School Shootings Examined in Films Born of Anguish

Hollywood’s infatuation with firearms is getting a dramatic twist in two new films--a documentary feature and a cable TV drama--that attempt to tarnish the titillating appeal of guns in American culture by examining the phenomenon of school shootings.

It remains to be seen whether Michael Moore’s documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” which opens Friday in Los Angeles and New York, and Showtime’s “Bang Bang You’re Dead,” which premieres Sunday, draw large audiences. But both projects enjoyed a remarkably smooth and swift path to production and distribution, in large part because of executives’ strong support of their anti-gun-violence message.

“Bang Bang You’re Dead” is built around William Mastrosimone’s 40-minute play that has been downloaded by 100,000 schools across the globe since it was posted on the Internet in 1999. In the play, a student gunman is revisited by the ghosts of his victims, forcing him to confront the consequences of his rage.

In the fall of 2000, Showtime’s president of programming, Jerry Offsay, gave the green light to Mastrosimone’s proposal to embed his small but popular stage production in a feature-length drama.

Mastrosimone created a depressed protagonist named Trevor who had threatened to gun down the football team the previous year and who returns to school an outcast. His only friend is the drama teacher, played by Tom Cavanaugh (NBC’s “Ed”), who casts Trevor as the lead in the school play, “Bang Bang You’re Dead.” Through daily rehearsals, Trevor, who is played by the pasty-faced Ben Foster, must reintegrate himself into school while coming to grips with his past desire for vengeance.

Trevor’s behavior and Foster’s physical appearance bring to mind Kip Kinkel, the 15-year-old student from Thurston High School in Springfield, Ore., who killed his parents in May 1998 and then took his .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle to school, where he killed two students and wounded 24 other people. Kinkel is now serving a 112-year prison sentence. The resemblance is no coincidence, because it was Kinkel’s rampage that brought the issue of gun control into Mastrosimone’s home.

A few days after the attack, Mastrosimone’s son came home and reported that a classmate had written on the blackboard, “I’m going to kill everyone in this class. And the teacher too.” Mastrosimone, 55, wrote “Bang Bang You’re Dead” that night, keeping in mind the limitations of a school drama department budget. The play can be performed with 11 actors, almost no costumes and few props. He was planning to mail it to the drama teachers at his son’s school and the one at Thurston High in Oregon, but his assistant, who was Internet savvy, persuaded Mastrosimone to post it on the Internet, where it immediately got thousands of hits.

“This is a mission I did as a parent, not as a screenwriter,” says Mastrosimone, who was nominated for an Emmy for 1994’s “The Burning Season.”

“I really feel that these are not psychotics. I feel the media has been hasty in branding them,” Mastrosimone says. “They’re normal kids who have been pushed to their limits, pushed to fantasize about trying to get back.”

Like Mastrosimone’s play, Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” was informed by a school shooting. It was April 1999, and Moore walked into his office to see his employees gathered around a TV watching coverage of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Two student gunmen killed 12 students and a teacher and then turned the guns on themselves.

“My first thought was not to make a movie but to run against Charlton Heston as head of the NRA,” Moore says, referring to the National Rifle Assn., which Heston has headed since 1998, “but that sounded like too much work.”

Moore is a lifelong gun user and a member of the NRA, but he is at odds with the culture of fear he says both the government and the NRA have cultivated. The film climaxes when Moore accompanies two students who were disabled by gunshot wounds at Columbine to the corporate headquarters of K-Mart; the shooters had purchases their bullets at their local K-Mart. The encounter yields surprising results.

“Bowling for Columbine” (named because the two student gunmen went to the local bowling lanes before heading to school) was made with $2.2 million from a Canadian film company, and Moore insists that despite its heavy message, his goal was to make it entertaining.

“If I just wanted to make a political statement, I’d run for political office. I’m a filmmaker,” he says. But then, as befits his reputation as a provocateur, he notes, “If I only reach the people who believe in what I’m saying, then I’m OK, because they’re the majority. Every poll shows that. Every poll shows that people believe in gun control.”

Mastrosimone says his goal in penning “Bang Bang You’re Dead” was to get a message to the most troubled students in the audience and possibly prevent future violence. “I aimed it at a person contemplating murder,” Mastrosimone says. “I did that by having a person in the first scene bragging about the people he killed, so anyone in the audience [who was thinking the same thoughts] would immediately identify with him.”

His film comes with loads of parental advisories, but the network also put together a study guide for schools, which was endorsed by the Assn. of School Psychologists. On Thursday, Showtime and the National Education Assn. are screening the film in Washington, D.C., for educators and high school students.

“We have a problem, whether or not there are guns accessible to those terribly damaged kids who feel that they have no recourse but to lash out against their cohorts in that way,” Showtime’s Offsay says. “I am anti-gun. But to say this is a movie about anti-gun-violence simplifies it far too much.”

Immediately following Sunday’s television premiere of “Bang Bang You’re Dead,” Showtime will broadcast a panel discussion on preventing school violence hosted by journalist Linda Ellerbee. Also in attendance will be Mastrosimone and William S. Pollock, assistant professor of clinical psychology at Harvard Medical School.

While Mastrosimone’s project is based on real events, “Bowling for Columbine” is a mosaic of facts coupled with Moore’s highly subjective explanations of the causes for epidemic gun violence.

“The Canadians have this ethic to help people,” Moore says. “Our ethic is every man for himself. If you’re poor, we’re going to punish you for being poor. This creates a lot of violence.”

But the NRA doesn’t see it that way. Organization spokesman Andrew Arulanandam accuses Moore of “trying to inject himself into the political process.”

“To that I would say that Michael Moore is politically insignificant,” Arulanandam says.

Regardless of Moore’s film’s impact on politics, it has already had one on the film community. The organizers of this year’s Cannes Film Festival made it the first documentary to be accepted into the main competition in 46 years. It eventually won a special honor.

“It’s not just entertainment; it’s a news item,” says Bingham Ray, president of United Artists, who attended a morning press screening at Cannes and negotiated a deal by nightfall. “It’s Michael’s take on things, which began just as a film about the shootings at Columbine, but it was broadened as he gave it more thought.’”

From a commercial standpoint, Ray is betting that Moore carries appeal to audiences who would not normally be drawn to a documentary. He’s known for his popular 1989 movie “Roger and Me,” which won the National Society of Film Critics Awards, and his nonfiction book published this year, “Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!” that remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for 30 weeks.

“Michael has become, I believe, through his own dint of intensity, a brand name. He’s become a force of nature,” Ray said. “I didn’t advocate getting this film to change the world, but it can open some eyes, ask some questions and perhaps do some good and entertain them, promote them and challenge them.”

“Bang Bang You’re Dead” will be shown at 8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-PGVL (may be unsuitable for young children, with advisories for violence, language and adult themes).

“Bowling for Columbine” opens Friday in L.A. and New York and will premiere in other cities over the next few weeks.