Salvation Army

Image credit: Black Hawk Down: Sydney Baldwin

All About

Black Hawk Down

Get the latest photos, news, and more

A few feet from Hartnett, Scott sits in Sidi Moussa's one spot of shade -- a makeshift tent from which he watches the action on a pair of video monitors. Wiping the mud and fake blood from his boots, he says, ''Part of the fun of making 'Gladiator' was the elegance of the Roman period, but this is like a giant documentary. The goal is to leave the audience to debate this: Is it right for the biggest entity in the world to be the watchdog for the rest of the world? I don't have a smart answer, I just want to show what happened and how it happened.''

Yet how it happened, at least according to Bowden's book, is not the stuff of typical Hollywood movies. Especially the red-white-and-blue ''Top Gun''-''Pearl Harbor'' variety that producer Bruckheimer is known for. ''Ridley's not interested in making an American patriotic movie and I think Jerry is,'' says Bowden, 50, ''so it's been an interesting dynamic.'' While Bowden's book celebrates the brave, leave-no-fallen-comrade-behind ethos of the Rangers, it also splices into its narrative more critical chapters told from the Somali point of view -- a balance all but missing from the finished film. In fact, some reviewers have charged that ''Black Hawk Down'' is racist, since there are virtually no African-American soldiers on the U.S. side (in fairness, only two were involved in the actual incident) and the black ''skinnies'' on the Somali side are mowed down like inconsequential videogame targets. Scott brushes off this beef, saying ''I think you see in it what you want. Remember, I'm not an American, so I just want to portray this as a reportage of events.''

By the morning of Sept. 11, Scott already had a cut of the movie and was in the middle of postproduction in L.A. when he got a call from his son Luke, who lived two blocks from the World Trade Center. A few weeks later, as Hollywood scrambled to figure out what passed for entertainment after the terrorist attacks, the director met with Bruckheimer and the heads of Revolution Studios and Sony Pictures to hash out what to do. While the film had originally been slated to come out in March, it was decided that not only would Sony not shelve it, but it would push the release up to December so it could qualify for Oscar consideration. Says Scott: ''Life must return, as [former New York City mayor Rudolph] Giuliani said, right? So we decided we ought to go out now because it's incredibly relevant.'' Adds Bruckheimer: ''You never know what's going to happen with world events -- things could get worse sooner as much as later. It's pure flipping a coin. But when we started showing it to audiences they all agreed with us to get it out there early.''

One thing those test audiences did not agree with, however, was a postscript tacked onto the end of the movie that drew connections between the United States' lack of foreign intervention in the wake of the Somalia tragedy and the cause of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. ''About half the audience thought we should keep it and half thought we shouldn't,'' says Bruckheimer. ''And the 50 percent who said to take it out felt pretty strongly...so we took it out.''

Still, Scott and Bruckheimer insist that nothing else in the film was changed in light of current events. And both stand by their high-stakes gamble to go out early with ''Black Hawk Down'' -- even though they do admit they're nervous (it opens wide Jan. 18). Perhaps the only person who's not at home tensely poring over faxes of box office tracking numbers and studying industry tea leaves is Mark Bowden. When asked in Morocco last April to handicap the odds on the movie version of ''Black Hawk Down,'' he smiled like a man holding an unbeatable poker hand and said: ''If people like the movie they'll go out and buy the book. And if they don't like the movie, well, they'll say it wasn't as good as the book. That's my prediction.''