Terrorist Attacks Alter Showbiz Offerings

N E W  Y O R K, Sept. 25 -- As the world watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center come under attack, viewers repeated a common refrain: "It looks like a movie."

In fact, what happened was eerily close to some movie scripts that were soon to hit the big screen. But now the entertainment and industry and advertisers face the challenge of how to rework their fiction to adapt to American's altered mindset. Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, every topic from international politics to air travel has become sensitive terrain.

"The studios and networks don't want to upset viewers and are proceeding cautiously," said Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly's critic-at-large. "Images or stories that hit too close to home are being pulled or put on hold until the mood of the country calms down."

Off the Marquees

Almost immediately after the attacks, executives began editing scripts and yanking works that were already in production, Tucker said.

Each of the television networks has some potentially problematic material. NBC will be dropping a scene from an episode of the sitcom Friends that was shot at an airport security check. Fox's new show 24, a real-time drama about a terrorist plot to kill a presidential candidate, could be too intense for viewers, Tucker said. CBS's fall offering, The Agency, contains material about terrorists, and ABC's new show Alias has plot lines dealing with terrorist attacks and other threats.

A number of movies have been postponed indefinitely. They include Collateral Damage, which stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a firefighter who loses his family in a bombed building, and Big Trouble, with Tim Allen in a plot that features a terrorist smuggling a bomb onto an airplane. The script for Nosebleed, in which Jackie Chan was to play a window washer at the World Trade Center who foils a terrorist attempt to blow up the building, is being rewritten.

While studios and networks are certainly wary about showing violence, some are even skittish about airing any images at all of the buildings that were attacked, Tucker said. Industry executives are going back and forth on what to do about such images, he said.