'They're all forced to listen to us
'It began as a tiny internet film attacking the 'lies' surrounding 9/11. "
Korey Rowe / Dylan Avery / Jason Bermas
"Now, millions of people have heard its message.
Like it or loathe it, you can't ignore Loose Change," says
Ed Pilkington Friday January 26, 2007 The Guardian (London)
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Four
hours' drive north of Manhattan in the Catskill
Mountains, Oneonta is as close to
redneck country as you can find in the state of New
York. As the road winds upward, the terrain thins out into wooded
hills dotted with bungalows, with rusting Cadillacs
parked outside. At this time of year, the area should be buzzing with
skiers from the city, but El Niño and
global warming have put paid to that. In the absence of snow, this famously
beautiful part of America looks depressed and down-at-heel.
in
segments, like a 21st-century triptych.
At first glance, this seems an unlikely setting for what can reasonably be called a revolution in film distribution. There is nothing Beverly Hills about this room, or the twentysomethings sitting around in it. But when you stop to reflect, it is the perfect setting for the command-post of a phenomenon that has turned normal movie logistics on their head, challenged assumptions about documentary film-making and journalism, and created an army of hundreds of thousands of devoted "info warriors". This is the bedroom of Dylan Avery, the director and creator of Loose Change, the most successful movie to emerge from what followers call the 9/11 Truth Move- ment. More commonly, they are referred to as conspiracy theorists. They believe - or rather, they insist they can prove - that the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 2001 were not the work of Osama bin Laden, but of elements within the US government itself. They reject the term "conspiracy theorists", arguing that if you accept the official line on 9/11 you have in any case signed up to a theory about a conspiracy - an al-Qaida conspiracy. .
The movement of 9/11 sceptics has had an astonishing success in sowing doubt across the US. Recent polls suggest more than a third of Americans believe that either the official version of events never happened, or that US officials knew the attacks were imminent, but did nothing to stop them.
That's an impressive statistic in itself. Now look at the success Loose Change has had. Google Video acts as a portal for the movie, where you can also see the running tally of the number of times it has been viewed since last August. As I write, it stands at 4,048,990. By the time you read this, it will have risen considerably higher. On top of that, the movie was shown on television to up to 50 million people in 12 countries on September 11 last year; 100,000 DVDs have been sold and 50,000 more given away free. Then there are many more who have watched the film but are never counted, as a result of the active encouragement the film-makers give their supporters to burn the movie and distribute it to their friends. Avery says 100 million people - "easy" - have seen it. That may be an exaggeration, but it's fair to say that something extraordinary is going on. The Loose Change story begins in May 2002 on the opening night of a Mediterranean restaurant in Oneonta where Avery, then aged 19, is working as a dishwasher. A friend of the owner, James Gandolfini (aka Tony Soprano), is a guest at the party and Avery gets chatting with him. "We started talking about movies and shit," Avery recalls. "Gandolfini told me, if you want to do something that matters, you have to talk to the entire world. You have to have something to say." Avery had just finished high school. He'd long been a film buff, a fan of Tarantino, Fight Club and The Matrix. He was inspired to begin writing a novel/film-script. He began toying with the idea of a fictional work that would explore the fantasy that 9/11 hadn't been carried out by 19 Arabs with box-cutters, but by the American government as an attack on the minds of its own people. At that point, he was writing pure fiction. But as CORN EXCHANGE NEWBURY: Deputy Director THEATRE ALIBI: Administrative & Financial Director he began researching September 11 for background to the story, he began to come across evidence that made him change direction. All the footage and the eyewitness accounts he gathered, he says, "just didn't add up".
Entirely self-taught, and without a single journalistic qualification between them beyond a couple of media courses Jason sat at college, the three men have sought to take on the combined might of the Bush administra- tion, the FBI, the CIA and the mainstream media. If viewer statistics are a measure of success, they have to no small degree prevailed. One can speculate as to the reasons for their success. September 11 was such an overwhelming event that many people have been open to the wilder accounts of what lay behind it. The reaction of the Bush administra- tion - Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo, terror clampdowns within America - have generated profound fears about the president's intentions. And this openness to - even need for - alternative explanations has come at just the moment when the internet has made it possible for such theories to be disseminated rapidly and widely.
"I think what happened to the World Trade Centre was simple enough," Avery says in the film. "It was brought down in a carefully planned controlled demolition. It was a psychological attack on the American people and it was pulled off with military precision." Flight 77, which supposedly flew into the Pentagon, could not have flown at that speed without going into a tailspin. There is no sign of any parts of an aeroplane in footage of the crash site, and the building looked as though it had been hit by a missile. Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld was safe on the other side of the Pentagon. Flight 93, said to have come down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, never did crash there. Instead it landed in Cleveland airport shortly after the airport had been evacuated. The emotive phone calls by the so-called passengers to their relatives before they "died" were staged.
The three men have instant answers to any objections you can throw at them. There may have been a lot of people involved - they think about 100 - but only a handful of those would have known the full plot. As for Bush acting heinously, haven't leaders the world over proven themselves capable of monstrous acts?
"This is unlike anything I have worked on," says Tim Sparke of Mercury Media, which handles international distribution for the film. "It has forced millions of people to question whether they can trust big media, and by bypas- sing the broadcasters through internet distribution it has altered the media power balance profoundly. With a little money and passion, anyone can make an important film." The final test for Avery and co is yet to come. They are putting together Loose Change: the Final Cut using an upgraded Power Mac G5 (price $5,000). They have filmed original interviews with Washington players, employed lawyers to iron out copyright issues with borrowed footage, commissioned 3D graphics from Germany, and recruited a theology professor to act as fact-checker and consultant. The end result, they hope, will be seen at Cannes and have a cinema release in America and across the world on the sixth anniversary of 9/11.
If that happens, they will have squared the circle. The underground film-makers will have come up for air, ex- posing millions more people to their argument - and themselves to intense scrutiny. Stand back and enjoy the fireworks. |
plane entering tower.
CONTENTS
fiba 2007
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FILMBANK 2007
Year of
the PIG