Okay to Make a 9/11 Film? I Think So...But by Oliver Stone?

Apparently, some are bothered by the very idea of a feature film built around the events of September 11, 2001. Blogger Ann Althouse calls the very idea "unspeakable." To be honest, it doesn't bother me.

Some say that any such project would be an instance of exploitation. But it seems to me that one might as well dismiss any effort to write history or create historical fiction as being exploitative. Our past has always been grist for dramatic presentations, going all the way back to preliterate humanity, who would tell stories about ancient ancestors and that day's hunt while sitting around the campfire at night.

What does bother me about the film being produced about 9/11 right now is that its director is to be Oliver Stone. Stone has a contemptible track record of distorting the historical events he claims to chronicle. That offends me as a student of history.

I've never seen a Stone film. But when I read excerpts from the script for JFK, I tuned him out. Anybody familiar with Jim Garrison knows that he was a headline hunter whose tenuous grasp on reality negated his every assertion about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Back in the late 1960s, Tonight Show host Johnny Carson hadn't gone completely Hollywood. (In fact, the show was still being done in New York.) Drawing on his undergraduate degree in Journalism and his natural inquisitiveness, Carson would sometimes conduct serious interviews. One night, he spent an hour-and-a-half interrogating Garrison and ended up demolishing the prosecutor's assertions about some grand conspiracy.

Stone could not be unfamiliar with that interview and the countless other ways in which Garrison's case was long ago destroyed. But he refused to allow the facts to get in the way of his movie, thereby foisting lies, on a generation of uninformed movie-goers.

If I were in charge of doling out money at a major movie studio, the only way Oliver Stone would be able to do a movie is if he showed me a script that was historically responsible and if I could view the dailies to make certain that he wasn't veering off into la-la-land.

I think that it is possible to make a responsible film about 9/11, even through the use of fictional characters. Something similar was done a lot--chronicling and fictionalizing events still vivid in people's memories or still part of their experiences--during World War Two and nobody seemed to mind.

In fact, I think that it could be useful to have such a film as a reminder to a people grown complacent about the dangers we face in the world today of the threat posed by hate-filled enemies.

But Oliver Stone is almost the last person I would pick to make such a film.