Re: Anyone seen 2012 yet?
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Dogtown</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Hey Cavscout, go back to the top and re-read the thread. You made that claim earlier last year and I pointed out that it's false, yet you brought it up a second time in this thread.
Bill, oops, I meant "Transformer 2" - 3 is in production now
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Fuckin memory, man...Besides, in the info below, it was the writer's/director's decision. I'm not quite sure what a producer even does but I can see this decision being made outside the scope of his knowledge.
anyway, this is the article I was basing my info on:
http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/movie-talk-roland-emmerich-fatwa.html
another article:
http://scifiwire.com/2009/11/5-best-things-2012s-direc.php
in case the link goes bad anytime soon as is often the case with yahoo here is the text of the article:
The One Place on Earth Not Destroyed in '2012'
by Jonathan Crow · November 3, 2009
Director Roland Emmerich on the set of Columbia Pictures' 2012
When I interviewed director Roland Emmerich a few months ago about his upcoming disaster flick "2012," the first question I asked was, "Why do you like killing the world?" His response: "It makes for a good story."
Over the past fifteen years, Emmerich has crafted some great tales about global doom, featuring some spectacular scenes of destruction. He had aliens zap the White House in "Independence Day," he let a massive lizard flatten New York City in "Godzilla," and he sent killer tornadoes through downtown Los Angeles in "The Day After Tomorrow."
For "2012," Emmerich set his sites on destroying the some biggest landmarks around the world, from Rome to Rio. But there's one place that Emmerich wanted to demolish but didn't: the Kaaba, the cube-shaped structure located in the center of Mecca. It's the focus of prayers and the site of the Hajj, the biggest, most important pilgrimage in Islam.
"Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit," the filmmaker told scifiwire.com. "But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said, 'I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie.' And he was right."
Photo by Muhannad Fala'ah/Getty Images
Emmerich went on: "We have to all, in the western world, think about this. You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it's just something which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out." Read the full article >>
Traditionally, a fatwa has meant religious opinion by an Islamic scholar or imam. The term has gained currency in the West after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence in the form of a fatwa against British author Salman Rushdie for alleged blasphemies in his book "The Satanic Verses" in 1989. As a result, the Indian-born writer was forced into hiding for most of the '90s.
Emmerich has no qualms about wrecking other major landmarks, however. The massive dome of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican rolls on top of a crowd of churchgoers. The huge Christ the Redeemer statue that looms over Rio de Janeiro disintegrates. And, of course, the White House gets crushed when a wave drops the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy on top of it.
The director was also reportedly approached by people hoping to get their famous landmarks trashed, like Taiwan's Taipei 101, which is the tallest completed building in the world. There's no word yet if that structure will meet the same on-screen fate as the Vatican and the White House. "2012" opens nationwide on November 13.