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CNN Live At Daybreak
America Recovers: Interview of Motion Picture Academy President Frank Pierson on Cinema's Post-9/11 Morality
Aired November 01, 2001 - 07:47 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: The nightmarish events of September 11 were beyond anything Hollywood could ever have dreamed up, and the president of the Motion Picture Academy says September 11 changed the way Tinseltown actually does business.
Frank Pierson is also an acclaimed director and screenwriter who wrote the script for "Cool Hand Luke".
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You want to see him? Right there. One, two, three, four five.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Lights out, right?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You stupid mullethead, he beat you in another. Good luck today, when he kept coming back at me with nothing.
PAUL NEWMAN, ACTOR: Yes, well, sometimes nothing can be a real hand.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAHN: "Cool Hand Luke," starring Paul Newman, earned Pierson an Academy Award nomination. He won an Oscar for the screenplay "Dog Day Afternoon," starring Al Pacino. Now he says Hollywood is rewriting many scripts.
Frank Pierson joins us this morning. Good to see you.
FRANK PIERSON, PRESIDENT OF THE MOTION PICTURE ACADEMY: It's good to see you. Thank you.
ZAHN: It's kind of nice to escape in that "Cool Hand Luke" stuff for 30 seconds there or so.
Pierson: Well you know ...
ZAHN: The nation could use an escape now.
PIERSON: About two days after the event on the 11th, my wife and I just needed some sort of relief, and what we looked at was "Singing in the Rain," and it was just so wonderful to be taken into another whole world, that wonderful world before we had to return to reality.
ZAHN: Let's talk about the new reality you confront in Hollywood. What kind of pictures do you have to make now, post September 11?
PIERSON: I think we're going to see a lot of comedies. I think you're going to see more of what we think of as adult fare, as opposed to the standard terrorist and thriller sort of action-adventure movies.
But you know, it's interesting at the same time, that Blockbuster and the other vendors of videotapes have had a run of movies of terrorist attacks and besiege and movies like that. So it's a little bit difficult for the studios to really judge what, in advance, this audience is going to want to see.
ZAHN: Take us inside some of the internal discussions that are going on within these companies, about the challenge of trying to figure out what people want to see and what they'll pay to watch.
PIERSON: Well, that's always ...
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: Yes, but it's a little different now.
(CROSSTALK)
PIERSON: It's very different now, and I think what it comes down to is the individual conscience and so what is it that you want to see -- what do I want to do with myself -- and I think that, like almost everybody in America, there's been a good deal of soul-searching and just rethinking, you know: who am I, what am I doing, what are the movies that I make saying to our children, what are we telling our kids by the type of movies we make?
ZAHN: People listening are saying why didn't you guys think of that 20 years ago before you tainted our kids? I'm not asking you to defend your whole industry here this morning.
PIERSON: Well no, I do think that there is a conscience in Hollywood. I think that there are many of us who have turned down Rambo movies and so on because we don't like that kind of thing.
At the same time, it begins to come down to the basic argument of what is the function of the artist if we think of ourselves as artists in society. Do we have an obligation to be necessarily good citizens or should we only be true to ourselves and our own vision of things. There are many of us who would argue with Oliver Stone over his view of the Assassination of Jack Kennedy; it was a very idiosyncratic and even kind of paranoid view, but it's his view, and he has the right to make that movie.
The problem with movies, of course, is that once you have made a big movie like that about a given subject and so on, and that becomes the only movie that is going to be made, nobody else is going to make another movie that is anti-Oliver Stone's view of what happened.
ZAHN: Can you shed some light on the ongoing debate about whether it is appropriate for films that showed images of the Twin Towers to somehow erase that from the films?
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: We know that some scenes have been reshot.
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: ... now that the Twin Towers are no longer there.
PIERSON: I, personally, wouldn't do that, but I would defend to the death the right of anybody else to do it. It seems like sort of a silly thing to simply obliterate as though it had never existed. It is a part of our heritage. It's a part of the skyline of New York during a period of time that it stood there, so on the idea of removing it from our history, seems to me to be just a false way. It's denial. It's not really dealing with reality.
ZAHN: Well we appreciate your dropping by to help us better understand what you all are trying to accomplish on the other coast. Make something funny. We all could -- we could...
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: That's your next challenge. We're look forward to what your next project brings.
PIERSON: Thank you.
ZAHN: Thank you, Mr. Pierson.
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