Cannes - A 20-minute excerpt from director Oliver Stone's film about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center provided a much-needed jolt to what has so far been an unremarkable Cannes film festival.
Stone showed the clip from the movie, titled World Trade Center, late Sunday, just ahead of a screening of his 1986 Oscar-winning film about the Vietnam War, Platoon.
The 59-year-old director, who specializes in taking on controversial political issues, said the two films had much in common.
'They are both about ordinary people caught up in monumental historical events,' Stone told an audience of invited guests and journalists.
World Trade Center stars Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena as John McLaughlin and William J. Jimeno, two real-life Port Authority police officers who were trapped in the debris of one of the collapsed towers, and were ultimately rescued.
The most impressive aspect of the footage that was shown is the breathtaking pacing of the everyday scenes leading up to the attack and the restraint of what is depicted before the tower collapses and the rescue effort begins.
The moment of the attack itself is portrayed with no more than the shadow of a plane gliding over a building's facade and a brief earthquake-like rumbling.
World Trade Center is scheduled to open in the United States in August, and a month later in other countries.
Its presence at the festival - with that of another 9/11 movie, Paul Greengrass' United 93, which will be screened Friday - suggests that Hollywood is finally ready to take a chance on commercializing the tragedy.
Until this year, only two films of note were made about the attack: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Palme d'Or for best film at the 2004 Cannes festival, and 11'09'01 - September 11, an anthology movie with contributions from 11 directors.
But neither of those films was made by a major studio. Paramount Pictures is putting out World Trade Center, while another Hollywood heavyweight, Universal, produced United 93, which depicts what happened in the cabin of the hijacked plane on which passengers fought back against the 9/11 terrorists.
In addition, Moore's work was more about US President George W Bush. And 11'09'01 - while generally well received - was screened in few theaters, perhaps because it was felt Americans were not yet willing to be confronted with a film about the disaster.
However, according to the film trade publication Variety, United 93 grossed an impressive 28.3 million dollars in four weeks in the United States, suggesting that moviegoers were now ready to look at the attack and the human toll it took.
But Paramount is proceeding very cautiously, even with the World Trade Center clip.
According to Variety, some exhibitors stopped showing the trailer for United 93 after audiences complained that the footage was too disturbing.
To avoid that happening with World Trade Center, Paramount screened the clip for exhibitors and allowed them to post warnings outside their theaters that the clip was being shown.
'We feel the trailer is for an emotional movie, and some people will have an emotional reaction,' Paramount marketing president Rob Moore told Variety.
Last week, Stone screened 26 minutes of his film for members of the Port Authority and family members of those who died in the attack.
Moore said the reaction was positive and the only major question from the audience, many of whom appeared as extras in the movie, was if they had been cut from the film.
© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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