I’ve seen the headline “Oliver Stone & Nic Cage To Make 9/11 Movie” on at least a dozen of the movie sites I most often frequent today. I spent the better part of this morning avoiding clicking on it. With the horrendous terrorist bombings in London yesterday, could news of a movie like this possibly come at a worse time? I’ve been recoiling from the mere thought of reading about it, let alone writing.
But now I’m back from lunch, I’ve got a sub sandwich in me and I’m ready to face whatever further misery Oliver Stone plans to inflict on the 9/11 victims, so I clicked over to Variety and started reading. Here we go.
Paramount Pictures is stepping up to the table to finance an Oliver Stone picture about the rescue of two Port Authority police officers from the World Trade Center rubble of 9/11. Nic Cage, fresh from appearing in a movie poster in which his face is constructed entirely of bullets (click here for that), will star in a script written by Andrea Berloff.
Put aside for a moment questions of whether or not we’re ready for a Hollywood movie about 9/11 and consider that even if we ARE ready for it, do we really want it made by Hollywood’s biggest wacko conspiracy theorists Oliver Stone? This is the guy that made JFK after all. It’s a subject that should be handled with delicacy… and delicate is a word simply not in Stone’s vocabulary. Next to Michael Moore he's Hollywood's biggest bludgeon. Paramount should have held out for Steven Spielberg, or heck, I’d even take McG. He’d turn it into Diehard, but at least the guy knows how to be patriotic.
What’s amazing is that the nation’s entertainment corporations have waited this long to cash in on America’s biggest recent tragedy. But now that the blossom is off the rose, they’re going full force. Stone’s untitled feature isn’t the only one in production. Columbia Pictures and ABC both have 9/11 related projects in the works.
Will you watch? Let us know here.
