Hollywood sends in the troops

After 11 September, producers trying to predict the audience's mood decided that mayhem was out and escapism was in. They were wrong. As Jerry Bruckheimer tells Adam Smith, revenge is now the hot ticket

When Jerry Bruckheimer first saw the images of the planes ploughing into the World Trade Centre towers and exploding into great clouds of fire, he thought what most people did – that it looked like something out of a movie. The irony was, he thought it looked like something out of one of his own movies. This collective thought rapidly became a cliché. Indeed, the US satirical magazine The Onion – one of the first to even joke about the catastrophe – ran the headline: "American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie".

"I thought it looked like CGI [computer generated imagery]," says the man whose films – including Top Gun, Con Air and The Rock – have traded on bigger and showier explosions for over two decades. "A while ago, when we were making Con Air, the original screenplay had a plane crashing into the White House. I just didn't think it could happen. I thought we had missiles and so on that would shoot the planes down. So we crashed it into a casino instead."

After what even Bruckheimer had rejected as too absurd actually happened, Hollywood was left with a quandary. The question that the handful of movie executives that control the huge bulk of output had to answer was, what difference would the bombings make to the public demand for movies? Within days there was an almost unheard of conformity about the kind of films the traumatised multiplex-goers of the country would want to see. They would, the reasoning went, need to escape the new uncertainty and a possibly long and unpredictable war into the safety of comedies and undemanding romances. No doubt studio chiefs noodled with ideas like There's Something Else About Mary; perhaps Jim Carrey could be corralled into Dumb And Even Dumber, while Bridget Jones might be prevailed upon to produce another diary. What they certainly wouldn't want were war movies. Surely there would be enough of that on CNN?

Reactions were swift. Dozens of projects almost certain of the coveted green light were suddenly abandoned, and many already in pre-production were "put into turnaround" – Hollywoodese for being put up for sale. As it turns out, the execs have rarely been so uniformly wrong.

The first hints came from the video stores. While comedies and romances remained glued to the shelves, demand for Hollywood's action back-catalogue skyrocketed. Blockbuster reported massive increases in demand for titles such as the Die Hard series, Rambos one to three, and even previously marginal Steven Segal and Chuck Norris films. Bruckheimer's own Pearl Harbor, critically lambasted on its release earlier this year and perceived as a moderate failure at the box office, became the nation's most rented movie – breaking records for a video release. Anything involving American military forces taking on terrorists was being rented. Audiences, it turns out, don't want escapism – vicariously, they want bloody retribution.

Bruckheimer was one of the first to spot the trend. "It's about revenge," he says. "People want to get back at the guys who did this, to feel empowered." On 11 September, he was midway through post-production on Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott's adaptation of Mark Bowden's book which details a bloody episode in Mogadishu in 1993 when a botched operation by US peace-keeping forces cost the lives of 18 of their men. The film had been scheduled for release in March 2002. While other producers were anxiously examining their upcoming movies for excessive militarism, with the intention of postponing them, Bruckheimer immediately brought forward his release by nearly three months.

This decision put massive and visible strain on its director, and led to reported spats over the film's special effects, but it looks as if, commercially, the gamble will pay off. Test screenings in the US left audiences reportedly ecstatic, while confidence at Columbia was so high that, unusually, an incomplete version of the film was screened in London late last week in a bid for Bafta nominations.

"There are documentaries about Mogadishu playing on CNN and the other news channels constantly framing that as a precursor to the World Trade Centre attacks," he says. "The awareness is now very high. I would want to go and see this movie immediately. That's how I judge these things: what would I want to see."

Bruckheimer's decision was no doubt helped by the fact that he has been in a similar position before. Before the release of Top Gun, an American fighter was shot down in the Middle East. He worried that the reality of the situation would puncture the fictional macho histrionics of his film. In the event, it was a massive hit, turned Tom Cruise into box-office gold, and caused a surge in air-force recruitment. With Columbia set to pull out all the marketing stops, Black Hawk Down looks likely to pull off a similar trick.

Bruckheimer may be the first to capitalise on the bellicose mood of American audiences, but he isn't the only one. 20th Century Fox's Behind Enemy Lines, another true-ish story of American military derring-do, this time set in Bosnia, is tipped for unexpected success, particularly given its neophyte director (ad director John Moore) and borderline unknown star Owen Wilson. Hong Kong action maestro John Woo's Second World War drama Windtalkers is being talked up as a hit for the early summer, and there are even alarming rumours, thankfully probably untrue, that Sylvester Stallone is to be wheeled out of retirement and jump-started for an Afghanistan-set Rambo IV.

It all smacks of the kind of gung-ho propaganda that infected cinema shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And shortly after the Trade Centre attack, a meeting was indeed held between American government officials and members of the film industry. The subject was how Hollywood could help raise Americans' spirits. Bruckheimer wasn't in attendance – and he insists that apart from an end title card, there have been no changes made to the movie in the wake of 11 September. But he has no problem about Hollywood's acting as a conduit for patriotic sentiment. "It's not part of my job, but it's something I'd like to do. I'd like to help the country that afforded me a career with a certain lifestyle and opportunities for education."

Interestingly, Bruckheimer is not planning on attempting to exploit moviegoers' current bloodlust any further. While other producers are now reportedly hungry for war and terrorist-themed material, he's not making any predictions about what will ring the box-office bell in the next months. He was the first in and he plans to be first out. "You never know when the other shoe might drop," he says. "It depends on the material, but by the time any movie started now came out, it would be a year, two years later – and no one knows what's around the corner.

Americans did, and to an extent still do, feel powerless in the face of Osama bin Laden. As usual in uncertain times, the movies are stepping in to fill the vacuum, presenting a coherent world in which "evildoers" are identified and vanquished with relative ease, and the few American lives sacrificed are done so with the appropriate heroism. So even if, as it seems, events in Afghanistan are now winding to a close and whether that might reduce demand for cinematic blood and lead – our cinemas are destined to remain war-zones for the foreseeable future.

Black Hawk Down opens here next month