Before beginning my career as a Washington writer, I was a "script reader" at a Hollywood movie studio. Each working day it was my dreary task to read a minimum of four feature-length film scripts, summarize their plots and write an opinion as to whether the studio should reject the script or — and this was a long shot — consider investing the time, talent and money it would take to transform the script into a finished motion picture.
The multimillion dollar profits earned by Earthquake, The Towering Inferno and the Poseidon Adventure were still fresh in the minds of studio producers, so my days were spent reading a lot of "disaster" scripts depicting all manner of spectacular mayhem rendered by Mother Nature and flawed man-made creations.
Pictures like Black Sunday were also drawing throngs into movie theaters, so I read a lot of "terrorist thrillers" with a high disaster quotient.
Like many of the movies proposals I rejected, the terrorist thriller scripts almost always lacked strong characterizations, a compelling plot and a satisfying conclusion. And though many of these movie scripts featured an impressively ingenious terror plot to dispatch tens of thousands of innocent people in an innovative and plausible way, they almost always shared two traits that automatically earned a toss onto the discard pile: credibility and motivation.
"The act of terror central to this story is not credible," I would often write in my commentary about the rejected script. "I don’t believe — and I don’t think any movie audience will believe — that the bad guys in this script would actually commit such a terrible act of terror." Furthermore, "I would invariably add," the act of terror central to this story is unmotivated: we are never told why the bad guys want to do this."
Sept. 11, 2001, forever changed how Hollywood script readers — and the global community — looked at what, until that day, was traditionally rejected as "incredible" and "unmotivated."
Yet, as the media — including the entertainment business — and the public reassess what they define as incredible and unmotivated, the global community has, with few exceptions, sought to better understand what many negative propagandists say contributed to the 9/11 tragedy.
To its credit, some of the Western news media has made as much effort in the past year trying to help the public better understand Islam, Arab culture and the roots of dissent in the Middle East than they have in the previous decade. And, perhaps, this is the one ironic blessing to come out of these awful events.
And our greatest loss?
I believe it is the loss of our innocence, particularly our presumptions about our invulnerability. The United States, in particular, has been forced to accept the idea that we, as a nation, are just as vulnerable to global terrorism as any other country.
And this, sadly, has cast a pall of gravitas over our day-to-day activities. Simultaneously, it has also made us acutely appreciative of life’s small gifts and the blessings that come with living every moment.
The tragedy of 9/11 may have forever changed how the global community — and Hollywood — defines what is "credible" and "motivated," but it has also helped us place greater value on one, universally-appreciated emotion: The unselfish expression of love for humankind.
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