September 11 Through the Looking Glass

tel: 818-882-3300 john@command-post.com

September 11th: Through The Looking Glass

The French composer Hector Berlioz once observed, "Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all it’s pupils."

To all my fellow filmmakers and future media moguls, I’d like to believe that the news and entertainment on our television screens and print media are great teachers, but like Alice in the looking glass, our perception of reality seems to change with each of life’s new lessons. So let’s look for a moment at the relationship between news and entertainment which has in the past changed to fit the cultural mode of the times.

In 1968, entertainers from the Beatles to Stanley Kubrick served up ulterior social commentary on the news and politics of the day. John Lennon weaved the threads of war, peace, and social temperment through his lyrics with a captivating degree of sensitivity and sarcasm. He and others of his generation shared with us a private exploration of public issues.

But by 1998, the polarities had almost completely reversed: the news media seemed to spend more and more time serving up the private lives of public figures. World class media were swallowed up by the tabloid madness, spending countless weeks covering the OJ Simpson trial or Princess Diana’s death, tales of internet wealth garnered by hi-tech CEO’s, not to mention Bill Clinton’s extramarital habits.

But the tabloid-enriched media diets of Americans suddenly choked on the stark reality of September 11th, forcing us to fully disconnect the Siamese twins of news and entertainment.

I’d like to share with you one of the stories that didn’t make the news that day. Ulli Lommel is a film director and writer who lives here in LA, known for the sometimes controversial films he has directed over the last thirty years. But early on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, he was flying over the Atlantic at 35,000 feet, returning on a flight from Europe to America.

He intended to stay with a friend in Boston for a day before continuing on to LA. But on that peaceful Tuesday morning, less than an hour from it’s Boston destination, something strange began to happen. The aircraft gently veered away from the United States and headed back the other way. Nobody had any idea what was going on. The Captain simply announced that they had been diverted away from Logan airport, reason unknown.

The giant Lufthansa 747 was directed to touch down, along with a throng of other international flights, at a small airport in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an airfield barely large enough to land a single jumbo jet. And there they sat on Tuesday morning and into the afternoon, dozens of flights from all over the world, backed up on the foggy airfield like... giant birds that had lost their way on their annual migration.

They sat paralyzed on the tarmac for eleven hours, And none of the passengers knew why. The airline feared arousing panic among the passengers, but because the long period of confinement was so excruciating, people were beginning to freak anyway, practicing various forms of civil disobedience.

Then, finally, the news of what had happened came through the loudspeakers, and an audible pall of disbelief arose among the passengers. Furthermore, the airport was so ill equipped to handle large aircraft, the only way to get out of the plane was to deploy the inflatable emergency chutes, and thousands of passengers slid down onto the tarmac. Then, amidst tight security, everyone was herded out of the airport and bussed to a football stadium.

What is going on here? Ulli was as shaken as everyone else in America by the events, but making a first down with his luggage on a Canadian football field with 10,000 other people in the middle of the night, wasn't on Ulli's agenda. With no end to his captivity in sight, he escaped the crowd and took a 7 hour taxi ride to the southern tip of Nova Scotia, caught a 12 hour ferry to Portland Maine, and moved on to Boston by car. And then Ulli waited in vain for a flight out of Boston to LAX.

But after a couple of frustrating days he took the train to Chicago. And by some bizarre series of air connections, fully a week after he was scheduled to arrive here, Ulli managed to find his way home.

Ulli had long planned to shoot some scenes in Late September in Washington DC, for a dramatic feature he had been preparing for some time. A large protest of the World Trade Organization was anticipated at their seasonal conference, and Ulli’s film crew wanted to capture some protest footage of the large unruly crowds, for the benefit of their movie plot.

But the meeting of the WTO, as you probably know, was canceled. The protest of the WTO meeting was canceled. And Ulli’s film, on which he had spent many months of careful preparation, was canceled.

The name of the Ulli’s political thriller? "Attack America".

Ulli is not the only minor casualty of the recent clash between reality and fiction, the short circuit between the minds of America’s creative writers and radical, Middle East politics. Arab Terrorists have been the subject of a hundred plotlines before September 11th.

In the Spiderman trailer, which was written and filmed long before the World Trade Center was destroyed, but promptly pulled from theaters after September 11th, terrorists have captured a passenger jet and are flying towards New York City, trying to evade capture by F B I agents pursuing them in another aircraft. Meanwhile, Spiderman has weaved a web between the two towers of the world trade center, and as the aircraft flies between them in an evasive maneuver, the Terrorists are caught in Spiderman’s web.

But in the Crash of 79, a novel which ex-banker Paul Erdman wrote in 1976, the plotline took a somewhat different twist: Bill Hitchcock is an American Investment Banker hired by the Saudis to manage hundreds of billions of their overseas investments. Prince Abdullah, an obscure, radical member of the royal family, is determined to overthrow the Saudi government and install his own regime, with the aid of military insiders.

But in the end, The Shah of Iran, an ally of the United States, executes a surprise attack on the oilfields of Saudi Arabia, holding them hostage by threatening to blow them up with nuclear weapons.

Bedtime stories aside, the focus of those who concoct Terrorist plotlines has clearly shifted from Los Angeles to Washington, for predicting what terrorists are going to do in the decades that lie ahead is no longer a matter of entertainment, it may be a matter of survival.

So, is what I’ve shared with you today news, or is it entertainment? You decide.

-John Graves