HBO Probes Limits of Restraint, Revelation in 9/11 ‘Memoriam’

Even HBO exercises restraint when it comes to some images from the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The network that built its reputation on a willingness to allow language and pictures that other networks won’t air has found some images too horrific for its Sunday documentary, “In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01.”

A final cut of the documentary, screened Monday evening in New York for a celebrity-filled crowd that included “The Sopranos” stars James Gandolfini and Lorraine Bracco, was missing some provocative images that were included in an earlier, unfinished version. Other images were significantly altered to be less shocking.

A picture of a bloody hand was a case in point. The still photo of the severed body part helped illustrate a larger picture that showed people running away, seemingly oblivious to what lay nearby. HBO had initially decided not to use the whole image, focusing only on the hand. But in internal screenings, “it began to be what everyone was talking about,” said Sheila Nevins, HBO’s executive vice president of original programming. At first, she said, “it seemed necessary, and then it seemed vulgar.” The hand was taken out of the film.

The one-hour film was culled from 1,000 hours of footage, including the work of 16 news organizations and more than 100 amateurs. It originated with Rudolph Giuliani, who brought the idea to producer Brad Grey as a project to record oral histories of the day as witnessed by the then-New York mayor and his staff. Their recollections are interspersed with the images, including one in which Giuliani covers his face after apparently watching someone jump or fall from a World Trade Center tower.

Giuliani said in an interview that the film, which he has seen four or five times, “gets worse each time I watch it. It’s more difficult for me to get through it each time,” particularly the reflections of his executive assistant, who lost her husband, a firefighter. Still, what’s on screen is “not nearly as horrifying as the actual event,” he said, calling it “a euphemistic version of the horror that occurred.”

Plenty of difficult images remain; some drew gasps from the premiere audience. Among them are video and still images of people who fell to their deaths, accompanied at one point by audio of a man admonishing the videographer to stop filming the grim scene. Whether the images are too strong, Giuliani said, is “a very individual choice people have to make.” But ultimately, he said, people have to face what happened. “As time goes by, people are going to forget the horror of this; people are already referring to it as a tragedy, but it was an attack,” he said, adding the images will help them remember.

Nevins pared the film’s content as successive screenings led her to believe that some scenes were just too much. The reactions depended on the personal experiences of the screeners, she said. But some gruesome scenes had to be left in, she added, or pictures of bystanders reacting wouldn’t make sense.

In some ways, HBO’s history shaped what Nevins chose to include. “Maybe there was a part of me that thought, ‘Everybody expects HBO to be vulgar, and I’d better step away from it,’” she said. “We’re just trying to be in the middle somewhere, as truthful as we could be at this time in history.... I don’t know who’s God when it comes to judging what’s appropriate. Everybody has a different level of reality.”

HBO’s film is only one of many about the day that have already been made or are in the works, from CBS’ film on the firefighters, which drew high ratings when it was broadcast in March, to Showtime’s films from student filmmakers and HBO’s previously aired “Telling Nicholas.”

Much of the attention will culminate in the days leading up to the one-year anniversary, when ABC News has already announced plans for a 7 a.m.-to-midnight retrospective. Still, Nevins said she doesn’t foresee such projects undermining one another.

“I think there can be hundreds of shows about this day,” she said.