RETURN TO TERROR SIX MONTHS REMOVED FROM SEPT. 11, A SLEW OF DOCUMENTARIES TRIES TO MAKE SENSE OF THE UNTHINKABLE.

Byline: David Kronke Television Writer

GHOSTS DRIVE THE PEOPLE who assemble the footage from Sept. 11 into documents of unfathomable courage and unspeakable tragedy. In cramped editing bays, filmmakers watch the same ghastly images again and again, and then watch them some more, honing and shaping their stories, pausing occasionally to gasp, to shudder, to cry anew. They're driven to make their films perfect, because the thousands who were lost that day deserve no less.

But a day is coming - and ``sooner, rather than later,'' warns Robert Thompson of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television - when it will not always be so. The opportunists are waiting for their moment, to spin profitable schlock from a nation's wounds. Already we've seen Fox News Channel's Geraldo Rivera in Afghanistan, pistol on his hip, turning the War on Terrorism into a celebration of his own machismo.

Monday marks the six-month anniversary of the terrorist attacks; this weekend two films commemorate the date: ``New York Firefighters: The Brotherhood of September 11,'' airing Friday on the Discovery Channel, and ``9/11,'' highlighted by the only footage shot within the World Trade Center minutes after the attacks, on CBS. Memorial Day weekend brings another documentary, HBO's ``In Memoriam: September 11, 2001, New York City,'' personally rubber-stamped by the day's symbolic hero, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Already, however, the inexorable hype of the media machinery is promoting these projects: Where, on Sept. 11, TV news organizations shared their resources, each of these projects promise ``never-before-seen'' footage.

Room to interpret

``All of this is absolutely inevitable,'' says Thompson. ``That day and those images were so colossal, so enormous, experienced in a profoundly immediate way. Then, it was a pure visceral response - we didn't know how it would turn out, if it was a conspiracy, if our response would lead into a greater geopolitical nightmare - there were so many variables. Casualties were initially so much higher. It was hard to begin to digest it.

``Now,'' Thompson continues, ``we're entering the period where we're going to see some things that are enlightening, some that are good, some that are mawkish and awful and everything in between. All of this is so unthinkable, but then, at the time, so was the return of 'Spin City' or 'Saturday Night Live.' ''

Presenting the horrible facts of Sept. 11, notes Sheila Nevins, head of HBO's documentary division, is not a frivolous decision. ``Definitely, there's an element of taste involved in your presentation,'' she notes. ``There are very difficult decisions to be made. You want to present truth but you don't want to exploit the violence. But if you don't demonstrate the truth of the violence of that day, you haven't portrayed the truth accurately.''

Which seems to suggest we should appreciate these earnest productions while we can, and the stories behind ``New York Firefighters'' and ``9/11'' are nearly as compelling as the films themselves.

Gedeon and Jules Naudet, the brother-filmmaking team who shot the footage for CBS' ``9/11,'' had before that day been working on a documentary about the passage into manhood for a ``probie''- a young fireman named Tony Benetatos who was working to become part of a ladder company.

Jules had followed the company on a routine call a few blocks from the World Trade Center, when he happened to film the only footage of the first plane hitting Tower One (the only Naudet footage that has been heretofore seen). He continued with the company to the site and ventured, with the company's Chief Joseph Pfeifer, into Tower One.

Horrific scenes

``The first thing I saw were people in the lobby on fire,'' Jules Naudet remembers. ``Jet fuel had rushed down the elevator shafts and entered the lobby in a fireball. I decided immediately, this was not something to film. For the rest of the day, I never filmed anything graphic in that sense.

``When the second plane hit, I was still in the lobby,'' Naudet continues. ``It was then that we realized that it was a terrorist attack.'' Inside Tower One, Naudet says, no one initially realized that Tower Two had collapsed - they figured it was just a couple of floors far above them compressing. Once what was happening become apparent, he heard Captain Pfeifer order an evacuation - Jules suggests that Pfeifer saved the lives of many firemen that day as well as his own, even though Pfeifer lost his own brother in the conflagration.

``9/11'' has inevitably become controversial, as families of the victims have decried seeing the deceased in peril, but Jules insists he, almost reflexively, decided not to capture that on his camera immediately. ``Honestly, it came when I was entering a building and people were on fire. I glanced at it and it was the first time I had seen anything like this. It was horrible. I thought immediately, it's not something people should see. I did auto-censorship, just like that.''

Throughout the day, both brothers kept filming, under the assumption the other had been killed in the collapse of the towers. Miraculously, none of those at the company they covered were lost that day.

What may shock viewers, however, is the audio element of the documentary, the raw dialogue between the firefighters and the sounds of those who jumped from the higher floors colliding. ``That sound is tough, and you hear people talk about it,'' says CBS News' Susan Zirinsky. ``You'll hear a fireman say: 'I kept wondering how tough it would be to know jumping was a better option.' You don't see it, but you need to know the reality existed. We edited quite a lot of them, but the sound is overwhelming.''

Not so lucky

Although the firefighters the Naudet brothers covered survived, such was not the case for Rescue 3, a Bronx team that dispatched eight firemen and lost them all, whose story is told in Peter Schnall's ``New York Firefighters.'' Schnall had profiled the house a decade earlier; three of the men he had known were lost in the towers' collapse.

In addition to the events of that day, Schnall captures the families of the murdered firefighters visiting the station. ``The station became a more important character than I had ever imagined,'' he says. ``This was a place where their husbands, fathers, brothers lives still existed. Their coats were still hanging on racks. In that setting, they felt comfortable to talk to us in a way that I didn't expect. I asked them to just talk to each other about what they were going through.''

HBO's documentary will soon follow, of which former Mayor Giuliani says, ``It's important to have an accurate recitation of what happened, conveying what it felt like to be in the middle of it, particularly those big clouds rushing through the canyons of the city.

``It's (also) important for both scholars and people in government to take a look at how we responded, to figure out what we did right and what we did wrong, because we're going to face things like this in the future. Where was it effective? Where should we have been better prepared? Those are all very valid questions that are important for people to ask in the future.''

Questions remain, however, regarding what is appropriate to show in these films, or how to present them.

``At some point, we did look at the question - are we showing the building collapsing too many times?'' Schnall admits. ``We thought that very thought, we wanted not to superficialize the whole event, which could anesthetize viewers to the horrors of that day. There is a concern about how much people can take.''

The right host?

Some wonder why CBS needed to recruit Hollywood star Robert De Niro to host ``9/11.'' ``This was shot by a classy documentary crew, not some two-bit operation; this is about something central to our lives,'' says Thompson. ``I'm nervous about De Niro introducing it. That turns it into an entertainment extravaganza.''

CBS insists that because the film will raise money, it was inappropriate for its news division to get involved. De Niro - who appears three times, fleetingly, in the production - was appropriate since he's a New Yorker who lives near the attack, the network says.

More bizarre permutations of the aftermath of the tragedy are in the offing: ABC has a ``reality'' series, ``Profiles From the Front Line,'' based on American military exigencies in Afghanistan, produced by filmmaker Jerry Bruckheimer (``Top Gun'') without news crews.

``(ABC News) is miffed, and they ought to be - everyone should be fuming,'' Thompson says. ``There are very few vacancies for camera crews to go off to battle, and those few should be relegated to people who have gone through some semblance of journalism ethics. They need to know how to handle and deliver the story we really do need to know. I'm surprised there's not more outrage over that.''

Officials at ABC News and ABC Entertainment refused comment.

Most filmmakers involved admitted that there were personal stakes involved in ensuring Sept. 11 documentaries were respectful. As Schnall, a longtime New York native, put it: ``Every time a fire truck goes by, people look at them differently. I was walking my 7-year-old to school recently and she asked, as all those pictures of the missing eventually disappeared, 'Dad, how come the pictures are down? Did they find everybody?' ''

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- cover -- color) When does tragedy become entertainment?

With two new documentaries, TV faces the challenge of reporting on 9/11 without exploiting it

(3) The World Trade Center lies in rubble in an image from ``9/11,'' the documentary shot by the Naudet brothers, who followed a fire company into the disaster.