Kudos to Harvey Keitel

Harvey Keitel has been a favorite actor of mine ever since he played Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe in 1994's Pulp Fiction, so I was pleased to hear last summer that Keitel would play John O'Neill in an ABC miniseries on 9/11. I figured that if Keitel was involved, then it would be a serious treatment of a serious subject.

But with all the news of late that the ABC mini-series was going to be a SwiftBoat-type attack on the Clinton Administration, I started thinking that Keitel was perhaps an undercover right wing extremist who signed on to the project for political reasons. But this New York Post article restored my faith in him:

When Oscar nominee Harvey Keitel signed on to play Deputy FBI Director John O'Neill, who perished in the World Trade Center attacks, he thought the film's aim was to be historically correct, he said.

"It turned out not all the facts were correct," which led to "arguments," he said on CNN.

Virtually from Day 1 of shooting, "Keitel put his own researcher on the case," looking to correct historical, character and other inaccuracies he found in the script, said John Dondertman, a production designer on the film.

That led to Keitel rewriting most of his own lines - which in turn meant almost daily revisions for cast members who had scenes with him.

A particular point of contention was a scene in which O'Neill, observing reams of Arabic documents, asks his assistant, "Do we have Arab translators?" only to be told, "I don't know of any. I'll call around."

"Keitel couldn't understand why the FBI didn't have Arabic translators, so the dialogue was changed on the spot," said a script supervisor.

On one occasion, Keitel holed up in his hotel for an entire day with director David Cunningham revising the script.

Other times, Cunningham would "fumble through the 9/11 Commission book trying to figure out how to correct details Keitel called into question," said the script supervisor.

Good for you, Harvey. Of course, what all this really means is that the original script -- i.e, the one that existed before Keitel's re-writes -- had to be one of the biggest pieces of shit in television history.