Red Carpet Meets Harsh War: Are audiences ready for a stream of movies, documentaries about Iraq?

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NYT: Red Carpet Meets Harsh War
By DAVID CARR
Published: September 17, 2007

....Are audiences ready for the steady stream of movies and documentaries that bring a faraway war very close?

“In the Valley of Elah,” a mystery about a returning veteran who disappears, starring Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Paul Haggis, opened last Friday. It will be followed into theaters over the course of the fall and winter by “Grace Is Gone,” “Stop Loss,” “Nothing Is Private,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and “Redacted.” They all take as their central concern the price of America’s military and security activities since the attacks of Sept. 11. HBO, which has already waded into bloody waters with “Baghdad ER” and “Alive Day,” has commissioned “Generation Kill,” written by David Simon, creator of “The Wire.”

All of this is undoubtedly well intended, but will it be well attended?

“I have no idea,” Mr. Haggis said last week after a screening of “In the Valley of Elah.” “We all certainly hope so. When I first started working on this in 2003, I thought I would be in for the fight of my life.” He added that he went through more than a dozen “War Is Not the Answer” signs on his lawn in the liberal enclave of Santa Monica, Calif., because they were stolen or defaced. “But the tide seems to be turning.”

That tide is bringing a wave of films about a war that most Americans wish would go away. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll this month, 62 percent of the respondents said the war was a mistake. When the CBS News anchor Katie Couric recently went to Iraq, even landing an interview with President Bush, the evening broadcast clocked record low ratings for the week. A study released last week by the Project for Excellence in Journalism comparing the mainstream news agenda with user-news sites like Reddit, Digg, and Del.icio.us found that when citizens did the editing, war news made up just 1 percent of the content.

Hollywood, which is bringing a reflexively liberal, antiwar agenda to most of these projects, has some assets, most notably stars like Mr. Jones for “In the Valley of Elah,” Tom Cruise in “Lions for Lambs” and Tom Hanks in “Charlie Wilson’s War.” These are not small bets from tiny indie companies. Many of the war-themed works include A-list actors and directors, budgets in the $25 million range, and major studios including Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers. Clearly, media companies are hoping that asking questions about the war is good for business, in addition to being good for the republic. These movies may land with some impact during the Oscar season as the academy loves citing important films. But historically, audiences enter the theater in pursuit of counter-programming as an antidote to reality....

“These movies have a chance to work because the American public hasn’t been able to see anything from this war like they did during Vietnam,” said Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which is behind “Standard Operating Procedure,” a documentary being made by Errol Morris. “People have no idea what the texture of life is like over there, and these films can give them that look.” Mr. Bernard argues that because of embedding rules for journalists and the dangers of covering the conflict, the visual context of the war has been lost, although citizens who have seen the photographs from Abu Ghraib or the checkpoint stops that have gone terribly awry would say they have seen plenty....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/business/media/17carr.html