Will Hollywood be the same?

Reporting on Hollywood’s decision to postpone the release of films with terrorist plots, the Times of India observed Friday: “The disaster movie set in New York has long been a Hollywood fad. For an industry that thrived on terrorist-disaster plots, offering a romanticised and often macabre, view of real life, the days to come could well be soul-searching time. Today, in the face of a real disaster, Hollywood is quiet. It is unlikely to try and encash something like this until the wounds heal.” However, director Edward Zwick, whose 1998 movie The Siege concerned a group of terrorists who launch a bombing attack on New York, told today’s Boston Globe: “I can’t imagine that it will be but a week’s respectful grace, and things would then essentially continue as they’d been planned. As, by the way, it should be. … I mean, look, it was certainly one of the points of the film that I made, which is that there is only one defense, really, on the part of a free society, and that is to continue its freedoms.”