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9.11.11 Ayub Khan-Din Christopher Knopf Denis Leary Robin Schiff Aaron Sorkin Peter Tolan Lawrence Wright Plus, Mentoring Military Veterans
10 Years After Mark Boal’s hunt for Osama bin Laden
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 VOL. 15 ISSUE 5
THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST
©
9.11.11
12 The Brotherhood By MATT HOEY For Denis Leary and Peter Tolan, the finale of Rescue Me won’t be their last goodbye to fallen firemen.
36 Isaac and Ishmael By AARON SORKIN Why West Wing postponed its season premiere to produce an episode about civil liberty.
18 9/11 Plus Ten By F.X. FEENEY Unearthing the subtext of movies written during a 10-year war against terrorism.
38 The Sword and the Pen By LISA ROSEN How the WGA’s Veterans Writing Program is mentoring those who served the nation.
22 We Have Met the Enemy RICHARD STAYTON Ground Zero got personal for Mark Boal and Lawrence Wright. On a literary jihad, each used investigative journalism tools to hunt al-Qaeda.
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DEPARTMENTS 2 Fade In 4 Letters 6 Writers’ Room 56 Fade Out
Cover portrait of Mark Boal by Tom Keller Contents Art: The National September 11 Memorial Squared Design Lab | Courtesy of National 9/11 Memorial & Museum
34 The Show That Did Go On Less than a month after 9/11, Emmy-nominated writers gathered at the WGA Theater to share notes.
46 Ghosts of Pakistan Past DAVID GRITTEN Never heard of Ayub Khan-Din? For this star writer and actor in Britain, there’s only one obstacle to making it here: Khan-Din’s ties to Pakistan.
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The Magazine of The Writers Guild of America, WEST
FADE IN
Ten Years AFTER, and it’s all too vivid. First came disbelief. How could their luck be so bad? Then hope. Maybe they missed the plane. Finally, grim confirmation: twotime Emmy winner David Angell, co-creator of Frasier, and his wife, Lynn Edwards Angell, were on board American Airlines Flight 11—the first hijacked plane to crash into the World Trade Center. Gone. Soon joined by 2,982 additional victims. What could we at Written By do? The October issue was finished, designed to commemorate National Diversity Month. We tore it up. The cover became David Angell. In less than a week, the magazine contained numerous pieces on the Angells, voluntarily written by Les Charles, Jeff Greenstein, Madelyn Pugh Davis, Dave Hackel, Colleen Dunn Bates, Allan Burns, Charlie Hauck, Joe Keenan, Christopher Lloyd. Our tribute to the Angells became Written By’s small gesture of solidarity with all the 9/11 victims. Where were you that day when everything changed? Mark Boal, a 28-year-old freelance journalist living on 23rd Street in Manhattan, breathed debris-thickened smoke until he “felt I could taste the dead in the back of my throat.” The next morning, Boal discovered, in a newspaper’s long list, the name of a high school buddy. His friend had become a firefighter and was on a rescue mission in the World Trade Center. Boal’s beat changed to war. After embedding with a bomb squad in Iraq, Boal scripted The Hurt Locker. New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright was in his hometown of Austin, eating breakfast with his Spanish club, when the news hit Texas. “There was this haunting feeling at the beginning of the attacks that this looks like a movie. And then I thought: It looks like my movie.” Wright had lived in the Middle East. The Siege, released in 1998 [story by Wright, screenplay by Wright and Menno Meyjes & Edward Zwick], depicts Islamic terrorist cells in New York City, linked by a leader modeled on Bin Laden. For the week after 9/11, The Siege became the nation’s number-one movie rental. But Wright wished his original title remained: Blowback. The focus of his work became Islamic terrorism. He wrote and performed an autobiographical play, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, because he’d grown “fearful of what my country is becoming. I have a dark realization that we are following a script that is written by Osama bin Laden.” No wonder the CIA approached Wright for a screenplay to help in capturing Osama bin Laden, who boasted after 9/11 “the American people will terrorize themselves.” A decade later, Written By acknowledges the anniversary by looking at our past reactions to the tragedy and our current response to war, terrorism, and international conflict. It’s clear that the death of Bin Laden and the decline of al-Qaeda will not bring our country back to the cultural, political, and financial security that existed before 9/11. But what is the “New Normal”? How have we changed? —Richard Stayton, Editor 2 •
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The Actors Fund is also The Writers Fund.
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Carol Mendelsohn Executive Producer/ Showrunner CSI; Executive Producer/ Co-Creator CSI: Miami, CSI: NY “Writers write. Actors act. Directors direct. Crews crew. And, whether it’s a film or television series, we all depend on each other. That’s how the job gets done. You know that. But what you may not know—I didn’t—is that when you contribute to The Actors Fund, you’re giving to an organization that is there to help everyone in our industry in times of crisis. Please join me in supporting this wonderful organization that has helped so many of us.”
John Wells President, Writers Guild of America, West “Don’t let the name fool you. The Actors Fund provides support to all of Hollywood’s union members. Writers can get help with career counseling, obtaining affordable health care, and securing emergency assistance. All WGAW members should learn more about how this wonderful organization can help them in times of need.”
The Actors Fund is a national human services organization that helps everyone—those in front of the camera and behind it, including writers—who works in performing arts and entertainment, helping more than 12,000 people directly each year, and hundreds of thousands online. Serving professionals in film, theatre, television, music, opera, radio and dance, The Fund’s programs include social services and emergency assistance, health care and insurance, housing, and employment and training services. With offices in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, The Actors Fund has—for nearly 130 years—been a safety net for those in need, crisis or transition. Western Region 5757 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 400 Los Angeles, CA 90036 323.933.9244 | 888.825.0911
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The Magazine of The Writers Guild of America, WEST
LETTERS
In the Land of Women
It was so refreshing to see Eileen Heisler & DeAnn Heline on the cover of our magazine! How wonderful that you celebrate women, a writing team, and the unique approach that women can bring to the art and business of writing. I was so excited to open it! Josefina Lopez
Written By ©
PUBLICATION STAFF Editor in Chief
Creative Director
Richard Stayton
Ron S. Tammariello
Managing Editor
Christina McBride
Contributing Editors
Rob Feld, Matt Hoey, Mark Lee, Susan Littwin, Marsha Scarbrough, Pat Sierchio
Our Dalek
In your Summer 2011 edition, I believe you wrongly encapsulate the creation of the British TV stalwart Doctor Who. The recent book The Man Who Invented the Daleks (by Alwyn W. Turner) furnishes a rather fuller picture, involving Irene Shubik: Sydney Newman, an exec, came up with the concept, yes, but “the format that emerged was largely shaped by Verity Lambert” (the producer of the show) and “David Whitaker, the script editor.” The first script was written by Anthony Coburn. The second, more iconic, story—which introduced the Daleks and more than anything set the style of the science fiction show—was written by Terry Nation. Stephen Volk
Do Movie Stars Read?
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY committee
Dear Richard, I am writing on behalf of Robert Redford. Because Bob is immersed in a very hectic schedule, he has asked me to thank you for your May letter and magazine article. He very much appreciated you thinking of him and sending the article. Thank you for taking the time to write. Bob extends his best wishes. Sincerely, Julie Dalley Assistant to Mr. Redford
Peter Barsocchini, Steve Chivers, F.X. Feeney, Georgia Jeffries, Peter Lefcourt (chair), Glen Mazzara, Margaret Nagle, Rosanne Welch
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Questionable Eyesight
After going through the summer edition of Written By, I discovered that the Guild is very proud of its successful TV writers and perhaps even prouder that the entire staff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer supports same-sex marriages. But in the 26 pictures of writers (playing fair, I didn’t count the extra photos of Ray Romano, Mike Royce, Russell T. Davis, or the three pictures of Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline), I failed to see a single writer over the age of, say, 50. When you combine all that with Ben Shapiro’s expose of TV writers and producers, “Primetime Propaganda,” who boast about blacklisting conservative writers, it occurs to me that there is no industry that is simultaneously as filled with prejudice and as self-congratulatory as the one the Guild magazine applauds on a regular basis. Burt Prelutsky
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Advertising Policy: Readers should not assume that any products or services advertised in WRITTEN BY are endorsed by the WGAW. Although the Editorial Advisory Board adheres to standard industry practice in requiring advertisers to be “truthful and forthright,” there is no extensive screening process by either WRITTEN BY or the WGAW.
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actively seeks material from Guild members and other writers. Submissions are subject to editing for length, style and content. Letters are subject to editing for length without correspondent approval. The content of letters is s ubject to review. Not all letters are published. Inquiries about column writing should be directed to WRITTEN BY.
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It’s your Guild
VOTE SEPTEMBER 15, 2011
Yep, There’s an App for That
F
or decades, the standard screenplay was 120 pages, single-sided, with two brass brads inserted in the first and third holes, every draft clearing a forest and taking several minutes to copy, even on high-speed machines. Early-’90s, technology allowed scripts to be printed double-sided at a reduced size, a fashion first championed by Laura Ziskin at Fox 2000. “Screenplays became the size of paperbacks and lightened her weekend read shoulder bag,” says Christopher Vogler, who worked with Ziskin at the time. “It was easier to read those on airplanes too.” With the expanding use of email in the mid-’90s, scripts were emailed to executives and readers alike, saving paper, crosstown Friday evening commutes, and overburdened shoulder bags. But the seachange came with the advent of high-quality digital readers three years ago, says John August. “The Kindle was the first device that seemed suited to reading screenplays,” he says. “Then the iPad came out and was an even better solution. The weekend read is now a digital thing.” Necessary to this transition is FDX Reader, an application that translates screenplays created in Final Draft (an industry standard formatting program since 1991) from the saved PDF file into a more manageable document. “Trying to read a 120-page PDF file on the iPhone is torture,” says August, who teamed with Nima Yousefi and Ryan
TIPS
WRITERS’ ROOM Nelson to create the recently launched iPhone and iPad app. “Reading a 120page script on the iPhone with FDX Reader is surprisingly pleasant.” FDX Reader, available via iTunes for $7.99, allows users to open Final Draft files on the iPad or iPhone, presenting pages that look like a hard-copy screenplay with changeable type-size, fonts, and layout for read-only purposes. (You can’t write or edit in FDX, but it holds many screenplays in its archive). Since launching last spring, FDX has gained legions of industry fans, including Rob Thomas and J.J. Abrams, who enjoy the app’s ease of use and the ability to resize and reflow screenplay text for greater small-screen readability. August and his collaborators plan to evolve FDX Reader but for now are enjoying the rush of easing screenwriters’ woes. “You’ll still want your iPad for reading scripts when you can, but in situations where you only have your phone—like at your kid’s softball game— FDX Reader is a much better solution. You can almost look like you’re living a normal life.” —Todd Aaron Jensen
Tips From
Industry Pros:
Auditions If you’d like to see something different from an auditioning actor, what’s the protocol for giving an adjustment? It depends on your
agreement with the director, and what that relationship is like. I’ve done pilots where
the director isn’t on yet, so
the writer-producer gives all the notes. Then the director
comes in and it’s a completely different bag. You might have
to recast because the writer is thinking something else, and
the director has another vision, which they begin to discuss with the writer-producer. If
they have an agreement as to what they’re looking for,
then I would imagine that the
writer can make an adjustment, unless they have no clue, and sometimes that’s true. Don’t
say something that will throw
the actor off. When someone’s
brand new and hasn’t been in a room, or they only do features and they’re doing TV, you
have to establish what your
relationships are. That has to do with the casting director too. There have been times when I’ve seen people dismissed, where you had to say, “I’m
sorry, I know that this actor can do this better.”
—April Webster, Casting Director
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WRITERS’ ROOM
Theof Art
OVERHEARD Twar at Comic-Con 2011
“Videogame developers get a higher-caliber of writer writing their games now. The days of Pong where there was no story are gone. Now story is an important part of games. Every intellectual property begins with some writer sitting in their apartment, bleeding onto a page so they can create a new story and tell a tale out of their heart that one day will have a director directing it and actors acting in it. But it all has to start on the page. Comic-Con has made it so that the writers are known by their fans.” —Steven Elliott Altman, videogame writer
How writers use Twitter to expand their fanbase
O
“As a writer you need to have that connection with the fanbase because you really need to know what they’re thinking.” —Brandon Easton, animation writer
M r . C / P l a n et C h oc k o
“Why aren’t we just going out and making the stories that we know there’s a market for, that we know we want to write—let’s just make them. How you can get it out with your self-financing is you put it online and hopefully networks see it and go, ‘Oh there’s a market for this story that we didn’t think we could sell—they’re selling it, now let’s give them a whole bunch of money and put it on the television set.’ Why not?” —Jane Espenson, Creator Husbands web series
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“In television the good news is the ratings are there for everyone to see so you can’t deny success. You can build an audience over a season, especially on cable. That’s why there are more female-driven, compelling, great series on television.” —Gale Anne Hurd, producer
2011
n a gloomy Monday afternoon, Matt Nix and Jeff Eastin are commanding their respective Burn Notice and White Collar writing staffs on the paintball field. This is war—or rather, Twar. And what started as 140-character roasts in a race for the most followers, which led to such hijinks as planted alarm clocks in a writers’ room, birthed an entire marketing strategy. (The latest season DVDs of each show feature the Burn Notice and White Collar writers skewering each other’s shows, and FTvS publicity filmed the paintball battle.) Every showrunner’s chasing that coveted 18-49 demo into which Twitter users squarely fall, so today many shows, writers’ rooms, and even network scheduling departments maintain their own Twitter accounts. Is this the next big thing, or just the Friendster of marketing? “This is only additive at the moment and not huge yet,” says Shawn Ryan, who busted into Eastin’s office and posted photos of himself at Eastin’s desk and lounging in the White Collar writers’ room as part of their own ongoing Twar. “For the hardcore fan, it provides an added experience to the show. Maybe in the future we’ll be a threat to traditional marketing.” The immediacy of Twitter is a big part of its draw. Fans can connect easily to the creators and cast of their favorite show in a way that normally would be impossible for them. But does this direct line to fans translate to added viewers? Though there’s no correlation between followers and viewers in the strict sense, Eastin says the volume of Tweets he receives for a given episode do relate to its ratings. “I come fairly close to predicting what our numbers will be the next day,” he says. “It’s the closest thing I’ve found to a dial test.” Eastin regularly tweets prop photos and even script pages, which are then retweeted and linked to Facebook, continues on page 10
Table Read books from our library
The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book: The Definitve History of Television’s Most Enduring Comedy By Vince Waldron (Chicago Review Press): “What was the secret ingredient in our success? I always answer that our show represented a perfect marriage of players and playwright. We had that great, great cast; and Carl Reiner understood exactly how to write to every one of our strengths. “Unlike a lot of writers, Carl never wrote a character and expected the actor to come in and play it as written. Carl was a student of human nature—before he’d write a script, he’d have his eye on us. He’d watch us on the set; he’d listen to us as we talked. Then he’d filter those observations through his own comic genius, and out would come one of those terrific scripts he wrote for the show. I think that’s why, with Carl’s scripts, the words always seemed to fit you so perfectly that you almost didn’t have to memorize them. That’s good writing.” —Dick Van Dyke
ultimately reaching millions. “Direct contact with a showrunner or star, or good word of mouth from a friend, has greater impact than an average commercial, which most people find themselves subjected to by the dozens in a given day,” says Ryan. “Twitter can seem like sincere persuasion.” No longer the anonymous title card at the end of the show, the showrunner on Twitter is an active and public persona, shedding light onto the dark art of, well, running a show. “An audience feels like they have a sense of me now, instead of just having ‘heard’ me trying to talk like all the characters on their favorite show,” says Jane Espenson, whose original web series Husbands debuts September 13. Espenson maintained an instructive writers’ blog for many years and has an even more prolific web presence since joining Twitter. “I’m using it in a very different way,” she says. “People like the ‘writing sprints’ I host, in which I let people know when I’m hunkering down to do a piece of uninterrupted writing and invite them to share the time with me. Instead of teaching, it’s more about motivating. That might be the best way to teach writing, since it is definitely a skill you can only learn through doing.” —Jenny Dearmitt
ATTENTION WRITERS, AGENTS, MANAGERS AND PUBLICISTS:
Have YOU submitted yet?
Submissions for the 2012 Writers Guild Awards are now being accepted! A completed entry form must be submitted for WGA Awards consideration. FOR DRAMA, COMEDY AND NEW TELEVISION SERIES: The production company or any writer(s) who received writing credit on the series may submit the series for awards consideration. Writer representatives (e.g., agents, managers or publicists) may submit on the writer’s behalf. The deadline for TV series (Drama, Comedy and New) submissions is 5:30 p.m. (PDT), Friday, October 14, 2011. FOR ORIGINAL AND ADAPTED THEATRICAL SCREENPLAYS: The production company or any writer(s) who received writing credit for the theatrical screenplay may submit the screenplay for awards consideration. Writer representatives (e.g., agents, managers or publicists) may also submit on the writer‘s behalf. The deadline for Original and Adapted theatrical submissions is 5:30 p.m. (PDT), Friday, November 18, 2011. To submit your work online for 2012 Writers Guild Awards consideration, please visit the Guilds’ websites at: www.wga.org or www.wgaeast.org. If you have further questions about the Writers Guild Awards submission process or TV/screen eligibility, please contact WGAW Awards Administrator Jennifer Burt in the WGAW Awards Office at 323-782-4569 or email jburt@wga.org; or Dana Weissman in the WGAE Awards Office at 212-767-7835 or email dweissman@wgaeast.org.
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5 Conversations You'll Hear Only in the Writers’ Room When group procrastination gets you ike most TV sitcom writers, I spent many evenings and early mornings in the rewrite room pitching jokes to “save” that week’s script. Sure, it was awful, stomach-churning, tensionfilled, but we shared hysterical times in that dreaded rewrite room. The best times were when we set aside the script and debated insanely ridiculous subjects with an intensity found on MSNBC. We were sharpening our comedic talents, honing our punch-up skills. Fine—we were just goofing off. Here, my top five rewrite room discussions: 5. If you were trapped in an avalanche and had to eat your own leg to survive, would you gain or lose weight? We dived in like scientists, logically exploring all aspects of the situation, occasionally veering into such side subjects as whether eating a pound of of chocolate would cause you to gain more than a pound. 4. We became so obsessed with the weight of peoples’ heads that we’d pass someone on the lot and
L
whisper to each other, “That’s a 12-pounder.” Late at night, we’d argue as to whose head weighed the most—George Foreman, Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, John Travolta, Mandy Patinkin, Alec Baldwin, or Shrek. Among our writng staff was a former geologist and a math major, which added depth to the discussion. Using a hastily procured protractor and compass and a convoluted mathematical formula, we figured the distance of the men from the camera and measured their head sizes. A larger head doesn’t necessarily mean a heavier head, the former geologist somberly informed us. Bummer. 3. Though it might not hold the same gravitas as previous topics, it spurred the longest and most impassioned argument: If it’s Wednesday and you tell someone you’ll see them next Friday, does that mean this coming Friday or a week from Friday? Lines were drawn, the debate so heated two writers nearly came
to blows. Fortunately, one realized he was a comedy writer and said, “Fine, I’ll meet you out in the parking lot next Friday.” Because no one could agree when exactly that was, the argument dissipated. 2. Bathroom conversations frequently found their way into the rewrite room. One writer claimed he was so turned off by the open stalls in his Army barracks that he didn’t go to the bathroom for the entire two months of basic training. The writer said Jewish faith prevents him from going to the bathroom if he even suspects someone can see or hear him. 1. Sex was always a major preoccupation in the rewrite room. Rumors regarding some actors were a pleasant topic, such as the one about the comedic actor who liked to spend his afternoons vacuuming his house wearing nothing but a short apron; another supposedly liked to eat his own excrement—ironic because he made writers eat s**t for years. —Sy Rosen
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Written by Matt Hoey TAKE FIVE
The
Brotherhood Denis Leary & Peter Tolan T work with firemen traumatized after 9/11 on Rescue Me.
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his month, the FX series Rescue Me ends after seven seasons. It began airing in September 2004, three years after the events of September 11, 2001, and has become, in some ways, the most prominent piece of popular culture to address this tragedy directly. It depicts New York firefighter Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) in his life on and off the job, with his two families—the one at home and the crew at the firehouse. It posed a big, serious question about life, post-9/11: What now? When the show debuted, Tommy was estranged from his wife, Janet, but living across the street to keep tabs on her and stay close with his children. He was still reeling—as so many others— from 9/11, in particular the death of his cousin and fellow firefighter, Jimmy
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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Keefe. Throughout the course of the series, he has had an affair with his cousin’s widow; been estranged and reunited repeatedly from his wife; seen his cousin’s son paralyzed on the job; and lost his own young son, his brother, his father, and his uncle’s wife. He has struggled with sobriety (his own, his daughter’s) and, as if to make up for some perceived failing during 9/11, routinely hurled himself into danger on the job, often coming into conflict with his superiors. Oh, and the ghost of his cousin appears to him. And talks to him. Regularly. As well as the departed spirits of other people from his life—relatives and fire victims he couldn’t save. Did we mention this show is kind of a comedy? Co-created by Leary and Peter To-
lan (co-writer, Analyze This, The Larry Sanders Show), the bulk of the series was written by these two men alone (along with co-producer Evan Reilly). The two writers share a distinct sensibility and collaborative partnership, informed by a closely connected background. Leary and Tolan spoke with Written By on a conference call (Leary lives on the East Coast, Tolan the West) and from the moment they are on the line together, it feels like being in the show’s firehouse kitchen. It’s a peek at their evident camaraderie, their weirdly symbiotic natures.
of construction and the lack of a finished memorial. But really they’re trying to cover a wound that’s never going to go away. We were more interested in that.” Tolan agrees, with a caveat: “It doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t bring anybody back and doesn’t put an end to terrorism.
If we had done anything, we would’ve played it for comedy.” “Totally,” Leary says. “Seven pages of Bin Laden jokes.” The two men laugh before any more words can be exchanged. It’s a glimpse into the private world of their collabo-
The Last Sunset
It’s only a few weeks after President Obama’s historic announcement about the Navy SEAL mission that killed Osama bin Laden. The finale of the series takes place the week before the 10th anniversary of September 11, which is when it’s scheduled to air. However, these final episodes were filmed in 2010. As part of the larger 9/11 narrative, did they feel a need to address this development in the storyline of those final shows? “No,” Leary says emphatically. “Because the issue is eye for an eye and revenge, which the guys, specifically Tommy, have talked about, whether there’s a value to that or, for lack of a better word—I don’t think it’s a word Tommy likes—closure. It doesn’t fill the hole they need filled. “I had a cousin who was a firefighter who died,” continues Leary. “The people who started the fire, one was sent to jail, the other went to rehab. Neither thing provided ‘closure’ to me or my family, or I’m sure to the other families. Nothing was going to bring the people back. That’s the problem for Tommy and the guys. They put their blame on the site, on Ground Zero, the lack SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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“It’s not over—there are tendrils of pain and suffering snaking out still,” says Peter Tolan. “After 9/11, that whole thing about the firemen being heroes? Within two months they were marching for a pay raise. . . They went through something cataclysmic that’s never happened, and they came out the other side. That’s not to be forgotten.” ration, the shared sensibility that unites them and makes them an effective team. “Lou says,” Tolan continues. “Guys, I’m going to posit a possibility. You’re on a beach vacation”—Leary is really laughing now—“and bin Laden’s body washes up. What do you do?” “That’s a very funny conversation,” Leary adds, still laughing. For all the humor shared by its creators, the show’s origins come from a serious, personal place for Leary. In 2000, he established the Leary Firefighters Foundation in honor of his cousin, a childhood friend, and four other firefighters lost in a 1999 warehouse fire in Worcester, Massachusetts. From that tragedy, the roots of Rescue Me grew. “When a person close to you or in your family becomes a firefighter, their crew becomes family too because of the brotherhood angle firefighters live by,” Leary says. “One of my oldest friends in Manhattan became a firefighter when we were young. When my cousin was killed, the guys from New York were one of the first groups to come up. And on 9/11, the guys from Worcester were among the first down here [to New York]. I’d witnessed the brotherhood before, but seeing it on that level and trying to formulate the grief and do something with it, I thought of a movie idea.” Leary elaborated on that initial film concept with Tolan: “Firefighters, especially in urban firehouses, are often adrenaline junkies. They have a different approach to life. I told Peter and he agreed that’s an interesting place to go for a long time in a television series, to deal with brave men dealing with the worst event in their lives, in terms of mortality and what they do. That’s where the seed started.” Leary lives in New York and Tolan 14 •
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had worked with him there on The Job. “I was actually directing an episode [for that series] on 9/11,” Tolan remembers. “We saw the city up close after the tragedy. That informed a lot of it. “I don’t think we felt this at the time, but we almost didn’t have a choice,” Tolan says of creating Rescue Me. “People have a hard time defining Rescue Me. It’s not a drama, it’s not a comedy. It’s its own thing. It was dicey in terms of the execution, especially when you consider how soon after the event it was.” “People who haven’t been in a firehouse, they probably don’t know a lot about firefighters, but black humor is the way they deal with the horrors they see on the job,” Leary says. “September 11 was no exception. It was an unbelievably horrendous event. When you’re looking at that kind of grief, there’s obviously drama inherent in it but, day to day, even after 9/11, as they go to work, their sense of humor is how they keep moving on.” Tragedy, Plus Time
As Tolan says, finding the right tone for Rescue Me was a tricky process. It mixed equal parts tragedy and hilarity. Leary credits Tolan with a line in the pilot that set the show on course. “Franco [the crew’s resident ladies’ man] says something to Tommy about how he can’t get laid,” Leary says. “He goes, All that pussy I was getting after 9/11, man, people forget. That’s the sensibility.” The second thing that helped set the tone for the series was a note from FX president John Landgraf about the ending of the pilot. “People loved it, except for the last minute,” Tolan says. “Tommy is having sex with someone we think may be his wife,
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but it’s just a blonde he picked up. You get the sense of this guy who does this horrible job and sees so many horrible things and he’s doing a lot to medicate his reality. Landgraf said that didn’t work. We got on the phone and pitched a new ending.” “Landgraf felt it was a little harsh,” Leary says. “Peter said, Here’s an idea. Tommy goes down by the ocean and pulls out his one-year sobriety coin from AA and tosses it into the ocean. He gets up to walk away and all the ghosts he’s been haunted by are walking behind him. I said, ‘Holy shit.’ It obviously set the tone for the series: literally, one man who’s haunted.” Tolan agrees: “In terms of people he couldn’t save, people he’s lost.” After the pilot, Leary and Tolan both cite the same episode as the show’s turning point, when Rescue Me established its identity. “You write these things viscerally,” Tolan says. “It takes a few episodes to figure out. Tonally we figured it around the time that [actor] Eddie Sullivan’s character died. In the episode, the guys get into a cock measuring contest.” Tolan’s referring to “Inches,” episode eight of season one, which followed two wildly divergent plot strands. In one, the crew of 62 Truck loses one of their own, and in the other, the guys hold a contest to see who has the longest manhood. “I remember thinking, Are we really gonna do this?” “Do you remember how it came about?” Leary asks rhetorically and dives headlong into the story, clearly a favorite. “A lot of real firefighters play extras on the show. We were getting ready to shoot and two firefighters were having breakfast. They started to say this guy in their firehouse won the cock-measuring contest and they thought he cheated. I was like, ‘Really, what did he do?’ They started to talk about it and I said, ‘This is fucking crazy. This is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.’ That’s where the idea came from. So we had a guy who dies in a fire, which is tragic, and at the same time, we’re having a cock-measuring contest. That’s where the tone was established.” Tolan reveals the theory behind these extremes. “We figured as far as you go in one direction, you have to
go just as far in the other. As crazy comedic as it is, it has to be that dark and dramatic. We figured that out fairly early. I can’t say we went in knowing that. You start out with most of the pieces, but five or six episodes in, you go, Oh, this is what we’ve got.” “We just had a shorthand,” Leary says. “We only wrote two episodes at a time, which we would shoot. We had a bible for each season and overall knew where we wanted to go, but that allowed us to watch the characters get in front of the camera. We could see where there was more juice coming from the actors in certain stories. That helped a lot.” “The shows aren’t as plot-driven,” Tolan adds. “There is more room for the characters.” Writing was a constantly evolving process throughout the series, which found them working almost nonstop to produce scripts. “We worked together in one room, we had my trailer, which was the writers’ trailer,” Leary recalls. “We’d write on the fly, on the set, but sometimes I’d be acting, Peter would be directing, and we’d tell Evan, ‘Go write that thing, rewrite that scene.’ We did three guys in three different places, emailing each other. We did everything. We wrote on napkins.” They never considered hiring a writing staff. From the outside this might seem a bizarre or incorrect choice, Tolan admits: “Because of the shorthand we share, we felt it would be a better use of time to talk to each other and write, as opposed to talking to each other, then trying to explain it to other people and try to get that same sensibility. Which is insane,” he admits. “You’re looking at three guys who wrote 90-something hours of television.” With Leary acting and Tolan directing many episodes, writing became a challenge. So, a lot of it fell on Rescue Me co-producer Evan Reilly, their writer’s assistant on The Job. “Evan was there every day,” Leary says. “Whenever Peter and I hit a roadblock, Evan was always going, How about this idea?” “Because he had to sit and listen to us bullshit and come up with stuff, our sensibility rubbed off on him,” Tolan says. “Poor bastard. He started to write like us.
When he said, ‘Could I try to write an episode?, we were like, ‘Please.’ In this rather organic way, we got a writing staff.” As the series ends, Tolan recalls the search for an appropriate, meaningful conclusion to Tommy’s story: “There were conversations we had that didn’t have a hopeful end for Tommy. As time went on, we wanted to have Tommy come out a little better on the other end of the journey. The question became a guy who survived 9/11—how is he gonna survive it? It was important to answer that in the positive, otherwise you’re sending a bleak message.” Of utmost importance to the show’s creators, throughout the run of the series, has been the obligation to ensure that the events of September 11 and the people involved are remembered— and honored. “It is critically important,” Tolan says. “I always feel an American response to something like 9/11 is embodied in George Bush saying, Mission accomplished. That happened. It’s over. We can move on.” Tolan pauses, then: “It’s not over. There are tendrils of pain and suffering snaking out still. It’s always been important to me and Denis after 9/11, the whole thing about the firemen being heroes—and remember too that within two months they were marching to get a pay raise, that’s how we treat a hero—but they’re also people. And they’ve got a hard job.” Where does someone end up after a life-changing experience of such magnitude? There is no simple answer. Moving forward is not always the same thing as moving on. “Tommy fought the idea that life goes on and wished he had died on 9/11. Now he’s got the real struggle of living,” Tolan says. For Leary, it comes back to his own ex-
perience with his cousin and his cousin’s crew. “One of the guys in the Worcester fire department, his wife said something to me which was interesting: ‘People talk about those guys that died that night, but they don’t talk about the other guys who died, like my husband.’ She was referring to his grief. He hadn’t been able to save those guys or hadn’t died instead. The survivor’s guilt, it’s at the root of Tommy Gavin. The only way 9/11 could have been salvaged for Tommy is if he had died instead of his cousin. That’s a com-
plicated issue to ever resolve. That was the story of the series, him trying to fix that, not only in terms of his cousin’s widow, but his own marriage, and the guys in the firehouse—deep emotional stuff that only dysfunctional families get to share.” As the show concludes its run, there was validation for Leary and Tolan in the response of real firefighters, those who worked as extras or as consultants and became an integral part of the Rescue Me experience. “When we were filming the finale, several were overcome with emotion,” says Tolan. “The end of the show took them back to 9/11, or at least made them ponder the odd journey they’d been on since the tragedy. Out of that horrible day came this most improbable thing— a TV show—that provided them with a new family and support group. They went through something cataclysmic that’s never happened and they came out the other side. That’s not to be forgotten.”
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SPECIAL SECTION: HOW WRITERS WORK 10 YEARS AFTER
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9/11 Plus Ten
In a decade of anxiety, cinema changed to deflect and reflect homeland insecurity.
A
t first I thought I’d heard gunshots, but then realized a neighbor had lit off a belt of firecrackers. This particular moment—Sunday, May 1, 2011— arrived upon a mild evening, in a last flare of magic-hour light. The plan was to watch a movie with a friend, but I stopped to check email and was confronted with a live image from the White House, an empty podium with a long corridor behind it, pending a major presidential announcement. osama bin laden killed, read the spoiler subtitling Barack Obama as he strode up to give the world the news. My neighbor lit off another belt of fireworks. Cherry bombs, ash cans, and side-winding whistlers began to sound as well, from many blocks away. What does the hero want, and what prevents him or her from getting it? This formulation, older than Aristotle but most freshly reiterated by David Mamet, illuminates the euphoria that was spontaneously expressed by people of all ages and political stripes that night, not only in my neighborhood but outside the White House, and near Ground Zero in Manhattan. Call it giving the public what they want: The progress of our story toward the attainment of a single well-defined goal. Here was a satisfying climax and conclusion to the national narrative of “9/11.” The man who’d ordered a merciless surprise attack that took the lives of some 3,000 defenseless American civilians on September 11, 2001, had at last been tracked to his hideout and killed in his pajamas, put to death by the sword he’d lived by. God forgive him, God can have him, Good riddance. Of course, “history” is a narrative, but life is not. Terrorism didn’t begin with Bin Laden, and it won’t end with his death any more than it did with Timothy McVeigh’s execution the summer prior to 9/11. Literally as I write these words, on July 22, a young proto-Nazi living in Norway has just dressed up as 18 •
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Written by F.X. Feeney
a policeman and killed upwards of 76 people in a phobic psychotic protest against “multiculturalism.” Our world will forever abound in benighted renegades awaiting their elevations to Legend. Yet the perpetual war for our identity as a Republic— fought from our nation’s very beginnings, but raging with singular intensity every day since the smoke cleared over the fallen towers—is first and last a struggle of competing narratives. When such a major protagonist dies—hate Bin Laden or pray for him, he caused America and the world around it to change direction in a single blow—his death should be the catharsis which, for the moment, resolves the many conflicts in play. We’re right to catch our breath. This is especially necessary for those of us making our livings by storytelling. 9/11, meet 11/22/63
David Thomson once observed that a striking array of the most outstanding American films made between 1964 and 1980 react in sometimes conscious, often unconscious ways to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The same could now be said of movies made between 2001 and the present in relation to 9/11, whether we’re talking about Gangs of New York or Cowboys & Aliens. But such a deeply ingrained, shared response to any public trauma becomes fully visible only with the passage of time. Producer Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn referred privately to the ultraviolent shootout they devised at the climax of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) as “our Zapruder moment.” That horrific slow-motion spectacle, much-imitated by countless other films from The Wild Bunch forward, certainly expressed— without purging the burden of—the haunting after-image of JFK’s having been filmed as he was murdered, on a homemovie camera by Abraham Zapuder. Notice, too, the thicket of magnified
evident. Take these lines of dialogue from two very differleaves explored in greater and greater enlargements at the ent matinee fantasies, the first from 2004: “Everything I’ve heart of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (1967) [adapted ever cared about, everything I’ve ever worked for, has been by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra from Julio Cortazar’s story; a preparation for a future that no longer exists.” The second English dialogue by Edward Bond]. There, the slats of picket was released late last year: “These are dark times, there is no fence part to reveal the thickening shadow of a gunman condenying. Our world has perhaps faced no greater threat than cealed beyond in a deliberate echo of those leafy magnificait does today. But I say this… We, ever your servants, will tions in the Zapruder film that disclose an equally anomalous continue to defend your liberty and repel those forces that figure lurking in the bushes on the Grassy Knoll. Antonioni, seek to take it from you.” who co-wrote and directed Blow-up, had befriended KenThe latter is from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows nedy while he was president, securing a promise that he could accompany one of the Apollo missions into outerspace, cam(Part I, 2010), adapted by Steve Kloves from J.K. Rowlera in hand. For him the violent loss, “the unfulfilled proming. The former is from The Day After Tomorrow, written ise,” and its mysteries were personal. by Roland Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff. In plot and For other high-achieving creators, the blow was more abtheme these movies have extremely divergent surfaces. One stract, but its reverberations no less keenly felt. Look between is a coming-of-age story with sorcery mixed in. The other the lines of Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather. An immigrant offers an environmental revenge fantasy. Both revel in apocalyptic spectacle, yet each contains intensely expressed sentipatriarch, ruthlessly building an empire on both sides of the ments that might not have readily law, with an eye toward enthroning one of his three sons: the Corleones Directly or indirectly, the best written films occurred to their authors in any decade but this past one. are nothing if not the Kennedys reI tripped over these two parimagined as mythic Sicilians; Don of the past 10 years process the attack’s ticular examples by accident while Vito stands in for Joseph P., who as much made his fortune rum-run- inevitable consequences of hopeless loss, supposedly taking a break from the wide array of movies that are ning as on Wall Street; the highly sexed, lighthearted, and heedless hysteria, fear, high-level deceit, and war. either directly about 9/11 or that reflect its warring consequences Sonny easily stands in for Jack; Fredo the fuck-up gets what in the Each is so rich in scope and insight that to across the past decade. The uncanny fact is that the best films since 1960s looked like the “Teddy” role; and Michael Corleone, like Robert name them is to wish there were space to 2001 have either mirrored or processed the events of September 11 Kennedy, is the sensitive sufferer turned ruthless. (That Puzo had explore all of them in detail and praise their or been obliquely answerable to its powerful gravity. Directly or indiKennedys on the brain is evident rectly, the best written films of the from his later novel The Fourth K, writers and directors by name. past 10 years process the attack’s which imagines a future Kennedy inevitable consequences of hopeless loss, hysteria, fear, highin the White House dealing with a nuclear terror-threat.) Is level deceit and war: The 25th Hour (2002), Good Night it any wonder the movie that director Francis Coppola cowrote with Puzo bonded so deeply with the public that it and Good Luck (2005), Jarhead (2005), Syriana (2005), became one of the classics of the age? It was drawing on the A Few Days in September (2006), Stop-Loss (2008), The deepest imaginative energies of those times. Hurt Locker (2008), Nothing but the Truth (2008), Men Similarly, when Robert Altman was planning Nashville Who Stare At Goats (2009), Fair Game (2010), and The (1975) with writer Joan Tewkesbury, he made a single firm Green Zone (2010). request: “One of the characters has to die.” Tewkesbury then Each of these is so rich in scope and insight that to name wove a loner with a pistol into that crowded mural, and in them is to wish there were space to explore all of them in dethe climactic moment before this nowhere-man elects to betail, and praise their writers and directors by name. come an assassin, Altman fills the screen with an American flag, through which the wind sends a solitary ripple. “We Are Under Attack, Consider too how, after 1964 many sympathetic movie But We Do Not Know by Whom” characters die of sudden wounds specifically to the head, in The primal terror of that statement—endlessly repeated over movies as unalike as Easy Rider, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and the airwaves, on the day—drives the suspense of big-ticket items as outwardly dissimilar as War of the Worlds (2005), The Deer Hunter—to name only a few memorable examples, picked at random. Prior to 1963, with the prophetic excepThe Departed (2006), Taken (2008), State of Play (2009), tion of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), characters only Edge of Darkness (2010), Knight and Day (2010), Unknown took gunshots in the back, the chest, or out of frame. (2011), and Source Code (2011). The ghostly impact of our era’s defining trauma is no less In his novel War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells imagined aliens SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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ates a historic mirror in Kingdom of Heaven that not only landing in an 1898 New Jersey. Updating his daydream to 2005, writers Josh Friedman and David Koepp conjure an organically reflects but magnifies the religious roots of our present conscary, lived-in sense of the fantastic. Their opening scenes burst flicts, without making any one group the bad caste. There with panicked neighbors, responding to mysterious blasts and are fanatics in his Islamic and Christian camps, and by the quizzing one another about what just happened. Director Steven end it is fanaticism that has been dramatized as the enemy of Spielberg meanwhile boosts these prompts literally skyward, so humanity—1184 becomes a distant mirror of 9/11. sharply evoking the everyday tedium of a suburban neighbor(Incidentally, if you have not yet seen the sublime 194 hood—one that just happens to have Manhattan towering mistminute “director’s cut” by Ridley Scott, you’ve not seen Moily at its backyards, from across the river—that the movie’s most nahan’s “writer’s cut” either.) relevant source of inspiration is unmistakable. Monahan’s later collaboration with director Scott, Body of William Monahan has been a screenwriter of such conLies, holds up a whole hall-of-mirrors to the world of treachsistent excellence this past decade—Kingdom of Heaven eries into which our Byzantine responses to Bin Laden’s attack have plunged us. (2005); Body of Lies (2008), as well as The Departed and Edge of Darkness—that a laureate position could be christened in his honor: Bard of Our Disorder. Background Briefing Although The Departed is based on a 2002 Chinese action Even straight-ahead thrillers—Luc Besson and Robert Kapicture called Infernal Affairs [writmen’s script for Taken; or Oliver ten by Alan Mak and Felix Chong] Butcher and Stephen Cornwell’s and could easily have been remade The morning after Osama bin Laden’s death, rival star-vehicle for Liam Neeson, as a low-budget police-procedural to Unknown [from the novel by Disterling if less mythic effect, Mona- after it felt like the whole nation expelled dier van Caulewaere]—feel born han actively fulfills its zeitgeist potendirectly of September 11. Each tial. As a native of Massachusetts, he (for a sweet moment) a unified sigh of commences with an attack by perinfuses the story’s outlines with a firstsons unknown. So does State of hand sense of Boston. The first plane triumph and relief, the battle for narrative Play, a stop-the-presses newspaper into the Twin Towers was launched thriller scripted by Matthew Miout of Boston, and though this is nev- supremacy resumed. The White House— chael Callahan, Tony Gilroy, and er directly alluded to, Monahan is a Billy Ray. So does Patrick O’Neill’s storyteller with such a palpable sense alas, contradicting the admirable cool with ebulliently written romantic-action of historic grandeur that from the comedy Knight and Day, which marrow-out he affords the wide vistas which Obama had delivered the first news— manages (under the expert direcof this tale a psychological center of tion of James Mangold) to open gravity appropriate to America post put out a variety of confusing reports about with a lethal skyjacking that so 9/11. It shapes up as a metaphoric defies expectations of gravity as to quest to destroy a terrorist—the local the siege on Bin Laden’s compound. Over on be laugh-out-loud sobering. So for crime-lord played by Jack Nicholson that matter does Tony Gilroy’s Mihides in plain sight as he dominates the right-wing, Rush Limbaugh’s headline chael Clayton (2007), whose hero both the city at large and its phalanxes narrowly escapes being blown up at of cops and officials with his lawless was: “Obama crashes copter.” the outset by unknown sources and conspiracies. whose poster proclaims another The theme of “We are under attack, but we do not know 9/11-keyed theme: “Truth Can Be Adjusted.” by whom” applies to the network of spies the crime-lord In Source Code, written by Ben Ripley and directed by has planted throughout the police department. The story’s Duncan Jones, a time-traveler attempting to rewrite history logic thus becomes a relentless game of an eye-for-an-eye by undoing a terrorist attack on American soil, with interestthat no side can win, and a particularly American brand of ingly unpredictable results, adds an extra layer of 9/11 poihelplessness is mercilessly X-rayed as the investigators unwitgnancy to its already fierce tensions. tingly betray their own best men. Competence is disfigured The velocities of all these pictures interbreed the traditionby needless suspicion between allies to the point that Mark al beats of “chase-escape” with doubts of who’s behind it. As Wahlberg’s detective refuses Baldwin’s most invasive queries such they advance a fine tradition whose most notable ancesby telling him: “Feds are like mushrooms. Feed ‘em shit and tors are North by Northwest and Three Days of the Conkeep ‘em in the dark.” dor, but those pictures were novelties without peer in their Epic films about the era of the Crusades had been pitched own times. (The first, written by Ernest Lehmann, merrily and attached to big stars for decades prior to 9/11 without sends up 1950s witch-hunt paranoia; the second, adapted by hope of coming to fruition—“Who cares?” Monahan creLorenzo Semple and David Rayfiel from the novel by James 20 •
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Grady, invites the audience to take for granted the post-JFK idea that the American government routinely assassinates Americans, even in the workplace.) Border Crossings
“Truth can be adjusted” is one recurrent subtheme of post 9/11 films. Another might be summed up in the maxim coined in the 1960s by cartoonist Walt Kelly, for his classic comic strip Pogo: We have met the Enemy and he is Us. In Sorry, Haters (2005), written and directed by Jeff Stanzler, a New York cabbie who happens to be Muslim finds himself at the mercy of an outwardly well-balanced American woman who has gone quietly but murderously insane over the deaths at the Twin Towers. That her rage is so specifically a response to this particular act of terror makes of her madness a cautionary distillation of our nation’s swoon into war. The Visitor (2007), written and directed by Thomas McCarthy, gives us a widower lost in a maze of private grief. His sudden involvement with a pair of homeless immigrants, and his subsequent restoration to an empathy that pulls him out of himself, would have made perfect sense on September 10, 2001—but it would have stopped with the strictly personal. That McCarthy unfolds his tale after the catastrophe ups the stakes into the stratosphere, because immigrants (especially such as his new Muslim friends) have it worlds rougher now. An upsurge of spontaneous identification with the strangers in his apartment directs him into a helpless and outraged confrontation with the bigotries and bureaucratic cruelties to which 9/11 has given rise. A number of comedies embraced our contemporary craziness with comparably sarcastic high-energy. Take the Harpo Marxist anarchy of I Heart Huckabees (2004), written by David O. Russell and Jeff Baena, whose hunky fireman (played by Mark Wahlberg) is a wandering beneficiary of the public’s post-catastrophe love for men of his trade. Or sample American Dreemz (2006), written by Paul Weitz, which manages to skewer George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Simon Cowell with one hilariously far-reaching kebab. War Inc. (2008), a witty Strangelovean farce written by John Cusack with Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser, and well brought off on an ultra-low budget by director Joshua Seftel, stars Cusack as an assassin-for-hire who serves at the beck and call of a “former vice president, back in the private sector” (Dan Aykroyd, channeling Dick Cheney). The veepee directs him to assassinate an oil oligarch in an aptly named jihad-ridden capital called “Emerald City.” Past vs. Post-Op
“The past is never dead,” as William Faulkner put it: “It’s not even past.” By now the day itself has been directly commemorated in a number of films, most unblinkingly by writer-director Paul Greengrass in United 93 (2006), which dramatizes the single sustained revolt by hijacked passengers against
their captors in that fatal hour (others trapped on other flights had neither information nor time to rebel). His mesmerizing account, done without narrative embellishments or recognizable stars, erases every possible distraction against our total empathy as its people rush the cockpit and fight for their freedom, even while their prospects literally nose-dive. In World Trade Center (2006), writer Andrea Berloff movingly traced the remarkable true story of two firemen trapped under the rubble of the South Tower. The firemen are obliged to imagine the calamity, and so are we, making the experience intensely spiritual as well as cathartic. How does the great wizard Dumbledore put it to his prize student? “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” The tales we tell onscreen are a counternarrative to the “facts” our would-be oppressors incessantly try to impose. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
The morning after Osama bin Laden’s death, after it felt like the whole nation expelled (for a sweet moment) a unified sigh of triumph and relief, the battle for narrative supremacy resumed. The White House—alas, contradicting the admirable cool with which Obama had delivered the first news— put out a variety of confusing reports about the siege on Bin Laden’s compound. Over on the right-wing, Rush Limbaugh’s headline was: “Obama crashes copter.” Critics on the left, such as Michael Moore, wondered aloud if we weren’t betraying an old fashioned American ideal by killing an outlaw without giving him a trial. This cauldron of brewing narratives is natural and inevitable, even reassuring. A similar witch’s brew followed the day of 9/11, and our public commentators were so at sea in a swirl of warring facts that the nation was hypnotized into pursuing two wars. We allowed ourselves delusions of triumph (“Mission Accomplished”) but operated without practical hope of victory. A near decade ago in Written By, reacting to the psychological fevers that gripped our imaginations after this worlddefining tragedy, I wrote: We owe it to ourselves to wrest the National Story out of the hands of the few; to be skeptical of every Grand Narrative the mass media devises; to rebel against being bagged, tagged, and too glibly understood by those who are trying to either love or destroy us. We need to take our cues from the heroic and even antiheroic dead: There is no limit to human possibility. Few things give me more pleasure on this tenth anniversary than to look around and realize how many of our fellow storytellers rose to this challenge so blazingly on their own. When we look back in another ten years, the best of the movies we’ve made in this hellish time will surpass in value the work of most of our contemporary historians. They’ve only had the facts to deal with, and facts too easily lie. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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LIsten in as Mark Boal & Lawrence Wright share secrets about al-Qaeda and America.
We Have Met T heir first profession was investigative journalism. Each discovered screenwriting by accident, through magazine research. Both careers were profoundly transformed on 9/11. Their subsequent work explores the ominous consequences of that infamous day. Mark Boal and Lawrence Wright share so many passions that for this 9/11 10-year anniversary issue, Written By arranged a conversation via a conference call for them. They had never interacted before this discussion. Each spoke from their homes: Boal in Los Angeles, Wright in Austin, Texas. Mark Boal began his journalism career specializing on the emerging digital age. After 9/11, his focus shifted. “It was the individual’s role in the multi-tentacled expansion of the War on Terror that I tried to wrap my head around,” he wrote for Written By [December 2009]. Boal published “a
series of investigative stories and profiles about soldiers, their triumphs and their crimes, set against ‘the news’ of predator planes, PTSD, and IEDs.” One crime Boal covered concerned the murder of a soldier by his platoon buddies. Paul Haggis read it, and the article became a movie about returning Iraq war veterans, In the Valley of Elah, his first screen credit [story by Mark Boal & Paul Haggis, screenplay by Paul Haggis]. Then a Playboy assignment took Boal to Iraq, where he embedded with a bomb squad. The subsequent article led to The Hurt Locker, earning Boal a Writers Guild Award and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Boal is currently writing a script about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, working with director Kathryn Bigelow, who helmed The Hurt Locker. But he occasionally returns to journalism, most recently publishing the controversial “The Kill
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the Enemy Team” for Rolling Stone (April 14, 2011), about U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdering and mutilating civilians. Lawrence Wright is a novelist, playwright, and author as well as screenwriter. While a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he was required to teach English in Egypt, where he studied Arabic and began to formally investigate Middle East culture and politics. His original 1996 script, Blowback, eerily prophesied 9/11 and became the basis for The Siege [story by Lawrence Wright, screenplay by Lawrence Wright and Menno Meyjes & Edward Zwick]. A staff writer for the New Yorker, Wright’s books include The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2007. He adapted the book for the stage as My Trip to Al-Qaeda, performing it himself. Alex Gibney’s documentary based on the play is also written by Wright.
Richard Stayton: Let’s begin with Osama bin Laden, since you’ve
both written extensively about his impact and influence. Mark Boal: I’m in the middle of researching the intelligence and hunt that led to the May 1 raid [and Osama bin Laden’s death]. It’s a professional interest of mine, but it’s also personal. The guy attacked my hometown. I’m a New Yorker. And I was just saying to somebody the other day that he really did, in so many ways, define to me the past 10 years of not just American foreign policy but also the kind of cultural vibe that 9/11 created. Lawrence Wright: I agree. Bin Laden infected our imagination in a way that has been very deleterious. You have to give him credit for having a cinematic imagination, maybe more than most of us in the film business. Had we put what he did in a movie before 9/11, it would have been seen as too Hollywood.
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Journalism vs. Screenwriting And since then it seems like the stakes have been raised until there’s a perception that only big blockbuster actiontype movies can occupy the marketplace. I sometimes think of Bin Laden as having a kind of producorial role, and al-Qaeda as being like the studio for terrorism. Mark Boal: Hey, Larry, you’re down in Texas but up here in L.A., if I can give you a little career advice, comparing al-Qaeda to a studio? No. Lawrence Wright: You’re probably right. Mark Boal: I just want to go on the record. Lawrence Wright: But terrorism is theater. It always has been, but it’s never been played in such large theatrical terms as al-Qaeda brought to it. And that’s the mind of Osama bin Laden. And where did he get that? The whole notion of flying airplanes into skyscrapers and so on has a vividness and scale never achieved by a terrorist before. It’s haunting. It’s humiliating that it happened to us, and it’s gotten into our psyche. In some ways, it’s blowback from the way the world sees American culture. What Bin Laden wanted was a hit, a blockbuster. He’s having a little trouble with the sequel. Mark Boal: My [Bin Laden script] will in some ways memorialize the end of this era. There are plenty of other bad guys out there that the military and intelligence folks are still trying to kill, but I hope the president is right when he said that the tides of war are receding and maybe the country can start taking a different direction. Lawrence Wright: I hope that too. Mark Boal: I started thinking about the hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2006 or ’07. I was always intrigued and fascinated by the fact that Bin Laden was the most wanted man in the world and in some ways the most dangerous man in the world. And he was subjected to the largest manhunt in history yet still seemed to be evading capture. That was an interesting paradox for me, and I started looking particularly at December 2001 in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, when it seemed like the U.S. Special Forces had Bin Laden in their grasp and he got away. As a dramatist, I’m not necessarily looking to assign blame. Senior military leaders clearly had a lot to do with what happened. But there are other factors at play too. There was a miscalculation, and I’m not quite sure who made it, about the willingness of what they call the Eastern Alliance, the local Afghan guy to actually take a shot at Bin Laden. That was a pretty big assumption that I’m not sure was correct. I don’t know if that assumption comes out of the CIA or where it came out of. Sometimes well-intentioned people don’t necessarily accomplish what they set out to. Lawrence Wright: Also, we trusted our ally Pakistan to close the door, and they not only didn’t close the door, they provided safe haven to many members of al-Qaeda. Mark Boal: It’s pretty much a cluster fuck if you look at it collusively, but a fascinating story. And particularly the role of the Special Forces guys is what I was looking at, and
Mark Boal: I spent the better part of 10 years trying to get halfway decent at writing a nonfiction prose magazine article, and there isn’t that much carryover to screenwriting. I look at it as a separate craft, a separate discipline with its own set of aesthetic requirements and skills to master. Paul Haggis was extremely helpful [while writing In the Valley of Elah]. He was the first screenwriter to break down the screenplay for me into its component parts. He’s a diligent structuralist. We talked about how things that happened in the first 10 minutes play out in the next 10, and the ripple effect through the movie. Before, I had thought about structure in the context of, say, an 8,000-word magazine piece. But it’s a different ballgame when it’s a 120-page screenplay with half-a-dozen characters. When I sat down to write The Hurt Locker, I realized that most of what I’d learned from him applied to In the Valley of Elah and not to another movie. Each film is its own mountain to climb. You start from the bottom every time. Lawrence Wright: For me there is more cross-fertilization between journalism and screenwriting. The research skills required in the journalism world are helpful in terms of trying to find out what happened, knowing how to get that, and knowing what’s true when you hear about it. It works the other way too. In screenwriting, I’ve learned how valuable characters are in scenes. Those turn out to be useful tools for any writer. Increasingly, I build my nonfiction around creating scenes and inhabiting it with characters that become more vivid because I’ve understood how to do that through writing movies and plays. Mark Boal: But there is such a big difference between the sort of performative aspect of a screenplay or a play and the fact that a piece of nonfiction prose, or even fiction prose, is going to be read and imagined entirely in the mind of the reader. To me, it was such a leap to go from that to a medium where you have actors and directors and producers and financiers and cameramen. Lawrence Wright: It is a different medium, but when you’re sitting down to write and you’re trying to imagine what it would be like if it were filmed, there’s not all that much difference. What are the elements that I have to work with? I have language. I have the ability to describe it and imagine it. In that sense, they’re a similar enterprise. Mark Boal: Of course, [the hunt for Bin Laden] did require a rewrite [after Bin Laden’s death], which I’m in the midst of now. In that sense, when you’re working on a film that is very topical and timely, there’s something that’s inherently journalistic about the enterprise, because I literally got back from Washington a week ago interviewing people with knowledge of the events, and now I’m writing scenes based on what they told me. Probably within six months somebody will be bringing those scenes to life on a movie set. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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“In the case of The Hurt Locker, I read what little there was out there on the bomb squad,” says Mark Boal. “But I couldn’t have written that movie without going to Baghdad and spending time with the people who do that work. By the same token, for this movie about the hunt for Bin Laden, I’ve been talking to people actively involved in that.” the intelligence guys on the ground. Not so much the senior leaders, but the enlisted guys who were actually doing the fighting. Their take on the events is pretty interesting. Richard Stayton: Larry, didn’t the CIA want your take? Lawrence Wright: Media pointed out how [the CIA] had failed
to connect the dots. Hollywood had tons of films that had connected the dots, in better or worse manner. Themes that were played for al-Qaeda on 9/11, many had already played out in American movies. In The Siege, [there’s] rounding up Arabs and illegal renditions and torture and so on. The intelligence community was feeling a little bruised [by not having anticipated 9/11] and decided to go to screenwriters and ask for their help. I just happened to be one. And I said, “I’m flattered, but I’m also a journalist. I can’t write screenplays for the CIA.” I told them I would write an op-ed for the New York Times in which I described my ideal scenario if we caught Bin Laden. And of course they didn’t follow my instructions. Mark Boal: I don’t think they were that interested in capturing him. Lawrence Wright: No. One of their main concerns expressed to me was what might happen if we did capture him and held him for trial. They worried about hundreds of Americans being kidnapped and held for ransom. It was a scenario
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one could easily envision. So I think that they were going to be quick on the trigger, no matter what. Mark Boal: This most recent Bin Laden operation was probably one of the most closely held operations in history. Very, very few people knew about it. The head of the FBI only found out about it very, very late in the game, just to give you one example. Lawrence Wright: I tried [to be allowed by the U.S. armed forces] to embed. I pitched it to the head of national intelligence when I was writing about Mike McConnell [former director of the National Security Agency] for the New Yorker, and I also put it to the CIA that I would love to be embedded in whatever team it is at the point of the spear [for hunting Bin Laden]. This was 2007 maybe, or 2008. My book had come out [The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11] and I said since I had written about the rise of al-Qaeda, I’d like to write about the end of it. They actually did consider it, but they came back to me with qualifications: I’d have to get a security clearance, which would be time-consuming and even unlikely to get, and secondly, I’d have to vet with the CIA before they’d publish it. They’d be able to redact it. And so there were a lot of problems, but a part of me wishes I could’ve gotten into that group. During that timeframe, it may not have been the most exciting. I could’ve spent years doing nothing but hanging around the tribal areas. Blowback
Richard Stayton: Larry, The Siege was eerily prescient, especially
in your draft titled Blowback. Lawrence Wright: Speaking of how the stakes have changed, in one of the early drafts, the terrorist organization that is behind all the action had attained a nuclear weapon. And the director thought that was overplaying the event. So it was brought down to the level of bus bombings in New York. Now the nuclear card would be hard to avoid. Al-Qaeda has been in search of a nuclear weapon. Before 9/11, it seemed implausible that you would have a terrorist action on that scale. Now it seems like the logical next step. Actually, a representative of the Pakistani nuclear establishment opened negotiations with alQaeda shortly before 9/11. So God knows where that might have led, and we still to this day don’t know if the [Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan’s clandestine nuclear] network has actually been shut down. The Pakistanis have never let the U.S. intelligence or members of the Atomic Energy Commission examine the facts in that matter.
Mark Boal: I try to consume as much publicly available, open-source material as I can, and that’s kind of the first cut. But for me, the exciting stuff tends to be with people who have firsthand experience with whatever it is that I’m writing about. So in the case of The Hurt Locker, I read what little there was out there on the bomb squad, but I couldn’t have written that movie without going to Baghdad and spending time with the people who do that work. By the same token, for this movie about the hunt for Bin Laden, I’ve been talking to people actively involved in that. Lawrence Wright: That, to me, is the journalistic impulse that’s not true for all screenwriters. One of the weaknesses of a lot of Hollywood movies in the past has been that people felt they could make it all up. But it’s very hard to make things up, at least for me, if I don’t know what actually happens and how things actually work. Mark Boal: I’m with you on that. I don’t know how other screenwriters work, and it depends on the type of material you’re doing, but I know a lot of writers typically draw from their own lives. The stories that I tend to be drawn to I don’t have any direct experience with them. There’s not much in my own stock of experiences that I can relate to, not being a Delta Force soldier or a CIA case officer or a diplomat. That world is all foreign to me, but that’s part of what makes it exciting for me: learning about things I don’t know. Shock & Awe Shucks
Richard Stayton: Have we as a nation gotten numb to truth
since the 9/11 shock? Lawrence Wright: I think so. People don’t want villains who are Americans. We want to see ourselves in a better light and maybe a more heroic light. And it’s hard. Ever since Abu Ghraib and all the fallout from the renditions and so on, it’s just been a cascade of disillusioning news about who we are. Maybe that’s why movies that depict us in that way haven’t done so well at the box office. Mark Boal: I don’t know how to account for the way different films get received. There are so many different factors in each one, and it’s tough to generalize. I’m fairly skeptical of the idea that people aren’t interested in this stuff. It’s empirically, demonstrably not true. You can say that and still show that these films maybe underperform. I guess I’m so focused on building my own little go-cart that it’s hard for me to think about what might work or might not work, or what other movies will come out in that world. I just think if I take my eye off the ball of what I’m doing right now, it’ll all never come together. While I was making Hurt Locker, I was the same way. I was aware of the other [9/11 film] projects, and I would hear about a new one every week, but we just kept our head down and tried not to take our eye off the ball. I don’t think we would’ve gotten through it if we had focused too much on what other people were doing. Professionally, I put blinders on [to get the work done].
Screenwriting in a Post-9/11 World
Richard Stayton: On a wider range topic, do you see in the past
10 years how 9/11 has perhaps impacted television and film? It’s obvious we have Homeland Security and much more surveillance and wiretapping now. But what about the art itself, the craft of screenwriting? Mark Boal: We may part ways on this one, but I don’t think the craft of screenwriting changes with history. Audiences may change, but writers don’t. So the challenges seem roughly the same to me as they probably always have been. Emotional tone and subject matter and that sort of stuff changes. But at the end of the day, telling a good story is always going to be really hard. Lawrence Wright: I do think that it affected at least the kinds of stories that we chose to tell and also the portrait of who we are when we tell those stories. After 9/11, for instance, I was disappointed in the American creative community for not rising to the occasion. I thought, This is a profound moment in our lives, in our history, and where are the great books and movies and plays? It’s just a stunning lack of response. Maybe it was just shock. Mark Boal: How many do you want? If you look at Vietnam, you’ve got A Bright Shining Lie. You’ve got a few. Sometimes I wonder that maybe our expectations are a little high. Lawrence Wright: It could be. After all, we were goaded into it as creative artists. We were suddenly in two wars. There’s a lot to be said, but shows like 24 addressed who we are in a way that was very unsettling to me. The moral issues brought up in that show and in others made me a little distressed about how we had changed as a country and the kind of people we agreed to be. Mark Boal: I’m not that familiar with that show, but I know what you’re talking about. There was some good work done in nonfiction and some interesting fiction and certainly a lot of people in Hollywood took a whack at it. There’s a lot to be proud of in a way. The first movies about Vietnam didn’t come out until three or four years after the conflict had ended. Thirty-odd years later, with 9/11, you have pretty established filmmakers wading into this obviously difficult and contentious terrain and unpopular war while it’s still going on. And that’s pretty cool. I’m one of them. Lawrence Wright: Look at M*A*S*H. Thirty years after KoSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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The Death of Osama bin Laden
I was surprised at the raid, and I had no clue they were coming, but the fact that Osama bin Laden was in the city of Abbottabad, Pakistan, didn’t surprise me. There had been a narrative for a long time that he was in a cave, but another narrative seemed a little more realistic to me. It’s not impossible to get messages out if you’re in a cave in Waziristan or wherever, but given the frequency of his media statements, and the fact that he was still trying to run the organization, it felt like he would be in a place where he could have easier access to communication that couldn’t be tracked. So I thought he was going to be in a city, but I didn’t think Abbottabad. When I was in Peshawar, in 2004, there was a firefight right outside of town. The base of the al-Qaeda path and tribal areas are right there. The Pakistani army was supposedly engaged in a firefight with al-Qaeda and said that they had captured the son of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was alQaeda’s number two guy. He’s now number one. And the papers were full of all this, his son Ahmed is talking and so on. Which is interesting because al-Zawahiri doesn’t have a son named Ahmed. What does this mean? Is this all just a show? It occurred to me that, with the massive amount of aid we poured into Pakistan and especially into its military, they were in the looking-for-Bin-Laden business. If they found him, they’d be out of business. So when it was revealed that Bin Laden was sequestered in this compound a mile away from the most elite military academy in the country, and also in the city chockful of army and intelligence agencies and retired military officers, it made a shocking amount of sense. Bin Laden was the most precious asset that the army and the intelligence agencies in Pakistan had—it made sense to keep him close by. It does look like he was confined. When I was studying the videos that came out after his capture, Bin Laden looked wasted. He had always been a very vigorous figure despite these rumors about his health. He was riding horses and strolling in the mountains and shooting his gun and so on, but in the videos he looked emaciated and gaunt and unhealthy. So I suspected he had been essentially locked up there for the past five years and not allowed out. I’d like to know more about it, and maybe Mark [Boal] will find out, but the terms of his confinement are interesting and critical to understanding exactly what the role of the Pakistani army was in maintaining his residence there. —Lawrence Wright SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 W G A W W r i t t e n B y • 29
rea, you have a television show that is based on a mood of that time looking back at another time. Maybe we’ll have something like that in the future about this age of terror. Mark Boal: I actually heard a few pitches, believe it or not, kind of along those lines. A M*A*S*H or a show that takes the lighter side of the war on terror, the upside of al-Qaeda. Richard Stayton: Looking back at 9/11 and that week, journalists and media commentators focused on the cinematic quality
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of the 9/11 attacks. The Twin Towers, when all those cameras were in place, seemed almost like a designed film set. Mark Boal: I’m okay with it now, but at the time, that analogy pissed me off because it felt like a failure of a response to say, you know, here’s this catastrophe and it reminds us of a piece of cinema. It seemed a little quick to begin that process of distancing and analogizing. But again, I was in New York on 9/11, so I took it all a little more head-on than maybe somebody just watching it on TV. There were people I knew in the Towers. To hear people talk about it like, wow, this reminds me of a disaster movie—I wanted people to say there was nothing analogous to it, that it was an event so monumental that it couldn’t be compared to anything else. Of course, that’s not true. One of the goals of The Hurt Locker was to put you in the soldiers’ shoes so that somebody who wasn’t in the military could get a feeling for what it’s like to be walking on the streets of Baghdad. And I suppose, Larry, if you want to go back to that influence of journalism, that’s a fairly journalistic goal as well, isn’t it? Lawrence Wright: Yes. One of the things that happened after 9/11 is that people had a great hunger to know what’s going on. And Lynda Obst, a producer friend of mine who had been one of the producers of The Siege, said, “We’re living in a nonfiction age.” She had captured the mood of that moment. There was a switch. Maybe, at that moment, movies and novels weren’t ready to organize their reaction. At the time, I was drifting away from journalism. I was trying to get into the movie business. I was writing scripts that I wanted to direct, and then 9/11 came and the next thing I knew, I was in Afghanistan and
less than a mile from the Trade Center site. There was a Saudi Arabia and the movie business seemed very far away lot of pain out there. It felt in some ways ministerial in from me. It just didn’t seem pressing enough for me to spend addressing all of that. People were out there who had lost my time on. And I love writing scripts. I love the movie busiloved ones. I could see people crying in the audience. It was ness. But I just felt like a firedog getting back on the truck. affecting to me too. It was very symbolic to be placed so Mark Boal: I also found myself trying to report on the afterclose to the scene. Many of the people coming to the play math, but one of the things I realized when I started working were not ordinary theatergoers. They were going for some with Haggis is that—and you know this, and in some ways it’s other reason. They were hungry for their experience to be an obvious point—there’s nothing that compares to a film for reach and audience impact. Even a film that might not rise to the level of a blockbuster still gets seen most likely over the course of its lifetime by way more people than will ever read an article, unless it’s a huge bestseller or a book, and that’s just one of the consequences of the world we live in. And so that’s kind of what brought me back into film—realizing the obvious power of the media. Lawrence Wright: It’s incomparable. Mark Boal: It’s just incredible. Lawrence Wright: Well, perversely enough, I went the other direction, which was theater. Mark Boal: That is perverse. Lawrence Wright: It was kind of odd, but I just decided when my book was published to do this one-man show. I did it for six weeks Off-Broadway, and I did it at the Kennedy Center, addressing people in a very intimate way about what had happened to us and how it had affected who we are. And then it became a documentary, but it didn’t start out that way. It was just a small theater, but night after night it was very interesting, especially when we did it in Soho, Pages from Blowback, written by Lawrence Wright in 1996 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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acknowledged and also somehow interpreted and explained. And as the playwright you have control. Mark Boal: It’s definitely a cold shower when you work in Hollywood and realize just exactly where the writer falls on the totem pole. That’s probably why I got into producing, by the way, which is to try to keep my hand in the process and maintain some level of advocacy for the screenplay. Lawrence Wright: That’s also part of my predilection for theater. The playwright has the final word. It’s a delightful feeling. It’s a just universe in that way.
“It could be that we’re in the prelude of a much darker era,” says Lawrence Wright. “Or it could be that this’ll seem like a strange little blip in history when a small organization founded by a single individual could affect the course of events, if al-Qaeda passes away and dies a natural death.”
The Tenth Anniversary
Lawrence Wright: This is the 10th anniversary, and it’s going
to be interesting to see if the page will turn or if we’re in for another 10 years of coping with these kinds of issues. It could be that we’re in the prelude of a much darker era. Or it could be that this’ll seem like a strange little blip in history when a small organization founded by a single individual could affect the course of events, if al-Qaeda passes away and dies a natural death. Mark Boal: A natural death, at the end of a drone somewhere. Lawrence Wright: Well, eventually the idea has to die, otherwise it won’t go away. And that would probably cause us to change a bit. But I am concerned about the fact that we built up this immense security state to fight it, and now it’s become a part of the way we are. Mark Boal: In 1998 I covered the Internet. Privacy rights online was my big thing. It’s similar to your story about The Siege. It seemed almost verging on paranoid at the time, writing about the possibilities for the Internet to be used as a medium for surveillance. The growing sense that convenience was being used as a way to entice people to give up more of their private information. And then after 9/11, all the shit that I wouldn’t have even dreamed of in my most Orwellianlike, three-in-the-morning fantasy happened and became law. It is incredible. I know you’re not just talking about the sort of monitoring aspect of it when you say the security state. I assume you’re including all the private security. Lawrence Wright: I’m not advocating that we abandon airport security, but I do think we should be a lot more discreet about how we go about it. Now you can’t walk into an office building without getting tagged and photographed. You have to take off your belt and shoes to visit the Liberty Bell. All of this is a part of the way we are now. And after al-Qaeda is gone, we’ll still be that way. Al-Qaeda is begin-
ning to fade, but the security state that we created to fight it will still be here. It has changed us and our country in so many different ways. The template that it’s created will always be with us: the idea that a small super-empowered group or even individual can change world history in the course of an event. Other groups will rise up. They might have nothing to do with Islam or even religion at all, but they’ll affix themselves to the notion that they can have that kind of power. Mark Boal: You’re right, and that is troubling. At the same continues on page 54
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The show that did go on: Emmy-nominated writers talk terrorism in 2001.
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n October 5, 2001, the Friday before the Sunday when bombs began falling on Afghanistan, more than 500 guests crowded into the Writers Guild Theater to hear what Emmy writing nominees had to say. Moderator Bryce Zabel, then chairman/CEO Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and WGAw Board member, led the discussion. Participating writers included Kirk Ellis (Anne Frank, based on the book by Melissa Muller), Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks), Robert L. Freedman (Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, based on the memoir by Lorna Luft), Jeff Greenstein (Will & Grace, created by David Kohan & Max Mutchnick), Loring Mandel (Conspiracy), Alex Reid (Malcolm in the Middle, created by Linwood Boomer), Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), and Hank Steinberg (61*). The occasion was designed to discuss their scripts before the winners would be announced during that weekend’s Emmy celebration. Inevitably, the events of September 11 became a subject. On Sunday, October 7, the awards show was cancelled for the second time. But on November 4, the show eventually did go on.
Bryce Zabel: Loring, you were able to write about something as
serious and awful and horrible as the Final Solution. What will people write about in the future about the World Trade Center? Loring Mandel: I don’t know what people will write, but I know what my impulse will be. In Conspiracy, I wanted very much to de-demonize the men sitting around that table. They weren’t monsters. They were human beings making decisions based on their ideology. It’s very consonant with what happened September 11. If I write about it, I would want to make [the terrorists] human beings, to try and understand why they do what they do rather than to create false monsters, [who are] easier to hate but take you nowhere. You cannot learn from them. I hope that you can learn something about what human beings are capable of in the normal course of business. It was pretty banal what they did. It was a corporate board meeting yet the result . . . I’m trying to think what I might say should I get the
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Emmy, and the last thing that occurred to me was to simply point out that the ultimate end of intolerance is murder. That’s what it is. Exclusion, devaluing human life, devaluing people outside your group eventually damages and kills humanity one way or another, to some degree or another. So for September 11, I would want to approach it as I did in Conspiracy. Bryce Zabel: Do we need a lot of time, a little time, to pass
before it is an appropriate topic for movies? Or will it ever be? Loring Mandel: Thematically, I see it as completely appropriate now. But in terms of reaching a full understanding of how it happened, what happened, that’s a wait away.
Bryce Zabel: Kirk, in your film [Anne Frank] there’s a scene where they’re literally taking them from their residence, and a Nazi officer has a slight moment of humanity in him. He lets them get their belongings. Kirk Ellis: In actual fact, Otto Frank, who had been a reserve officer in the Great War, outranked the man who arrested him. The arresting officer being German, once that was pointed out to him, suddenly became very deferential. I should point out that we were excoriated in a column by Julie Salomen in the New York Times for being too humanist, that we actually showed a sympathetic German in the film. Part of the point of the movie was to show this humanity that some people can preserve and other people lose in times of great, great stress. And to do very much what [Loring] did with the Nazi officers meeting to discuss the final solution in Conspiracy, which was to say, “Look, what decision would you have made in a circumstance like this?” Oh, it’s easy to say you would’ve hidden eight Jews in your attic. Really? Particularly, when there was a death penalty for collaborators? You have to challenge yourself. There was an effort made in the 1950s, very much at Otto Frank’s behest, to essentially “de-Jewify” [Anne Frank] so her message could be more universal because at that time there was this association of Jews with Communism, which was the same as what happened in Nazi Germany. Anne Frank
has always been known rather erroneously by the quote taken very much out of context: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart.” That comes buried in a sentence where she also talks about being able to see what she calls “the approaching thunder” that will eventually destroy them, and feeling the sufferings of others, and saying that whenever she looks at the sky, she knows that that too will end. And that one day peace and humanity will be returned. I hope that the events on September 11 will make us creators, as well as audiences, demand that we go back to a more humanist approach to our material and less toward the extremes to which both feature films and television have been driven in the past several years. Aaron Sorkin: There’s a George Bernard Shaw quote that is what I base all my writing on, and it addresses this. It’s just a four-word sentence that’s in the back of one of his books. It says, “All men mean well.” That’s really the key to everything. I support President Bush, but when you start talking about “evildoers,” it becomes more of a comic strip and it dehumanizes any understanding that we could have. Jeff Greenstein: [The September 11 tragedy] has certainly changed us. We were in the middle of a production week on an episode when it happened, and everyone was so completely shattered. It was very, very difficult to go back to work for all of us. It was certainly difficult to go back and say, “What’s the funny physical business that Grace is gonna do with the water bottle in the A scene?” It suddenly seemed trivial. But an interesting thing happened to us during that week because two of our guest actors found themselves in various parts of the world, unable to get back. We had to shuffle the episodes around, and we ended up shooting an episode that week with just our core cast that was about Grace dealing with [being] dumped by her boyfriend. She’s just completely devastated, and she won’t come out of her bedroom. The other characters in the show kind of take turns trying to use whatever they have in their personal tool kit to get her out of there. The show in a way, though we didn’t intend this, was about grieving and moving along. Because we went ahead and shot an episode the following Tuesday night, we came out in the beginning and said, “We know that this is hard, but we’re trying, and we hope that maybe you can take a break from what you’ve been going through for the past week and laugh with us for a little while.” So we at least acknowledged what was happening, and it was ultimately in its small way very moving and appropriate, surprisingly enough, to be doing that episode at the time. After everyone had taken their curtain calls, Megan Mullally came out and sang “Smile,” the Charlie Chaplin song, and we sent everybody home quietly. It was very reverent in a way. It was a hushed atmosphere at the end. It was unusual for us. We kind of said, “Okay, we’ve gone through the first week. The curse is off. We can allow ourselves to do our business again.” But interestingly enough, we began work on an episode, and we wanted to try—God love Aaron Sor-
kin for doing what he did the other night because I thought it was so brave to actually address the thing head on. We’re not that good—we wanted to do an episode that dealt with all the emotions we were feeling. A couple of our writers came in with an idea for an episode about gay-bashing, where Will is actually beaten up and doesn’t know what to do in the aftermath of it, how to reenter in his life, and he’s very unsure about how to deal with it. It was also about the other characters dealing with the massive trauma to somebody they love and trying to figure out how to feel safe in the aftermath of that. If we’re successful, it’s our way of allegorically treating the attacks of September 11 and trying to deal with the emotions that stirred up in us. None of us wants to see a multicamera comedy attempt to tackle [terrorism]; the proscenium is too small to contain those kind of emotions. But we’re trying in our way, in our situation comedy way, to deal with it. Bryce Zabel: Alex, one of the things that people have said in some of the newspaper and magazine articles is that the type of comedy may have changed, that the ironic, cynical type of comedy might not be appropriate anymore. Malcolm is a pretty ironic show and very good. Has it changed how you look at what you do? Alex Reid: Actually, I don’t see it as that ironic because none of our characters step back and say something that they think of as funny. It comes from their behavior. In some ways, they’re all very messed-up people, and they treat each other horribly. We were behind [on September 11], so we actually had to shoot the day of the attacks. Like most scenes in our show, everybody’s yelling at each other in the scene that we were shooting. It was a pretty heated scene between Malcolm and Lois, and they’re screaming at each other. They weren’t being light or kooky. Ultimately, it will play funny, but at the time they were just channeling what they were feeling that day. To address part of your question about how it’s affected us: We had some things that seemed funny at the time before September 11 that we’ve had to strip out of episodes that we’ve already shot. We had a story on September 10 about Francis, the son who’s in military school. [He] has left school, he’s hitchhiking to a new job, he gets lost in the woods, and this guy takes him in. Francis is kind of out of it and doesn’t realize that this guy is a survivalist, Unabomber kind of guy, but he’s very insecure and he’s not sure if he should go through with his plan. They think they’re talking about the same thing, but Francis is talking about his mother controlling his thoughts and this guy’s talking about society controlling his thoughts. Francis unwittingly props up this guy’s confidence in himself before he moves. Ultimately, Francis leaves him a note and says, “Hey, I fixed your timer on your VCR thingy.” The guy’s eyes go wide, and the place explodes. Someday maybe we can air that. continues on page 52
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was in the middle of writing our sixth episode on September 11. I was about halfway through. These scripts are written very close to production. There isn’t a bank of scripts. In other words, we were in the middle of shooting the fifth episode while I was in the middle of writing the sixth episode. And I threw it out immediately. It wasn’t that there was anything objectionable. There weren’t any bombs. It was just wrong. It was a Halloween episode and everybody was yukking it up a little bit. And I was kind of paralyzed. I was like everybody. I didn’t know what to write. It didn’t feel right to write. Among the minor casualties on September 11 was that suddenly all artists were irrelevant. We were silly, sort of despicably silly in a way. The luckier ones, the freelance writers, got to say, ‘Well, I’m just not going to do anything until this isn’t an issue anymore.’ But for a lot of us here, we don’t have that choice. I wanted to write something, and I didn’t know what. A day went by. Two days went by, and I was kind of spinning my wheels. I [said to] the people I work with, “Let’s dig in, and in 24 or 48 hours, let’s learn everything we can about the history of terrorism. And let’s maybe find one or two issues that don’t get that much play on the news, that people aren’t aware about, and see if we can talk about it on our show. We’re not gonna do the thing on our show. We’re not gonna have a World Trade Center attack on the show. I’m not even sure what we’re gonna do, but maybe there’s something we can do.” And sort of over a weekend, a Saturday and Sunday of walking around my room, the whole thing kind of came together. Early that Monday morning I went in. I 36 •
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said to the people I work with, John Wells and Tommy Schlamme, and a couple of the line producers, “Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but there’s this episode that I want to do, and I think that we have
to do it before we do the season premiere. It’s not going to be a new season premiere. There isn’t even a name for this really. It’s going to be a foreword or an overture or something. We’re just going to do this before the season premiere. I think that’s the only way. That’s our only hope of people being able to watch our show and watch stories about an MS coverup and Donna and Josh going through the hallways. The only way people are going to be able to watch this with any hope of enjoying it the way that they used to is if there’s some sense that the characters on the show have experienced what we’ve all experienced. If we don’t believe that, if somehow that parallel universe has gone so far away from us, the show’s gonna seem quaint awfully quickly.” Everyone rallied around, agreed to do it. It got written in about two or three days and then written many times after that. I would rewrite large portions of it. There were three directors, three units going all the time. We would be shooting in the interrogation room while we were shooting in the mess. There would be a team of editors in the last few days literally working around the clock. There was no such thing as weekends anymore. This was just an operation devoted to this. NBC and Warner Bros. came on board very fast. Reasonable minds can differ certainly on what the final result was, but what was very moving was to see the phenomenal team effort, just a phenomenal team effort. On the show, there’s a very difficult needle to thread. There are large contemporary things that you can’t reference because you kind of blow the illusion. It’s not that those things don’t exist in this world; it’s just they don’t mention them. Eisenhower is the most recent president that I’ll mention. But when September 11 happened, all of a sudden it was an event much too large to ignore.
Either you were living in this world or you weren’t. Either you were living in this world or you were in a comic book. That needed to be contended with. Compared to that, everything else has been small potatoes. —Aaron Sorkin
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9/11 Plus Ten
Lisa Rosen
Written by Photographs by Michael Jones
The
Sword and the Pen
The Writers Guild Foundation’s Veterans Writing Project mentors those who served.
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worked in production, I know what it takes to put your pen down, and go to this thing at 6:30, when most of Hollywood hasn’t left the office,” says April Fitzsimmons. Kyle Hartnett finds himself “almost embarrassed” by their generosity. “These guys come monthly and read a ton of work we turn in, half of which is probably terrible, just for a small group of veterans who want to be writers of some sort.” Michael Black uses one word to describe them: angels. Who are they praising? Those who are serving those who served. Fitzsimmons always wanted to be in the entertainment industry. She’d performed in theater while serving in the Air Force from 1985 to ’89. After her discharge, Fitzsimmons continued her stage pursuits while working in Los Angeles as a PA for films. Post-9/11, she looked back at her experiences as a 19-yearold military intelligence analyst. These became fodder for a one-woman show, The Need to Know, which she performed for eight years. “As a veteran I had mixed feelings about what was going on, and as the war progressed, I had even more mixed feelings,” she says. “Writing helped me to get a deeper understanding of the collective confusion that was happening.” 38 •
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Despite her various avenues of expression, which also include teaching classes in creativity (one class is held at the Veterans Administration Hospital), she remained far from her original goal: to write and direct films. “I had sort of forgotten my dream,” she says. “I just felt lost.” Then Fitzsimmons heard about the Veterans Writers Program. In 2008, WGAE Foundation president Michael Weller had the idea to match up Guild members with veterans who were interested in writing. He organized weekend retreats in
Texas and Ohio. WGAW Foundation president David Brancato visited one of the Texas weekends and came back eager to implement the project at home. To find participants, the WGAW Foundation contacted Keith Jeffreys’ organization, the United Service Veterans’ Artists Alliance, headquartered in Los Angeles. “The veterans in our group had the feeling that we were out here alone,” says Jeffreys, who had served in the Army during peacetime for four years. “It felt great to have the Writers Guild reach out
to us and say, ‘We just want to give you the opportunity to get together and talk about your writing.’” Fitzsimmons signed up, hesitantly. “I was very scared,” she admits. “It’s weird bringing writers together anywhere be(Top row, from left) Robert Ben Garant (mentor), Keith Jeffreys, Chris Knopf (mentor), Kyle Hartnett, Larry Andries (mentor), Jonathon Michals, Brian Anthony; (bottom row, from left) Marie Weiss (mentor), Marina Viscun, Robin Schiff (mentor), Winnie Holzman (mentor), Jan Oxenberg (mentor), Kevin Ott (project coordinator)
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cause we’re kind of loners. At least I am. Big group gatherings make me want to crawl under a table.” The first WGAW Foundation Retreat took place over a weekend in 2010. About 50 vets applied and were admitted, and 20 Guild members attended as mentors. They broke into smaller groups, exploring all manner of writing exercises. As the attendees talked about their work and interests, Fitzsimmons felt more at ease. “I saw the extraordinary talent and diversity of the stories that everyone was telling,” she says. “I felt like I had a safe place where I could share my stories and have it be okay if they weren’t all fleshed out or up to industry standards yet. It just put me back in touch with the possibility of that dream.” Fitzsimmons became close friends with attendees Marina Viscun and her husband, Jonathon Michals. “I would never
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know they were here in L.A. without the Writers Guild,” she says. “I wouldn’t even know how to reach out to vets.” Volunteer Mentors
Jonathon Michals served in the Navy from 2002–2007, stationed primarily in North Carolina, and entered the screenwriting program at UCLA in 2008. The WGAW retreat blew him away. “I still think about it,” he says. His group included the prolific screenwriter Robin Schiff as a mentor. “The biggest thing for me, wanting to be a writer, were issues of confidence and just being able to share and to even think of yourself as somewhat decent.” The two days of attention and approbation were liberating for Michals: “Some of these guys hadn’t written at all, others had been tucking it away under their beds. So that inspired me.
They were there to write, and they weren’t “What’s unique about these vets comes disillusioned, based largely on my own experiences.” shy about it.” But Hartnett’s workshop sessions led Michaels is now working on two is they’re like sponges,” says him away from screenplays. “There came scripts, one focused on a bank heist, the other a romantic comedy about a hapless Kevin Ott. “They want to learn to me a theme throughout our sessions with these mentors, these extremely talguy who gets hit by lightning. “The weekend is a big lovefest,” men- and have almost no ego about ented and successful people, that no matter how big they got, they were still tor and past WGAW president Christopher Knopf acknowledges. A veteran their writing. They are also the beholden to the whims of people that are not as talented or don’t understand himself (Air Corps, 1945–47), Knopf adds, “I just have such respect for these most pretension-free group of writing as much as these people. It might sound arrogant or idealistic, but I don’t guys and girls. They’re very modest about it. My greatest moment is when one of people I’ve ever worked with out want to take part in that. I don’t want to be hostage to some idiot producer.” the older ones came up who had served Instead, Harnett decided to work on in Vietnam and said, ‘This is the first time here. That’s obviously valuable something he could produce on his own, anyone has made me proud wearing the in Hollywood.” so he’s writing a comic book called Mr. uniform.’ That moved me deeply.” Kevin Ott, who organizes the program for the Foundation, says, “What’s unique about these vets is Bubbleguts, about a they’re like sponges, they want to learn and have almost no dead pig who’s the proego about their writing. They are also the most pretensionprietor of a mystical free group of people I’ve bar. The group backs ever worked with out here. him in his new direcThat’s obviously valuable tion. And regardless in Hollywood; you want of format, he echoes to work with people who his comrades when he aren’t jackasses.” says, “My growth as a Attendee Michael Black, storyteller has been exwho served in Korea from ponential since joining 1951–55, confirms Ott’s the group.” point: “You got face-toface meetings with people Painting It Black who were making a living Michael Black has moved in the other direction, from short story in writing. To those who’ve to script, as a result of the workshop. “I have always written well, never been there, they’re like a group of mystics. They’re but what I have written was not writing,” he states. Black has been working magic; they scoop up a handful of crap and turn it a high-school teacher, a into an Academy Award–winning movie.” professor, and a congresThat first weekend proved so beneficial the Foundation desional fellow who helped veloped a monthly workshop to support anyone who wanted revise the Civil Rights to continue meeting with mentors Schiff, Knopf, Robert Ben Act of 1964. “But it Garant, Winnie Holzman, Larry Andries, Marie Weiss, and wasn’t until I connected Jan Oxenberg. These days, the lovefest is held one night a with the Writers Guild month on the fourth floor of the WGA. All available mentors through this program join a core group of about 13 veterans, six or so showing up that I found out what on any given night. writing was about.” Kyle Hartnett served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne DiviHis story is based sion from 2000–2003, with a tour in Afghanistan in 2002. on his stepfather’s exHe found out about the program from his work on Robert perience as a black Greenwald’s In Their Boots project, directing a documentary caddy who played against the white pro about veterans. at a whites-only counTalking after the June meeting, Hartnett was surprised to try club in the Jim Crow South. Black has been taking notes learn that Michael Black had also served in the 82nd. “We about it since the ’70s. In his first version for the group, the rarely actually talk about our time in the military,” Hartnett character was lynched. “They asked me, ‘Why do you write?’ says. He wrote a well-received script, “about a soldier who beSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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And I said, ‘Because I love to write, but my motivation comes when you show me the money.’ And they said, ‘If you want to see the money, give it an ending that makes people go home on a high.’” So he’s gone back to the story’s actual ending, involving a perilous escape north. “There are scripts in this group that should happen,” enthuses mentor Garant. “I swear to god, if Michael Black’s story got in the right producer’s hands, it would get made. I’m not even talking about the script. If he sat down with Will Smith for five minutes, Will Smith would make that movie.” Not that a deal is the point of the program. Jeffreys is working on a science-fiction script that he’s been thinking about for years. “This process made me want to finish it,” he says. “There’s a slight possibility it might get made, there’s also a big possibility it will never see the light of day. That’s reality. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to come out of this process without giving it every bit of commitment that I had. For me that’s a success.” Schiff, who runs the workshops, claims she had no idea what she was doing at first, and in fact for months started each meeting saying, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” But the group found
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its footing. Workshops have ranged from writing exercises to a lesson in structure led by guest speaker Robin Swicord. The June meeting began with everyone checking in on how their projects were going and getting feedback. Schiff then began a discussion about character because “I’m working on a pilot for HBO and I’m so stuck with this character,” she admits. “I’m hoping the other mentors can help me.” Schiff’s honesty about her own process is inspiring, says Marina Viscun. “When it started, they were mentors, but now the relationship developed where it feels like we’re part of the writing group, instead of just writing down notes when the teacher speaks.” Viscun moved from Moldova to Brooklyn in 1998, at age 16. After high school, she served in the Navy from 2000–2003 and was stationed in Italy. She’s working on a script about a young woman who naively joins the military, “thinking she’s going to save the world and be a hero, and the military structure and her experiences make her realize the world is not the way she imagined it.” It’s only partly autobiographical. She believes the mentors give much more than advice and commentary. “For any writer, it comes from the inside. It’s not just something you sit down and type. It feels to me the mentors are there to make sure we grow on the inside. They’re inspiring us to see the world as writers, to notice things and learn how to be able to express that every day.” The mentors’ commitment “just means the world to me,” says Fitzsimmons. “I don’t know how to say that without sounding schmaltzy.” So Kyle Hartnett says it for her: “They didn’t have to do it for us, and the fact that they do is a testimony to their character.” No Bloodlust
In turn, the mentors insist they’re getting more than they’re giving. “They seemed genuinely shocked that we’re devoting one or two weekends a month and reading their material,” says Garant in disbelief. “I don’t have any actual skills, but the closest I have is writing. So it’s the least I could do.” “We write things that we need to learn,” explains Holzman. “In the same spirit, we mentor because we need it.” Garant agrees. “I’ve been a writer for 20 years,” he says. “I never talk
Fitzsimmons has been commissioned to about writing, ever, with my fellow writ- “You got face-to-face meetings write a musical (which she’s not yet ready ers. You learn a lot talking about it. It’s also fun because I never would have got- with people who were making to discuss publicly). She asked her buddies Viscun and Michals to participate in a readten to meet a guy like Chris without this room. He’s badass.” a living in writing,” says vet Mi- ing and then emailed Schiff and Holzman, in terror, before it took place. They wrote Said badass explains another element of the appeal. “You take somebody who chael Black. “To those who’ve back reassuring notes. “Just hearing from them made a huge difference.” is kind of raw, and you work with them, She and her fellow workshop memand all of a sudden you see them flourish,” never been there, they’re like a bers volunteered at the second retreat says Knopf. “It’s Pygmalion all over again. Everybody wants to discover somebody.” group of mystics. They’re working this past spring. “That was so profound, noticing the difference between the first Schiff calls the workshop “a turn-on. We’re storytellers, and we all get into this magic; they scoop up a handful of and the second one, how comfortable I felt,” Fitzsimmons says. She wanted to be thing because we want to express ourselves and tell our own stories, but I’m also ad- crap and turn it into an Academy a friendly face for the veterans coming in, so they wouldn’t be nervous. dicted to stories. So I’m sitting in this Ott says about 80 to 100 vets applied room, facilitating other people’s creativity, Award-winning movie.” to that retreat, but only 50 could be adbut I’m getting to hear their stories.” mitted. The Foundation is hoping to find funds to grow the The mentors don’t try to dictate what those stories are, program. A new monthly workshop has started, with new much to the veterans’ relief. “I feel like there’s this bloodlust mentors, set to run until the next retreat. The present group when people want veterans to tell their stories,” says Fitzsimwill phase out in December, but Jeffreys suspects the veterans mons. “They want the gritty, yucky part. That’s what’s drawill continue to get together somewhere else on their own. matic, and that’s what sells movie tickets, but it’s not always The veterans’ bond was evident at the workshop, and acthe best thing that they want to tell. This group of people becording to all, it had been there from the start. “Some of lieved in veterans’ storytelling, regardless of the kind of story the veterans are recent combat veterans. Others are veterans they were telling. That’s pretty awesome in a town that wants of combat in Korea or Vietnam. We all served in different product.”
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From Area J, written by Kyle Harnett 44 •
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“For any writer, it comes from the inside,” says Marina Viscun. “It’s not just something you sit down and type. It feels to me the mentors are there to make sure we grow on the inside. This group of people believed in veterans’ storytelling, regardless of the kind of story they were telling. That’s pretty awesome in a town that wants product.” branches,” says Jeffreys. “But at the end of the day, we wake up in the morning and we’re all veterans. There’s this common thread to our experience. On top of that we’re all, in one way or another, aspiring artists, so we go through that struggle.” Fitzsimmons points out that veterans are used to being self-sufficient, sometimes to a fault. “Even though you’re taught to be an ensemble in basic training, there’s also this ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps, figure it out troop’ kind of thing, so I’m reticent to ask for help, and this group has taught me that it’s totally fine and that they’re there. I feel this level of support that I’ve never felt before. We’ve all had one
evening where we were just like, ‘Ahhh, I don’t know what I’m doing,’ and suddenly by the end of the night you did know what you were doing. Having that is just golden.”
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9/11 Plus Ten
Ghosts of Pakistan Past Ayub Khan-Din dramatizes the East and West sides of his Anglo-Pakistani family. Written by David Gritten Portraits by Matt Crossick
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Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the two shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth! —“The Ballad of East and West,” by Rudyard Kipling
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o one’s bought the rights yet,” Ayub Khan-Din says of his film West Is West, a hugely popular overseas production about a teenage boy from an AngloPakistani family who travels from Britain to his ancestral homeland to find his cultural identity. “One U.S. distributor apparently said, ‘It’s a great film, but I can’t sell that to Middle America—Pakistan’s the enemy.’” So what are the chances for the film’s future? Khan-Din sighs ruefully: “It didn’t exactly help that Osama bin Laden was discovered hiding in Pakistan.” A talent for writing and storytelling can sometimes flourish in the most unlikely circumstances—and few are more unlikely than those in which Khan-Din, the successful actor, playwright, and screenwriter, grew up. The eighth of 10 children from Salford, an unlovely industrial part of Manchester in the north of England, his mother was an English Catholic, his father a Pakistani-born Muslim who ran a fish-and-chip shop. The huge family was packed into a tiny terraced house, and fierce arguments were common—and dramatic. It’s hard to square that hardscrabble background with the man he is today. I meet him in Granada, Spain, near his home in a remote part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where he lives with his wife, actress Buki Armstrong, and their two daughters. It’s an existence of blissful isolation: no TV, indifferent phone reception, and they must drive to the nearest village to pick up email. The family moved to Spain after Buki worked there on the legendarily ill-fated BBC-TV soap opera Eldorado. “Her work wasn’t so enjoyable,” Khan-Din recalls, “but we fell in love with the country.” For the interview, Khan-Din, 50, is elegantly dressed, looks prosperous, and has no trace of a Manchester accent. Thanks to East Is East, his play that he subsequently adapted for film, Khan-Din is successful by any measure. But Ayub agrees that a writing career would have seemed unlikely to anyone who knew him when he was young. Back then, his domineering father, wanting
his sons to be more Pakistani and Muslim, tried arranging marriages for them; his sons, who felt British, rebelled. After working unhappily for a spell in a hairdressing salon run by three siblings, Khan-Din attended drama school, became an actor, and discovered writing. It seemed only natural to devise a play about an Anglo-Pakistani family very like his own. East Is East made its bow in a well-received 1997 production at London’s Royal Court. Two years later, his film adaptation was released and became a phenomenal hit in the U.K.; at the time, it was the most successful wholly Britishfunded film in England’s cinema history. Khan-Din insists East Is East, set in 1974, accurately portrayed his own parents, and says the family’s youngest boy was a version of himself. But he finds one aspect of its success odd: “People think it was a comedy, but it wasn’t just that. There were funny things in it, though it was actually a rather dark film. It was the same with the play.” He cites the character of the father, George “Genghis” Khan, played by legendary Indian actor Om Puri. A tyranni-
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cal patriarch who can resort to physical West Is West opened in Britain to in 1975 in Salford, where the family’s youngest son, 15-year-old Sajid (again a violence when family members displease him, it is evident that George had a previ- enthusiastic reviews and a strong disguised younger version of Khan-Din) is struggling with adolescence. He curses, ous wife and children whom he abruptly in petty theft, suffers bullying abandoned in Pakistan. It’s a story that’s box-office. But selling the film in indulges and racial abuse at school, and is genersurely not to be played just for laughs. ally hard to handle. “But in the film world it has to be His father George (Om Puri again) deone thing or the other,” Khan-Din adds, the U.S. remains unlikely. There’s cides to take him to Pakistan and expose “so it was pushed as a comedy.” The film’s success might suggest that he that little matter of Osama bin him to traditional values, hopefully providing the boy a sharper sense of his ideneffortlessly bridged the gap between writing for the stage and screen. Not so. In his Laden’s cozy retreat near the elite tity. George accompanies him and finally comes face-to-face with the Pakistani wife initial efforts, “I kept referring back to the and daughters he deserted three decades play all the time. I finally had to rip the Pakistan military school. before when he left for England. They’re stage script up and put it in the bin. Only joined in Pakistan by his English wife, Ella (Linda Bassett), puzthen did the writing progress. The play was very dialogue heavy, zled that her husband prolonged his stay. so I tried remembering the imagery and some bits of dialogue “George has to confront the reality of what he did back then from it. It was that classic case of ‘don’t tell me, show me.’” and the consequences,” Khan-Din tells me. “So this is a comingEast Is East had its share of admirers and not only in Britain: “I of-age story, both for a 15-year-old boy and a 60-year-old man.” got a phone call from Harvey Weinstein after he saw East Is East, Khan-Din was himself shipped off to Pakistan when a 12-yearwhich felt like a stamp of approval. But all my film work has been old, though in real life his father did not accompany him. “I can for British producers.” He laughs almost apologetically: “I’ve never see why he sent me,” he says. “I was a real problem. I was playing even been to Los Angeles. So far it’s just never happened.” truant from school, where a lot was made of the fact I was halfPakistani. I was in my preteens and a pain in the backside. I was a Go West, Young Man horrible kid. Any excuse not to go to school was fine by me. Still, it’s widely agreed that in East Is East (the title’s from a “My brother had gone out there a year before and stayed on famous Rudyard Kipling poem), Khan-Din brilliantly mined in Pakistan to get married there,” Khan-Dan continues. “So his family’s history during his formative years and adapted it my dad looked at me and said, ‘Let him go to Pakistan too. It into a compelling story. might work—and we don’t want him here.’” Khan-Din lived Remarkably, 12 years on, he’s done it again in a sequel. West there for a year. Is West draws directly on his own experiences as a young boy. For this second visit to his past, the setting changes. It begins West Is West opened in Britain earlier in 2011 to enthusiastic reviews and a strong box office. But selling the film in the United States remains unlikely. There’s that little matter of Osama bin Laden’s cozy retreat near the elite Pakistan military school. At least, Khan-Din sighs, West Is West has screened on transatlantic flights. But some commentators in the Anglo-Asian press have pointed out the absence of Islamic fundamentalism in Khan-Din’s stories. Last fall, he fielded questions on the subject when the film opened at the London Film Festival. “But West Is West isn’t about that,” Khan-Din insists. “I was writing about the ’70s, when it wasn’t an issue. [Radical] Islam didn’t exist to the extent it does now. I’m not steering away from any subject. For me it’s instinctive. If something happens today that jumps out at me, I’ll write about it. But I refuse to churn out something specific because I happen to be a writer with a Pakistani father. Being half Asian does inform who I am, but it doesn’t dictate who I am.” 48 •
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It’s All Material
While at drama school, it dawned on the apprentice Khan-Din that his upbringing in this huge, colorful, unorthodox family might become fertile territory for a play. So he would visit his parents, ply his mother with questions about her life with his father, and beg her for anecdotes. His task assumed some urgency: She was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and her memory was starting to fade. Yet the genesis of his writing skill might go all the way back to that year in Pakistan. “I didn’t go to school or anything,” he admits. “I was completely obnoxious to everybody—to my dad’s first wife and his daughters. What you see in West Is West is a pretty accurate description of me at that age. But by the end, I loved being there. I was just allowed to wander around villages. It was the best education my parents could have given me, just to be able to experience all that.” Pakistan was a profound culture shock to him: “And that’s why the change of scene is so abrupt in the film. You go from Salford, which had toilets, electricity, and running water, and suddenly it’s a completely different country—a different century even. There are camels on the roads and the occasional dead body on the roadside. “I had no books, but I had some paper and pens, so I drew and started to scribble bits of stories,” he continues. “Maybe I enjoyed it because I wasn’t being forced to do something.”
He has one regret from his time in Pakistan: “I wish now I’d had the maturity to talk to my dad’s first wife and my two half-sisters and get their side of the story.” After that year, he returned home to Salford where his young life continued unremarkably: “I left school but didn’t have a job. My parents said, ‘You’re not going on the dole.’
GEORGE Son, he not bloody son. He should be here working in my bloody shop. Oh no, not like my shop, no like chip shop, he want be bloody hairdresser. ELLA He had a right to know what was happening. GEORGE Right, what you mean right, Pakistani believe if father ask son doing something son follow father instructions, has respect see. Nazir follow bloody pansy hairdresser instructions, but I tell you, this no happen again, ‘cause I bloody teach others respecting me. ELLA Not by force you won’t George. GEORGE I should have sent all bloody kids to Pakistan, when young, other wife teach bloody respect. ELLA Over my dead body you would have done. GEORGE Your bloody son bloody mad! Your daughter walking around in bloody short skirt like bloody prostitute! ELLA It’s her school uniform! What more can the girl do to please you? The moment she finishes school she’s back here and changed into trousers. She never moves off the bleeding doorstep unless I say so or she’s in the shop. GEORGE I tell you my family in Pakistan show me bloody respect, she listen what I tell her doing.
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But my brothers were in hairdressing in “For me it’s instinctive,” says East Is East. “It’s on a much bigger canManchester and said, ‘Right, come and vas,” he reflects. “It’s emotionally more work with us.’ I had no interest in it. I Ayub Khan-Din. “I refuse to churn mature, but not just because of the subwas terrible. I did it for two years and then ject matter. It’s about my progress as a went to drama school.” out something specific because writer too. I’m looking at other things Leslee Udwin, producer of both East besides humor coming out of characIs East and West Is West, finds Khan-Din’s I happen to be a writer with a ters. I’m going for more depth in them. I’m also trying to tell a big story: to success story remarkable: “These incidents in the two films come directly from his Pakistani father. Being half Asian discuss identity, who you are, who you think you are, how where you are affects life. In his teens, he was the runt of the litter and getting no affirmation from any- does inform who I am, but it you as a person, and how you perceive your culture to be. So there’s lots of mawhere. He was the dunce at school. Nothterial there.” ing much was expected of him. He told doesn’t dictate who I am.” me he got the idea of writing and storytelling from his days in the hair salon when he picked up a copy of The Sun Never Sets David Niven’s autobiography, The Moon’s A Balloon.” During the 12-year interim between the two films, KhanBefore Khan-Din emerged as a writer, he had a successDin was hardly idle. He rewrote Bill Naughton’s play All ful spell as a handsome, popular young actor, starring in the in Good Time, set in a town a mere 10 miles from his own 1987 Stephen Frears film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (he Salford home, replacing its white English characters with Anglo-Asians and retitling it Rafta, Rafta. Produced at Lonplayed Sammy) and later joining the casts of various British TV series. Yet acting gradually lost its appeal: “I became don’s National Theatre in 2007, his version depicts young jaded,” he believes. “The work wasn’t so great. It became all newlyweds unable to consummate their marriage. Khan-Din about getting jobs to pay the big mortgage off.” also adapted it for a film, to be released next year under its Now, he says, “I still get excitement from writing, more original title, All in Good Time. than I did from acting. And if you’ve had a few things that For New York’s Lincoln Center, he is writing a contempohave done well, you get to have more control too.” rary update on the Faust story called Fauzi. Its main characAround 1982, while still at drama school, he had written ter is a successful Manhattan plastic surgeon willing to trade early drafts of the play that would become East Is East. But his soul if he can learn the meaning of life. Khan-Din hopes to return to the National Theatre with only after he had quit acting to concentrate full-time on writing did the work make real progress. Following the successful Bunty Berman Presents, a play with music about a struggling Royal Court production, it was only a matter of time before film studio in 1950s Mumbai. And a new play, All the Way he adapted the play for film. Home (“about a white working-class family,” he stresses), will Why did it take 12 years for West Is West to emerge? “There be produced at a Manchester theatre this fall. Then he hopes to complete the Khan family saga with was an immediate clamor for a sequel,” he recalls. “East Is East a third film, advancing the action to 1978, when “in real was complete, but questions remained unresolved. George’s life I was leaving school, the dimension of the family was first family [in Pakistan] were this dark shadow in the backchanging, and my dad wasn’t working ground. So many people wanted to know anymore. Death has got to come into their story and what happened next.” it, and also Sajid moving away, coming But the unprecedented success of of age, breaking the mold, and going to East Is East stopped him from immedidrama school.” ately continuing the Khan family saga: But there’s no longer any vestige of his “Sequels often don’t work. Any time I’ve family’s life in Salford. The terraced house seen a sequel to something I’ve enjoyed, fell victim to a slum clearance program in it’s been a disappointment. The probthe mid-1970s, and the chip shop was delem is that people try to recapture the molished. His parents died some 20 years original. And you can’t. Everyone exago. He is on amiable terms with his sibpected something along the same lines lings, although Spain is far from all of them. [as East Is East]. But it was never going Khan-Din knows he is chronicling to be like that. George and Ella would a way of life that is no more. “You only have moved on and so would the chilget one childhood, so you have nothing dren. In writing a sequel, you have to to compare it with,” he says, smiling. “But move on too. Finally that’s what I did.” even I can see it was an extraordinary upWhile West Is West has its amusing bringing.” moments, its tone is more serious than SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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ATTENTION WRITERS GET YOUR PLAY PRODUCED Award-winning Broadway Producer and Consultant will help you get your play to production. For information email: Jgordonproductions@gmail.com www.judygordonproductions.com
Emmy, continued from page 35
Bryce Zabel: Robert, what kind of proj-
ects are you attracted to now? Has it changed what kind of things you would be interested in writing? Robert L. Freedman: I think we would all agree everything seems so trivial. Something that you may have been approaching as a good project before you just can’t imagine getting all excited about it. I’m always looking for something that moves me, and I don’t want to sound pretentious, but something that illuminates something about the human condition. So that hasn’t changed at all. I had to, I didn’t really want to, but I had to go to a meeting. It must’ve been about 10 days after. It just felt so ludicrous to be going in there to pitch and say, “And then this happens” and “What’s great about this character is . . .” It was at ABC, on the Disney lot there. The night before the FBI had warned all the studios that they were under terrorist threat, and the next morning I had to be there at nine. It was just the weirdest thing, and we all kind of felt, what are we doing here and why do we care? Everybody says with time everything will get back to normal. Honestly, I don’t think any of us know what the ramifications are going to be down the line. I don’t mean for show business. I just mean in general for our whole world. Everybody’s on some weird shaky ground. I don’t work on a series, so I envy you having to go to work and having to get out the next episode. Anybody who has to be at work and doesn’t have to structure their own day like somebody who writes freelance. Because you do have to put one foot in front of the other, and that in itself can be comfort. Bryce Zabel: I wonder if the nature of conflict that we often write about is starting to change. Aaron, I think about your show and what strikes me is that these characters disagree with each other a lot but they’re all kind of a family. They support each other. They work things out. Is that something you think we’ll see more of in the future in other shows?
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Aaron Sorkin: I keep reading about how what happened on September 11 is going to change television. It’s going to change movies. One of the things you read a lot, as you said, is that there’s gonna be less irony. In terms of our shows, action shows, I guess there will be fewer things blowing up and more, believe it or not, Westerns. I just read in the trades that all of the networks have at least one Western in development; that it’s another allegorical way. This idea for Will & Grace, by the way, sounds wonderful. But people are searching for a way to show battles of good versus evil that won’t be troubling to us. I wanted to say, by the way, that on our show we’re now having no problem being funny at all. We’re really embracing it after this last thing that we did. I guess what I’m trying to say is this: Who knows when the time is going to be right, when it’s going to be appropriate to tell certain stories, when it’s going to be appropriate to put the Unabomber story on, though honest to God, if I went home and watched it now, I would laugh. It sounded that funny. While obviously we all want to be sensitive to what other people are feeling because we’re all feeling it and it’s very real, I hope that artists and writers in particular will not sit around and wait for their cue to come from the public, will not sit and wait for permission that it’s okay to do this. We ought to be the ones to find a way to unlock the door to say, “Know what? I found a way for you to laugh at this again. I found a way for you to find this story interesting without just tripping over the fact there was an explosion in it or it took place in a country that’s troubling to us right now.” I hope that we’ll be the leaders. Kirk Ellis: It really is up to us to lead here. People are looking for a sign. Regardless of your political inclinations, one thing we always look for from our leaders, like the president on The West Wing, is a sense of it’s okay to do that, this is the proper way to behave. If we don’t do it, nobody’s gonna do it.
Bryce Zabel: Hank, do we need more hero stories? Is that what’s going to be selling? Hank Steinberg: We need to be very careful about being too didactic. The fact that there are a lot of Westerns about to be made now frightens me. I actually like Westerns, but I don’t think we need black hat, white hat. If our job has any meaning at all, it’s to try and bring some humanity into situations and even to educate in our own way. Archie Bunker educated America about certain things. Will & Grace did the same thing. It does it by coming around the back door. If you hammer people over the head with things, you don’t get receptive audiences. I’m working on a biopic about Robert Kennedy— Bryce Zabel: —There’s a hero— Hank Steinberg: —But a very flawed
one and a guy who was grappling with how to deal with himself in the aftermath of his brother’s death. That’s the period we’re dealing with, and we’re trying to bring humanity to him and show that he was a political animal, that he was struggling, that he had lofty goals but didn’t know how to implement them in a very complicated world. Those are the heroes, the people who are struggling. Black hat/white hat is not really what our world is right now and has evolved to. We need to be careful not to be too politically correct and not to be too cautious. If we want to make something humorous, go for it. Aaron Sorkin: Speaking of politically correct, one of our fellow writers is getting pounded, Bill Maher. Agree with what he said; don’t agree with what he said. I didn’t really understand what he said, to be honest with you. And it was probably ill-timed, but there is no question that there has never been a more important time to demonstrate that it’s okay to go on television and say something that is a minority opinion without fear of being taken off television, without fear of being called unpatriotic. You can’t get up and say that we were attacked because they hate the
freedom that we have and then turn to Bill Maher and say, “You can’t say what’s on your mind right now,” or “It’s un-American.” If you don’t like Bill Maher, change the channel or write him an email saying that you disagree, but the guy shouldn’t be lynched, and that’s what’s happening right now. Loring Mandel: I’d like to ask a question. I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing to stop using the word hero at all for a while. I wonder if the word hasn’t become so devalued that it does not have the meaning it should have when used properly. Bryce Zabel: It’s interesting because we
were just told the firefighters in New York don’t want the word hero used because, at least the ones who survived, they feel badly. They don’t want to hear it applied to them, and we’ve been asked to minimize the use of the word in the Emmy telecast. I don’t know what to feel about that other than to respect their feelings. Don’t we need heroes? Do we take the word out of the language? Kirk Ellis: I agree with Loring actually. The word has become what we call a steamer-trunk word. It’s been used to describe people like teenage gymnasts who sprain their ankles and then win a gold medal. That’s a hero? I don’t know what the word means anymore, and the very fact that these people actually called and said, “Don’t use it,” means they actually fit the definition of a hero. Miep Gies, who hid the Frank family, refused to have her name used in print for years. She didn’t want it known. Not because she was somehow embarrassed that she tried to save these eight people but because she felt she only did, as she said, “I only did what a good Christian woman was supposed to do. I wasn’t a hero. To make me a hero means that I did something beyond what an ordinary human being could do. It puts me on a category that is somehow unapproachable, and that’s a bad signal to give to people.”
Julie Blair Carter, mft
Originally published in Written By October 2001 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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“The template that it’s created will always be with us: the idea that a small super empowered group or even individual can change world history in the course of an event,” says Lawrence Wright. “And other groups will rise up. They may have nothing to do with Islam or even religion at all, but they’ll affix themselves to the notion that they can have that kind of power.” Wright/Boal, continued from page 33
time, it occurs in this world of reality TV and so many people interested in celebrity and fame who will do anything to get noticed. There’s some people who maybe don’t find that level of scrutiny to be unsettling. The general sense of living in a world in which you’re being looked out for, some people find that kind of comforting and even thrilling. Lawrence Wright: Of course, they willingly surrender their privacy to commercial interests. So the idea that the government is also peeking over your shoulder doesn’t trouble many people. But I had the experience of having the FBI come to my house and
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ask about phone calls. I was interviewing all these jihadists and they… Mark Boal: Did you just give these guys your home phone number? Lawrence Wright: No, the FBI were tracking the calls. Mark Boal: I know, but they’re terminating at your house or they’re terminating on your cell phone? Lawrence Wright: My office line at home. But this is the nature of the government. They thought that it was my daughter who was making those calls. The only way they could’ve gotten her name was through listening to the calls because her name wasn’t on any of the phones. But this is what happens when you award government that kind of additional power. They don’t understand what’s going on. They came into my office, and it’s full of al-Qaeda books. It’s hard for them to interpret things correctly because I’m a writer. Of course, I’ve got all this material around. And my daughter is a college student. She’s not a terrorist. But she was on a link chart that had her two steps away
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from Osama bin Laden. Mark Boal: No. You’ve got to be kidding me. Lawrence Wright: She was. The calls I was making were going to family members of Zawahiri and representatives of al-Qaeda in London and a solicitor in London. So it was not surprising that the FBI would be interested, but it’s a different thing when they actually start listening in and then a completely different thing when they listen in and they think, Oh, Caroline Wright must be connected to terrorists. That’s dangerous because they simply don’t know what they’re dealing with. Mark Boal: Did they get a FISA? How did they listen? Lawrence Wright: I can’t imagine they could get a FISA on me because I’m an established journalist. This wasn’t the only instance. I had a source at Alec Station—the Bin Laden station at the CIA—who said that he had seen a transcript of one of my telephone conversations with members of Zawahiri’s family. Mark Boal: Well, they’re just listening to anything that those guys say and you were on the line, so there it is. Lawrence Wright: Yeah, but on the other side of it, Nidal Malik Hasan had made 18 different calls or emails to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. I want them to be up on that. I’m not advocating no monitoring at all, but indiscriminate monitoring that is overbearing is very dangerous to liberty. And traditionally, when you award a government those kinds of extraordinary powers, it’s difficult to retrieve it. Mark Boal: Well, I’m going to send you a box with two unmarked cell phones in it for the next time you do one of these crazy stories. So you can hopefully keep people off your track. Don’t use your home phone. Lawrence Wright: I know. I had a conversation with some Times reporters who had been told to use those kinds of phones. In other words, it’s adopting the same behavior that the terrorists use. Mark Boal: Yeah, exactly. Take the battery out.
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FADE out
We built the pyramids, we saw Christ crucified, pulled the oars for Roman emperors, sailed the boats for Columbus, retreated from Moscow with Napoleon and froze with Washington at Valley Forge! We’ve been in there dodging left hooks since before history began to walk! In our struggle for freedom we’ve hit the canvas many a time, but we always bounced back! Because we’re the people— and we’re tough . . . So tear down the fence that separates you, tear down the fence and you’ll tear down a lot of hates and prejudices! Yes, sir, my friends, the meek can only inherit the earth when the John Does start loving their neighbors. You’d better start right now. Don’t wait till the game is called on account of darkness! Wake up, John Doe! You’re the hope of the world!
—Meet John Doe, written by Robert Riskin based on a story by Richard Connell and Robert Presnell
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