Entries Tagged 'path to 9/11' ↓

The Path to 9/11 might have been lowbrow infotainment (yes: infotainment comes in many flavors, and see my entire take on the miniseries and related issues here), but screenwriter Cyrus Nowsrateh is one serious dude. And he points up one very serious side effect of the era of extreme political partisanship: the witch-hunting is getting uglier by the day.

In July a reporter asked if I had ever been ethnically profiled. I happily replied, “No.” I can no longer say that. The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings–wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response.

The hysteria engendered by the series found more than one target. In addition to the death threats and hate mail directed at me, and my grotesque portrayal as a maddened right-winger, there developed an impassioned search for incriminating evidence on everyone else connected to the film.

Nowsrateh, the son of Iranian immigrants, also says that he undertook the project as a sort of (nonpartisan) mission:

I am neither an activist, politician or partisan, nor an ideologue of any stripe. … I felt duty-bound from the outset to focus on a single goal–to represent our recent pre-9/11 history as the evidence revealed it to be. The American people deserve to know that history: They have paid for it in blood. Like all Americans, I wish it were not so. I wish there were no terrorists. I wish there had been no 9/11. I wish we could squabble among ourselves in assured security. But wishes avail nothing.

“The Path to 9/11″ was intended to remind us of the common enemy we face. Like the 9/11 Report itself, it is meant to enable us to better defend ourselves from a future attack. Past is prologue, and 9/11 is merely another step in an escalating Islamic fundamentalist reign of terror. By dramatizing the step-by-step increase in attacks on America–all of which, in fact, occurred–we are better able to see the pattern and anticipate the future. That was the point of the series, its only intention. Call it the canary in the coal mine. Call it John O’Neill in the FBI.

Read the whole thing.

Good for Nowsrateh. His movie may have been lowbrow, but it seems to have been an honorable attempt to communicate important information to everyday people who don’t follow the news too closely.

This is not to say that his version of the story of the 9/11 Commission is accurate according to the historical record (which has not yet been fully revealed), but it gets the important part of the report out there in a way that people can relate to.

That’s the power of infotainment. That’s why the project was endorsed by Tom Kean. And Clinton was a narcissistic asshole for the arm-twisting and kicking and screaming he did over it. And some Democrats were willing to stain their reputation as democrats over it.

Nowsrateh makes one other wholly nonpartisan point that is being avoided by partisans on both sides—because it’s about human nature and you can’t make hay from it for either “side”:

“The Path to 9/11″ was set in the time before the event, and in a world in which no party had the political will to act.

That is a very shrewd observation: the failure of imagination that was the backdrop and the run-up to the terror attacks of 9/11 was accompanied by a narcotized, celebrity-obsessed, glamour-obsessed, addicted-to-the-good-life population that had to be—and still has to be—roused from its long slumber.

Infotainment is a good way—maybe the only way—to get through to…us. Because in addition to being impossible to pin down in our media choices, we are also addicted to being distracted. About which more another time.

UPDATE: Edward Wyatt of the NYT certainly doesn’t agree with me. He thinks it’s “puzzling” that ABC aired the movie:

It’s little wonder that ABC?s mini-series “The Path to 9/11″ drew stinging criticism earlier this month for its invented scenes, fabricated dialogue and unsubstantiated accounts of how the Clinton and Bush administrations conducted themselves in the years encompassing the World Trade Center attacks of 1993 and 2001.

A more puzzling question is why ABC spent $30 million on what, since it lacked commercials, amounted to a five-hour public service announcement.

Of course Nowsrateh did consider it a public service announcement, and it may well have been one. Robert Thompson, the go-to pop culture guy when Neal Gabler isn’t available, sniffs his dispproval:

“Saying it is a public service is the same as claiming ideological ownership,” said Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “If it is being packaged as a way to expose people to the contents of the 9/11 Commission report, and you’re encouraging it to be used in schools, then you do have to present it as factual. It doesn’t do a good job of that.”…

Maybe it didn’t do a good enough job for the politicians, but the audience isn’t interested in their reputations.

Mr. Thompson asserted that however that form of entertainment was categorized, it did little teaching about history. “ ‘Richard III’ is one of the greatest plays ever written,” he said, “but it is not very good history.”

Maybe not, but that’s not why people stage and attend the play, as Mr. Pop Culture should know.

Although I find reasons to criticize most of it, I’m a pop culture fan—and a fan of anything that gets people to understand our world a little better, regardless of the format—so it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I’m enthusiastic about this graphic adaptation of The 9/11 Report, which was published a couple of weeks ago to little fanfare but which apparently has been enjoying excellent sales.

The book boasted an initial print run of 60,000 copies, and has gone back for additional printings of 20,000. And like its original source material, which was published two years ago, the adaptation has made the New York Times bestseller list, debuting at No. 6 in the paperback nonfiction category.

Veteran children’s comic book writers Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, who are both in their mid-seventies, are my new heroes. Having spent their 50-year career doing work-for-hire, they made a fascinating discovery (interestingly, one that has not been mentioned anywhere in the hysteria over ABC’s The Path to 9/11) and ran with it:

one of Jacobson’s biggest paydays is coming from a property that he had absolutely no hand in creating. As a work of the U.S. government, the 9/11 report falls in the public domain, a fact discovered by Colón when he read a news story about director Ron Howard’s effort to turn the report into a film. [emphasis added]

(Memo to Bill Clinton, Esq.: The Report is in the public domain, which means anyone has the right to publish it. And toy with it.)

Anyway, the writers took the 567-page report and, in 16 months, condensed it down to 131 comic-book pages:

As expected, the project has its critics:

[S]ome critics of the adaptation argue the medium is an inappropriate venue for such a sensitive topic.

In particular, they’ve taken umbrage with Colón’s use of “Blamm!” in big red letters in a panel showing American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon.

Indeed, I can see that this is not for all tastes:

But Commission co-chairs Hamilton and Kean both endorsed the project after noting that it was serious and faithful to the Report. And Hamilton noted the most important reason for endorsing it: graphic novels reach a different audience—one we especially need to reach.

“It also opens the report up to a whole new audience that doesn’t read much anymore.” [emphasis added]

Oh—and Stan Lee loves it too:

“Never before have I seen a non-fiction book as beautifully and compellingly written and illustrated as The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation. I cannot recommend it too highly. It will surely set the standard for all future works of contemporary history, graphic or otherwise, and should be required reading in every home, school and library.”

Next up for Colon and Jacobson: a graphic adaptation of the war on terror, based on news reports.

John Fund, WSJ:

Docudramas” are the worst draft of history.

No further elaboration needed, right?

When it comes to pop culture: caveat emptor.

Reminding Britons of their historic responsibility for the plight of the Palestinians, the Palestinian prime minister, seemingly unaware of the West’s sour mood vis-a-vis recalcitrant Muslim leaders, goes over the head of Tony Blair, who is visiting the Middle East and has met with Abbas and with Olmert but won’t meet with any Hamas leaders, and appeals directly to a presumably more sympathetic audience: the “real” Labour party:

Here in Palestine we wonder what the British public thinks of the Blair government conduct that has brought about untold hurt to the Palestinian people. We know why our people are being collectively punished. It is because we refuse to give up our right to freedom and independence.

At the heart of our region’s problems is the Israeli occupation, which has brought about endless suffering and disasters. If you wish to do the right thing, Mr Blair, then work for the end of occupation without further delay. Our message to Labour party delegates as they assemble this month is not to allow those who stand with our oppressors to divert you from your values and historic association with freedom movements around the world.

It would seem, however, the Palestinians couldn’t be further from the minds of Labour Party politicians, who are in a full-out public war with one another. Here’s the BBC’s headline:

If Charles Clarke’s savage attacks on Gordon Brown were designed to flush him out and even expose him, then to some extent they have worked.

I know close to nothing about Labour Party politics, but here’s a handy primer from the BBC, which promises to be the “full story” of the Brownites vs. the Blairites. I’ve cut and pasted the highlights. (There’s not a word about foreign policy.):

It would wrong to use the labels Old Labour and New Labour but they do give a guide to the differences.

For example Mr Brown and his closest aides and supporters are at ease with trade unionists and can live with the left.

Sharp divide

Blairites can barely disguise their contempt for the unions and the many traditions of the labour movement.

So you are unlikely to find the Brownites calling for the party to cuts its link with the unions, a demand which has been made repeatedly by arch-Blairites.

…

Just as sharp is the divide over the use of spin doctors such as Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell.

Brownites have detested the reliance which Mr Blair has placed on the black arts of media manipulation.

They have hated the leaking and briefing against colleagues which Downing Street endorsed and which became so commonplace in recent years.

…

[Brown] has promised to restore the authority of the civil service in the hope that he can rebuild public trust in the Labour government.

Secret loans from a coterie of rich entrepreneurs are likely to be a thing of the past.

Mr Brown is thought likely to favour a new and more transparent way of funding party politics.

…

He has indicated he will seek to improve consultation with Labour’s constituency parties and deepen the sense of participation.

And now it seems that the pressure is on Brown.

Meanwhile, Blair is having a fine old time with Olmert and Abbas, who are ready to meet each other unconditionally—because they want what is best for their people. But of course Hamas stands firm: it wants only resistance.

And only a fool or a marked man would try to insert himself into the double-dealing back-stabbing blood-curdling rip-their-guts-out arena of British politics.

Oops! That’s fiction!

I wouldn’t want you to think that I can’t tell the difference between…

The frenzy over the ABC TV movie extravaganza cannot possibly get hotter—with Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger now applying considerable pressure on Tom Kean by suggesting that his endorsement of the movie endangers the credibility of the sacred 9/11 Commission (of which he was a member).

The dramatic impact of a costly but carelessly produced film will invariably overwhelm the impression of any government document.

Earlier in the day, before Kean heard about this letter (in an incredible turn, he found out about it on CNN’s air tonight, while Wolf Blitzer was interviewing him on the Situation Room—which is to say that the press had a copy of the letter before Kean even knew it existed), Kean had this to say:

“The American government let us down,” Kean told Reuters. “Not only didn’t they stop the plot, they didn’t even slow it down.”

Kean said he saw the show as a way to raise awareness of the recommendations made by the 9/11 commission, which issued its report in 2004.

Kean said he expected criticism. “People in both parties didn’t particularly like the commission report, and I think people in both parties aren’t going to love this one.”

Kean makes the most important point: that regardless of how far back the path to 9/11 may go (as far as the early 1980s, or to 1979, or to 1947, or to the Ottoman empire, or to the 7th century—depending on your point of view), it was a failure of government. (Clinton’s bad luck is that he was president for 7 years during the immediate run-up to 9/11, whereas Bush was in office for only 8 months.)

More important, I believe: it was primarily a massive failure of imagination (and that failure of imagination lingers in some quarters: there is a great tendency, even among otherwise intelligent people, to believe that real-life villains are mustache-twirlers or that they wear black hats. The best example of this is the refusal on the left to take Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric seriously, because he smiles a lot and speaks in a soft tone of voice. It should go without saying that not every malignantly evil person screams like Hitler did. Nor should Richard Reid and Zacharia Moussaoui have been considered non-threatening just because they looked and/or acted, um, dazed and confused).

The story of how we as a country got to 9/11 is of interest—but it’s a story that is still being written (and there’s a lot of grist for the mill of speculation, which is precisely what makes it good material for a drama such as The Path to 9/11).

For most of us, what’s really important about the actual events of 9/11 is the lessons we draw from it and how we behave and think after 9/11: as a country and as individual Americans and as human beings. That is a nonpartisan challenge—indeed, it’s a suprapartisan challenge, and it affects all of us. Which is why it’s so gross for the Clinton crew to be screaming over their precious reputations. An unwelcome reminder of their m.o.: everything is always all about them.

Even if he started at an unconscionably low level—and there’s no question that he was completely ignorant of what was happening in the world outside America’s borders—at least Bush has grown on the job. There is no question about it. [links to come]. Whereas the Democrats have wandered in the darkness [links to come at a later date].

Worse, they have wasted six years, because they still have not come up with one coherent suggestion about how to confront the external challenges facing America. All of their brainpower is directed at arguing that Bush is wrong, that he is stupid and incompetent, that Rove is the puppetmaster that manipulates him, that Cheney is the power behind the throne, that Bush’s brain was hijacked by neocons, and that his administration is evil and incompetent. They can hardly wait to shred his ideas and his policies to pieces.

Time’s a-wasting, fellas. Some of us are desperate to hear your ideas about the right policies: coherent ideas only, please.

That’s what Roger Simon says about the by now insanely controversial ABC miniseries, which Clinton has now managed to make much, much, much more important than it ever would have been.

I agree with Simon:

Is Bill Clinton in the pay of ABC?

How else to explain the behavior of the normally politically savvy Clinton in trying to suppress ABC’s 9/11 miniseries? He’s only adding millions of viewers for the show, reminding them that while Bin Laden was concocting the World Trade Center catastrophe, our president was playing hide-the-cigar with Monica in the White House corridors. [I thought he was great at multi-tasking.-ed. Sorry. I forgot.] But the blame game for 9/11 is one of the biggest wastes of time imaginable. Nearly everyone on both sides of the aisle was asleep. Or clearly not awake enough. It doesn’t take a commission to figure that out.

I’m with him on this, too:

 The reason I have left the Democratic Party is that most of them seem to want to go back to politics as usual, a weird inversion of the Clinton-Gore theme of “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.” They seem to be dreaming of the past when everything has changed.

 And especially on this:

And whatever the quality of ABC’s film turns out to be - yes, I suppose I’ll watch - the flick that really interests me is the bit of cinéma verité just released today by Al Qaeda Studios. Filming on location in Scenic Afghanistan, my guess is their resident videographers were hard at work while in the good old USA our two political parties were biting each other’s throats over impeachment. Pathetic when you think about it.

Because of headlines like this:

NYT Falsely Claims 9/11 Commission Concluded Lewinsky Distracted Clinton Admin From Terrorism

Never mind the brain-dead tactic of attacking the review (and reviewer) of a made-for-TV movie that will have been forgotten by next week. (People will remember the hysteria over the movie long after they have forgotten the movie itself.)

The problem is the syntax. The even bigger problem is the tortured logic required to understand what the headline writer is saying. People need to have been following this story in order to get the point. And most people aren’t paying close attention—nor do they want to.

They want the headline.

Memo to Democrats: stick to sound bites. They work.

And I’m wondering: do they really want to be associated with smearing, sight unseen, on the basis of “reports from experts on 9/11 who have viewed the program,” a television drama? Do the Democrats want to be associated with censorship ( because the “program” they object to “could be construed as right-wing political propaganda”)?

I guess they do, because Senators Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Charles Schumer, Debbie Stabenow, and Byron Dorgin sent a letter to Disney chief Robert Iger reminding him of the responsibilities that come with his broadcasting license. It is

predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events.

And then they go ahead and accuse Disney of peddling falsehoods, er, I mean:

numerous and serious inaccuracies that will undoubtedly serve to misinform the American people about the tragic events surrounding the terrible attacks of that day.

And they utterly fail to acknowledge that this is a movie that they are trying to shut down. They refer to it as a “program,” a “broadcast,” and a “miniseries,” but their accusation is that ABC and Disney are misrepresenting the “factual record.”

Read the whole depressing mess here.

This is thuggish political intimidation of the leftist variety—over a trivial piece of pop culture that is being inflated into the Final Word on 9/11.

Now…not so much:

According to the New York Post:

A furious Bill Clinton is warning ABC that its mini-series “The Path to 9/11″ grossly misrepresents his pursuit of Osama bin Laden - and he is demanding the network “pull the drama” if changes aren’t made. …

“The content of this drama is factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate and ABC has the duty to fully correct all errors or pull the drama entirely,” the four-page letter said.

Ever the lawyer, Clinton acknowledges not once but twice in the same sentence that he knows ABC created a drama.

Nevertheless, pop culture-wise (not to mention common sense-wise), he’s on very shaky ground when he demands that a drama (i.e., a fiction) produced for television—an entertainment medium—be factually and incontrovertibly accurate according to facts he claims are accurate.

Zeitgeist-wise, however, he’s seizing this moment to make sure that the burning finger of blame—no matter how ephemeral—points away from him.

And the Clintonistas Madeleine Albright, Bruce Lindsey, and Sandy Berger object vociferously to a television dramatization:

Madeleine K. Albright, said in her letter to the Disney executive, Robert A. Iger, that although she had requested a copy of the film, ABC had not given her one. But, Ms. Albright said, she has been told by people who have seen it that it “depicts scenes that never happened, events that never took place, decisions that were never made and conversations that never occurred.”“It asserts as fact things that are not fact,” she wrote….

“Sept. 11 is not ‘entertainment,’ it is reality,” Ms. Albright wrote Mr. Iger. “Before you air your broadcast, I trust you will ensure you have the facts right.”

I hate to remind Ms. Albright that other historical “realities”—such as World War I, World War II, the Civil War, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust, to name just a few—are all entertainment.

Everything, including the daily “news,” is packaged and presented as entertainment.

There is nothing new under the sun: the historically ignorant and intellectually lazy American public chooses to get its information about the world through pop culture. 9/11 is not exempt.

I’ve been writing about this for a while: here, here, here, and here.

This story gets stupider and stupider by the minute. The folks at Democratic Underground are so afraid that ABC’s 9/11 miniseries could have a negative impact on Democrats at the polls that one of them proposes a Google-bombing for the morning after.

To counteract the effects the ABC 9-11 movie could have on the midterm elections, I recommend this course of action:

The night of, and the morning after, people will be hitting the internet looking for information on the events as depicted in this movie.

Our biggest opportunity will be to have nearly identical blog posts waiting, then submit them to be found internet wide the morning after the movie. Google and Technorati will pick up on these posts quickly. We can make these entries dominate the first several pages of the search engines.

MAKE SURE THE POST TITLE HAS THE TITLE OF THE MOVIE IN IT!

Get every Democratic friendly blog on board as possible… you e-mail the ones you know, they’ll e-mail the ones they know, etc. Make SURE these blogs are on the Technorati network and have also been submitted to Google’s blog search.

For one day, change the title of your blog to the title of the movie.

Agree on a clear, detailed, and sourced body of information — I’ve seen several examples on DU lately disputing what is in the movie. Media Matters has one. One was posted today on DU by Richard Clarke.

Everyone post it. Right after the movie is over or the next morning at the latest.

‘Cause it’s only a movie—not, you know, the gospel truth. But some people are taking the upcoming ABC TV extravaganza The Path to 9/11 waaaay too seriously:

the Clinton administration’s lethargic and chronically dilatory efforts to deal with bin Laden are an irrefutable part of the historical record.

The preceding leaves us with two possible explanations regarding the [scene that is causing all the controversy]. One is that the filmmakers have unearthed a previously unknown jewel that they can fully document; that Berger really did slam down the phone on a field agent looking for guidance. If that’s the case, then this entire conversation is irrelevant and you should cease reading this essay.

The other explanation is that, being a docudrama, the filmmakers included a fabricated scene (which was a composite of many real factors) to dramatize the ineptitude and fecklessness that so characterized the Clinton administration. One can (if one so chooses) give the filmmakers artistic license to do such a thing. But if that is what they have done, conservative analysts who back this movie as a historical document will mortgage their credibility doing so.

YOU MIGHT NOTE THAT the defense of the scene offers a rationale that Dan Rather would probably be comfortable with – fake but accurate. I’m uncomfortable embracing such a rationale, and I suspect most other bloggers who have rushed to tout the film will feel the same way once they think it through.

It’s all fake, fer chrissake. Who’s claiming it’s accurate, and what meds are they on? Are conservative bloggers (or liberal bloggers, for that matter) really investing their “credibility” when they voice an opinion about a movie about 9/11?

Television offers dramas designed to grab and hold our attention for as long as possible. The dramatizations on television take liberties with the “truth” (which in real life takes a long time to unfold, if it ever does, and is often confusing and nonlinear) in order to tell a story. A docudrama is an entertainment based (loosely) on true events and factual tidbits. It is infotainment. Infotainment about 9/11 is no more truthful or sacred or important than any other television programming. Nor is it more likely to stick in the mind of the average viewer (or voter) than any other piece of entertainment.

My previous thoughts on this apparently important cultural moment are here, here, and here. I do seem to have underestimated the amount of attention this “controversy” would receive prior to the airing of the miniseries (this coming Sunday and Monday evenings).

Today, for example, the New York Times weighed in.

Days before its scheduled debut, the first major television miniseries about the Sept. 11 attacks was being criticized on Tuesday as biased and inaccurate by bloggers, terrorism experts and a member of the Sept. 11 commission, whose report makes up much of the film’s source material. …

In particular, some critics—including Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar—questioned a scene that depicts several American military officers on the ground in Afghanistan.

It is quite amusing to see serious people taking this so seriously—as if the court of public opinion and the politics of the day are all that matters, and as if their legacy were being determined by dramatists. And it’s always the serious people who talk about the “dumbing down” of America.

On the other hand, after I followed the Power Within link that Jeff Jarvis pointed to today, I decided that I have to revise my personal definition of “serious person.” Sadly, Bill Clinton has jumped the shark.

The upcoming ABC TV movie (which I discussed here and here) has been given some last-minute surgery. Hugh Hewitt has the scoop from an e-mailer, who tells all about an unprecedented weekend meeting to decide the fate of the final cut, which the Clinton team was reportedly very unhappy about:

- There will be a handful of tweaks made to a few scenes.
- They are minor, and nuance in most cases - a line lift here, a tweak to the edit there.
- There are 900 screeners out there. When this airs this weekend, there will be a number of people who will spend their free evenings looking for these changes and will be hard pressed to identify them. They are that minor.
- The average viewer would not be able to tell the difference between the two versions.
- The message of the Clinton Admin failures remains fully intact.

This story is so inside baseball that the many millions of viewers of this $40 million project will be completely unaware of the controversy in the blogosphere. Which is not to say that they’ll take the movie as gospel. They’ll know it’s a movie, and they know that movies are stories, which organize information and make it go down easy.

When they’re done watching it, they may know a little more about 9/11 than before they sat down to watch it. Or maybe not. Either way, it will be part of the smorgasbord of 9/11 programming offered by the entertainment conglomerates that rule our universe. Which are going to go totally overboard on the 9/11 anniversary, which will then become the topic of debate (political debate and media criticism).

Just to be clear: I consider all of it infotainment. The “serious news” outlets are as overstuffed with storytelling packaging as the “non-serious” cable networks. That’s because they are all ruled by the Infotainment Imperative: their mission is to grab and hold our attention for as long as possible (by whatever means possible: it is an amoral enterprise).

Among the 9/11 anniversary offerings:

BBC:

The fifth anniversary of the attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001 will be marked by special reports and programming on the BBC.

9/11 - The Twin Towers (Thursday 7 September 2006, 9.00pm, BBC ONE) tells the 11 September story through the testimonies of survivors, victims’ families, emergency workers and city officials.

A Path to 9/11 (Tuesday 12 September, 9.00pm and Wednesday 13 September, 8.00pm, BBC TWO), starring Harvey Keitel, traces the origins of the 9/11 attacks, drawing on the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report.

On 11 September itself, BBC News bulletins and BBC News 24 will feature live reports from Ground Zero in New York, with packages from Jeremy Cooke.

BBC World will co-present from New York with Katty Kay. etc.

PBS:

NOVA “BUILDING ON GROUND ZERO”
Tuesday, September 5, 2006, 8:00-9:00 p.m. ET (check local listings)

AMERICA REBUILDS II: RETURN TO GROUND ZERO
Monday, September 11, 2006, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings)
FRONTLINE “RETURN OF THE TALIBAN”
Tuesday, October 3, 2006, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings)

FRONTLINE “THE ENEMY WITHIN”
Tuesday, October 10, 2006, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings)

FRONTLINE “THE LOST YEAR IN IRAQ”
Tuesday, October 17, 2006, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings)

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times talks about a plethora of programs here.

Variety mentions a mind-boggling number of programs of great, er, variety:

CBS is bringing back an updated version of the “9/11″ docu produced by brothers Gedeon and Jules Naudet and firefighter James Hanlon.

CBS said it won’t censor language in the doc, shot by the brothers who were filming at a firehouse in lower Manhattan when the attacks took place.

Update includes additional interviews with survivors. A total of 39 million people watched “9/11″ the first time it aired.

The two 9/11 specials will go up against NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” in Gotham on Sept. 10, when the Giants play host to the Indianapolis Colts.

Also on CBS, Katie Couric will preside over her first primetime special for the network, the one-hour “Five Years Later: How Safe Are We,” on Sept. 6, the day after she takes over as anchor of the “CBS Evening News.”

NBC will air an updated version of the “Dateline” special “Flight 93″ on Sept. 11, including new interviews and audiotapes from the hijacked plane that was crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pa.

…

The cable-news networks will spend all or part of Sept. 11 broadcasting from lower Manhattan, carrying some or all of the ceremony live.

Fox News Channel kicks off coverage called “9/11: The Day America Changed” over the weekend, and Jon Scott will start anchoring coverage at 8:30 a.m. Monday from Ground Zero.

Most of Fox’s primetime will also originate from Ground Zero, with Neal Cavuto, Shepard Smith and Greta Van Susteren doing live shows at the scene.

CNN will air a new documentary, “CNN Presents: In the Footsteps of bin Laden,” reported by Christiane Amanpour and partially based on Bergen’s book, “The Osama bin Laden I Know.”

“American Morning” will cablecast from Ground Zero, as will some of CNN’s primetime lineup. CNN’s “Pipeline” broadband service will be free for the day.

MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews” will do a week of remembrances of 9/11 from politicians and public figures including Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell; Matthews will also host an hourlong live special, “9/11: The Day That Changed America,” at 10 p.m. on Sept. 11.

From “Countdown to Ground Zero” to “Inside the Twin Towers,” cable TV has created docus geared both to providing information and to stirring emotions.

History Channel’s biggest project is the two-hour “Countdown to Ground Zero,” which ran Sunday on the web, with a repeat scheduled for Sept. 11. Charles Maday, senior VP of programming for History, said “Ground Zero” traces the events of 9/11 in grim detail, with a focus on individuals caught up in the tragedy. Re-creations with actors of some incidents are meant to heighten the drama.

I rest my case. But not before saying that no matter how overblown the programming will be—and I expect it to be totally over the top—I think it’s all good. We need to process 9/11, and there’s no better way to do it than through stories, which, when done as they should be done, offer clarity. And catharsis.

A few weeks ago, I posted about an upcoming TV miniseries titled The Path to 9/11:

I wasn’t able to ascertain much about the agenda of this TV movie from the credits, but I did have my suspicions that this would become a hot potato.

And apparently it has become hugely controversial. Read all about it here, where Justin Levine, who’s seen the film calls it “astonishing” and says

For those who have been asking for a clear historical account of the build up to the 9/11 disaster, free of political spin, politically correct whitewashing and partisan wrangling - I can say wholeheartedly that this is the film that you have been waiting for

and where he also says

The Clinton administration will likely go ballistic over this film.

and then go here, to his later post, where he describes how the shit has hit the fan–to the extent that it’s rumored Disney is being lobbied by Clinton administration officials to pull or edit the film before it airs on 9/10 and 9/11.

Who says Hollywood is dead? The Player author Michael Tolkin [$$], that’s who):

“The movies haven’t been very good the last three or four years, they really haven’t,” he said. “Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what they were will never return.”

The source of all this creative-industrial-complex angst is the death of what he both eulogizes and parodies: the classic journey-of-the-hero story structure, analyzed by Joseph Campbell in the 1940’s, popularized a generation ago by George Lucas through “Star Wars,”…

“I don’t think America’s had a good movie made since Abu Ghraib,” Mr. Tolkin said, before clarifying that he’s talking about big movies, not the minuscule ones that have met the industry’s quotas for unembarrassing award nominees. “I think it showed that a generation that had been raised on those heroic movies was torturing. National myths die, I don’t think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way.”

Um, no. It’s the anti-hero that is finished. Our national myth is being rewritten. On television. As infotainment. While the Hollywood film industry continues its narcotized slumber.

Set your TiVos.

9/11 is coming to your TV screen. Curiously, the same network that stopped showing video of planes slamming into the Twin Towers a week after the event for fear of further traumatizing Americans, now brings you the story of How We Failed to Connect the Dots:

The miniseries will take viewers behind closed doors at the CIA, the FBI and the White House and into the world of Richard Clarke, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Sandy Berger and CIA Director George Tenet, among others. Viewers will follow the international manhunt for elusive bomber Ramzi Yousef (Nabile Elouahabi, Eastenders) and meet several key players in the 9/11 saga, including: John O’Neill, the career FBI agent who spent years zealously chasing bin Laden; then-ABC newsman John Miller (portrayed by Barclay Hope, Stargate SG-1), who interviewed bin Laden; Emad Salem and other key Muslim informants who aided the U.S.; and Ahmed Shah Massoud, commander of the Northern Alliance, a crucial American ally and the person bin Laden feared most. …

Former ABC News anchor John Miller, now the FBI’s Assistant Director of Public Affairs, was also a consultant on the project. His book, The Cell, co-authored with Michael Stone, was optioned by ABC for use in the teleplay. In addition, The Relentless Pursuit by Samuel Katz was also optioned.

The Path to 9/11 is executive-produced by Marc Platt (Empire Falls). The producers are Hans Proppe (Anne Frank) and Cyrus Nowrasteh (also the writer); and Governor Thomas H. Kean (Chair, The 9/11 Commission) is senior consultant. The director is David L. Cunningham. The miniseries is a production of UHP Productions, Ltd., and will be distributed by Touchstone Television.

The list of contributors gives no hint of the agenda of this miniseries. It hardly matters. By the time the entertainment community is finished with 9/11—and, remember: they’re just getting started!—there will be enough theories out there to satisfy people of all stripes.

Perhaps there will also be some works that tell the emotional truth. A gal can hope, can’t she?