Security issues

Staff member talks about War of the Worlds

By Al Sullivan
Reporter senior staff writer

The tall blonde-haired man wore a baseball cap with an industry logo. He didn't want to give his name because he had signed an agreement with Spielberg about keeping information private.

He said he had never seen so much secrecy, even though as movie industry worker out of New York City he had worked on many movies before taking the job for War of the Worlds.

This previous experience provided him enough insight to know that The War of the Worlds, which stars Tom Cruise and Tim Robbins, would be among the most expensive block busters ever filmed.

"This is going to go way over the $200 million the newspapers said it would cost," the man said. "I've never seen so many trailers for camera equipment in my life."

The man approached me at a poetry venue in Jersey City where I had just read a poem called "War of the Worlds," which played against the character Cruise was portraying in the movie and how Cruise might have used his own past of wandering from city to city as a kid as motivation.

The man had worked on all of the local sets in Bayonne, Newark, Central New Jersey and Staten Island, and chuckled over the idea that this gave him any more contact with the director or the star.

"I've seen both of them about three times during the whole shoot," he said.

Yet he had been on hand to catch some of the great action sequences that the film would unveil, an awesome display of technical and dramatic clashes, and detailed the closing of a highway in Staten Island where a chase scene was filmed.

He cautioned me against wandering onto Spielberg's sets and how tough security was in rooting out violators. He recalled a character that had actually got onto the highway in Staten Island.

"People are always trying to get on the sets," he said.

He also spoke of the various cults that seemed to plague this movie, and not all of them dedicated particularly to Spielberg or Cruise.

"One guy was really up on War of the Worlds, especially the farm at Grover's Mills," he said, referring to the New Jersey site Orson Wells had used as the geographic centerpiece of his 1939 radio adaptation of War of the Worlds. "He kept talking about the farm. He had signed on as an extra. I didn't tell him that the owner of that farm was on the set not far from where this guy was."

This suggested that Spielberg would pay homage to Wells in the 2005 as well as to the 1953 film whose female lead would have a cameo appearance.

This man said Spielberg kept security tight whenever possible and had hired a guy with a shaved head whose name had the harsh clash of a lot of consonants. The description fit one of the security people I had seen near the soccer field in Bayonne from which Tom Cruise came and went by helicopter.

"He's not a man I would mess with," this man said, suggesting the shaved headed security chief had some military experience on the level of Special Forces. This was an additional warning for me to watch my step when taking pictures of sets.

In Bayonne, security had been an issue especially during the outdoor shoots in front of the gas station where some people tried to get a bird's eye view from the top of the bridge.

"One of the lanes was closed off and people kept crossing over to look over the side," the man said. "Security went up there and chased them off."

Security during the Newark devastation scenes proved less effective since a number of fans signed on as extras and smuggled in cameras with which they took snap shots of the wreckage scenes - many of which later appeared on unauthorized Spielberg fan sites on the internet.

"People kept having to go to the bathroom or get something to eat," the man said with a laugh.

Spielberg, he said, was particularly secretive about the movie's script.

"We had to sign for every page," he said. "So if the details got out, he could figure out who did it."

The man also confirmed some of the details behind scenes shot in Central Jersey and the liberal use of the many, many barrels of fog fluid I had seen stored in the Bayonne special effects warehouse. In one scene, fog filled a whole forest.

"This is going to be one hell of a movie," he predicted.