6C
---
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 2007
ENTERTAINMENT
ACROSS
1 Oil cartel acronym
5 Equitable
9 Upper surface
12 Plane-related
13 Farm measure
14 Pub orde
15 Sullied
17 Carnival venue
18 Destiny
19 Poultry buy
21 Frequently
24 Articulated fanfare
25 Piglet's papa
26 Quitters of a sort
30 “— Town”
31 Accomplishment
32 Brock of baseball
33 Place of great wealth
35 Tolerate
36 Pedestal occupant
37 Benefactor
38 Tablecloth material
40 Not quite a quartet
42 Expert
43 "Pulp Fiction" director
48 Calendar pp.
49 Culture medium
50 Weed whacker?
51 Navy rank (Abbr.)
52 Run at an easy gait
53 Uppity one
2 Shell-game need
3 Blunder
4 Discuss the situation (with)
5 Speedy
6 Rue the run
7 Rage
8 Porters
9 Rainout cover
10 Hodge-podge
11 Menial worker
16 Author Fleming
20 Fuss
21 Reed instrument
DOWN
1 Feedbag
morsel
22 Out of bounds
23 Result of a delay
24 Dorothy's dog
26 Offer from Howie Mandel
27 "Awe-some!"
28 Well- — (prosperous)
29 Litigant
31 Head-on
34 Praise in verse
35 Alternatives to tables
37 Cacophony
38 Weak, as an excuse
39 PC symbol
40 Snare
41 Almost raw
44 Past
45 Charged bit
46 Ultra-modernist
47 Sphere
Solutions on page 11C
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 10 11
15 16 17 18 19 20 10 11
| 18 | | | | 19 | 20 | | | |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | | | 24 | | | | |
| 25 | | | | | 26 | 27 | | | | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | | | | 31 | | | | | 32 | | |
| 33 | | | 34 | | | | | 35 | | | |
| 36 | | | 37 | | | | |
| 38 | 39 | | | | | 40 | 41 | | | |
| 42 | | | | 43 | 44 | | | | 45 | 46 | 47 |
| 48 | | | 49 | | | | 50 | | | |
| 51 | | | 52 | | | 53 | | |
Telling a 62-year-old story
》 DOCUMENTARY
Film includes formerly banned footage of post-detonation in Hiroshima
BY DAVID BAUDER
Associated Press
NEW YORK — It's hard to imagine HBO's disturbing documentary on survivors of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan appearing on an American TV network 10 or 20 years after the event. Filmmaker Steve Okazaki tried — and failed — to make it for the 50th anniversary.
There's apparently enough emotional scar tissue built up to allow HBO's premiere of "White Light/ Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" tonight at 7 p.m., exactly 62 years after the
United States detonated the firstever nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. The second, and so far last, atomic bomb was dropped three days later. It ended World War II.
"History is always worth recording and if there is a moment in history that hasn't been recorded and you're in a place where you have the resources, you should do it," said Sheila Nevins, head of HBO's documentary unit. She hopes it becomes a document of record shown in schools.
Why is the time finally right?
The uncomfortable footage of cities reduced to rubble and gro
tesquely deformed survivors has received relatively little circulation because — unlike the well-recorded Holocaust — this was something done by Americans, Nevins said.
HBO and Okazaki also felt the same urgency experienced by "The Greatest Generation" author Tom Brokaw and Ken Burns, maker of PBS' epic series on World War II coming this fall.
8-7 CRYPTOQUIP
F W S X B J F Q R DR Q O E Q, F
I L X G G R Q O G M E K H G
D E T M X H F H F E Q T F I S H V X
V F B B X J R G R I L B W
Today's Cryptoquip Clue: G equals S
by Dave Green
Conceptis Sudoku
2007 Concept Puzzles, Dist. by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
9 7
8 1
6
2
5
7
8
4
9
7
4
8
5
6
4
9
7
3
9
5
"I do have strong opinions and feelings about it. But I have a stronger motivation to get these stories out."
8/07
Difficulty Level ★★
People who fought and survived World War II are dying quickly now, and soon there will be no more eye-witnesses.
white Americans held in custody with Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The project dated back to the
The film is built on stories told by 14 survivors, with childrens' pictures depicting the bombing and footage of the injured that was banned from the public for 25 years. The American-born Okazaki interviews crew members who dropped the bombs and wondered whether they would escape before their planes were engulfed in the mushroom cloud.
STEVE OKAZAKI
Filmmaker
early 1980s, when Okazaki agreed to accompany his sister to a San Francisco area meeting of bomb survivors for a school project she was doing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Okazaki wanted to make a comprehensive documentary about the
She dropped
experience of living through the bombings and began doing it for PBS in the mid-1990s. But the project fell through, with the filmmaker believing PBS didn't want to risk angering
World War II veterans. He instead made a more personal film, "The Mushroom Club," and figured his dream was dead.
That's when he heard from Nevins.
"It was well-received intellectually, but it wasn't well-received emotionally."
When he attended a festival of bombing-related films in the 1980s, Okazaki was struck by how little survivors were heard from. People had an aversion; it was much easier to
SHEILA NEVINS Head of HBO's documentary unit
"I was shocked when they called and said they wanted to do this film and when they described it, I realized it was the film I wanted to do for 25 years," he said.
He made a short film and others that showed his interest in the era, including the Oscar-winning "Days of Waiting," about one of the few
the class, but he went to the meeting anyway. At its end, one man stood up and said that everyone who agreed Okazaki should make a film about their stories should raise their hands. They all did and turned to him.
debate whether dropping bombs that instantly killed more than 200,000 people was right or wrong.
That debate continues today. Many believe that a potential U.S. invasion
would have killed many more people if the Japanese hadn't been shocked by the bombs into surrender. Some think Japan's war effort was near an end anyway, and that the bombs were partly meant to intimidate Russia.
Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, navigator of the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, is among those who believe it was necessary to end the war.
He saw Okazaki's film and didn't seem overwhelmed.
"The story about the survivors of this has been told many, many times," Van Kirk, 86, told The Associated Press. "It doesn't change. And this is just another story about survivors. I don't think there will be much reaction to it at all."
There were no advance protests. Nevins is curious about how it will be received after what she thought was a strangely dry-eyed reception at a Sundance Film Festival screening. "It was well-received intellectually but it wasn't well-received emotionally," she said.
Other than documenting the horror of war, the film carefully takes no sides on the morality of dropping the bomb. Okazaki even refuses, in an interview, to say how he personally feels about it.
"I do have strong opinions and feelings about it," he said. "But I have a stronger motivation to get these stories out. There was this empty space on the shelves under 'H'."
That's not entirely true. The 1970s film "Hiroshima Mon Amour" contained post-detonation footage. The 1989 Japanese film "Kuroi ame (Black Rain)" was about the aftermath. Reporter John Hersey's book "Hiroshima" has received wide circulation.
Something Okazaki found mystifying, and a barrier to his research, was the lingering stigma faced by bomb survivors in Japan. Perhaps it's because they remind Japanese of a time they'd rather forget; it was never fully explained to him. When he sought to interview the "Hiroshima Maidens", girls who came to the United States in the 1950s for surgery on disfigurements, the only one whod talk was a woman who now lives in the U.S.
Okazaki also found a plaque where the Nagasaki bomb detonated that said everyone within a one kilometer area was killed instantly — except an 8-year-old girl who had fallen asleep in a bomb shelter.
He tracked her down and she refused a meeting.
"Her husband only knew that she was a survivor and she felt that would hurt her husband's business and her children's job opportunities," he said. "So the story will never be told."
1