This article needs additional citations for verification .(July 2020) |
Live from Baghdad | |
---|---|
Genre | War drama |
Based on | Live from Baghdad by Robert Wiener |
Screenplay by |
|
Directed by | Mick Jackson |
Starring | |
Music by | Steve Jablonsky |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
Production | |
Executive producers |
|
Producer | George W. Perkins |
Cinematography | Ivan Strasburg |
Editor | Joe Hutshing |
Running time | 108 minutes |
Production company | Industry Entertainment |
Original release | |
Network | HBO |
Release | December 7, 2002 |
Live from Baghdad is a 2002 American television war drama film directed by Mick Jackson and co-written by Robert Wiener, based on Wiener's book of the same title. The film premiered on HBO on December 7, 2002, during the prelude stage of the Iraq War.
Michael Keaton stars as Wiener, a CNN on-location producer in Baghdad, Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991. The film focuses on the news media's (primarily CNN's) coverage of the war. Fundamentally an action–drama, the characters grapple with the ethics and implications of 24-hour journalism in the days leading up to and during the United States-led bombing of Baghdad.
This section's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed.(August 2020) |
On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces and tanks roll into Kuwait City, as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait begins. In Atlanta, CNN picks Robert Wiener and his crew to go to Baghdad and cover the invasion. At Rome International Airport, Wiener meets his colleague and producer Ingrid Formanek. Wiener and his crew arrive in Baghdad on August 23, and stay at the Al-Rasheed Hotel.
As they settle in their hotel rooms, they notice that they are being monitored. The crew report their first story on a young British boy held as a hostage by Saddam Hussein. As they continue to report stories, they get pressured by the Iraqi government. Wiener later meets the Iraqi Minister of Information Naji Al Hadithi, and requests pieces of equipment and an interview with Hussein. As the movie goes on, Wiener and Al Hadithi become friends.
Wiener and his crew get access to interview Americans forced to stay in the country by the Iraqi government. The Iraqis use the American hostages as human shields for potential bombing sites. After Wiener's crew interview an American named Bob Vinton, Vinton goes missing. Wiener becomes worried about Vinton. Later, Al Hadithi gives CBS and Dan Rather the Saddam Hussein interview. Instead of the Hussein interview, Al Hadithi gives Wiener and his crew a trip to Kuwait. They arrive in Jahra Air Force Base, Kuwait on October 17. The crew cover the incubator story [1] in three Kuwaiti hospitals, but then Iraqis call off the interviews because the CNN crew broke some ground rules. As soon as they arrive back in Baghdad, Wiener and the crew become the story as the only Americans to be in Kuwait.
After an argument between Wiener and Al Hadithi, Al Hadithi agrees to give CNN a Saddam Hussein interview. On October 29, and the CNN crew interview Saddam Hussein at one of his presidential palaces. In the interview, Hussein states that Iraq withdrawing from Kuwait would be like the U.S. withdrawing from Hawaii. The crew then covers the release of American hostages from Iraq. Wiener then finds Bob Vinton and is emotionally moved by his being safe.
The United Nations gives Iraq until January 15, 1991 to withdraw from Kuwait, or face military action. As the deadline comes to an end the crew sees that the Iraqi Army is installing anti-aircraft guns in Baghdad. The crew then gets a piece of equipment called the four-wire, which gives them communications to CNN in Atlanta. The four-wire is essentially a direct phone line to their CNN facility in Jordan. From that point it can hit the satellite above and then go to the CNN headquarters in Atlanta. The Iraqis eventually find out that the crew have established communication with Atlanta. The CNN crew is the only foreign news group with the four wire. On January 9, the crew eventually believe that there will be war.
Bernard Shaw arrives in Baghdad again on January 13 to interview Saddam Hussein again at the deadline. As soon as the deadline expires, streets in Baghdad are empty and businesses are shut down. Americans and foreign news groups begin evacuating Baghdad on January 15 in fear of American bombing strikes. Wiener decides to stay, and some members of the crew decide to leave. At around 3 a.m. on January 17, U.S. F-117 Nighthawk stealth bombers begin to bomb Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers begin to fire anti-aircraft guns into the sky to shoot down the bombers. As soon as the bombing strikes begin, CNN correspondents Bernard Shaw, John Holliman and Peter Arnett begin to report and describe the bombings on the four-wire communicator. The reports are broadcast live on CNN in America. The film shows the points of view from Saddam Hussein and U.S. President George H. W. Bush watching the CNN reports. It also intersperses actual archival footage of news anchors from rival networks, having to report off CNN's live feed, since CNN was the only news source transmitting during the bombing of Baghdad. Other archival footage is of Dick Cheney, during a news conference as Bush's Defense Secretary, stating "The best coverage I've seen of what transpired in Baghdad was on CNN", and NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw stating, "CNN used to be called the little network that could. It's no longer a little network."
At around 5 a.m., the crew is forced to stop reporting by Al Hadithi and Iraqi soldiers.
Most of the crew leaves Baghdad, including Formanek and Shaw. Wiener stays, returning to America on January 23. The film ends showing the destruction of buildings from bombings in Baghdad.
Filming took place in Morocco and Los Angeles. [3]
The film received positive reviews from film critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 88% out of eight professional critics give the film a positive review, with a rating average of 7/10. [4]
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. He also served as prime minister of Iraq from 1979 to 1991 and later from 1994 to 2003. He was a leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organization, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, which espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism.
This is a timeline of the events surrounding the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Iraq under the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party saw severe violations of human rights. Secret police, state terrorism, torture, mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape, deportations, extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, assassinations, chemical warfare, and the destruction of the Mesopotamian marshes were some of the methods Saddam Hussein and the country's Ba'athist government used to maintain control. Saddam committed crimes of aggression during the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War, which violated the Charter of the United Nations. The total number of deaths and disappearances related to repression during this period is unknown, but is estimated to be at least 250,000 to 290,000 according to Human Rights Watch, with the great majority of those occurring as a result of the Anfal genocide in 1988 and the suppression of the uprisings in Iraq in 1991. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued regular reports of widespread imprisonment and torture.
The Iraqi no-fly zones conflict was a low-level conflict in the two no-fly zones (NFZs) in Iraq that were proclaimed by the United States, United Kingdom, and France after the Gulf War of 1991. The United States stated that the NFZs were intended to protect the ethnic Kurdish minority in northern Iraq and Shiite Muslims in the south. Iraqi aircraft were forbidden from flying inside the zones. The policy was enforced by the United States and the United Kingdom until 2003, when it was rendered obsolete by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. French aircraft patrols also participated until France withdrew in 1996.
Peter Gregg Arnett is a New Zealand-born American journalist. He is known for his coverage of the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. He was awarded the 1966 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for his work in Vietnam from 1962 to 1965, mostly reporting for the Associated Press.
The Battle of Baghdad, also known as the Fall of Baghdad, was a military engagement that took place in Baghdad in early April 2003, as part of the invasion of Iraq.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq involved unprecedented U.S. media coverage, especially cable news networks.
The following is a timeline of major events during the Iraq War, following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Farzad Bazoft was an Iranian journalist who settled in the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s. He worked as a freelance reporter for The Observer. He was arrested by Iraqi authorities and executed in 1990 after being convicted of spying for Israel while working in Iraq.
The following lists events in the year 2003 in Iraq.
The Saddam–al-Qaeda conspiracy theory was based on false claims made by the United States government, alleging that a highly secretive relationship existed between Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization al-Qaeda between 1992 and 2003. The George W. Bush administration promoted it as a main rationale for invading Iraq in 2003.
Richard Roth is an American journalist, a CNN correspondent who covers the United Nations. He was the host of Diplomatic License, a weekly program that was devoted to United Nations affairs. Roth is a CNN "original" — one of the first employees when the network launched in 1980. He has covered a wide range of stories over the last 25 years, from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf War.
Naji Sabri Ahmad Al-Hadithi is an Iraqi former politician who served as the Iraqi Foreign Minister under Saddam Hussein in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
This article is a chronological listing of allegations of meetings between members of al-Qaeda and members of Saddam Hussein's government, as well as other information relevant to conspiracy theories involving Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
John Holliman was an American broadcast journalist. He was a member of the original reporting corps for CNN, serving as its agriculture correspondent after serving in the same capacity for Associated Press Radio in Washington, DC. He rose to prominence as one of CNN's "Boys of Baghdad" during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 and was one of only three journalists reporting from Baghdad when allied bombing of the city began. He was later known for his coverage of science, technology, and space exploration.
The cinema of Iraq went through a downturn under Saddam Hussein's regime. The development of film and film-going in Iraq reflects the drastic historical shifts that Iraq has experienced in the 20th century. The Iraq War which began in 2003 had an influence on many films being produced.
House of Saddam is a 2008 British docudrama television miniseries that charted the rise and fall of Saddam Hussein. A co-production between BBC Television and HBO Films, the series was first broadcast on BBC Two in four parts between 30 July and 20 August 2008.
The Persian Gulf War, codenamed Operation Desert Storm and commonly referred to as the Gulf War, was a war waged by a United Nations-authorized coalition force from 34 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait. Media coverage of the Gulf War was significant for many reasons including CNN's live reporting from a Baghdad hotel, alternative and international coverage, and the use of images.
The timeline of the Gulf War details the dates of the major events of the 1990–1991 war. It began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 and ended with the Liberation of Kuwait by Coalition forces. Iraq subsequently agreed to the United Nations' demands on 28 February 1991. The ground war officially concluded with the signing of the armistice on 11 April 1991. However, the official end to Operation Desert Storm did not occur until sometime between 1996 - 1998. Major events in the aftermath include anti-Saddam Hussein uprisings in Iraq, massacres against the Kurds by the regime, Iraq formally recognizing the sovereignty of Kuwait in 1994, and eventually ending its cooperation with the United Nations Special Commission in 1998.