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RAIN AND FIRE.(The Talk of the Town)("Last Best Chance"'s screening)
Movie screenings in private theatres for invited audiences, with drinks, canapes, and opportunities to schmooze with stars and directors, are a favorite tactic of the Manhattan branches of Hollywood's publicity machines. The goal is to generate buzz, which, with any luck, will trickle down to the ticketbuying masses. Early autumn is a big season for new releases, and last week, what with the opening of the New York Film Festival and all, there were lots of such screenings around town.
One of them was different. Its setting was a modest auditorium in the immodest East Side mansion that houses the Council on Foreign Relations. The audience consisted of diplomats, military officers, international bankers and lawyers, and think-tankers. The speakers after the lights went up were white-haired gentlemen in business suits: Pete Peterson, the council's chairman; Ted Turner, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of CNN; Warren Buffett, the folk philosopher and fabulously rich investor; Richard Lugar, Republican, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Sam Nunn, Democrat, the retired chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and now head of a nongovernmental organization called the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
The film, "Last Best Chance," was a bit unusual, too. You might even say it isn't really a movie at all--it just plays one on TV. Set in the near future, it takes the form of a slick international suspense thriller, the kind that cuts from a rainswept warehouse in a bleak corner of the former Soviet empire to a dimly lit White House Situation Room. It has no sex scenes, no car chases, and no wisecracking sidekicks, and it is only forty-five minutes long, but it lays out a frighteningly plausible narrative of how terrorists might buy or steal the makings of a nuclear bomb, assemble one, smuggle it halfway around the world, and send it on its way to an American city in an S.U.V. The closest thing to a star in the cast is Fred Thompson, the lawyer turned actor turned Republican senator from Tennessee turned actor again. Thompson plays the President of the United States, and his character is mature, wise, and serious--the one jarringly unrealistic note in the picture.
"Last Best Chance" was made not by a movie studio but by a singularly unraffish indie producer: Nunn's Nuclear Threat Initiative, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation. The blurb on its poster comes not from Ebert & Roeper but from Kean & Hamilton--Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairman and vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. Its grosses are zero. For the past five months, it has been distributed free on DVD. Now it has been taken up by HBO, which plans to show it repeatedly, beginning on October 17th.
"Last Best Chance" is entertaining, in a grim sort of way, but entertainment is not its raison d'etre. Its purpose is to stimulate public support and political pressure on the Bush Administration and Congress to do something serious about the terrifying danger of nuclear terrorism. And this is a scandal. It is scandalous that at this late date, four years after the attacks on New York and Washington, people like Nunn, Lugar, and Buffett feel it necessary to go to such unorthodox lengths to get the attention of Washington's responsibles. "Last Best Chance" is a symptom of an immense failure of national, and especially Presidential, leadership. "As short a time ago as nine years or eight years," Turner said in his remarks after the screening, "I still thought that nuclear weapons, biological and chemical weapons, was an area that the government took care of."
One of the attendees at the screening was Graham Allison, the founding dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the director of its Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, who ...
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