The Other Paper
Thursday, June 28, 2007

Nutty or not, here they come - Columbus’ 9/11 conspiracy theorists unite for a film fest at Studio 35

By Jordan Gentile

Even at a time when most Americans have turned against the Iraq War and the president’s approval ratings loiter at sub-Jimmy Carter levels, there remains one strain of anti-Bush fervor that mainstream politicians and pundits won’t touch with a 10-foot pole.

This, of course, is the belief that the administration conspired to topple the World Trade Center on 9-11 — or at least cover up the real story behind its collapse—in order to sell a new war to the public.

Recently, celebrities like Rosie O’Donnell and Charlie Sheen have picked up the mantle of “9-11 Truth,” as the conspiracy theorists call their movement. To no one’s surprise, the actors’ comments were met with ridicule and derision.

Sherry Clark can relate. When the raven-haired, Delaware, Ohio-born mother of two—a self-described Republican “trophy wife” who voted for George W. Bush twice—was converted to the cause last year, she was told by friends and relatives to seek mental help. The Presbyterian church she helped create, she said, suddenly wanted nothing to do with her or her activities. And she’s currently divorcing her husband, to whom she became an embarrassment and social liability.

“It was quite a painful thing to go through,” Clark said. “We’re called conspiracy nuts.”

Despite her travails, Clark persists in trying to persuade those who doubt her. This Saturday at Studio 35, a group she co-founded, Columbus 9/11 Truth, will present the Truth Film Festival—a slate of five muckraking documentaries that attempt to expose various shady dealings within the highest reaches of media and government, including a couple of films that radically question the accepted explanation for 9-11.

Clark pitched the fest to Studio 35 co-owner Eric Brembeck during the theater’s Earth Day celebration in April, and, after some consideration, he gave her the green light.

“Clintonville tends to run a little liberal,” Brembeck said of his theater’s neighborhood. “It just seemed like the right venue, the right fit. Why not?”

Whether the people of Clintonville—liberal though they may be—are open to the suggestion that the U.S. government had a role in, or covered up, the murder of 3,000 American citizens is anyone’s guess.

However, even filmgoers who are skeptical of the festival’s claims might get something out of its programming. Conspiracy-themed pictures, from Three Days of the Condor to JFK, have long held a dark allure for American audiences, and there will certainly be enough material Saturday to sate even the most paranoid movie buffs.

The festival kicks off with America: Freedom to Fascism, an IRS exposé that purports to show how much abuse the U.S. government is willing to heap on its citizens. It is followed by Orwell Rolls in His Grave, a treatise on how the mainstream media whitewashes threats to democracy, and Oil, Smoke and Mirrors, which attempts to explain America’s nefarious intentions in the Middle East—and why, perhaps, the Bush administration might have a motive for revving up the nation’s appetite for war. (Hint: It’s black, wet and increasingly expensive.)

These pictures have been cannily selected to lay the groundwork for the more controversial claims in the festival’s last two entries: 9/11 Press for Truth, which suggests a government cover-up after the World Trade Center disaster, and Improbable Collapse: The Demolition of Our Republic, which tries to scientifically prove that the buildings could not have been brought down by two jet planes alone.

Of course, there have been many rebuttals to the claims in Improbable Collapse and similar documentaries—most notably from the magazine Popular Mechanics, which reported in 2005 that the buildings’ steel skeletons did not have to reach a 1,500 degrees Celsius “melting” temperature to collapse, as the conspiracy theorists claim. They could have been fatally weakened at a mere 400 degrees Celsius, a temperature easily reached as a result of the jet-fuel fires that raged on 9-11.

Clark, of course, dismisses the article as “that stupid thing in Popular Mechanics.”

“That was yellow journalism,” she said. “The magazine is owned by Hearst, you know.”

The film-festival idea came last January from Jamie Henderson, a 22-year-old Ohio State senior who’d recently joined Clark’s newly hatched group. Henderson’s thinking, as Clark recalls it, was that anybody who hoped to convince the public of a 9-11 conspiracy would have to do it visually, by showing how the buildings came down.

But there was another reason the group deemed the movie concept so attractive: It would place similarly open-minded strangers in a movie theater together — and away from judgmental family members.

“Your friends and family—they don’t want to see you upset,” Clark said, speaking from personal experience. “‘What made you upset? 9-11 Truth? Well, then stay away from that.’”

Luckily for the group’s cinematic ambitions, there were lots of radical 9-11 docs to choose from, most of them already in the public domain. One of them, in fact, was the picture that first inspired Clark to join the movement—back when she was still a Republican trophy wife. It’s an Internet movie called Loose Change, and she says it changed her life.

“I was beside myself—I was determined to prove them wrong,” Clark said, referring to the filmmakers. “But doggone it if they weren’t right.”

Of course, it’s hard to imagine most viewers—regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum—being won over by either Loose Change or the movies scheduled for this weekend. Many, in fact, would find their claims morally reprehensible. Brembeck, however, isn’t worried about a backlash.

“I don’t think I’d show a neo-Nazi film or anything like that,” said the theater owner. “Far right, far left—just total wackos. I’m not into that kind of stuff.”

“But,” he said, “I don’t think this is on that same level.”

Told that many people find 9-11 conspiracy theorists to be exactly the kind of “wackos” he describes, Brembeck replied, “Who calls them that? Fox News?”

For Clark, the Truth Film Festival remains very much about reaching the people we assume are unreachable—people just like she used to be.

“That’s why I have so much compassion for those who ridicule me,” she said. “I used to be one of those people—God, this is so embarrassing—who said, ‘Turn the desert into glass.’”

“But,” she said, “the truth was so jarring and so obvious that I had no other choice but to change my mind.