War films give box office a reality check

By ROGER FRANKLIN

About six weeks ago in Oxnard, an unremarkable town on the northern fringe of Los Angeles, a platoon of the movie industry's most seasoned generals plucked up the courage to hit the beach.

They had been mulling the assault - more of a surprise raid, really - since September 11, first as a half-serious, wouldn't-it-be-neat sort of exercise in wishful thinking, and then, once the pollsters and focus groups reported back, in the growing belief that their bold strategy was a stroke of genius.

The plan was this: rather than follow the original schedule and release director Ridley Scott's bloody combat epic Black Hawk Down in March of next year, they would push it on to screens in time for the post-Christmas crush.

What made the plan so daring was that the rest of Hollywood was running the other way, dropping war movies for fear of alienating a public overdosing nightly on death and destruction on the TV news.

According to the conventional wisdom, Mr and Mrs Multiplex wanted escapist comedies such as Ben Stiller's gloriously goofy Zoolander, or, better yet, the even more innocent fare of the animated Shrek, which gained such an extended lease on life at the box office after September 11 that it is now one of the early favourites to take Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Joe Roth, the former Disney exec who runs Revolution Studios, had pulled together the $95 million that went into Black Hawk Down and understood his fellow moguls' trepidation.

He could even feel a little sympathy for rival Warner Bros, which had been forced to shelve the completed Collateral Damage, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger visits retribution on the terrorists who kill his family. The public wouldn't go for that at all - especially since Big Arnie had been cast as a fireman, which could invite only unflattering comparisons with the 350 flesh and blood heroes from the New York Fire Department who died beneath the Twin Towers.

Nor would Tim Allen's Big Trouble have been likely to elicit much mirth, given that its plot hangs on an a nuclear bomb hidden at an airport.

The terror attacks had made the selling of death for fun and profit such a sensitive subject, that MGM even delayed the release of Windtalkers, an innocuous story about the American-Indian GIs who confounded Japanese eavesdroppers during the Second World War by sending signals in their native tongue.

So Roth knew he had a problem. But what if Black Hawk Down could be repositioned? Suppose for the sake of argument, instead of being promoted as a standard gore-fest, it were to be pitched as something patriotic and uplifting, a wholesome affirmation of strength, valour and selfless duty - Saving Private Ryan with an MTV edge. By the rest of Hollywood's reckoning, the gamble was just too much of a longshot.

The first impediment was the mere presence on the credits of Roth's co-producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, whose Hollywood hallmark has been blowing up everything he hadn't already shot, crashed or incinerated. That was what he did to Alcatraz in The Rock, what his crew of convict hijackers visited upon Las Vegas and environs in Con Air, and what the notoriously arrogant mogul almost permitted the hand of God to inflict on the entire planet in Armageddon. He was also the force behind Pearl Harbor.

The boom-boom stuff had been Black Hawk Down's chief attraction - the reason Bruckheimer had paid top dollar for the rights to Philadelphia reporter Mark Bowden's best-selling book about the US Army's disastrous mission to Somalia in 1993.

Then there was Ridley Scott, who has never shied from action, either. If you were to go by the advance word in the Hollywood trade papers, Black Hawk Down sounded like a "modern-day restaging of the pitch battle at the start of Gladiator", all quick cuts, spurting arteries and severed heads.

True, Blade Runner and Alien demonstrated Scott's deft hand with horror and creepy suspense. But, while those films proved the director's range, they offered no indication that the Englishman's name on the credits would lead Americans to regard his latest effort as a celebration of red, white and true-blue patriotism.

Finally, there was the biggest problem of them all: the plot.

The events and decisions leading up to the 14-hour gun battle in the Somali capital of Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, represented one of the most humiliating military debacles in US history. When President Bill Clinton later awarded posthumous decorations to the families of the dead, the father of one slain soldier told the President that he was unfit to serve as commander in chief.

Later, none other than Osama bin Laden would cite the aborted mission to Mogadishu as proof that America lacked the resolve to persevere in the face of casualties. Kill a few, bin Laden advised his disciples, and watch those Americans cut and run.

Why then, particularly in the aftermath of bin Laden's testing of that theory on September 11, would Americans want to relive defeat and ignominious retreat?

Recognising that moviegoers were eager to do so is the measure of Roth and Bruckheimer's genius for calibrating the public mood. Market research is one of Hollywood's most finely tuned black arts, and it was to the specialists in mass psychology that the producers turned for confirmation of their shared instinct.

Would you go to a movie, the pollsters asked, that stressed the bonds of love and honour uniting America's fighting men in combat? How do you feel about comradeship and sacrifice, of hanging together for the common good?

Much to the producers' relief, the responses were uniformly positive, so Black Hawk Down was reborn. For Bruckheimer, the news was especially welcome. Until September 11, he had been investing heavily in another project tentatively titled World War III, which was to feature the nuclear destruction of Seattle and San Diego. With that project hastily canned, he needed a box-office winner. The seemingly ill-starred Black Hawk Downemerged as the vehicle of his salvation.

The original posters, which had featured a cartwheeling helicopter, were recalled and new ones printed. Now, instead of the initial invitation to gasp and marvel at a screen filled with fireballs, publicity materials stressed the human element. The reconstituted press kits, for example, captured leading man Josh Hartnett as he slumped filthy and haggard in the door of a helicopter. It is both a classic image of war and a none-too-subtle evocation of the weary firefighters and rescue workers whose pictures have been beamed in their thousands from Ground Zero.

The posters - the ones that will be plastered all over hoardings and cinema lobbies - received similar treatment. From being the centrepiece of the artwork, the Black Hawk helicopters that inspired the title shrank to mere background silhouettes.

Once again, there was a soldier at centre frame - though the look of harried heroism he wore was not, from a marketer's point of view, the most interesting element. That honour went to the outline of a bombed and burned-out building in the middle distance. Supposedly a part of the Mogadishu skyline, it looks suspiciously like something that has been cut and pasted from the wreckage of the World Trade Center.

All those pieces were in place at that Oxnard movie complex, where Roth and Brookheimer nervously unveiled Black Hawk Down at a sneak preview. As is the norm at these affairs, hidden cameras gauged audience reaction, monitoring facial expressions and body language, counting the blinks per minute to divine the parts of the movie that worked and the ones that didn't.

After the show, as the producers rejoiced in the spontaneous cheers that erupted as the credits rolled, enthusiastic audience members filled out questionnaires. Their answers left no doubt that Roth and co had a hit on their hands.

According to one whisper, it was the most enthusiastic reaction Hollywood had seen at a test screenings since Saving Private Ryan.

Now, if Black Hawk Down flies, expect all the studios to let slip the dogs of war. Already Fox has unleashed Behind Enemy Lines, a Tom Clancy-esque flick that stars Gene Hackman as a US Navy Admiral who risks his career to rescue downed reconnaissance pilot Owen Wilson after he ejects over southern Bosnia. While many reviewers have accused it of jingoism, it made $US18.7 million on its opening weekend and is the second most popular movie in America after Harry Potter. There is talk of Mel Gibson's Vietnam flick, We Were Soldiers, having its release date brought forward.

Further down the cinematic food chain, the schlock merchants are also getting in on the act. Take veteran B-movie horror maven Roger Corman, who gave the world such classics as Bucket of Blood. He has just bought the rights to Peshavar Waltz, a 1993 Russian movie about that country's war in Afghanistan. A little cutting, a lot of editing, some redubbing of the dialogue and Corman will have a bargain offering to ride the coattails of Black Hawk Down.

In Hollywood, as in war, that's the way it goes. The big victories go to the boldest generals - and the camp followers scour corpses for any pickings left to snatch.