World Trade Center

[cron]

and by gay you mean what?

fit guys in police uniforms, the 'staches, the tagline at the ending.

[hedwig]

haha, i guess fire fighters are just gay..

LADDER 49 2 mil...the sexual tension between travolta and phoenix was so thick you could cut it with a knife...whose got a hose...those boys need to be cooled off...when they say the bond forged by fire is never broken...i believe them

prediction: this movie will be FILLED with phallic imagery. 

[Ravi]

prediction: this movie will be FILLED with phallic imagery.

...being demolished by other phallic imagery.

[Gamblour.]

oof.

yeah, the plane shadow in front of Zoolander was just laughable, honestly. Absolutely ridiculous. As for the film's tagline, if the film is actually like an hour's worth of the two men stuck in rubble, then the trailer did a fantastic job, I think. Cage's dialogue was terrible, like Weak said. Could be decent at best.

[MacGuffin]

Cannes sees moving clip of 'World Trade Centre' movie

Cannes viewers got a powerful 20-minute glimpse of Oliver Stone's new movie "World Trade Centre", the first US film to focus on the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers.

The film is "the true story of two New York Port Authority policemen who are trapped in the rubble, their wives and their children and the incredible and almost improbable rescue efforts to save them," Stone said ahead of the screening.

But the film is very sensitive in the United States, still deeply scarred by the 2001 attacks in which nearly 3,000 people died.

In the moving and impressive opening sequence, the audience sees dawn breaking over the city as Sergeant John McLouglin, played by Nicolas Cage, sets off for work for what seems like just another day.

A soft autumn morning glow hangs over the buildings and the World Trade Centre as McLouglin and the rest of his crew travel in to work, including William J. Jimeno, played by Michael Pena.

Gradually come the sounds of the city -- birdsong, traffic noise and even a plane flying overhead.

As the men gather for their morning briefing, the most pressing issue is to find a missing runaway. But shortly afterwards, a huge bang shakes the Port Authority office, and McLoughlin and his men watch in disbelief at television images of smoke pouring through the gaping hole in Tower One.

They gather together oxygen tanks and breathing apparatus before trying to climb the tower, amid rumours that a second plane has flown into the second tower. But as they are about to head up, in a few terrifying seconds the tower comes crashing down, engulfing them.

The planes hijacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists are not seen, except in a shadow that hovers and then passes over a nearby building.

"Sometimes history is shaped by the collective memory of people, men and women, and here was a great chance to work with these people," Stone told the Cannes audience.

"And they gave us what I hope one day will be seen as the truth. For the truth must exist in some way to confront power and extremism."

The clip was shown ahead of a screening of "Platoon" to mark the film's 20th anniversary, and Stone was flanked by his principal actors in the film, Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe.

"Platoon" changed their lives, said Stone, who was welcomed with loud applause when he arrived in the cinema.

"I would say the struggle of these 20 more years has been to try to make these stories about people who really see it with their own eyes and their own ears, whether they were in the jungles of Vietnam, the deserts of Iraq, or the rubble of the World Trade Centre," he added.

"World Trade Centre" goes on release from August 9, but the trailers were already being shown on Friday, prompting Paramount to send out warning letters.

"It's a very delicate trailer. It will be up to individual theatres to decide how to warn audiences," a Paramount spokesman said.

The US release comes one month ahead of the fifth anniversary of the attacks, in which terrorists riding hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

A fourth plane bound for Washington, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after a passenger uprising, has also been the subject of a movie, "United 93" by director Paul Greengrass, which will be screened here on Friday.

Some critics have been nervous about Stone directing a film about the 9/11 attacks as he has been publicly critical of President George W. Bush's handling of the attacks and their aftermath.

But Stone has maintained it is not a political film and does not contain any conspiracy theories.


Oliver Stone shows clips from "World Trade Center"

Director Oliver Stone has given the Cannes film festival the first glimpse of "World Trade Center," a tale of survival on the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Before the roughly 20 minutes of the movie were shown late on Sunday, Stone told an audience it resembled his Oscar-winning "Platoon" -- also screened to mark its 20th anniversary -- in that it took the view of everyday people involved in conflict and attempted to find truth within their story.

Stone said that whether in Vietnam, the current conflict in Iraq or "in the rubble of the World Trade Center," his struggle had been to re-tell what really happened.

"It's the true story of two New York Port Authority policemen who were trapped in the rubble, their wives and the children and the incredible, almost improbable rescue efforts that went on to rescue them," Stone said.

"The truth must exist in some way to confront power and extremism," the 59-year-old added.

Based on the clip, which follows the policemen as they go about their normal lives before joining the rescue effort after the towers are hit, "World Trade Center" does not appear to delve into conspiracies like his "JFK," about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The movie stars Nicolas Cage as the leader of the policemen who are trapped inside the building and must be saved.

The footage ended as the buildings came down, and all the audiences can see were Cage's eyes in the dark.

The full movie is due to be released in the United States in August, not long before the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

It comes several months after Paul Greengrass's "United 93," a film that seeks to reconstruct events on the hijacked plane which plowed into a field in Pennsylvania after three others had hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

When the trailer for that film was shown, audience complaints prompted one New York City cinema to pull the advertisement off its screens.

[©brad]

Cannes: Sex and Oliver Stone
The most provocative Hollywood movies, unfortunately for American audiences, are in France this spring. OK, that's only if you don't count The Da Vinci Code. Cannes Film Festival attendees broke into "thunderous applause" after last night's premiere of extended footage from Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, a drama about two policemen who were trapped beneath the WTC rubble...

from movies.com. sorry to invade your turf macman.

[MacGuffin]

sorry to invade your turf macman.

Not a problem. The purpose is to inform xixaxers. Not scoop one another.


By Jeffery Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere:

The first 20 minutes of World Trade Center, which was shown last night at 10 pm at the Salle Debussy, is smooth, well-cut, understated and pro-level all the way. But as I suspected, it doesn't feel very much like a Stone film...not this portion of it, at least. One of the most urgent, hyperkinetic, go-for-it directors of the late 20th Century has chosen to go tasteful, respectful, and understated (no shots of the planes hitting the towers, only one glimpse of a jumper, etc.). Which is an okay way to go for a film like this, I suppose -- it just feels like a film thatg anyone could have directed. I've said it before, but World Trade Center is basically Ollie's make-up film for having failed with Alexander -- he's proving to the powers-that-be that he can play the role of a de-balled functionary who can turn out a money-making film. I guess we'll see how the rest of it plays a month or two from now, but at the risk of boring everyone (including myself) I still don't understand -- I will never understand -- what is so fascinating and meaningful about a couple of Port Authority cops buried by North Tower rubble on 9/11 and unable to free themselves until help comes along, etc. And I still really despise that soothifying Craig Armstrong music (i.e., music meant to tell you that what you're watching is supposed to produce a lump in the throat). The warning buzzer sounded for me when Nicolas Cage's John McLoughlin character looked in on his sleeping kids and we suddenly hear tinkly Marvin Hamlisch piano music. But the sound is fantastic, and the film looks sturdy and disciplined. The only "bad" thing comes when the building starts to collapse and it goes into slow-mo when Cage says "runnnn!!" to his men. (Slow-mo action scenes are bad...very bad...they haven't been hip since The Wild Bunch .) I was scrunched into one of the balcony seats. Before it began Stone came up to the stage and talked a little bit about WTC and also Platoon, which is being honored for its 20th anniversary. Three of his Platoon stars -- Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe (the French emcee called him "Weeleem Dahfoohh!") and Tom Berenger ("Tohm Behhrangeahrr!") joined him on the stage, but they just smiled. Dafoe and Sheen look almost as young and trim as they did in '86, but Berenger has clearly bulked up some. I sat through about a half hour's worth of Platoon, a superb film that will hold up for a long time to come. The print looked fine but not spectacular (Stone said it hadn't been restored) but I was totally shagged and fagged and couldn't keep my eyes open. Stone abalogized the two films by saying, "For me, the struggle [all along] has been to try and make these stories about people who really see it with their own eyes and their ears, whether they were in the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of Iraq or rubble of the World Trade Center."

[matt35mm]

"Tohm Behhrangeahrr!"

This made my day.

... it was a very lame day.

[MacGuffin]

Paramount Sues Internet Movie Maker

Paramount has sued 28-year-old experimental filmmaker Chris Moukarbel for using excerpts from the screenplay of Oliver Stone's upcoming World Trade Center to create a 12-minute film, featuring Yale University student actors, and posting it on his website, the Washington Post reported today (Wednesday). The lawsuit says in part, "Large numbers of people will see the Moukarbel Film first for free and determine, based on this poor-quality copy, that they do not want to pay to see the remainder of the WTC Film at a theater when it is released." The film has since been yanked from Moukarbel's website and replaced with the notice: "VIDEO REMOVED AT REQUEST OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES." Paramount has also sent warning notices to other websites that had linked to the film. The website Filmthreat.com replaced the link with a copy of the Paramount notice. It also posted a comment from one person who had seen the Moukarbel film, saying that it looked more impressive than the trailer for Stone's film.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0621061stone1.html

[MacGuffin]

Oliver Stone's 'World Trade Center' Seeks Truth in the Rubble 
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER, NY TIMES



INSIDE a flimsy temporary office on a dusty movie lot here, a young man sits in front of a computer, showing off a three-dimensional rendering of the collapse of the World Trade Center. It was assembled by merging the blueprints for the twin towers — the before-picture, you might say — with a vast collection of measurements, including some taken with infrared laser scans from an airplane 5,000 feet above Lower Manhattan, just days after 9/11.

With a few clicks, Ron Frankel, who has the title pre-visualization supervisor for Oliver Stone's new 9/11 film, begins to illustrate the circuitous path that five Port Authority police officers took into the trade center's subterranean concourse, until the towers above them fell, killing all but two.

As Mr. Frankel speaks, behind his back a burly man has wandered through the door. He is Will Jimeno, one of the two officers who survived. He has been a constant presence on the movie set, scooting from here to there in a golf cart, bantering with the actor playing him and with Mr. Stone, answering questions and offering suggestions — a consultant and court jester. But he has never seen this demonstration before, he says, pulling up a chair.

Mr. Frankel, continuing with his impromptu show-and-tell, says the floor beneath Mr. Jimeno, Sgt. John McLoughlin and their three fellow officers dropped some 60 feet, creating a 90-foot ravine in the underground inferno. The difference between instant death and a chance at life, for each of the men, was a matter of inches.

Mr. Jimeno sits quietly, absorbing what he's just seen and heard. His eyes moisten. "I didn't know this," he says. "I didn't know this. I didn't know there was a drop-off here. This is an explanation I never knew about." He pauses. "We try not to ponder on it, because we're alive. But it answers some questions. That, really, played a big part in us being here." The countless measurements taken and calculations made by scientists and government agencies helped ground zero rescue workers pinpoint dangerous areas in the weeks after the attacks. The data also provided a fuller historical record of how the buildings collapsed and lessons for future architects and engineers.

Only a movie budgeted as mass entertainment, though, could harness all that costly information to reconstruct the point of view of two severely injured and bewildered men, who didn't even know the twin towers had been flattened until rescuers lifted them to the surface many hours later.

Their story, and those of their families, their rescuers and the three men killed alongside them, is the subject of Mr. Stone's "World Trade Center," which Paramount plans to release on Aug. 9.

The quandary that Paramount executives face is a familiar one now, a few months after Universal's "United 93" became the first 9/11 movie to enter wide theatrical release: How do you market a movie like this without offending audiences or violating the film's intentions? Carefully of course, but "there's no playbook," said Gerry Rich, Paramount's worldwide marketing chief. In New York and New Jersey, for example, there will be no billboards or subway signs, which could otherwise hit, quite literally, too close to home. And the studio is running all of its materials by a group of survivors to avoid offending sensibilities.

But Paramount, naturally, wants as wide an audience as possible for this film.

Nicolas Cage, who plays the taciturn Sergeant McLoughlin, says the movie is not meant to entertain. "I see it as storytelling which depicts history," he says. "This is what happened. Look at it. 'Yeah, I remember that.' Generation after generation goes by, they'll have 'United 93,' 'World Trade Center,' to recall that history."

Whether Mr. Stone set out to make a historical drama or a dramatic history isn't entirely clear. Mr. Jimeno and Mr. McLoughlin, who have both since retired from the Port Authority, say the script and the production took very few liberties except for the sake of time compression.

"We're still nervous," Mr. Jimeno said last fall, after shooting had shifted from New York and New Jersey to an old airplane hangar near Marina del Rey. "It's still Hollywood. But Oliver — it's to the point where he drives me crazy, trying to get things right."

There are many people of course who have been driven a little crazy for other reasons by some of Mr. Stone's more controversial films, "JFK," "Natural Born Killers" and "Nixon" chief among them. But in several interviews, sounding variously weary, wounded and either self-deprecating or defensive, Mr. Stone spoke as if his days of deliberate provocation were behind him.

"I stopped," he says simply. "I stopped."

His new film, he says, just might go over as well in Kansas as in Boston, or, for that matter, in Paris or Madrid. "This is not a political film," he insists. "The mantra is 'This is not a political film.' Why can't I stay on message for once in a while? Why do I have to take detours all the time?"

He said he just wants to depict the plain facts of what happened on Sept. 11. "It seems to me that the event was mythologized by both political sides, into something that they used for political gain," he says. "And I think one of the benefits of this movie is that it reminds us of what actually happened that day, in a very realistic sense."

"We show people being killed, and we show people who are not killed, and the fine line that divides them," he continues. "How many men saved those two lives? Hundreds. These guys went into that twisted mass, and it very clearly could've fallen down on them, and struggled all night for hours to get them out."

By contrast Paul Haggis is directing the adaptation of Richard Clarke's book on the causes of 9/11, "Against All Enemies," for the producer John Calley and Columbia Pictures.

Asked if that weren't the kind of film he might once have tried to tackle, Mr. Stone first scoffs: "I couldn't do it. I'd be burned alive." Then he adds: "This is not a political film. That's the mantra they handed me."

Mr. Stone says he particularly owes his producers, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher, for taking a chance on him at a time when he had gone cold in Hollywood after a string of commercial and critical disappointments culminating in the epic "Alexander" in 2004. "They believed in me at a time when other people did not, frankly," he says. " 'Alexander' was cold-turkeyed in this town, I think unfairly, but it was, and I took a hit. Nobody's your friend, nobody wants to talk to you."

Mr. Stone came forward asking to direct "World Trade Center" just about a year ago. He decided it would require a different approach from, say, "JFK." "The Kennedy assassination was 40 years ago, and look at the heat there, a tremendous amount of heat," he says. "I was trying to do my best to give an alternative version of what I thought might have happened, but it wasn't understood. It was taken very literally. 'Platoon,' I went back to a Vietnam that I saw quite literally, but it was a twisted time in our history.

"This — this is a fresh wound, and it had to be cauterized in a certain way. This is a very specific story. The details are the details are the details."

The details that led to the movie's making began in April 2004, when Andrea Berloff, a screenwriter, pitched a story about Mr. Jimeno's and Mr. McLoughlin's "transformation in the hole" to Ms. Sher and Mr. Shamberg. Ms. Berloff, who had no produced credits, was candid about two things:

"I didn't want to see the planes hit the buildings. We've seen enough of that footage forever. It's not adding anything new at this point. I also said I don't know how to end the movie, because there are 10 endings to the story. What happened to John and Will in that hospital could be a movie unto itself. Will flatlined twice, and was still there on Halloween. And John was read his last rites twice."

The producer Debra Hill, who had optioned the rights to the two men's stories, was listening in on the line. When Ms. Berloff was done, she recalls, Ms. Hill said, "I don't want to speak out of turn, but I think we should hire you."

Ms. Berloff and Mr. Shamberg headed to New York to meet with the two officers and their families, and to visit both the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where the men had once patrolled, and ground zero. In long sessions with the Jimenos in Clifton, N.J., and with the McLoughlins in Goshen, N.Y., Ms. Berloff says, she quickly learned that both families, despite the nearly three years that had elapsed, remained emotionally raw. "Within 20 minutes of starting to talk they were losing it," she says. "We all just sat and cried together for a week."

Before leaving, Ms. Berloff says, she felt she had imposed on, exhausted and bonded with the two families so much that she warned them that in all likelihood she would not be around for the making of the movie. "I had to say, 'The writer usually gets fired, so I can't guarantee I'll be there at the end,' " she recalls. "But I'd recorded the whole thing, and I said they shouldn't have to go through this with a bunch of writers. They'd have the transcripts to work from."

Ms. Berloff returned to Los Angeles, stared at her walls for a month, she says, and then wrote a script in five weeks, turning it in two days before her October wedding.

Ms. Hill died of cancer the following March. Mr. Shamberg and Ms. Sher moved ahead, circulating the script to Kevin Huvane at Creative Artists Agency, and to his partners Bryan Lourd and Richard Lovett. Mr. Lourd gave it to Mr. Stone, Mr. Lovett to his client Mr. Cage.

The agency also represents Maria Bello, who plays Mr. McLoughlin's wife, Donna, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who plays Alison Jimeno. Ms. Gyllenhaal, who'd just seen "Crash," suggested Michael Peña, who made a lasting impression in a few scenes as a locksmith with a young daughter. (Mr. Peña did a double-take, he confesses, upon hearing that Mr. Stone was directing a 9/11 movie: "I'm like, let me read it first — just because you're aware of the kind of movies that he does.")

Given the need to shoot exteriors in New York in September, the cast and crew raced to get ready for shooting. The actors aimed for accuracy in different ways. Mr. Cage says he focused on getting Mr. McLoughlin's New York accent right, and spent time in a sense-deprivation tank in Venice, Calif., to get a hint of the fear and claustrophobia one might experience after hours immobile and in pain in the dark. Mr. Peña all but moved in with Mr. Jimeno.

Ms. Gyllenhaal had her own problems to solve. That April she had stepped on a third rail, saying on a red carpet at the Tribeca Film Festival that "America has done reprehensible things and is responsible in some way" for 9/11. She apologized publicly, then met privately with the Jimenos, offering to withdraw if they objected to her involvement. "We started to get into politics a little bit, and Will said, 'I don't care what your politics are,' " she recalls.

With Mr. Jimeno and Mr. McLoughlin vouching for the filmmakers, more rescuers asked to be included, meaning not only that dozens of New York uniformed officers would fly to Los Angeles to re-enact the rescue of the two men, but that there were more sources of information to replace Ms. Berloff's best guesses with vivid memories.

Ms. Bello, who had gone to St. Vincent's Hospital on 9/11 with her mother, a nurse, and waited in vain for the expected deluge of injured to arrive, contributed a scene after learning from Donna McLoughlin of a poignant encounter she had had while waiting for her husband to arrive at Bellevue.

Some of the film's most fictitious-seeming moments are authentic. Mr. Jimeno's account of his ordeal included a Castaneda-like vision in which Jesus appeared with a water bottle in hand. But Mr. McLoughlin recalled no hallucinations, or nightmares, or dreams: only thoughts of his family. "He kept saying I'm sorry — 20 years in the job, never gotten hurt, and here we go and I'm not going to be there for you," Ms. Berloff says. "So we tried to dramatize that."

Nearly everything else in the movie is straight out of Mr. Jimeno's and Mr. McLoughlin's now oft-told story: the Promethean hole in the ground, with fireballs and overheated pistol rounds going off at random; the hundreds of rescuers, with a few standouts, like the dissolute paramedic with a lapsed license who redeems himself as he digs to reach Mr. Jimeno.

And the former marine who leaves his job as a suburban accountant, rushes to church, then dons his pressed battle fatigues, stops at a barbershop for a high-and-tight, heads downtown past barricades saying he's needed and winds up tiptoeing through the perilous heap calling out "United States Marines" until Mr. Jimeno hears him and responds. Mr. Stone says he is adding a note at the end of the film, revealing that the marine, David Karnes, re-enlisted and served two tours of duty in Iraq, because test audiences believed he was a Hollywood invention.

Reality can be just as gushingly sentimental as the sappiest movie, Mr. Stone acknowledges, especially when the storytellers are uniformed officers in New York who lived through 9/11. And particularly when it comes to Mr. Jimeno and Mr. McLoughlin, who have struggled with the awkwardness of being singled out as heroes when so many others died similarly doing their duty, and when so many more rescued them.

"You could argue the guys don't do much, they get pinned, so what," Mr. Stone says. "There will be those type of people. I say there is heroism. Here you see this image of these poor men approaching the tower, with no equipment, just their bodies, and they don't know what the hell they're doing, and they're going up into this inferno, they're like babies. You feel saddened, you feel sorry for them. They don't have a chance."

Mr. Cage says he once mentioned to Mr. Stone that their audience had lived through 9/11: "That it's not like 'Platoon,' where most of us don't know what it's like to be in the jungle."

"He said, 'Well what's your point?' " Mr. Cage says. "And my point is that we all walk into buildings every day, and we were there, and we saw it on TV, so this is going to be very cathartic and a little bit hard for people."

Despite its fireballs, shudders and booms, Mr. Stone's film is also unusually delicate, from the shadowy intimacy of the officers' early-morning awakenings to the solemnity of their ride downtown in a commandeered city bus, to the struggle of their wives to cope with hours of uncertainty and then with false reports of their husbands' safety.

"It's not about the World Trade Center, really. It's about any man or woman faced with the end of their lives, and how they survive," Mr. Stone says. "I did it for a reason. I did it because emotionally it hit me. I loved the simplicity and modesty of this movie.

"I hope the movie does well," he adds, "even if they say 'in spite of Oliver Stone.' "

[MacGuffin]

A film too far for Stone?
Relatives of 9/11 victims say those involved in a new movie by director Oliver Stone are cashing in on the atrocity, reports Rob Sharp
Source: The Observer

Oliver Stone has never shunned controversy in the past. But while many of the film director's projects have tackled head on sensitive subjects such as the Vietnam War, the life of Richard Nixon and the death of JFK, his attempts to drop his previous confrontational form in directing the most highly scrutinised movie of his career have already floundered.

Despite Stone's insistence that his days of deliberate provocation are behind him, World Trade Center, which opens in US cinemas next month and in the UK on 29 September, has divided the public, critics and academics ahead of its release.

The film, which stars Nicolas Cage as John McLoughlin, one of two New York Port Authority police officers caught up in 9/11, has been attacked in a way that Stone's fellow director Paul Greengrass managed to avoid in his portrayal of circumstances on the doomed Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked on 11 September that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Greengrass's film, United 93, stunned British audiences this year with its documentary style, as if much of it had been filmed in real time.

Paramount Pictures is marketing World Trade Center as 'a human story', and Stone is at the forefront of the studio's message. The Platoon director has already insisted that World Trade Center 'is not a political film'. Also in the film are Maria Bello who plays John's wife, Donna, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who plays Allison Jimeno, wife of another police officer, Will.

The film's financial backers have also been careful not to play up brutal imagery, saying that it is the tale of two ordinary police officers and their experiences of the day. Its makers have avoided the use of news footage of the planes colliding with the towers.

The plot follows McLoughlin and his fellow officer, Will Jimeno, as they venture into the Twin Towers before their collapse, and features their confinement in their wreckage and subsequent rescue.

But members of the families of those who died on 9/11, academics and the film's producers have begun a battle over the film's subject and the way Stone decided to focus on just one story behind the tragedy, accusing those behind the film of cashing in on events.

The widows of two Port Authority Police officers who were killed on 11 September have decried Jimeno and McLoughlin, who acted as close advisers to Stone's film, and earned at least $200,000 each for their services. Jeanette Pezzulo, who lives in the Bronx, told the Seattle Times that Jimeno's decision to make the film was hurtful because her husband, Port Authority police officer Dominick Pezzulo, died while trying to free Jimeno and McLoughlin. She said: 'My thing is: this man died for you. How do you do this to this family?'

Her sentiments were echoed by Jamie Amoroso from Staten Island, whose husband also died in the rescue operation. She said: 'I do not need a movie to tell me what a hero my husband was.'

Baltimore detective Ken Nacke, whose brother Louis died on Flight 93, said he would not be going to see the film. He criticised its producers for not involving enough of the survivors' families in its production, something he said did not happen with Greengrass. He added: 'I met a couple of people who lost relatives and had approached the producers and weren't allowed to be involved, and I think it would be disrespectful to them if I went to see it.'

Those connected to the project have been quick to leap to its defence. McGloughlin's wife, Donna, told The Observer: 'We got involved because we felt it needed to be done accurately. We wanted to do the right thing and I think the filmmakers wanted to do the right thing too.'

The film's producer Moritz Borman also hit back at the allegations. He said: 'The cops have not cashed in. They have spend endless hours on this because they felt it was important that the story came out. The fee they got was minimal. The amount they got paid on an hourly rate was very low compared to what anybody in the film industry gets on any job. It was really a pittance.

'Of course there are surviving family members of almost 3,000 people who died in World Trade Center alone. The ones who had anything directly to do with the story were completely consulted. I know there is one widow out there who didn't want it to be made because she felt it was too painful to see her husband die. But I am convinced when she sees it she will be resolved. But she wasn't there. Will and John were there.'

The picture has also provoked debate among the academic community. US media critic and author Shari Graydon condemned the use of the most dramatic elements of tragedies such as 9/11 as crass. She said: 'These tend not to increase our understanding or make us better equipped to deal with situations such as these in the future.' She added that such films only served to increase the 'culture of fear' in certain parts of the United States.

Borman, though, said it was never the film's intention to be a definitive account of the day.

'We never went out to explore the whole story of 9/11 and its impact on America and the rest of the world,' he said. 'It was more about the working class heroes who risked their life to rescue two of their own. It's a different topic. Nobody went into this film and thought this was the explanation for why 9/11 happened or its geopolitical impact.'

[MacGuffin]

NYC Police, Firefighters to See Stone Film

Police and firefighters who risked their lives at the World Trade Center site will attend private screenings of Oliver Stone's new Sept. 11 movie, but one police union warns the experience could be too traumatic for the rescuers.

Stone's movie, called "World Trade Center," stars Nicolas Cage as one of two Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officers who survived the towers' collapse and were rescued from the trade center's rubble after 22 hours. It opens nationwide August 9.

Police and firefighters have been invited to free, private screenings at area multiplexes this week, the New York Post reported Sunday.

"Emotionally, it's important that these men and women have the opportunity to see the film first, though only if they feel comfortable," said Michael Shamberg, the film's co-producer.

But the union representing Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officers wants ground zero rescue workers to be aware that watching the movie could cause post-traumatic stress disorder. Symptoms of the condition include depression, mood swings and panic attacks.

[MacGuffin]

Director Stone hopes Sept 11 movie helps to heal

Oliver Stone, director of controversial films like "Platoon" and "JFK," hopes his movie about the September 11 attacks will prove therapeutic rather than incendiary.

"World Trade Center," opening August 9, tells the true story of two Port Authority Police officers rescued from the rubble of the collapsed twin towers. By focusing not on death and destruction but hope and survival, Stone wants U.S. moviegoers to take a fresh look at their response -- and America's response -- to the attacks.

"We're saying, 'Look, go back to the day, forget about all your prejudices and look at it again,"' Stone said in an interview with Reuters.

"I think what might emerge is a re-examination of the feelings that day that were somehow transmuted into hatred and revenge and misunderstanding," he said, ticking off what he sees as September 11 fallout -- "a war, debt for America, a climate of fear, a breakdown of the Constitution."

Starring Nicholas Cage and Michael Pena, the movie follows the two officers as they go to the World Trade Center, after hearing a plane has struck one of the towers, and become trapped in the buildings' massive collapse.

As they lie pinned, their wives, played by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, struggle with the news they may never see their husbands alive again.

Some families of September 11 victims said the movie could be too painful to watch. Sensitive to the response, the producers plan no outdoor advertising in New York and New Jersey and will donate 10 percent of the first five days of box office receipts to September 11 charities.

"There are two very separate, equally passionate and legitimate points of view in the 9-11 community of those who were directly affected," said co-producer Stacey Sher.

"One is 'Show everything. Show how horrible it was. Nobody knows what we went through,"' she said. "And then there's the other viewpoint, that is if your child died in a car accident, would you want to see it on the 6 o'clock news?

"Both are equally valid points of view. Unfortunately they're in conflict," she said.

The director said concentrating on the story of two men was not unlike his method in "Platoon," which showed soldiers in realistic combat to explore the moral conflicts of the Vietnam War and the divisions it caused.

Those who worked on "World Trade Center" say they are proud of its verity. The trapped officers, John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, were consultants.

"I really wanted to get it right," said Cage during a media event to promote the movie. "I didn't want to let John McLoughlin down. I didn't want to let Will down. I didn't want to let the rescue team down, the families and Oliver Stone."

Several rescuers at the towers that day have seen the movie and have praised it. "They had it - down to the dust," Gus Danese, president of the Port Authority Police Benevolent Association, told New York's Daily News.

Stone said he hopes his film will have "a psychotherapy aspect" for Americans. "Let's face that day again," he said

[MacGuffin]

Where angels fear to tread
No subject could be more sensitive and difficult to film than the destruction of the World Trade Center. But after a particularly bad run in Hollywood, director Oliver Stone has everything to play for. David M Halbfinger reports from the set.
Source: The Guardian

Inside a flimsy temporary office on a dusty movie lot in Los Angeles, a young man sits in front of a computer displaying a three-dimensional rendering of the collapse of the World Trade Center. It was assembled by merging the blueprints for the twin towers - the before-picture, you might say - with a vast collection of measurements, including some taken with infrared laser scans from an airplane 5,000 feet above Lower Manhattan, just days after 9/11.

With a few clicks, Ron Frankel, pre-visualisation supervisor for Oliver Stone's new 9/11 film, begins to illustrate the circuitous path that five Port Authority police officers took into the trade centre's subterranean concourse, until the towers above them fell, killing three of them.
As Frankel speaks, behind his back a burly man has wandered through the door. He is Will Jimeno, one of the two officers who survived. He has been a constant presence on the movie set, scooting from here to there in a golf cart, bantering with the actor playing him and with Stone, answering questions and offering suggestions - a consultant and court jester. But he has never seen this demonstration before, he says, pulling up a chair.

Frankel, continuing with his impromptu show-and-tell, says the floor beneath Jimeno, Sergeant John McLoughlin and their three fellow officers dropped some 60 feet, creating a 90ft ravine in the underground inferno. The difference between life and death, for each of the men, was a matter of inches.

Jimeno sits quietly, absorbing what he's just seen and heard. His eyes moisten. "I didn't know this," he says. "I didn't know this. I didn't know there was a drop-off here. This is an explanation I never knew about." He pauses. "We try not to ponder on it, because we're alive. But it answers some questions. That, really, played a big part in us being here." The countless measurements taken and calculations made by scientists and government agencies helped Ground Zero rescue workers pinpoint dangerous areas in the weeks after the attacks. The data also provided a fuller historical record of how the buildings collapsed and lessons for future architects and engineers.

Only a movie budgeted as mass entertainment, though, could harness all that costly information to reconstruct the point of view of two severely injured and bewildered men, who didn't even know the twin towers had been flattened until rescuers lifted them to the surface many hours later.

Their story, and those of their families, their rescuers and the three men killed alongside them, is the subject of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, which Paramount is releasing in the US next week. A few months after Paul Greengrass's United 93 became the first 9/11 movie to enter wide theatrical release, the quandary that Paramount's executives face is a familiar one: how do you market a movie like this without offending audiences or violating the film's intentions? Carefully, of course.

In New York and New Jersey, for example, there will be no billboards or subway signs, which could otherwise hit, quite literally, too close to home. And the studio is running all of its materials by a group of survivors to avoid offending sensibilities.

Nicolas Cage, who plays the taciturn Sergeant McLoughlin (opposite Michael Peña as Jimeno), says the movie is not meant to entertain. "I see it as storytelling which depicts history," he says. "This is what happened. Look at it. Generation after generation goes by, they'll have United 93, and World Trade Center, to recall that history."

Whether Stone set out to make a historical drama or a dramatic history isn't entirely clear. Jimeno and McLoughlin, who have both since retired from the Port Authority, say the script and the production took very few liberties except for the sake of time compression. "It's still Hollywood," says Jimeno. "But Oliver - it's to the point where he drives me crazy, trying to get things right."

There are many people, of course, who have been driven a little crazy for other reasons by some of Stone's more controversial films such as JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon. But Stone now speaks as if his days of deliberate provocation were behind him: "I stopped," he says simply. "I stopped." His new film, he says, might go down as well in Kansas as in Boston, or, for that matter, in London or Madrid. "It's not a political film," he insists. "Why can't I stay on message for once in a while? Why do I have to take detours all the time?"

He said he just wants to depict the plain facts of what happened on September 11. "It seems to me that the event was mythologised by both political sides into something that they used for political gain," he says. "And I think one of the benefits of this movie is that it reminds us of what actually happened that day, in a very realistic sense.

"We show people being killed, and we show people who are not killed, and the fine line that divides them. How many men saved those two lives? Hundreds. These guys went into that twisted mass, and it very clearly could've fallen down on them, and struggled all night for hours to get them out."

Crash director Paul Haggis is now making an adaptation of Richard Clarke's book on the causes of 9/11, Against All Enemies. Asked if that weren't the kind of film he might once have tried to tackle, Stone first scoffs: "I couldn't do it. I'd be burned alive." Then he adds: "This is not a political film. That's the mantra they handed me."

Stone says he particularly owes his producers, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher, for taking a chance on him at a time when he had gone cold in Hollywood after a string of commercial and critical disappointments culminating in the epic Alexander in 2004."Alexander was cold-turkeyed in this town," he says, "I think unfairly, but it was, and I took a hit. Nobody's your friend, nobody wants to talk to you."

Stone came forward asking to direct World Trade Center about a year ago. He decided it would require a different approach from, say, JFK. "The Kennedy assassination was 40 years ago, and look at the heat there, a tremendous amount of heat," he says. "I was trying to give an alternative version of what I thought might have happened, but it wasn't understood. It was taken very literally.

"This is a fresh wound, and it had to be cauterised in a certain way. This is a very specific story. The details are the details are the details."

The details that led to the movie's making began in April 2004, when Andrea Berloff, a screenwriter, pitched a story about Jimeno's and McLoughlin's "transformation in the hole" to producers Sher and Shamberg. Berloff was candid about two things: "I didn't want to see the planes hit the buildings. We've seen enough of that footage forever. It's not adding anything new at this point. I also said I don't know how to end the movie, because there are 10 endings to the story. What happened to John and Will in that hospital could be a movie unto itself. Will flatlined twice, and was still there on Halloween. And John was read his last rites twice."

Berloff and Shamberg headed to New York to meet the two officers and their families, and to visit both the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where the men had once patrolled, and Ground Zero. Despite the nearly three years that had elapsed, both families remained emotionally raw. "Within 20 minutes of starting to talk, they were losing it," says Berloff. "We all just sat and cried together for a week."

The actors aimed for accuracy in different ways. Nicolas Cage says he focused on getting McLoughlin's New York accent right, and spent time in a sense deprivation tank to get a hint of the fear and claustrophobia you might experience after hours immobile and in pain in the dark. Michael Peña all but moved in with Jimeno. Maggie Gyllenhaal, playing Jimeno's wife, had her own problems to solve. Earlier in the year, at the Tribeca film festival, she said of 9/11: "America has done reprehensible things and is responsible in some way." She apologised publicly, then met privately with the Jimenos, offering to withdraw if they objected to her involvement. "We started to get into politics a little bit, and Will said, 'I don't care what your politics are'," says Gyllenhaal.

With Jimeno and McLoughlin vouching for the film-makers, more rescuers asked to be included, meaning not only that dozens of uniformed New York officers would fly to Los Angeles to re-enact the rescue of the two men, but that there were more sources of information to replace Berloff's best guesses with vivid memories.

Some of the film's most fictitious-seeming moments are authentic. Jimeno's account of his ordeal included a Castaneda-like vision in which Jesus appeared with a water bottle in his hand. Or there's a dissolute paramedic with a lapsed licence who redeems himself as he digs to reach Jimeno. And a former marine who leaves his job as a suburban accountant, rushes to church, then dons his pressed battle fatigues, stops at a barbershop for a high-and-tight, heads downtown past barricades saying he's needed and winds up tiptoeing through the perilous heap calling out "United States Marines" until Jimeno hears him and responds. Stone says he is adding a note at the end of the film, revealing that the marine, David Karnes, re-enlisted and served two tours of duty in Iraq, because test audiences believed he was a Hollywood invention.

Reality can be just as gushingly sentimental as the sappiest movie, Stone acknowledges, especially when the storytellers are uniformed officers in New York who lived through 9/11. And particularly when it comes to Jimeno and McLoughlin, who have struggled with the awkwardness of being singled out as heroes when so many others died similarly doing their duty, and when so many more rescued them.

"I say there is heroism," Stone says. "Here you see this image of these poor men approaching the tower, with no equipment, and they don't know what the hell they're doing, and they're going up into this inferno, they're like babies. You feel saddened, you feel sorry for them. They don't have a chance."

This is going to be hard for people, says Cage. "Unlike Platoon, where most of us don't know what it's like to be in the jungle, the audience has lived through 9/11. We all walk into buildings every day, and we were there, and we saw it on TV, so this is going to be very cathartic."

"It's not about the World Trade Center, really. It's about any man or woman faced with the end of their lives, and how they survive," Stone says. "I did it for a reason. I did it because emotionally it hit me. I loved the simplicity and modesty of this movie.

"I hope the movie does well, even if they say 'in spite of Oliver Stone'."

[RegularKarate]

Rule #1 for making a respectable, tasteful 9/11 movie: No Coldplay in the ads

United 93: 1
WTC: 0