Even the Green Lights Flash Caution in Today’s Hollywood

Fledgling screenwriter Jason Rothenberg was prowling the streets of New York late last summer, researching a script about a Manhattan skyscraper that collapses under the brutal onslaught of a raging storm.

The project, “The 69 Story Crisis,” had all the earmarks of a “Towering Inferno”-like disaster thriller with office workers scrambling down crowded stairwells, heroic firemen rushing in to save those trapped on upper floors, and worried officials racing against time before the high-rise building came crashing to earth in gigantic plumes of smoke and dust.

But in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Rothenberg’s script has been blown off course by Hollywood’s prevailing winds. Even though the plot had nothing to do with terrorism, officials at Paramount Pictures recently informed the writer they would not go ahead with the project.

“I respect their decision that they do not want to exploit the emotions of 9/11,” Rothenberg remarked afterward. “They said, ‘Obviously, we can’t make this movie now.’ ”

In television, the instincts were quite different. NBC had been developing “War Stories,” a television series in which Jeff Goldblum would play a fictional foreign correspondent from the Baltimore Sun who is covering the war on terrorism.

“We loved the script prior to 9/11, but we didn’t think the country was ready for it,” NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker said. After 9/11, the network reconsidered the show, and it will air this winter.

Following the terrorist attacks, many in the creative and business sides of the media and entertainment community shared the belief rippling through the rest of the country that nothing would be as it was before.

A year later, that appears to be only partly true.

Shortly after Sept. 11, the film community predicted that the action-adventure genre would tone down the violence while the consensus in television was that “reality TV” was doomed because real-life footage made such programs seem petty and pointless.

But reality TV programs rebounded within months, from ABC’s “The Bachelor” to NBC’s success this summer with unscripted series like “Dog Eat Dog” and “Meet My Folks.”

In film, though, some of what was forecast after Sept. 11 has come to pass.

On-screen terrorism has become less overt in films green lighted after Sept. 11, and studios have also become more reliant on period pieces and comic-book-based fare.

The big action films green lighted in the last year have been largely period pieces, such as Warner Bros.’ “The Last Samurai” with Tom Cruise, and Disney’s “The Alamo,” or comic-book-based projects like 20th Century Fox’s “Daredevil” with Ben Affleck and the studio’s “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” with Sean Connery.

Overall, in the film industry, the changes are largely in what kinds of stories aren’t being told, while in TV, with its hundreds of channels, the networks have served up sometimes contradictory fare. Highly rated New York-based sitcoms such as “Friends” and “Sex and the City” have shunned direct mention of terrorism while in the dramatic arena the roots of terrorism have been tackled by such hit series as NBC’s “The West Wing,” “Third Watch” and “Law & Order,” and ABC’s “The Practice.”

At the other end of the prime-time spectrum are nostalgic series that previously might have seemed overly sentimental but now are accepted and, more important, bankable.

For example, later this month, NBC will roll out “American Dreams,” a new prime-time drama about a family coming of age during the heyday of “American Bandstand” and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It will air during the network’s family time slot at 8 p.m. Sundays.

On ABC, an hourlong drama/comedy about a guy who returns to high school for a year of “do overs” will hit the airwaves next month as “That Was Then.”

“It is a softer show than we’ve picked up in the past,” said the network’s president of entertainment, Susan Lyne. “The theme of that show is, what if you could go back to a time in your life when you made a mistake and could fix it, knowing all you know now? I think that whole idea of wanting to make things right, and lost opportunities, came after 9/11.”

As for the movies, out for the foreseeable future are “Die Hard”-type projects that depict terrorists taking over high-rises, hijacking planes and setting off bombs to kill innocents. In are escapist films with fantasy or comic-book violence a la this past summer’s “Spider-Man” and the upcoming “Matrix Reloaded” and “Hulk.”

“Anything that involves bombs and terrorists, people are very cautious about, primarily because they don’t know when it stops being fun for the audience,” said Robert Newman, an agent at International Creative Management representing directors and writers, who noted the decisions are being “motivated by economics.”

John Fogelman, who heads the motion picture talent division of the William Morris Agency, also cited financial considerations. “The emotional chord that dictates what the public desires to see has shifted,” he said. “No longer do people want to watch [realistic] terrorism, because it is reminiscent of a sad reality.”

The reason studios have avoided Sept. 11 as fodder for big-screen entertainment while the networks have laced some of their top shows with terrorism themes is both practical and economic. Television--as well as the magazine and book publishing businesses--can more easily address ripped-from-the-headline tales faster and at less cost than movies, which typically take from two to four years, and often longer, to get from script to screen.

The last thing a studio executive wants is to shoulder the costs associated with a $100-million action film when no one knows how the current war on terrorism will play out.

“It takes a long time to get a film out there, and who knows what the mind-set of the public might be and who knows what the realities of terrorism might be by the time you get the film made?” said Rick Jewell, associate dean of the USC School of Cinema-Television. “If I’m the money man at a studio who is ultimately going to green light something, I am going to green light escapist fare like ‘Spider-Man 2’ or ‘Austin Powers 4’ before anything else.”

Studios found themselves shouldering heavy interest costs after Sept. 11 when they shuffled release dates for such big-budget pictures as “Collateral Damage” and “Windtalkers.”

One film studio chief admits that fear also plays into his decision making.

“My job is to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to entertainment projects,” said the studio head, who requested anonymity. “I don’t want to antagonize these people further.... We don’t want to go there.”

Last fall, the FBI privately briefed executives from the seven major film and TV studios and told them their companies were on the list of potential attack targets.

“We were told there was a threat--that a suicide bomber might blow up a studio,” said one executive who attended the meeting. “Some people hired personal bodyguards.”

One security expert who works for studios, however, called the meeting a “dog-and-pony show” and suggested it was designed to rally support among media moguls for the Bush administration’s war on terrorism. Nevertheless, security companies benefited as movie lots became virtual fortresses.

Two months after the attacks, Karl Rove, a top strategist for the administration, met with Hollywood’s power elite to discuss possible areas of cooperation. The meeting was controversial; some in the creative community were concerned about government influence over content and cited the 1st Amendment. The result, however, is what some in the industry describe as a form of self-censorship, though others call it a responsible reaction to dangerous times.

“Hollywood is caught in a bind,” added a former studio executive-turned-producer. “Executives are very wary of the word ‘terrorist’ in screenplays. In fact, it’s being excised. It’s almost a dirty word. They don’t want to use Arabs as villains, but why can’t we show the truth? The answer has still not been reached.”

Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman John Calley countered, “I don’t think we are censoring ourselves. We have not had that meeting that says, ‘Here is what we are not going to do’ because we have to be open to all possibilities.”

Among the few feature-film projects on the front burner at major studios dealing directly with Sept. 11 or the war on terrorism is one at MGM. It’s based on a New Yorker magazine article about the life of John O’Neill, the former hard-charging FBI counter-terrorism chief in New York who died in the World Trade Center, two weeks after being hired as chief of security at the twin towers.

O’Neill, who spent four years pursuing Osama bin Laden, had tried to warn his bosses at the FBI of the danger posed by Al Qaeda and also urged the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency to collaborate in battling international terrorism.

According to MGM President and Chief Executive Michael Nathanson, the deal was struck because O’Neill is a heroic and principled figure “whose story deserves to be told.”

Lawrence Wright, who penned the New Yorker article and is writing the screenplay, said: “It’s going to be about real events as much as possible. I’m going to people it with real characters. That’s what [MGM] bought. I believe that American artists, whatever form we work in, have an obligation to examine reality, to look at the world the way it really is. I think the failure of Hollywood is, we turn our eyes away from life as we know it.”

But Wright is still mulling whether to include scenes of hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers. “Maybe it will be implicit or explicit,” he said. “I haven’t decided yet.”

It may not be up to him to decide anyway. As with any screenplay’s development process, it will have to be approved by the studio and could go through various incarnations, depending on the director, star or green-lighting process.

This isn’t Wright’s first experience dealing with the complicated politics of writing a story involving Arab characters. He co-wrote the 1998 thriller “The Siege,” in which Arab terrorists set off bombs around New York City. The film was roundly criticized by Arab Americans as fostering negative stereotypes. Executives at 20th Century Fox reported death threats.

That film is credited with making Arab terrorists politically incorrect as film villains. Since “The Siege,” Hollywood has, for the most part, relied on Russian renegades, European neo-Nazis and even corrupt businessmen as villains. In the next James Bond film, “Die Another Day,” the archenemy is North Korean, according to sources close to the production.

“Today’s bad guys are these nefarious, unspecified, non-real, exaggerated villains,” said producer Bill Mechanic, who oversaw production on “The Siege” while a senior executive at 20th Century Fox. “They’re not ‘out of the headlines’ characters.”

Movies that try to portray realistic villains have, he said, become “taboo.”

Producer Marc Abraham, whose credits include “13 Days” and “Spy Game,” said that as a filmmaker he doesn’t want anything to be taboo.

“If there is a script with a hijacking, now you see if there is another way to present it, not because it is politically correct, it’s just that people prefer not to be reminded of those events,” Abraham said. But realistic terrorism in film, he said, “will eventually come back.”

The action-adventure genre is not the only kind of films being affected by the terrorist attacks. The Warner Bros.’ comedy “ ‘Til Death Do Us Part,” starring Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks, had to change its terrorist subplot, which included the destabilization of the stock market.

“The old script bore too much of a resemblance to Sept. 11,” noted producer Bill Gerber. “We had a rehearsal dinner for the wedding in Windows of the World [the restaurant atop the World Trade Center] and the bad guy’s subplot concerned the destabilization of the Nasdaq. It was totally inappropriate for a comedy.”

Rob Cohen, who directed this summer’s action spy thriller “XXX,” said he, too, made a concession after Sept. 11 in his film which involved a hydrofoil/submarine doomsday machine dubbed “Ahab.”

“I was five weeks into prep when 9/11 happened,” Cohen said. “Whereas I had the Ahab device originally look functional, I made it look a little more Buck Rogersy, as if to say, ‘You cannot do this at home. You cannot build a submarine and deliver binary nerve gas rockets at home.’ I made it a little more fantasy so it didn’t have some ugly vibe of reality.”

Prior to Sept. 11, filmmakers John Woo and Terence Chang pitched a film to MGM about an Osama bin Laden-like villain blowing up an airplane carrying the daughter of the biggest mobster in America.

“A Tony Soprano mobster goes after him because the government can’t get the job done,” recalled one studio insider. “Here we have a case where the studio has two really great filmmakers but now it’s very conflicted. It’s like having an angel on one shoulder and devil on the other. But whoever comes out and does the first movie about this will probably make something like $500 million worldwide.”

Times staff writer Brian Lowry contributed to this report.