Where's the 9/11 Film?

Hollywood after Sept. 11 seems to look a lot like Hollywood last summer, notwithstanding a few shots of the Twin Towers edited out of credit sequences. So where are the Sept. 11 movies? The Guys, an indie film about a journalist and a mourning fire fighter, is in the works, but big-time filmmakers and TV executives still seem cautious about bringing the tragedy to the screen, worried they will be accused of bad taste.

"No one wants to seem like an ambulance chaser, so they do it on the down low," says director Spike Lee. CBS has announced a TV movie on Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. But a network spokesman stresses that the movie is still in development and might not ever see the light of day. Meanwhile, an NBC biopic on former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is also undergoing close scrutiny for its handling of the tragedy. Jeff Gaspin, an NBC executive vice president in charge of movies, says the network is trying to figure out how many script pages should be devoted to Sept. 11: "We're at the five- or six-page option in the first draft, and we have to see whether we want to expand that." The risk, he says, is coming off as exploitative.

Lee's movie 25th Hour, due Dec. 20, was one of the first shot in New York City after Sept. 11. The story, about a criminal on his last night of freedom before prison, was written prior to the attacks, but Lee says he worked the aftermath into the film. "We definitely wanted to make it apparent that the film takes place in a post-9/11 New York City," he says. "I couldn't have that amnesia."

--By Benjamin Nugent