HBO.COMOn the morning of January 16, 1991, at the height of the first Gulf Crisis, the White House called each of the major American news organizations with the message, “Everyone’s fine at home, but the kids have the sniffles.” For the few Western journalists still in Baghdad, on the wrong side of George H.W. Bush’s “line in the sand,” the meaning of the code words was clear: the promised American attack on Iraq was going to begin that night. Within hours, the representatives of ABC, NBC, CBS (Fox News didn’t exist yet), The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times all took their cue and “pulled the plug” on their offices in Baghdad.
In the end, only the five-person team from Ted Turner’s Atlanta-based upstart Cable News Network didn’t get wobbly knees. Their decision to stay in Baghdad turned out to be one of the most successful gambles in media history. When the attack began, viewers quickly learned that only one news source was still in Baghdad. Thousands of local American channels patched CNN through onto their regular programming, and eventually over a billion viewers worldwide tuned in to hear the voices of CNN’s Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett, and John Holliman, as they vividly described the destruction of the city from the vantage point of their hotel suite.
CNN’s triumph was monumental, and its primacy on the Iraq story launched the network into the grand echelon of major news sources. As the only channel with access to arresting footage of civilian deaths and the destruction of Iraqi cities, CNN also turned out to be a minor antidote to the jingoistic, fawning endorsements of military technology that characterized most other network coverage of the war.
More than anyone, it was Robert Wiener, executive producer of CNN Baghdad, who earned the network its media coup. A manic journalism junkie who styles himself after Hunter S. Thompson (complete with Hawaiian shirts, cigarette holder, and omnipresent sunglasses), Wiener fast-talked his way through Iraq’s innumerable bureaucratic hoops and patiently forged a key friendship with Iraq’s then-Minister of Culture and Information, Naji al-Hadithi.
One terrific scene in “Live from Baghdad,” the film based on Wiener’s experience, offers a striking example of this: we watch as he waits for sixteen hours outside of al-Hadithi’s office for their first appointment, calmly sipping gallons of tea and smoking hundreds of cigarettes, while other reporters come and leave in a huff after being made to wait for three or four hours. Wiener’s patience pays off, since al-Hadithi finally grants him an audience, and later accords CNN an interview with President Saddam Hussein as well as unique access to the transmitter that allowed CNN reporters to broadcast live onto American TV once the war started.
When Wiener returned to the U.S., with dinars still in his wallet, five Hollywood studios immediately sought the rights to his story. Universal Studios eventually won the bid, and a year later, Wiener published “Live from Baghdad: Gathering News at Ground Zero,” a memoir based on his five months in Baghdad. Simultaneously, Wiener was working on the first drafts of a screenplay with Richard Chapman, now Senior Lecturer in the Film and Media Studies Department.
The book, peppered with Thompson-style gonzo exclamations and surreal situations, consists primarily of dialogue and descriptions, rather than inner-monologue, so Chapman said the transition to screenplay form was relatively simple. “He was really thinking filmically when he wrote it,” explained Chapman, “and the description lent itself to a filmic portrayal.”
The transition from screenplay to production, however, was not as smooth. The first drafts of the screenplay were completed shortly after “Live From Baghdad” was published in 1992, but 10 years elapsed before the TV movie version, starring Michael Keaton and Helena Bonham-Carter, finally saw its premiere on HBO.
In the interlude, Chapman explained, the project went through numerous incarnations, at one point flirting with black comedy, before settling on its final docu-drama form. Barry Levinson (“Sleepers,” “Wag the Dog”) was the director initially slated for the film, while Dustin Hoffman was set to play Wiener (which would have produced a bit of post-modern surrealism, since in his book Wiener describes an encounter with the real-life Carl Bernstein in Baghdad, and Hoffman himself already played Bernstein on the big screen in “All The President’s Men”). Through several rewrites and changes of staff, the project began languishing in Universal until Wiener, promoting Steven Spielberg’s “Band of Brothers” in northern France, ran into an HBO producer who expressed interest in putting his story on screen.
Momentum for the production picked up “when war drums were beating for the second war,” Chapman said. Suddenly, heightened interest in the first Iraq war and in Wiener’s unusual account of the American experience in Baghdad made the Baghdad project a hot commodity. Chapman himself admitted that the screenplay “would most likely have sat on the shelf had it not been for the second Gulf War” (the film eventually first screened on November 7, 2002, the day before the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1441 authorizing the return of arms inspectors to Iraq). It’s a historical detail full of irony of course, since, while falling short of being overtly anti-war, the film offers a touching and humanistic account of how the Iraqi people were (twice) caught in between the “battle of personalities” between a President Bush and Saddam Hussein. Without trying to persuade or using gory effects, Baghdad subtly tempers the American view of war as surgical and devoid of human casualties.
“Live From Baghdad” went on to garner three Golden Globe nominations and ten Emmy nominations, including one for Chapman’s writing-although he and his co-writers eventually lost to the writers of “Door to Door.”
Chapman, after working with Wiener, whom he described by saying, “He could sell a Persian rug to a Persian,” says he developed a deeper interest in the ways journalists cover war. His current project, a feature-length documentary called “Shooting the Messengers,” details the history of the Vietnam War through the “words, eyes, and lenses” of the print and photojournalists who covered it. The two-hour film will be culled from over sixty hours of interviews with personalities as diverse as celebrities like Walter Cronkite and David Halberstam, unknown North Vietnamese photojournalists, and the numerous unsung female journalists of the war. Their stories reveal the extent to which most journalists went in with a spirit of patriotism and hopefulness that the U.S. would succeed in Vietnam.
“It’s really a story of loss of innocence, and of the naivet‚ of the military, in thinking they could have a quick victory,” Chapman says of the film’s depiction of Vietnam. For Chapman, the Vietnam War was the end of a cordial entente between the military and the American media that culminated in the restrictions seen in the latest Iraq war. After the retreat from Saigon, the military brass blamed the media for “turning” the American public against the war effort, and vowed never again to allow journalists unrestricted access to the battlefield.
“We’re planning on going back and maybe interviewing some journalists from the latest Iraq war, to add to ‘Shooting the Messengers,'” Chapman said. “It should be interesting to see how their experiences compared.”