I WOULD BE A LOYAL VIEWER
The Pitch: A Series About Wacky Terrorists
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER, The New York Times
LOS ANGELES (Sept. 1) -- Here are a few highlights from the hottest Hollywood script you will most likely never see produced on a television or movie screen:
• Abu, Ahmed, Musab and Salar, a cell of Islamic terrorists sent to Chicago by a nefarious network resembling Al Qaeda, are getting chewed out by their murderous boss, just in from Afghanistan. (They have been spending the organization's money like crazy but haven't blown anything up.) Just then, two deliverymen knock on the apartment door, bearing a huge flat-screen TV.
• Ahmed, whose cover is a job as a bike messenger, falls in love with a neighborhood florist - who turns out to be Jewish - but can't get up the nerve to ask her out. "You're bright, you're funny, you're talented," Musab says, urging his comrade on. "Who made the best nail bomb in training camp? You did!"
• Abu blends in by joining a bowling team, and becomes a fanatic: "We will dance in the blood of the losers from Hal's Body and Paint Shop!" he vows. But he is a hapless terrorist. A fertilizer bomb in his trunk accidentally goes off outside when he is bowling for the league championship - toppling his last two pins and clinching victory.
"The Cell," as this exercise in envelope-pushing is titled, has been making its way through Hollywood for more than a year, cracking up development executives and their assistants, being passed from friend to friend like an underground newspaper behind the Iron Curtain, and winning its creators, Mark Jordan Legan and Mark F. Wilding, scores of meetings and three other writing assignments.
Sacha Baron Cohen, the star of "Da Ali G Show" on HBO, talked about producing "The Cell" for a cable channel like Comedy Central. An executive at Warner Brothers talked about pitching it to British television. The television eminences Warren Littlefield and Marcy Carsey raved about it.
"It was absolutely outrageous, it was smart, it was funny," said Mr. Littlefield, the former NBC Entertainment president. "When they said what the subject matter was, I said, 'Oh my God, how can they do that?' And they did - they pulled it off."
But the accolades invariably led nowhere.
This, it seems, is a comedic concept too explosive to touch.
Though a number of dramatic movies and mini-series about 9/11 are already being produced, executives who passed on "The Cell" told the writers they feared that Americans - particularly in New York and Washington - were nowhere near ready for a sitcom that could be seen as trivializing the attacks, even after four years.
"They always want you to think outside the box, then when you do, they say, 'What the hell's the matter with you?' " said Mr. Legan, 45, a Virginian.
"People say tragedy plus time equals comedy, but the timing is always iffy," said Matt Solo, Mr. Wilding's agent. "It's still too close to 9/11, and 9/11 can repeat itself. You'd be sinking money into it, and then at some point, there'd be a tragedy out there in the world. Imagine you're on the hook for tens of millions, and then you get a massive boycott."
Or consider the lag time before "Hogan's Heroes," set in a Nazi P.O.W. camp, came on the air in 1965. "They couldn't have done that show five years after the war," said Mr. Wilding. And "M*A*S*H," the antiwar sitcom that came out in 1972, was set in the Korean War, 20 years past.
With the fight against terrorism far from over, the clock may not even have started ticking toward acceptability for a satire like "The Cell," said Mr. Solo, of International Creative Management. "I think we just have to wait on this one," he said, "probably a generation."
While the script's heroes are ostensibly out to kill and paralyze Americans with fear, the running joke of "The Cell" is that they quickly fall in love with Americans and Americana. They order Domino's Pizza and heat up Hot Pockets, and get weak-kneed over super-sizes and double coupons and sexy college women. They become Chicago Cubs fans - these are hapless terrorists, after all - and derive their cultural literacy straight from television and the movies: their secret password is "Kelly Ripa."
And they love the lives they are living as Americans. Salar, under cover as a college student, becomes the teacher's pet. Abu, the bowler, becomes his team's emotional center. Musab, effectively the housewife, becomes a prize-winning cook thanks to the Food Network. Only at their supposedly deadly work are they miserable failures.
"It's the antiterrorist show," said Robin Schwarz, president of Regency Television, the maker of "Malcolm in the Middle," who said she had been casting "The Cell" in her head and still hoped to produce it for a network.
"It's a love letter to America," said Mr. Wilding, 48, from Connecticut, who is a writer on "Grey's Anatomy" on ABC. "It's about how these guys came to figure out how to live in the country and not hurt anybody."
The idea for "The Cell" arose in frustration. Mr. Wilding was writing for "Jake 2.0," the UPN series, and lamented that all its villains had to be terrorists. Mr. Legan, whom he met when both worked on "Dave's World" in 1994, flippantly suggested that they write a sitcom about terrorists. And the idea took hold.
Soon after, struggling to find a hook into the material, Mr. Legan was driving on Ventura Boulevard, the busy commercial strip through the San Fernando Valley, with every chain store known to man. "I was passing signs for Ralph's, double coupons; Sizzler, all-you-can-eat; filet of fish for a dollar - and I called Mark and said, 'This is the way in,'" Mr. Legan said. Mr. Wilding added that there was an element of truth to the material: "Even the terrorists who did 9/11, they were at Hooters and strip clubs the night before," he said.
With a draft in hand early last year, their agents shopped the script to TV executives, and, later, to film studios. "Invariably, the executives would say, 'We love it; who's doing it?' " Mr. Wilding recalled.
Executives at Fox, the writers and their agents said, countered that maybe the terrorists could be Albanians - or demons.
Mr. Baron Cohen, who could not be reached, proposed taking "The Cell" to British television. "We thought that in Britain it might be more palatable than here," Mr. Solo said. But then the London bombings occurred. "That's the case in point," he added. "It looks good till it looks bad."
The script is subversive in some gentle ways, poking fun at TV shows and even at the sorry state of television comedy. But this sitcom would have a tough time with a laugh track: When a gung-ho young suicide bomber is sent over to help them on a mission, the characters keep anyone else from being hurt, but the bomber is killed.
Ms. Schwartz, of Regency Television, said for this reason she believed the script might work best as an animated series, like "The Simpsons," because audiences will forgive outrageousness in cartoons that they will not in live action. Others have suggested a stage play, a short film or even a Web site along the lines of jibjab.com.
The script's writers, meanwhile, have landed three assignments thanks to "The Cell": a feature for Universal about children's entertainers who double as burglars; a comedy about the worst hospital in America, for Ms. Schwartz at Regency; and a family time-travel comedy for Paramount. But they hold out hope that their pet project will find a fearless patron. And they are not alone.
"I can't imagine that an advertiser-supported broadcaster would be playing with this," said Mr. Littlefield, the former network president. "But at some point maybe someone will try it. I'm sure there would be a lot of people that said you can't do this, but that's what they told me about 'Will and Grace.' The things that scared us, more often than not, had the biggest upside."
