Studios hoping Americans ready to watch Flight 93 movies

Studios hoping Americans ready to watch Flight 93 movies
By The Associated Press

Tuesday, December 6, 2005

PITTSBURGH -- Has the national psyche healed enough?

It's been more than four years since terrorists crashed Flight 93 in rural Southwestern Pennsylvania, killing 40 crew members and passengers. Some movie producers are hoping that American audiences are now finally ready to watch what happened on that plane.

Outside London this month, British writer-director Paul Greengrass began shooting a Flight 93 movie, produced by Universal Pictures and London-based Working Title Films. In Los Angeles, American filmmaker Peter Markle is finishing up his movie, produced by Fox Television Studios for the A&E cable network.

The films are part of a growing trend of new Sept. 11-themed movies. Oliver Stone is shooting an untitled 9/11 film; Mike Binder's "Reign O'er Me" deals with 9/11-related grief; and a movie adaptation of the book "102 Minutes" and a TV miniseries on the 9/11 Commission's findings are planned.

Industry experts say it's not surprising filmmakers would want to tell the story of that day.

"It's probably the most dramatic story of my lifetime. It is a seminal event for people who are younger than the World War II generation," says Delia Fine, A&E's vice president of film, drama and music.

Paul Dergarabedian, president of the Los Angeles-based box office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations Co., says everyone was touched by the attacks, so it's a story that everyone can relate to. He said he believes that will make the films profitable.

Observers say it worked earlier this year, when the Discovery Channel attracted large audiences to its docudrama "The Flight that Fought Back."

But that wasn't the case immediately following the attacks, when filmmakers and studios excised the Twin Towers from trailers, posters and some movies. They also postponed the release of films depicting terrorists and delayed the premiere of a counterterrorism TV show.

"You need the years to sort of let the emotion go, to be sensitive, but to let the culture as a whole experience it fresh without it being exploitive," says David Madden, Fox TV Studios' executive vice president of scripted programming. "If you tried to do it in 2002, it would have been too raw, too fresh."

Greengrass' film is scheduled to be released in theaters April 28. The $15 million film, "Flight 93," will have an improvised, documentary feel as it re-enacts in real time what happened on the ground and inside the fated plane.

Last year, the official 9/11 Commission report said the hijackers crashed the United Airlines aircraft as passengers tried to take control of the cockpit.

Markle is in post-production on Fox TV Studios' "Flight 93," which is scheduled to air Jan. 30 on A&E.

"It's a human story, a tragic story and, in some ways, an inspirational story," says David Gerber, executive producer of Markle's film. "These people were unbelievable."

Although the attacks were an American experience, the story of Flight 93 is universal, Markle says. The film, he explained, forces viewers to think about what they would have done in the same situation.

"It could have been us. Every one of us has been on a plane," he says.

The filmmakers say they tried to keep the stories as true as possible to what is known to avoid angering family members of those aboard Flight 93, as well as the public.

Markle's screenwriter, Nevin Schreiner, said he pored over news reports, books, transcripts of conversations between the plane and those on the ground, interviews with family members, and with counterterrorism, aviation and law enforcement experts.

"Where I did invent, it was simply because I had to and it was based on all probability of what would have happened," Schreiner says.

Officials with Fox TV say they stuck to what was on public record.

"We didn't want to make things up. We didn't want to turn this experience into something that was melodrama ... to 'Hollywood' them up," Madden says.

Allison Vadhan, of Atlantic Beach, N.Y., whose mother Kristin White-Gould was on Flight 93, knows the films might take dramatic license. But she says part of the beauty of the story is that there are some unanswered questions.

She says executives with Greengrass' film were meticulous about portraying people as true to life as possible. They were, she says, "extremely particular about every last detail -- would they stop for a Starbucks, would they stop for a New York Times, what kind of book the passenger might be reading."

Vadhan says she's glad the movies are being made because she doesn't want the victims of that day to be forgotten.

"A lot of us have a lot of pain we always have to live with, whether there are movies or not," she says. "Every which way, keep them coming, keep 9/11 in the minds of the next generation."