Somebody owes somebody some serious coin. Like Rod Tidwell level quan.
The Trib had a story late this week about the second 9/11 movie to hit theaters this summer - more than that they focused on the tact needed to promote the film and a pretty smart marketing move to focus on teenagers, for whom this was a defining moment of their generation.
Pretty great idea from an industry that can be bowel-looseningly stupid most of the time, no? So where did this strategy come from? A bright new studio exec? A marketing agency with its finger on the pulse of America's youth?
Of course not. It came from a kid who saw a test screening in Minneapolis (yay, Minneapolis!).
In fact, Josh Greenstein (Paramount's senior vice president of creative advertising) got the idea for the youth-focused TV spot that very night, when a male college student noted, 'It's like your grandparents knowing where they were when they heard Pearl Harbor got bombed or your parents hearing of JFK's assassination. For my age group, this event is for us.'
Somebody get that kid a check, a job, an internship... something, right? A t-shirt? Anything?
I never got around full circle on 9/11. It was a big news story at a time when I was reporting the news and so a lot of the things people went through, I never got my teeth sunk into. Everything was pushed to arm's length and usually when I have strong feelings one way or another, it revolves around the government response and ramifications of those actions.
Reading this story, I was reminded of stories we ran following the first week when I asked around with teachers I knew to see what the schools were doing to support the students, etc.
It was Frank the Tank's wife who pointed out that these kids were in school for the first Persian Gulf War and for Columbine - there was little they weren't set to deal with after those experiences.
It'll be interesting to see how this movie is received after the last one fell so flatly. The article touches on the core differences between the two movies with this one built for a bit more inspiration than the other.
Still there is a bit of a too much, too soon vibe from all of this for my tastes. Can you imagine the uproar of a Pearl Harbor Movie on the five-year anniversary of the attacks? How about a JFK movie a few years after that event?
I don't care how uplifting the script is - it still seems a little off to me.
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I remember the Challenger. That was about it for our traumatic generational events that happened when I was a kid.
I can't really place if I'm missing something there.
I think you're right about the Challenger disaster as being the seminal traumatic moment for us as kids. That's the one time I can remember an announcement being made at school regarding a shocking news event.
I also think it's a bit too soon for a Hollywood take on 9/11. For a movie about an event of this magnitude to work, there needs to be enough distance in order for there to be a wider perspective. As of this point, though, there are still too many fresh emotions wrapped up with that day.
The way psychologists describe how we can remember every vivid detail surrounding a traumatic event is certainly true for me with 9/11. I know I was walking by the Sears Tower the exact moment that the first plane hit the World Trade Center. An hour later, I was jammed in with a million people in Union Station under an atrium looking right at the Sears Tower, hoping that a train would get us out of the Loop because everyone was almost certain we were next. It was the only time in my life that I ever felt it was possible that I wouldn't see another day.
What was even scarier through all this was that all the news I heard up until that point was by ear. That lack of information in and of itself was terrifying because everyone was evacuating the city and I didn't even understand the extent of everything that was going on. When a guy told me at the train station that the Twin Towers actually fell, I just couldn't fathom that it was even possible. My wife and I had stood at the very top of the WTC the previous summer; to think that the buildings were gone just was out of the scope of my imagination. That same guy then started sobbing, talking about he had actually worked at Cantor Fitzgerald at the top of the WTC up until the previous year. Even before the news would confirm over the next couple of the days that no one in that office had made it out, he knew that his friends were gone.
All I wanted to do was to see my wife again. When I got home, I watched the news with my neighbor for a while until my wife was finally able to come home. We didn't move from the couch in front of the television for the next 12 hours.
I didn't break down through all of this until the next day. I decided to go back downtown to class again (I was in law school at the time), even though it was the last thing I wanted to do that day. On the way to school, I passed through Federal Plaza, where the huge American flag was lowered to half-staff. That's when I lost it and the tears started pouring out. As much as there was sadness, there was just as much anger as to how anyone could do this to our country.
A couple of months later, I visited my sister on the East Coast and we made a trip to New York together. We went to see the old WTC site, which at that point was almost cleaned up. I expected to see thousands of flowers and pictures to be there as memorials, which there were. What caught me by surprise, however, were the tons of posters asking people for information about loved ones that were still "missing". Even months later, people still were clinging on to one last shred of hope that a loved one was going to come back.
The details of everything surrounding 9/11 are completely vivid and fresh in my mind. If this is the case for me as someone that didn't have a personal connection to anyone that lost a life that day, I can't imagine that someone who actually did lose a loved one on 9/11 would even consider watching a movie about it at this point in time.
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