Prefiguring 9/11 in movies and on TV...

Back when I was a TVGuide.com, some three iterations before the current site, we did a prominently placed news item about the pilot of X-Files spin off The Lone Gunmen. We posted it some six months after the pilot aired and a good two months after it was canceled.

The pilot debuted on March 4, 2001, and the last aired June 1st — apparently viewers just weren't getting with eccentric sidekicks steeped in conspiracy theories. But after 9/11 that first episode, which revolved around a plot to fly a commercial airliner into one of the World Trade Center towers, took on a whole new significance.



Flash forward to December 2008. It's late, I'm half-watching an episode of the old UPN sci-fi series Seven Days (which ran from October 1998 to October 2000) and suddenly I'm seeing smoke pouring from a ruined segment of the Pentagon. Eek.

The episode, "Pinball Wizard," first aired on October 6, 1999, and involves a disgruntled super-programmer who decides to show the US government just how big a mistake it made when it rejected his anti-terrorist defense system. If there's a clip online, I couldn't find it. The episode itself is pretty clichéd stuff, but I don't remember anyone ever pointing out how disturbing the Pentagon footage looks in retrospect.The military's much-derided post 9/11 decision to invite Hollywood filmmakers to meet with representatives of army intelligence and discuss terrorist scenarios seems more reasonable with every passing day.

And now for a bizarre coincidence. A couple of years ago I watched the 1975 thriller The Human Factor, in which programmer John Kinsdale (George Kennedy), who's in Naples tweaking a supercomputer designed to run war-game simulations for NATO, loses his family to political terrorists and takes bloody revenge. It's standard-issue Euro-thriller stuff, even if it was directed by late great Edward Dmytryck (Crossfire, Murder, My Sweet, The Sniper, The Caine Mutiny), except for the name of the computer: 911.