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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
HBO's "Live From Baghdad" is the story of one of live journalism's finest hours -- and a cautionary tale for an increasingly docile press.
Dec 7, 2002 | The timing of the new HBO film "Live From Baghdad" is impeccable. It runs on Dec. 7, the very day that Iraqi officials have said they will turn over documents detailing the weapons of mass destruction they say they don't possess, and a date that could prove to mark the run-up to the second Gulf War. There's something ominously weightless about this coincidence: As Americans move like mannequins on an escalator toward the most talked-about and least imaginable war in our history, HBO's fictional account of a true story that came out of a 12-year-old war feels more real than the future war we've idly marked on our mental calendars like a reminder to buy snacks for the Super Bowl. In this regard, the broadcasting of "Live From Baghdad" may serve a useful function: Perhaps a fiction will help wake up a dreaming nation.
"Live From Baghdad" is hooked on one event: CNN's live broadcast in the wee hours of Jan. 16, 1991, from the ninth floor of Baghdad's Al-Rasheed Hotel, as allied bombs began to fall on Baghdad. It was one of the more memorable moments in the recent history of TV journalism. The voice of correspondent Peter Arnett, describing the flashes of light in the sky and the massive explosions as Baghdad came under attack, is probably as vivid a memory for many Americans as the broadcast of the moon landing or, in earlier times, the radio announcer wailing "The humanity!" as the Hindenberg crashed and burned. The broadcast was a coup for executive producer Robert Wiener (the film's protagonist and author of the book the film is based on), for his field team and for CNN, which was the only news outlet to provide live coverage of the attack. The broadcast was one of those rare events that single-handedly transformed the entire news landscape: It not only made CNN's name, it brought the concept of around-the-clock TV news to center stage, for good and ill.
Both director Mick Jackson's film and Wiener's 1992 book, then, are essentially inside-journalism tales, variants of the how-I-got-that-story genre jacked up by the killer payoff. Both are first-rate pieces of work. Both offer fascinating behind-the-scenes looks at how television news is made in the field; both show a veteran newsman at the top of his ringmaster-on-speed game; both tell the gripping tale of how Wiener and his team, in the face of Iraqi "minders," rival journalists who derided them as mouthpieces for Saddam, massive logistical problems and, at the end, the threat of imminent death, came up with the biggest story of their lives.
The film is fairly true to the book, but there are some significant and interesting differences. The book is a jolt of journalistic adrenaline -- an 80-mile-an-hour ride in a car full of info-junkies trying to score, punctuated by caustic, funny and profane observations about everything from fellow journalists to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to how the first President Bush misunderstood Arab culture. It's dominated by Wiener's smart, acerbic, no-bullshit and at times manic personality, which gives his story its sass and sizzle. The story itself is a moment-to-moment recounting, down to the last screaming match and shot of $80-a-bottle Stoli, of a few months in his hectic life as an executive producer. Wiener spends very little time brooding over Janet Malcolm-like problems of journalistic ethics. He is too busy having equipment flown in, pleading with Iraqi officials for a Saddam interview, managing his staff, dealing with his superiors, trying to get the word "hostage" past Iraqi censors, running around looking for stories and drinking heavily nightly, preferably at British parties at which numerous men show up wearing bras.
The movie takes a different tack. For obvious reasons -- the saga of whether Wiener is going to get his "four-wire" phone machine flown in does not have two-hour screen staying power -- it cuts out almost all of the the day-to-day logistical issues that dominate the book. More important, the film thematizes questions of journalistic ethics that the book barely touches on. The reasons for this are equally obvious: The book is carried by Wiener's voice, but a film can't capture that, and so a new source of narrative depth is needed. Enter morality, conscience and big ideas.
The big idea that "Live From Baghdad" deals with is the conflict between neutrality and involvement, between accepting that one's role is simply to gather news and believing that one should try to make a difference. Most journalists, pace Malcolm, would like to believe that the two are not mutually exclusive. But there is an element of self-deception and bad faith in that belief, and to its credit the film refuses to ignore that. The question is raised when Wiener, played with live-wire intelligence by Michael Keaton, trying to secure an interview with Saddam Hussein, makes a high-flown speech to the Iraqi minister of information, Naji al-Hadithi.
Wiener tells Hadithi that putting Saddam on CNN will help forestall war: "Think about what's at stake here, Naji! People are going to die. And I'll tell you exactly when they're going to die. They're going to die when the talking stops ... We gotta keep talking until we're old men." It's a noble speech, but the viewer is uncomfortably aware that it's undercut by the fact that while Wiener may be theoretically interested in peace, what he really wants is a big story.
