Holding Pattern
Local film feels the aftershocks of 9/11
By Michael Chamy, Fri., Oct. 12, 2001
Man makes film, film attracts top local talent, film gets accepted to film festival. Then the story gets juicy. Jet planes crash into buildings, killing thousands of innocents. Film festival decides comedy featuring jet planes crashing into buildings is no longer funny.
This is exactly what happened to Austin filmmaker Tom LeGros and his feature Jetblast, which was recently booted out of the Austin Film Festival. Jetblast is a spoof, featuring Kerry Awn and other local comedians, set in a future in which commercial jetliners are engaged in price wars so intense that they arm themselves with weapons and shoot each other out of the skies. Twice in the film jumbo jets fly into buildings and explode. The promo poster shows three skyscrapers, one of them mostly obscured, making it look like two, with a jet flying past in the foreground.
"For Jetblast, we had tried to dream up the most outrageous images we could imagine in order to catch people's attention," says LeGros. "Now that some of them have been realized is frightening."
The AFF's Courtney Davis explains the festival's "difficult, but appropriate" decision: "Many writers and filmmakers from out of state attend the Austin Film Festival, with a large percentage attending from New York. We did not feel it was appropriate to represent either the city of Austin or the Austin filmmaking community as being insensitive to the recent terrorist attacks on their community by screening a comedy that features a jet flying into a city skyscraper. As we all know, many things changed on September 11 and, for now at least, the definition of what is funny is one of them."
LeGros has no quibble with the decision.
"We're sensitive that our subject matter will cause some people some pain. We don't want to do that. We want people to know that we're not trying to make money off the terrorist attacks; we were just trying to make money off of drunk college kids."
Behind the utter silliness of the film, described by LeGros as a "mindless midnighter," he also sees a change in the eye of the beholder.
"Our story, with all it's ridiculous violence, was a product of our society before the attack," he says. "Now, after the attack, no one with the cold clarity of the morning after can believe we'd make -- or they'd watch -- such pandering garbage.
"So, now we're in the unenviable position of trying to market a dogfighting jumbo jet movie in the wake of the most horrendous abuse of commercial aircraft ever. Some people have advised us to stand back and be patient, but we do have time and money ($20,000) invested. ... We're not like Schwarzenegger where we can kick back by the pool and wait for the social climate to rebound. We have to eat."
