Oliver Stone plans film about 9/11 tragedy

Two men, a rookie police officer and his boss, are trapped 20 feet below a collapsed building. Their bodies are being crushed by massive chunks of cement and have begun to swell.

Though they’re relative strangers, they spend the next 14 hours goading each other to live, while their families worry over their fate and a ragtag group of rescuers tries to save their lives.

It might be a typical Hollywood disaster movie, but it’s actually scenes from the script of the upcoming film about Port Authority police officers Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, among the last people rescued from the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

And it is being brought to the screen by Oliver Stone, long seen as the nation’s premier conspiracy-theorist-turned-director.

“It’s not about the motives of the terrorists, or who the terrorists were, or the politics of 9/11 in any way,” says Stone.

“It’s about people standing together and overcoming the problem. It’s a no-nonsense, austere, verite document of what they went through in those 24 hours, a procedural if you like, and it should be shot like that.”

Word of Stone’s participation immediately led to convulsions on the Internet, where bloggers cracked morbid jokes about what he might deliver and wondered whether the director – who proffered a revisionist theory of the Kennedy assassination in his 1991 film “JFK” – would be a suitable candidate to tackle one of the most sensitive topics in recent American history.

Others winced at the timing of Paramount’s press release announcing the project, one day after the bombings in London.

A year from now, when the film starring Nicolas Cage presumably will be released – close to the fifth-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – audiences might be wondering whether they want to shell out $10 to relive the experience.

The riveting, well-crafted script by 31-year-old newcomer Andrea Berloff is not political. But it is disturbing, with shots of people jumping out of the towers and characters dying under slabs of concrete.

Stone’s visceral style of directing could amplify the terror experienced by the policemen and, consequently, by the audience.

“(The project) came to me,” says Stone. “If it hadn’t come to me, I wouldn’t have done it. (The script) just hit me between the eyes.”

Stone says he thinks that a film about 9/11 should have “been done right away. I don’t think you should run from things. You should confront them. It’s better for the country.

“Look at the English. They took it and absorbed it and continued on. They didn’t run around and call for huge pieces of legislation costing billions of dollars to defend our homeland and create a huge war in a foreign country.”

That is just the sort of subtext that conservative Internet bloggers believe could infuse a film in Stone’s hands. Given the narrative story arc of the script, though, it would be hard for a director to add explicit political content, with the two major protagonists spending most of the film in a hole, unaware that the towers have even fallen down.

While allusions to 9/11 have begun to filter through pop culture – most notably in Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” allegory – the untitled Stone film is on track to become the first high-profile studio film to explicitly deal with the tragedy.

Although Spielberg’s film earned largely glowing notices, some reviewers were troubled by his use of 9/11 imagery, and others have begun to wonder whether the gritty darkness of “War of the Worlds” has turned off some moviegoers.

The new project brings Stone back to the blue-collar terrain of some of his most successful works: “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July.”

“I found them both to be courageous, deeply wounded people,” he said of Jimeno and McLoughlin, with whom he has met. “They’re both still suffering from the injuries.

“Will (Jimeno) said this (film) is a testament not to the evil, but to the good that we as human beings are capable of. That’s important. That’s healing.”