Everybody complains that big Hollywood movies don't show enough awareness of current events, but a lot of people get just as uncomfortable when their escapist entertainments seem to be getting to close to reminding them of what they were hoping to get their minds off when they fled to the theaters. Last year, a full-blown media circus sprung up in Britain around the still-unsolved case of Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old girl who was reported missing from the Portugal resort where she and her family were on vacation. (The case received a lot of media attention partly because the parents actively sought it out in their public calls for help in finding their daughter, which in turn attracted shout-outs from celebrities.) One side effect of the case is that Ben Affleck's cracking directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, which happens to deal with a murky case involving a lost little girl, had its English premiere postponed out of deferrence to sensitive feelings stirred up by the actual case. (Affleck himself has said, "We are acutely aware of the situation... we don't want to release the movie if it is going to touch a Hooksexup or inflame anyone's sensitivities." Now, with the movie finally slipping into British theaters, Andrew Hubert does a quick run-down of other high-profile releases that had to bob and weave to keep from being overshadowed from actual events, in many cases unsuccessfully. Perhaps the most obvious forerunner to Gone Baby Gone in this department is The Good Son, which was made at a time when its star, Macaulay Culkin, was seen as having worn out his welcome as America's favorite twinkling child freak. Directed by thriller specialist Joseph Ruben from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, the movie was supposed to exploit the queasy feelings that Culkin inspired in some while easing his transformation to "real actor" by casting him as an evil child psycho. Unfortunately, by the time it was ready for theaters, a news story about a British toddler who was murdered by a couple of ten-year-olds had helped set off a wave of paranoia about killer kids. The movie was denied a theatrical release in England, and while it made it into theaters in the states, it did disappointing enough business that poor Culkin was required to paste his smile back on and star in Richie Rich.
There was also a real spate of these things in the wake of 9/11; Hubert doesn't mention Collateral Damage, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the last throes of his action movie career, played a fireman on the revenge trail after Arab terrorists blow up his family, but he does cite the over-the-top black comedy Buffalo Soldiers, which was punished for depicting members of the American military in an unflattering light at a time when hyper-patriotism was suddenly the flavor of the year. (Ironically, not long before September 11, 2001, Tim Blake Nelson's O was quietly dumped into theaters after two years on the shelf. That movie, which updates Othello to a modern high school, with Mekhi Pfifer as a basketball star dating Julia Stiles while Josh Hartnett whispers poison in his ear, reportedly freaked studio chiefs out because they saw "parallels" to Columbine in it, an unlikely enough possibility that it's worth considering that maybe they just felt like burying a movie that centered on an interracial romance. (By the time O was released, Stiles had starred in another interracial high school romance, Save the Last Dance; it was a hit, which might have helped spring O from movie jail.) Then there's Dr. Strangelove, which did manage to overcome having its first test screening on November 22, 1963. For some of us, the great modern movie mystery is: why did they cut the pie fight scene in the war room that was originally supposed to end the film? Everyone who might have some inside knowledge of that one has been asked about it, and so far as we've been able to determine, no one has ever given an answer that matched up with somebody else's. George C. Scott told a Playboy interviewer that the scene--which, as he recalled, included the line, "Gentleman, out beloved president has been struck down in the prime of life by pie! We demand merciful retaliation!"--was cut because of the Kennedy assassination. However, Terry Southern once told a Yale writing class that the real problem was that the people onscreen were smiling too broadly, because, according to writer Jeff MacGregor, they "all had too much fun hurling pies at George C. Scott." Peter Sellers once gave a long, vivid description of the scene to a Rolling Stone interviewer before explaining that "Stan" just thought it went on too long; discussing it in a documentary about the film, critic Alexander Walker insisted that the pies flew so hard and fast that "you couldn't tell what you were looking at." Always Mr. Analytical, Stanley Kubrick just insisted that he was making a "satire" and that the pie-throwing was too "farcical". Reports that Kubrick kept obsessively going back to the drawing board, and that somewhere in the vaults there are scenes of HAL 9000 hitting Keir Dullea with a pie and Private Pyle squirting the drill sergeant with his rubber carnation, remain unconfirmed.