbing story line for a Washington audience.

Paramount studio chief Sherry Lansing, who took a key role in mustering a group devoted to Hollywood-Washington collaboration after Sept. 11, has assembled a bipartisan political and military audience to view the film Wednesday. It first will screen today for a small gathering of the national press corps at MPAA headquarters, where it will be introduced by Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.).

“He sees the movie as entertainment,” Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher said. “But as things work their way into the culture of American life, Americans need to be continually aware of the possibilities of new attacks.”

Then, on Wednesday, an audience including the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretaries of the Navy and Air Force is confirmed for the Washington premiere. Also attending will be Lansing, who, along with Valenti, led a coalition after Sept. 11 that sought to brainstorm about what pro-U.S. movie and TV projects Hollywood could develop.

The group included the heads of every major television network and movie studio, as well as Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political advisor. Some raised concerns that a cozy relationship between Hollywood and the White House would foster a climate of propaganda, but the coalition’s mission has amounted to distributing pro-U.S. films to troops overseas and their families, and presenting USO shows.

Lansing said “The Sum of All Fears” would have been provocative even before the terrorist strikes of last fall. “I think the film would have been upsetting at any time,” she said. “It was relevant before 9/11, and I think now it has even more relevance.”

Phil Alden Robinson said he exercised restraint in directing the picture, favoring “implied” violence rather than straight-on gore, and had the script changed to allow the character of the president to survive. “There are no bodies in this movie. This movie is not about an act of violence; it was about a response to it.”

The filmmakers say they haven’t had walkouts in test screenings, where they claim an “overwhelmingly positive” response from viewers.

But producer Mace Neufeld, who also produced the earlier Clancy films, said the Washington crowd could be another matter. “I think it will be our toughest audience.”

“What we are trying not to do is sensationalize,” added studio vice chairman Robert Friedman. “We are not trying to exploit in any way, shape or form the sad events of 9/11.”