Makers of ABC miniseries question why 9/11 happened

The assignment: Executive producer Marc Platt was asked to take events from the surprise bestseller ``The 9/11 Commission Report" and convert them into a television drama so bracing that the American public would demand change in homeland security.

The risks: Powerful public officials would be fingered as failures in this show. What's more, the story line is long and convoluted at times, which might turn off viewers.

The upshot: ABC presents ``The Path to 9/11," a miniseries which will air in two parts, beginning Sunday at 8 p.m. and concluding Monday at the same time. The program is a whopping four hours and 50 minutes and will air with no commercial interruptions .

``The enormity of this entire project made us both scared and appropriately humble," Platt said. ``I don't think we went into it thinking that this is necessarily personally damaging to any individual. But the government did fail. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to understand how it happened. Our intention was to present that story."

The miniseries will span eight years, from the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 to the final tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001. It will follow the network of terrorists who planned the events, taking viewers to their hideouts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Yemen, and the United States.

Viewers will also see power struggles in closed-door meetings at the CIA, the FBI, and the White House. Patricia Heaton, famous for her sarcasm on CBS's sitcom ``Everybody Loves Raymond," plays tough-as-nails ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine, who was in charge there after the bombing of the USS Cole. CIA agents had to go through her before proceeding with an investigation. In the film, Bodine doesn't cooperate.

Penny Johnson Jerald, well known for her previous role as the scheming first lady on Fox's ``24," portrays Condoleezza Rice. The actress played the same part in 2003's television movie ``DC 9/11: Time of Crisis." Other actors play Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Rather than use actors for the roles of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the film uses actual news footage.

Some of the characters are composite sketches of real people (such as FBI agent Kirk, portrayed by Donnie Wahlberg) and some of the events portrayed are ``dramatized" in various ways (such as a CIA attempt to kidnap Osama bin Laden which was scuttled at the last minute after agents with guns were already hiding in his home. Platt says there were actually about 10 such attempts but details from those were all rolled into one for the movie).

Platt said that every scene is based on information from either the 9/11 Report (which was produced by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States ), or the books ``The Cell" (co-written by the former ABC News correspondent John Miller) and ``Relentless Pursuit," written by Samuel Katz.

This series is one of many attempts to record the events of 9/11. This year alone, A&E aired ``Flight 93," which dramatized the fight between the hijackers and passengers aboard United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. In April, there was a feature film on the same subject, ``United 93." This month, Oliver Stone debuted ``World Trade Center." Also this month, Hill and Wang, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, published a comic book aimed at young people titled, ``The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation."

Quinn Taylor, ABC's head of movies and miniseries, proposed the project after reading the 9/11 report, he said. ``I was having dinner with a friend, and I told her that the report was so gripping and so unbelievable. It reads, unfortunately, like a Tom Clancy novel. She said, `What do you do for a living?' I said, `I make movies. Hmm.' "

The miniseries was shot in Morocco, Toronto, New York, and the Washington, D.C., area. In a rare privilege, a few scenes were filmed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Although the series has 247 cast members, the producers chose to focus in detail on the lives of a handful of characters, including FBI agent John O'Neill (portrayed by Harvey Keitel), who followed the trail of bin Laden for years before the attacks. Frustrated with the government's lack of attention to terrorism, he retired from the bureau in the summer of 2001 and took over as head of security at the World Trade Center. He died on Sept. 11, 2001.

Governor Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, served as a senior consultant on the miniseries. At a press conference this summer in Pasadena, Calif., the former New Jersey governor said that his commission had presented 41 recommendations to make Americans safer.

Many of them have not been implemented, including government agencies providing the airlines with a unified checklist of who shouldn't be getting on airplanes. ``That's appalling after 9/11," he said.

The commission also encouraged police, fire, and other public safety agencies to begin using a universal radio spectrum to communicate with each other during emergencies.

``When the policemen were outside of the World Trade Center and were trying to communicate with these brave firemen who went up to save people and [the police] saw the towers start to wobble and got worried about it, they were trying to communicate . . . . The radios didn't work together," he said. ``If that had been implemented, we think there would have been a number of lives saved."

Kean is hoping this miniseries will have a political impact and inspire Americans to demand that their congressmen pass all 41 recommendations. ``We've got some legislation that's passed, but it's been very slow in the implementation. We have other legislation that hasn't yet been passed. All of it is necessary to help prevent another attack."

Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com