The Looming Tower | |
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Genre | |
Created by | |
Based on | The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright |
Starring | |
Composer | Will Bates |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
No. of episodes | 10 |
Production | |
Executive producers |
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Producers |
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Production locations | New York City Johannesburg Morocco |
Cinematography |
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Editors |
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Running time | 46–51 minutes |
Production companies |
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Original release | |
Network | Hulu |
Release | February 28 – April 18, 2018 |
The Looming Tower is an American drama television miniseries, based on Lawrence Wright's 2006 book of the same name, which premiered on Hulu on February 28, 2018. The 10-episode drama series was created and executive produced by Dan Futterman, Alex Gibney, and Wright. Futterman also acted as the series's showrunner and Gibney directed the first episode. The series stars an ensemble cast featuring Jeff Daniels, Tahar Rahim, Wrenn Schmidt, Bill Camp, Louis Cancelmi, Virginia Kull, Ella Rae Peck, Sullivan Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Peter Sarsgaard.
The Looming Tower traces the "rising threat of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the late 1990s and how the rivalry between the FBI and CIA during that time may have inadvertently set the path for the tragedy of 9/11. It follows members of the I-49 Squad in New York and Alec Station in Washington, D.C., the counter-terrorism divisions of the FBI and CIA, respectively, as they travel the world fighting for ownership of information while seemingly working toward the same goal – trying to prevent an imminent attack on U.S. soil." [1]
No. | Title | Directed by | Written by | Original release date | |
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1 | "Now It Begins..." | Alex Gibney | Story by : Dan Futterman & Alex Gibney & Lawrence Wright Teleplay by : Dan Futterman | February 28, 2018 | |
In August 1998, FBI agent Ali Soufan is asked to join John O'Neill's counterterrorism unit known as "I-49". As the squad fights to get information out of the CIA, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are bombed. | |||||
2 | "Losing My Religion" | John Dahl | Story by : Dan Futterman & Alex Gibney & Lawrence Wright Teleplay by : Dan Futterman | February 28, 2018 | |
Following the concurrent embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the FBI begins to investigate in Africa, while the CIA begins to devise a plan to strike back. | |||||
3 | "Mistakes Were Made" | John Dahl | Bash Doran | February 28, 2018 | |
Shaughnessy and Bennett capture Mohamad al-Owhali, who confesses to bombing the U.S. embassy in Nairobi after being interrogated by Chesney. O'Neill and Soufan search the home of a second suspect, Anas al-Liby, but do not have enough evidence to hold him. Stuart's minimal clearance at the CIA prevents them from building a stronger case. Schmidt convinces the President to retaliate by bombing an al-Qaeda training camp in Khost, Afghanistan. | |||||
4 | "Mercury" | Ali Selim | Adam Rapp | March 7, 2018 | |
I-49 obtains the phone number of Ahmed al-Hada, but their tap on the phone is taken over by the CIA. Alec Station learns of the Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda Summit from this, but Schmidt clashes with his superiors over their reluctance to commit to further airstrikes. Schmidt is demoted leaving Marsh in charge of Alec Station. | |||||
5 | "Y2K" | Ali Selim | Shannon Houston | March 14, 2018 | |
Events continue through New Year's Eve and the transition past a potential coordinated terrorist attack to coincide with Year 2000 problem ("Y2K"). | |||||
6 | "Boys at War" | Michael Slovis | Dan Futterman | March 21, 2018 | |
In Afghanistan, al-Zawahiri recruits Mohamed Atta to lead a hijacking on US soil. He also sends a young boy, who is a survivor of Operation Infinite Reach, to meet with two associates in Yemen. The three of them carry out the USS Cole bombing. O'Neill has his briefcase stolen while attending a mandatory retirement seminar in Florida and confesses the potential security breach to the bureau. | |||||
7 | "The General" | Michael Slovis | Ali Selim | March 28, 2018 | |
O'Neill and Soufan travel to Yemen to investigate the bombing of Cole and are able to implicate Tawfiq bin Attash, one of the architects of the Malaysia meeting. Marsh refuses to reveal Attash's last known whereabouts when Marino asks her. She hides the surveillance photos of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, fearing their eventual discovery by the FBI. | |||||
8 | "A Very Special Relationship" | Craig Zisk | Bash Doran | April 4, 2018 | |
The FBI has O'Neill removed from Yemen at the request of Ambassador Bodine. Soufan stays behind and learns about the link to Malaysia. After several co-workers confront her, Marsh agrees to start sharing intelligence if the FBI can prove that it already knows enough to identify al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Sanchez learns of an upcoming New York Times story about a stolen briefcase containing classified documents and fires O'Neill to save face. | |||||
9 | "Tuesday" | Craig Zisk | Adam Rapp | April 11, 2018 | |
After learning that a man has been flagged for ignoring the landing component of a flying lesson, I-49 requests a list of Arabs enrolled in American flight schools who have other aggravating factors. Marsh complies but obfuscates the fact that two of the men in her file are known al-Qaeda operatives. O'Neill starts working at the World Trade Center, while Atta's al-Qaeda cell decides to finalize its plans. | |||||
10 | "9/11" | Craig Zisk | Dan Futterman & Ali Selim | April 18, 2018 | |
Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, various members of O'Neill's squad try to get in contact with him. Meanwhile, Schmidt is reassigned back into his old position at Alec Station, and Soufan is finally given access to Abu Jandal and begins to interrogate him to confirm that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks. During the 9/11 Commission hearings, Marsh lies in her testimony regarding the handling of the Hazmi and Mihdhar files to save her own face. |
The project emanated from Ali Soufan and Lawrence Wright's realization that both of them were fielding offers from various studios and production companies regarding the rights to their books about the lead-up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. The pair met with filmmaker Alex Gibney, who had already adapted Wright's one-man show, My Trip to Al-Qaeda and book Going Clear for HBO. Wright said about the collaborations with Gibney, "He's a documentarian, and he understands the importance of truth. We've been in the trenches. I came to trust him, and that's what I wanted — someone I felt could handle and negotiate these really difficult moral questions." Following that partnership, the team began to interview potential showrunners. They soon landed on screenwriter Dan Futterman after one meeting, and then decided to work on their pitch for the series. [3] After refining their pitch, they approached HBO, Netflix and Amazon with the project. As a courtesy, they also reached out to Hulu without really placing them into consideration due to the perception of the streaming service as merely a place to stream episodes of network television shows. However, during their meeting with Hulu they were offered a straight-to-series order, an abbreviated development process, a promise not to cave under pressure from the federal agencies portrayed in the series, and the largest financial commitment of any service or network they had previously met with. It was due to these terms and conditions that the producers ultimately decided to sign with the company. [4]
During pre-production, producers spent months doing exhaustive homework. This involved interviewing the real-life counterparts of the characters they were bringing to life, including Ali Soufan and his wife; former National Security Council chief counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke; former and current members of the FBI's I-49 squad; and former members of the CIA. [5] Futterman has mentioned that in addition to adapting Wright's book, the series also drew from Soufan's book The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda and the 9/11 Commission Report. [6]
In September 2016, Hulu ordered The Looming Tower to series from Legendary Television with executive producers including Alex Gibney, Dan Futterman, and Lawrence Wright. It was announced that the limited series would consist of ten episodes and premiere in 2017. [7] It was later reported that Craig Zisk was also an executive producer for the series and would be directing as well. [8] Ultimately, five different directors were chosen to helm the series' ten episodes: Zisk, Michael Slovis, John Dahl, Ali Selim and Alex Gibney. The show's first episode was directed by Gibney, episodes six and seven were directed by Slovis, and episodes eight, nine, and ten were directed by Zisk. The series' story requires multiple international locations with the first five episodes having scenes that are set in seven countries and ten cities. Early on in the development process, Zisk and Gibney went on several international location scouting missions, in order to give their fellow directors options to pick from for filming. [9]
In January 2017, it was announced that Tahar Rahim was cast in one of the series' lead roles as Ali Soufan. [10] In February 2017, Michael Stuhlbarg and Bill Camp were announced as series regulars and cast as Richard Clarke and Robert Chesney, respectively. [11] In March 2017, Jeff Daniels was cast as John O'Neill. [12] Also announced that month were the castings of Sullivan Jones, Virginia Kull, Louis Cancelmi, Peter Sarsgaard, and Wrenn Schmidt and Ella Rae Peck as series regulars. [13] [14] [15] In May 2017, Alec Baldwin was cast as George Tenet in a guest role. [16]
After being cast as the late O'Neill, Jeff Daniels struggled on how to approach playing the role. He ultimately credits significant research he did involving speaking with those who knew O'Neill. At one point, he spent an evening at a bar in Lower Manhattan with ten of O'Neill's colleagues, who'd worked with him for years. He commented, "I had a great meeting with those guys, walked out to the corner, turned to get a cab and there's the World Trade Center. To feel him, you need the spirit of what John is fighting for." [5]
The series began filming on May 3, 2017 in New York City [16] and it was expected that shooting would take place in a number of locations around the world. [17] Ultimately, the production lasted six months and sprawled across three continents and six countries. [5] Various places stood-in for the locales in which the story actually took place. For instance, scenes set in Yemen were filmed in Morocco, and drone and car travel shots of Pakistani landscapes were used to evoke Afghanistan. Johannesburg, South Africa served as the production base, and was where the bulk of filming took place. The city possessed the "visual variety" that the producers were seeking, and doubled for various places including Nairobi, Tanzania, England, Albania, and Las Vegas, Nevada. [9] While there was an initial push to shoot the production all in South Africa, Zisk argued for filming the back half in Morocco. In August 2017, filming took place at the River Café in Brooklyn. [9]
Production designer Lester Cohen credits Wright's and Gibney's list of contacts and the production's research team for allowing him to gather the material needed to recreate various settings. During the design period, a set dresser shared photos of his tour in Afghanistan and an art coordinator's daughter dove into the newspaper archives in Nairobi to help re-create the bombing site of the 1998 embassy attacks. Those details informed the design of the huge rubble pile that shut down the central business district in Cape Town for weeks. Also, as much of the story that takes place in the United States occurs in offices, practical sets were built, including Alec Station and the FBI office in New York. [5]
On December 19, 2017, Hulu released the first preview of the series through a collection of images and a "first-look" video featuring interviews with the cast and crew. [18] On January 11, 2018, Hulu released the first official trailer for the series. [19]
On February 13, 2018, The Washington Post held a screening of the first episode. Following the screening, journalist David Ignatius moderated a question-and-answer session with Jeff Daniels, Tahar Rahim, Peter Sarsgaard, Wrenn Schmidt, Dan Futterman, Alex Gibney, Lawrence Wright, and Ali Soufan. [20] [21]
On February 15, 2018, the series had its official premiere at The Paris Theatre in New York City. [22] On February 20, 2018, the series held its international premiere during the annual Berlin International Film Festival at the Zoo Palast cinema in Berlin. [23] [24]
On February 27, 2018, the LBJ Presidential Library held a screening of the first episode. Following the screening, LBJ Foundation president Mark K. Updegrove moderated a question-and-answer session with Lawrence Wright, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Ali Soufan. [25] On May 1, 2018, episodes 1 and 2 were screened during the Series Mania Festival at the Le Majestic cinema in Lille, France. It appeared alongside seven other television programs in the festival's "Best of USA" series of shows. [26] [27]
In all regions outside the United States, the series is distributed by Amazon Video. [28] The series premiered on March 1, 2018, in the United Kingdom and subsequent episodes were released weekly for the following seven weeks, [29] The series began airing weekly on April 26, 2019, on BBC Two, with catch-up availability on iPlayer. [30] In Germany and Austria, the series premiered on March 9, 2018. [31]
The Looming Tower was released on Blu-ray and DVD on September 18, 2018. The set includes four behind-the-scenes featurettes and audio commentaries on the premiere and finale episodes. [32]
The Looming Tower was met with a positive response from critics. On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds an 88% approval rating with an average rating of 7.4 out of 10 based on 60 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "Well-acted and powerfully written, The Looming Tower delivers gripping counter-terrorism drama rendered even more soberingly effective through its roots in real-life events." [33] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the series a score of 74 out of 100 based on 25 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". [34]
The Washington Post 's Hank Stuever praised the series for its "coolly fascinating pace and tenor" and commented that "Tahar Rahim gives a smart and sincere performance as Ali Soufan, a Muslim American agent on O'Neill's squad." [35] The Hollywood Reporter 's Daniel Fienberg offered the series praise saying, "The Looming Tower demands a hasty combination of faith in the storytellers and half-forgotten knowledge of the history. Absent that, the series is essentially like a well-shot, brilliantly cast, fast-moving season of Homeland , which is better than the actual current season of Homeland." [36] In a positive review, Variety 's Maureen Ryan said that the show was an "accessible, illuminating series that does not downplay the petty and tragic elements of the tale." [37] Time 's Daniel D'Addario commended the show as "a series that's both gripping and relevant. It succeeds, with a project that restages the years before Sept. 11 and tells a darkly ironic story about the fecklessness of government." [38] In a more negative review, Collider 's Chris Cabin criticized the series calling it "a middling act of didacticism, an attempt to pass off facts as insight and characters as little more than the sum of their intellect. Rather than tracing the complicated personalities and ludicrous dick-measuring contests that led to Al-Qaeda carrying out the biggest terrorist attack in American history, Gibney, Wright, and the rest of the creative team boil down the personal drama to little more than a series of arguments and discussions in offices at varying volumes." [39]
It has been reported that if the limited series is sufficiently successful, a sequel series could possibly be ordered. Early discussions among the producers have begun; their concept revolves around the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood. [5]
Khalid Muhammad Abdallah al-Mihdhar was a Saudi terrorist hijacker. He was one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon as part of the September 11 attacks.
John Patrick O'Neill was an American counter-terrorism expert who worked as a special agent and eventually a special agent in charge in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1995, O'Neill began to intensely study the roots of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing after he assisted in the capture of Ramzi Yousef, who was the leader of that plot.
Barbara K. Bodine is an American academic and former diplomat. Bodine formerly directed the Scholars in the Nation's Service Initiative (SINSI) and lectured at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She currently serves as Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy and Director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University.
Daniel Paul Futterman is an American actor, screenwriter, and producer.
Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed is a double agent who worked for both the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Egyptian Islamic Jihad simultaneously, reporting on the workings of each for the benefit of the other.
Philip Alexander Gibney is an American documentary film director and producer. In 2010, Esquire magazine said Gibney "is becoming the most important documentarian of our time."
Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki was an American-Yemeni lecturer and alleged jihadist who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by a U.S. government drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a drone strike from the U.S. government. U.S. government officials have claimed that al-Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda.
Lawrence Wright is an American writer and journalist, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear. His 2020 novel, The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic, was released in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, to generally positive reviews.
The following is a list of attacks which have been carried out by Al-Qaeda.
The Bin Laden Issue Station, also known as Alec Station, was a standalone unit of the Central Intelligence Agency in operation from 1996 to 2005 dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden and his associates, both before and after the 9/11 attacks. It was headed initially by CIA analyst Michael Scheuer and later by Richard Blee and others.
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is a 2006 nonfiction book by Lawrence Wright, a journalist for The New Yorker. Wright examines the origins of the militant organization Al-Qaeda, the background for various terrorist attacks and how they were investigated, and the events that led to the September 11 attacks.
After the Central Intelligence Agency lost its role as the coordinator of the entire United States Intelligence Community (IC), special coordinating structures were created by each president to fit his administrative style and the perceived level of threat from terrorists during his term.
Osama bin Laden (1957–2011), a militant and founder of Al-Qaeda in 1988, believed Muslims should kill civilians and military personnel from the United States and allied countries until they withdrew support for Israel and withdrew military forces from Islamic countries. He was indicted in United States federal court for his involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, and was on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Ali H. Soufan is a Lebanese-American former FBI agent who was involved in a number of high-profile anti-terrorism cases both in the United States and around the world. A 2006 New Yorker article described Soufan as coming closer than anyone to preventing the September 11 attacks and implied that he would have succeeded had the CIA been willing to share information with him. He resigned from the FBI in 2005 after publicly chastising the CIA for not sharing intelligence with him which could have prevented the attacks.
Abu Zubaydah is a Saudi citizen who helped manage the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan. Captured in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, he has since been held by the United States as an enemy combatant. Beginning in August 2002, Abu Zubaydah was the first prisoner to undergo enhanced interrogation techniques. There is disagreement among government sources as to how effective these techniques were; some officials contend that Abu Zubaydah gave his most valuable information before they were used; CIA lawyer John Rizzo said he gave more material afterward.
Bathsheba Sarah Lee "Bash" Doran is a British-born playwright and TV scriptwriter living in New York City.
Ahmad Mohammad Ali al-Hada is an al-Qaeda operative from Yemen whose family was described by US government officials as a "supercell" within the al-Qaeda network. By February 2002, the "communications hub" which al-Hada running was no longer active following the death of his son, Samir.
Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden is a 2013 documentary film directed by Greg Barker that explores the Central Intelligence Agency's investigation of Osama bin Laden, starting from 1995 until his death in 2011. It premiered on HBO on May 1, 2013, two years after the mission that killed bin Laden. The documentary features narratives by many of the CIA analysts and operatives who worked over a decade to understand and track bin Laden, and includes archival film footage from across Washington, D.C., Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East. It also features extensive and rarely seen footage of Al-Qaeda training and propaganda videos, including video suicide notes from various terrorists who later worked as suicide bombers.
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