Now on reel

Los Angeles, Aug. 17 (Reuters): Universal Pictures unveiled plans yesterday for a big-screen thriller about the September 11 attacks on America, becoming the third major studio to set its sights on a subject Hollywood initially bent over backward to avoid.

As America nears the fourth anniversary of the bloodiest attacks on its soil, filmmakers and TV producers are clamouring to dramatise events surrounding the suicide hijackings.

In addition to films in the works at Universal and two rival studios, several new made-for-TV projects are expected to focus on what happened when Islamic militants crashed two jetliners into New York’s World Trade Center, a third plane into the Pentagon and a fourth in Pennsylvania.

While Hollywood’s embrace of the 9/11 story may seem exploitative to some, Paul Levinson, a media scholar at Fordham University in New York, called it a “healthy” sign that the popular culture is coming to terms with the calamity.

“Since this is one of the transcending, defining events of our age, inevitably Hollywood ... has to deal with it,” he said. “It’s part of the process by which we come to understand our own feelings about this.”

The Universal project, due to begin production October 1, will chronicle the events aboard United Airlines Flight 93, the plane that officials believe hijackers were steering toward Washington but crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers stormed the cockpit.

Universal’s movie, titled Flight 93, will be directed by Paul Greengrass, the filmmaker behind last year’s thriller The Bourne Supremacy.

Universal said Flight 93 would be partly improvised and shot with hand-held cameras and other techniques to give it a gritty look.

The production schedule pits the film against a different 9/11 project that director Oliver Stone plans to start shooting in mid-October for Paramount Pictures. Starring Nicolas Cage, Stone’s film centres on the true story of Port Authority police officers trapped in the Twin Towers rubble.