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StumbleUponBut the FBI's woes have just begun. Days later, scores of firefighters and law enforcement officials stare in horror at a massive Manhattan office tower that has been reduced to rubble. As the body count multiplies, soldiers march door to door rounding up Arab males for questioning. And in the bowels of a nearby building, an American woman stands over a detainee -- his naked body exposed to the glare of overhead lights, his head bowed in fear. He has yet to be formally charged with a crime, but the woman refuses to let up in her efforts to coax a confession out of him. Minutes later, he's dead.
These scenes have become agonizingly familiar, ticking by one by one since the terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And yet something's not quite right. Through the camera's lens, we pull back from the chaos in the streets, and there, soaring over the skyline, are the twin towers, still standing. How?
Because none of what you've just read is real. These scenes are from a movie, but not one in which digital animators have resurrected the towers. Instead, they're the product of Hollywood's sometimes prescient imagination -- in this case, brought to life in The Siege, a 1998 film that envisioned New York City under a stupendous terrorist attack. That's right: 1998.
Lawrence Wright, who wrote the screenplay, recalls feeling sickened when he watched the heart-rending newscasts of the actual attacks three years later. "There was a cinematic quality that was in some respects absurd but still undeniable," he says. "Then I realized, it looked like my movie. Over time, I watched events play out beat by beat -- American soldiers in the streets, the rounding up of Arab Americans, eventually the torture and these civil liberty questions that we're still dealing with.
"What made The Siege so unsettling was not the cinematic violence that rained down on New York. After all, Godzilla, also released in 1998 and starring a cranky mutant dinosaur, wreaked more havoc on the Manhattan cityscape. But that was escapist fare, whereas The Siege and other recent Hollywood productions are sometimes unnervingly realistic.
In Executive Decision (1996), Arabs hijack an airliner intending to wipe out Washington with a biological weapon that's on the plane. In Air Force One (1997), Russian neo-nationalists capture the President and demand the release of their incarcerated leader. In True Lies (1994), Arnold Schwarzenegger detonates air-to-air missiles to take out jihadists.
Hollywood, for all its follies, takes great pride in well-researched productions that strive for authenticity, especially when it comes to subjects like warfare, the military and the threat of terrorism. Before writing The Siege, Lawrence Wright immersed himself in government analyses of global terrorist activities and interviewed military, FBI and counterterrorism experts. He also had history to borrow from -- the first bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993, and two years later a foiled plot by Islamic extremists who planned to blow up Manhattan's Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the FBI headquarters, the building demolished in The Siege.
Studying the latest weaponry and security threats is one thing. Applying creative scenarios to terrorist tactics is another. When you realize that movies made in the mid-'90s actually predicted events, you begin to wonder if the military should be seeking Hollywood's counsel, not the other way around.
In TNT's summer miniseries The Grid, Silas Carson played a doctor who slowly develops a hatred for the West. To prepare for the role, he was carefully schooled in Arab culture and Islamic principles, so that he -- and the audience -- could better understand the motives of so-often stereotyped Islamic terrorists. "The show," says Carson, "really tests your black-and-white view of the world."
Such credibility and accuracy is vital to cultivate the viewer's trust and elicit the emotional response filmmakers covet. In 1997's The Peacemaker, the story of a Serbian renegade who plots to set off a nuclear blast at the UN, actors George Clooney and Nicole Kidman discover a bomb in the man's backpack. "Tell me what you see," says Clooney. Kidman, playing a brainy, excitable scientific type, surveys a long tube in the center of which sits a metallic sphere the size of a softball. "An SS18 primary with a plutonium core," she says. "A bomb inside a bomb, it has a capacity-relay detonator, double-pull, double-throw."
Meaningless to most, concedes Peacemaker director Mimi Leder, but thoroughly effective. "We did a lot of research into what exactly a bomb looks like, how you detonate it, how she could defuse it," she says. "Those were real terms. The important part is that it really scared you."
Achieving such realism is a lot tougher than simply packing the dialogue with convincing jargon. When filmmakers want to depict a war or even a brief graphic skirmish, they need hardware, uniforms and soldier-actors who at least appear genuinely lethal. For that, they routinely go to the Department of Defense, which has cooperated with Hollywood since the earliest days of filmmaking. And though it doesn't happen every day, Hollywood has done its part to help the government as well. After 9/11 the Pentagon tapped the movie industry's ability to spin fact-based what-if scenarios, consulting with writers, directors and producers in an attempt to war-game potential terrorist threats.
DOD cooperation makes all the difference. When it came to re-creating real-life events in the ambitious film Pearl Harbor, released in 2001, each branch of the military was consulted, and arrangements were made with preservationists so scenes could be filmed at actual historic sites. The Navy even assembled a fleet of previously mothballed ships.
Black Hawk Down, also released in 2001, was a detailed re-creation of the deadly October 1993 raid of a heavily defended neighborhood in Mogadishu, Somalia. Elite American military teams hoped to capture two lieutenants of a local warlord. Eighteen GIs died in the raid, which became an international PR disaster for the United States. "We flew in 8 combat helicopters and 100 soldiers to Morocco for that picture," says Philip Strub, the Pentagon-based Hollywood liaison, of the military's cooperation with director Ridley Scott.
Producers of Black Hawk Down also hired one of Hollywood's best-respected independent technical military consultants, Harry Humphries. A retired Navy SEAL who also worked on The Peacemaker and producer Jerry Bruckheimer's Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), Humphries made sure the actors were so well versed in military protocol that they behaved like real soldiers. "Black Hawk Down represented the absolute truth of what urban combat is all about," he says. The project was particularly dear to Humphries, who fought in Vietnam and remembers well how soldiers often paid with their lives when political constraints prevented U.S. forces from using their might to full advantage.
At every step of the process, liaison Strub met enthusiasm from officers who approved the cooperative venture. The film was seen as a chance to set the record straight -- to show that the men carried out their duties with pride and determination -- and that they did, in fact, capture the individuals they sought.
Such cooperation from the military comes with a price -- quite literally. To transport, maintain and fuel the helicopters, as well as to provide basic necessities for the troops, the military billed the makers of Black Hawk Down close to $3 million. There are also conditions put on any project -- laid out in the Army's Making Movies Guide, which provides instructions for everything from submitting scripts to the DOD to arranging advance screenings.
A story line need not fawn over the armed services, explains Strub, but if a plot assails the military or the military lifestyle gratuitously, it will be rejected. Men of Honor, for example, a 2000 film about a black man trying to prove himself as a Navy diver, shed light on the racism that once ran rampant in the ranks. Yet it received DOD support because it portrayed real events in realistic ways.
By contrast, Crimson Tide, the 1995 movie in which Denzel Washington heads a seemingly justifiable mutiny over his submarine commander, was considered so farfetched that a four-star admiral called a press conference prior to its screening to condemn the production. And Strub says that Oliver Stone's gory 1986 Vietnam story Platoon failed to garner official support because it portrayed the life of a patrol team as 24/7 mayhem.
In addition to -- or sometimes in lieu of -- working with the DOD, Hollywood has begun turning to a growing cadre of military veterans like Humphries who use their contacts and expertise to bring truth to a picture. No one is more sought after than Dale Dye, a retired Marine Corps captain who served in Vietnam and Beirut, earning a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Dye has consulted on dozens of motion pictures and major TV projects, including Band of Brothers (2001), Rules of Engagement (2000) and The Thin Red Line (1998).
The rough-spoken Dye is on a mission. "I have an agenda and have had one since I began my company almost 20 years ago," he says. "That is to ensure that professional fighting men get a fair rap. I have always been concerned that there was a certain bias -- that we're all fat, we're all from the South, we're all uneducated. It's not true."
Dye has matched his mission with Hollywood's need to look smart. His specialty is training. By putting actors through a week or more of military-like drills -- as he did for Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Tom Hanks's Band of Brothers -- he makes them convincing soldiers and better actors. "Most actors believe the sun rises and sets on their posteriors," he says. "That's the antithesis of the way a soldier thinks. We understand there are certain things worth sacrificing for -- the mission is frequently more important than you are."
When it comes to outfitting a production with props that the military can't or won't provide, Dye is as resourceful as the quick-thinking opportunist Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22. Dye uses his global old-boy network of museums, warehouses and legitimate arms dealers to secure rifles, handguns and tanks to match a movie's scope. If the hardware can't be found -- and if the budget is generous -- he oversees the manufacture of reproductions. For Band of Brothers, he secured several Soviet-era T-55 tanks and had them modified to resemble World War II German Tigers.
Sometimes the challenge in contemporary films is to boost believability by cramming in as many high-tech gadgets as the plot will bear. Despite appearances, movies never feature the latest toys in the U.S. arsenal -- in part for security reasons, but also because such weapons are usually in short supply. But Hollywood does come as close as it can to the cutting edge in order to dazzle the audience. The devastating Daisy Cutter bomb, which made headlines when it was used a few years ago in the war in Afghanistan, was actually declassified years earlier and was seen on the silver screen in 1995's Outbreak. The eavesdropping gear that played a prominent role in 1998's Enemy of the State, starring Will Smith, demonstrated how spy satellites can now zoom in and pick up a license plate number.
In The Sum of All Fears (2002), the audience is welcomed aboard the Presidential plane and watches in dread as a convincing facsimile of the "black box" with the nuclear launch codes is delivered to the President's side. In the film, a small nuclear device is set off in a Baltimore football stadium. Director Phil Alden Robinson chose to tone down the reality of such a cataclysm so the audience wouldn't be turned off -- and his message buried in the emotional fallout. "Let's not rub their nose in it," he said in a 2002 interview with IGN FilmForce, explaining how he scaled back the detonation and tried to make it clear that the bomb was so small the city survived. "The film is really about the response to terrorism. The message of the film is 'the proper response is that you don't rush headlong into violence.' "
Robinson actually hoped that political leaders might learn something from the measured restraint demonstrated in his Hollywood tale. Perhaps that is wishful thinking, but it wouldn't be the first time that the government accepted guidance from Hollywood. After 9/11, Pentagon officials phoned the Los Angeles-based Institute for Creative Technologies, a group founded in 2000 to design virtual-reality training simulations for the military, and requested that ICT assemble a team of screenwriters, directors and producers to dream up terrorist scenarios for the post-9/11 world. "They asked us if we could creatively think about what terrorists might do next," says ICT executive director Richard Lindheim.
He feared the scenarios they roughed out might be ridiculed as the fantasies of Hollywood crackpots. "Instead, they said, 'We never would have approached the problem this way, but what you're saying makes sense,' " says Lindheim, who could not discuss specifics for security reasons. Military analysts were methodical, but proved to be constricted by a slavish devotion to real-world specs. By contrast, the only boundary Hollywood knew was the limit of its imagination. In fact, The 9/11 Commission Report faulted the government precisely for its "failure of imagination."
Indeed, Lindheim wonders if that imagination hasn't, unintentionally, sometimes served as a weapon for the bad guys. "We know that there have been plenty of incidents where criminals have copied what was done in a movie," he says. "After 9/11, there were writers in Hollywood who asked themselves, 'My God, did they copy our films?' "
No evidence connects American movies with terrorist acts, yet Hollywood's brass try to err on the side of caution. "There's too much anger, too much hatred out there in the world," says director Mimi Leder. "You want to be accurate but you don't want to show someone how to make a bomb."
Harry Humphries laments that Black Hawk Down demonstrated for anyone who cared to rent the video that shoulder-fired rockets -- plentiful on the black market -- can cripple those awesome choppers. Still, he appears to be in the majority in feeling that bad guys have probably learned little from Hollywood. Indeed, the probable truth of the matter is that the terrorists we should most fear are not the inept caricatures so often portrayed in films where the good guys always prevail.
"These guys are serious," Captain Dye says. "They're not looking to movies for inspiration. They know more than filmmakers. They're professional soldiers."
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