” Live from Baghdad”
Saturday night at 8 on HBO
THE trailers HBO has been showing incessantly over the last few weeks fail to do justice to “Live from Baghdad.”
The snippets chosen for the promos are strung together like clichés from every movie you’ve ever seen about TV journalism.
And as a result, I groaned with disappointment everytime I saw them.
In fact, the clichés are few and far between in “Live from Baghdad,” which turns out to be a far-richer-than-expected re-creation of the run-up to the Gulf War as seen through the eyes of the CNN news crew who broadcast the sights and sounds of the first bombardments of Baghdad from a hotel balcony.
Most of us can remember where we were in mid-January 1991, when we first saw the greenish images provided by a night-vision camera of the allied bombing and Iraqi anti-aircraft fire, and listened to the anxious voices of Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett and John Holliman as they described the assault taking place just outside their hotel window.
But until I watched “Live from Baghdad,” I had no idea of the challenges CNN faced in getting its people into the position to become the only Western journalists to report on the action live from within the enemy capital.
The movie doesn’t flinch in its assessment that at least part of the reason the Iraqi Ministry of Information permitted CNN to procure a live telephone line connected directly with CNN headquarters in Atlanta was because the network seemed willing to be used by the Iraqi government as a propaganda tool.
In the movie’s view, producer Robert Wiener, the ranking CNN executive in charge of the crew in Baghdad, may have been a bit too willing to place his trust in Iraqi officials who were intent on manipulating him.
But eventually, when the war began, CNN had the story every other TV network wanted but was in no position to get. Though CNN had already been around for about 10 years, the Baghdad broadcasts were a watershed in the network’s history because they established CNN for the first time as a TV news organization on par with ABC, NBC and CBS.
Weiner – played with just the right amount of nervous energy by the always-reliable Michael Keaton – is the central figure in “Live from Baghdad.” Weiner also co-wrote the screenplay, and was the author of the memoir on which the movie is based.
“Live from Baghdad” ably captures the anxiety of an exotic, foreign city as its people prepare for war.
Rich in detail, the depiction feels real and accurate. And with another war looming in the same part of the world, the timing of “Live from Baghdad” couldn’t be more eerie.