A Brand New "Path to 9/11" Complaint: ABC Ads Look Oddly Familiar

We all know that ABC's event movie, "The Path to 9/11," is generating a lot of controversy. Bill Clinton doesn't like it because he thinks it portrays him as soft on Bin Laden, etc., etc. ABC is standing squarely behind its "dramatic license" defense. That is, before they decided to take it back into the editing room, they were. Anyway, before I get my own complaint going, take a good look at their poster.

All right. There you go. Very distinctive, right? My first reaction upon seeing it was, "Huh?" Exactly ten years ago this month (September 21, 1996), I was launching an NBC series called "Dark Skies" that was darkly paranoid and floated what my writing/producing partner Brent Friedman and I liked to call the Unified Field Theory of Conspiracies: that President Kennedy had been killed because he was going to tell the truth about UFOs in his second term. Take a look at our poster.

I guess if it was good once, it can be good again. I just thought the world should know. We were there first! In Hollywood this is not called ripping somebody off, it's called an "homage."

Now if only SONY (which owns "Dark Skies") would release our series on DVD with that key artwork, think of all new viewers we might get from people who think they are buying a 9/11 movie and get ours instead!

Buy One, Get One Free!

And as long as we're talking about conspiracy theories, I'd just like to state for the record that the one being circulated about 9/11, that somehow we did this to ourselves, is about the stupidest thing I've ever heard. On the other hand, I would like to thank the Kool-Aid drinkers who are circulating it because they have made the fictional paranoia that Brent and I hatched about JFK and aliens look pretty reasonable.