How long until "Saving Private Lynch" hits theaters, starring Rene Zellwegger as the M-16 toting PFC?

I'm telling you, there is going to be a Jerry Bruckheimer-type movie titled "9/11." It's going to be huge. Once focus groups show that the public is ready for it, Hollywood will fight for those dollars.

I don't know how long it's going to be before we see it, but there will be Arabs slashing travelers on the planes, people getting burned in their offices and firemen climbing stairs and not coming down. If they can show Leonardo DiCaprio freezing to death and our soldiers getting dragged through the streets of Somalia, as they did in "Titanic" and "Black Hawk Down," they'll make a movie about anything.

I dunno, Paul, it seems only natural that the biggest moments in our history be presented in film, and it's been that way ever since the first major blockbuster, "Birth of a Nation" in 1915, which (in the course of its pro-South Civil War narrative) recreates Lincoln's assassination. And at about 50 years after the event, this was closer than the recent Titanic or Pearl Harbor films you mention.

And long before films it's been common to recreate and dramatize the major events in American and world history, from the the large "Cyclorama" paintings which accompanied lecture tours to visually tell the story of Gettysburg all the way back to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. It's only natural for history's most dramatic moments to be the inspiration for art (though I'm using the widest possible definition of the term for Pearl Harbor...).

Of course, this isn't to say that I wasn't completely revolted by the base commercialism I saw when I was in the WTC area about six months back. CD-ROMs, photos, hats...it turned my stomach.

You know why I was never upset at the "selling" of 9/11? It was such a traumatic event for so many people that I did not blame them for buying. (There had to have been buyers to spawn so many sellers.) I railed against a small airport for having pictures of the WTC in the small waiting-for-takeoff area, and I have no WTC pics in my apartment, but if people find strength in seeing those towers standing tall, so be it. I wish everyone the best in recognizing that that event means to them.

And something about the sellers. I read in a book where a homeless man asked a woman on the morning of 9/11 why she was crying. She said, "Look behind you." He said, "It's not he end of the world." For some people, including those who need to sell hats and t-shirts off a stand on a street, life wasn't so great before 9/11.

Just to be clear, these weren't "Standing Tall" souvenirs but rather photos/CD-ROM's of the attack: towers in flame, folks running screaming, etc.

My problem isn't so much that these events are covered in film, but instead *how* they're covered in film. Excuse me, but isn't the real story of Pearl Harbor or the Titanic compelling enough? Why does Hollywood create one-dimensional fictional characters and bland story lines to tell the story of real people, many of whom behaved bravely in the face of sheer terror? I guess it all goes back to the buyers ... why was Titanic such a hit? And why did it win any Academy Awards besides technical ones?

i know for a fact that these movies were not soley made to profit off of traumtic events. They were meant to memoralize them. The reason writers and producers of these movies create fictional characters is mainly so that relatives or friends of victims or casualties are not saddened by what they watch. They combine real elements of many different people into one character. Thats not to make money, but to enhance the storytelling, and anyone with any knowledge of film knows this. In the case of Black Hawk Down, that movie was made to tell the story of what really happened that day because so many stories were told about it. No characters were created in that movie, and nothing was sensationalized. Do all these movies intend and hope to make money? yes. But to say that is their only motive not only wrong, but it is a flat out lie.

Joe, who said that profiting off of tragedy is "their only motive" for filmmakers? I said a lot of people in Hollywood got rich off of the Titanic and Pearl Harbor tragedies. Just found it to be interesting.