True Stories 20: 00s—United 93

I happened to be in Manhattan, visiting from LA, on the day the planes flew into the twin towers. It was surreal. Like everyone else, I was so affected by what had happened I wanted to do something—and as a writer, that meant writing about this. I told this to my then CAA agents and they said it was a bad idea—that people would think I was just using the tragedy for my own benefit. Well, I certainly didn’t want to do that, so I tried to put it out of my mind and took an assignment to write a family film—wanting to produce an uplifting movie as the tragedy had motivated me to write a positive story. [The film never got made.]

A year later the books and stories that were written about that time were legion—and some of them really, really good. I regretted listening to my agents’ advice and wished I’d followed my own heart instead.

One of the films that eventually got produced about that day was United 93 by Paul Greengrass.

Here’s the trailer for the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZwvxDaZlOU

As you can see, this isn’t a film about the lives of the people involved in the tragedy of flight 93 that day. We never meet their significant others, their kids—and that’s true of all the officials in air traffic control and the military, as well as the passengers on the ill-fated flight.

Think about that. The writer could have chosen to follow one or two characters from the time they woke up that morning, so we could see their lives and their families. The writer could have focused on the pilot, one of the flight attendants, a couple of air traffic control workers and a couple of military personnel. We could have seen how their morning started before going to work. We could have experienced the tragedy from each of their points of view.

Instead, this film takes another tack. It takes us into the chaos of those who monitor and control the flights from the ground. Everything is about the hijacking of the plane—from the tension between the hijackers about when to put things in motion to the reactions of the crew and passengers about how to deal with what’s been thrown at them.

And the word really is tension. After all, we all know how it's going to end, don’t we? So the tension has to come from elsewhere, from how the people on flight 93 stopped the hijackers from reaching their target. My husband and I watched the film again before I wrote this, and he turned to me at its end and said, “I’m a limp rag.” As was I. As are most people who watch the film.

Sometimes with true stories it’s not just about the people in the story, about their lives, etc., but it’s about the situation they are thrust in and seeing how they act in that situation. And that’s what the screenwriter imagined—after poring over all the possible research that could tell him what it must have been like to be on that plane, he wrote a screenplay that made us feel like we were there.

Next week let’s go to France… and Brooklyn—with Julie & Julia.

Copyright © Diane Lake

23Oct22

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