Studio shoots down ‘Phone Booth’

By Chris Coates
Assistant A&E Editor

It’s a terrifying prospect: A public telephone rings incessantly on a bustling urban corner. Out of curiosity, you take the phone off the receiver and respond. The gravely voice on the other end tells you a sniper’s rifle is trained on the phone booth: You are in the cross hairs. Hang up, flee or ask for help, and you’re shot.

Is this the latest act of the Beltway Sniper, the quick-witted assailant who terrorized suburban Washington D.C. for nearly a month?

Nope, this is the plot of the motion picture Phone Booth, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Forest Whitaker, originally slated for release on Nov. 15. But considering the dozen sniper shootings around the nation’s capital this month, the film’s production and distribution studio has delayed its release. Jamie Holcomb, 20th Century Fox’s manager of regional publicity and promotion, said the studio has yet to set a release date. The film’s website was also pulled after Fox announced the postponement.

But the postponement of Phone Booth is not the first time the industry has pulled a major release due to national affairs.

The most memorable of these, of course, came after the Sept. 11 attacks, when studios across the county scrambled to pull films dealing with terrorists. Collateral Damage—with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Los Angeles firefighter looking for payback after a bombing perpetrated by terrorists—and Big Trouble—a slapstick Tim Allen comedy about, of all things, a nuclear warhead aboard a commercial airliner— were delayed for months. Upon their eventual releases, both reaped considerably less-than-expected earnings.

Even films that dodged the cutting block faced alterations by sensitive distributors. Images of the World Trade Center were edited out of several pictures, including Spider-Man and Men in Black II. In Robert Redford’s The Last Castle, the image of an American flag flown upside down—the universal signal of maritime distress—was removed in fear of unpatriotic sentiments.

Perhaps the most noted holdup was that of O, the updated version of Shakespeare’s "Othello" set in a modern high school. It was filmed in 1999 and set for release months after the shootings at Columbine High School&8212;an event that paralleled a high school murder sequence in O. The movie was delayed for nearly two years before its release last summer.

Another film deferred in the aftermath of last fall’s attacks was the Joel Schumacher release Bad Company, in which a duo of U.S. agents (Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins) are faced with keeping a nuclear bomb out of the hands of terrorists in New York City. Ironically, Schumacher also directed Phone Booth, his second film to be postponed because of real-life events.

Elsewhere in the film industry, the effects of the sniper in Washington D.C. are muted. Interview with an Assassin, a film chronicling an ex-marine claiming he was the gunman on the grassy knoll in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, will premiere on its original release date of Nov. 15. Assassin is scheduled for distribution across the country on, of all dates, Nov. 22&8212;the 39th anniversary of Kennedy’s death in Dallas. Eamonn Bowles, president of Assassin’s distributor Magnolia pictures, said the nationwide release date was not planned to coincide with the anniversary of Kennedy’s death in Dallas. Although Bowles said Assassin does not have "any real bearings on the sniper [case in D.C.]," he admitted Magnolia might delay its release in greater Washington D.C.

That’s not always the case in the motion picture industry.

This summer, Trapped&8212;a film about a child kidnapper&8212;survived distribution even in the midst of a summer wrought with child abductions. Last year, the war flick Black Hawk Down premiered even while the U.S. entered the war on terror and The Sum of All Fears captivated audiences while worries of "dirty bombs" percolated the airways.

But frequently motion picture studios have too much to risk on a picture that mirrors or even references graphic events in the real world.

And with Phone Booth, professor of psychology at Kansas State University Richard Harris said a delay is not surprising.

"The problem, I think, with something like a movie about a sniper, is that reminds [audiences] too much of what’s going on in the real world," Harris said. "Real people actually do have these worries; this is not just this fantasy of the movie."

That said, with an arrest last week in the real-life case of the Beltway Sniper, Phone Booth might be destined for shelving altogether.

Dr. Tim Shary, an assistant professor of screen studies at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said the film won’t likely make an appearance for at least a few weeks. If the heat is too much from audiences, Phone Booth may only be "put out on video in five to six months," according to Shary.

"The oddity is that it reveals that [Phone Booth] presumes as if it was entertaining about a sniper picking off people altogether," Shary said.

That’s the same case for films delayed after Sept. 11 and this month’s sniper: Nuclear warheads on planes and gunmen bent on killing the innocuous are simply in bad taste in general, according to Shary.

And that’s where studios go wrong.

"[Audiences] like to put themselves in vicarious danger," Harris said. "But it can’t be so real the person can actually feel in danger from it."