September Morn, 9/11 truther movie

There was a movie called Communion, a UFO movie based on Whitley Strieber's bestselling "memoir" about how space aliens keep abducting him.

The book was a huge bestseller, but the movie bombed. Stuff that sounded creepy and vaguely plausible on paper was laughable on film.

There's been other stuff like that. I watched the movie Sleepers, a supposedly true story. I didn't read the book and I held off watching it because I knew I would be upset by it, a true story of kids subjected to horrible abuse in reform school. But when I finally saw it, I didn't buy it for a second. Again, things that seemed plausible on paper looked absurd under the glare of the Kleig lights.

There was a fairly recent Russian World War Two movie, based on a book which claimed to be true. A group of Soviet middle school boys, juvenile delinquents incarcerated somewhere, are trained as commandos and sent on a suicide mission to destroy a Nazi installation in the mountains. It was anti-Communist. People were supposed to watch the movie and think, "What kind of monsters would use innocent children as commandos!" But on the big screen, it looked ridiculous. The movie was too grim to work as an adventure story for boys but too idiotic to be taken seriously.

September Morn

Now? Now we have a movie called September Morn which is set to star Woody Harrelson, Martin Sheen and Ed Asner. They're still raising money. It looks like it will be a 9/11 "truther" movie, based somehow on the theories that the September 11th attacks were an inside job. It's not clear how they're going to approach it. The production company's website says it will be in the "vein of Twelve Angry Men."

If the movie shows scores of men in coveralls pushing hand trucks, placing explosives in busy office buildings without anyone noticing and without any of these guys ever saying a word about it, it will make a lot of the Truther claims look silly. 

But it's something to think about. They're going for a niche audience. Like Kirk Cameron making Christian dramas, or Glen Pitre in Louisiana who made Cajun-dialect historical dramas. Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for the Spanish language video market.

It doesn't always work that well. Audiences that are ignored by Hollywood still watch TV and still watch movies. Kirk Cameron's movies still cost a relative fortune. In the late '70s, when Hollywood produced next to nothing for black audiences, independent filmmakers tried to fill the void, but they attempted it on very low budgets. They often used the approaches of Third World Cinema for a first world audience and they generally failed.

You have to find a niche audience that will accept really cheap movies.