SPIELBERG'S NEXT MOVIE TO COVER MUNICH OLYMPICS

Next: Spielberg's Biggest Gamble By DAVID M. HALBFINGER (NYT)
LOS ANGELES, June 30 - On Wednesday, Steven Spielberg's apocalyptic thriller "War of the Worlds" invaded movie theaters worldwide. But the director had already moved on. That night in Malta, Mr. Spielberg quietly began filming the most politically charged project he has yet attempted: the tale of a secret Mossad hit squad ordered to assassinate Palestinian terrorists after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Mr. Spielberg has taken risks before…..But with the as-yet-untitled Munich film, already scheduled for Oscar-season release by Universal Pictures on Dec. 23, Mr. Spielberg is tackling material delicate enough that he and his advisers are concerned about adverse effects on matters as weighty as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process if his project is mishandled - or misconstrued in the public mind.

Indeed, the movie's terrain is so packed with potential land mines that, associates say, Mr. Spielberg has sought counsel from advisers ranging from his own rabbi to the former American diplomat Dennis Ross, who in turn has alerted Israeli government officials to the film's thrust. Mr. Spielberg has also shown the script to Mr. Ross's old boss, former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton's aides said Mr. Spielberg reached out to him first more than a year ago and again as recently as Tuesday. Mr. Spielberg is also being advised by Mike McCurry, Mr. Clinton's White House spokesman, and Allan Mayer, a Hollywood spokesman who specializes in crisis communications.

The film, which is being written by the playwright Tony Kushner - it is his first feature screenplay - begins with the killing of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich. But it focuses on the Israeli retaliation: the assassinations, ordered by Prime Minister Golda Meir, of Palestinians identified by Israeli intelligence as terrorists, including some who were not directly implicated in the Olympic massacre. By highlighting such a morally vexing and endlessly debated chapter in Israeli history - one that introduced the still-controversial Israeli tactic now known as targeted killings - Mr. Spielberg could jeopardize his tremendous stature among Jews both in the United States and in Israel….

Making matters more complicated, an important source for Mr. Spielberg's narrative is a 1984 book by George Jonas, "Vengeance," based largely on the account of a purported member of the Mossad's assassination team, whose veracity was later widely called into question….

Mr. Spielberg's interest in the question of a civilized nation's proper response to terrorism deepened, aides said, after the 9/11 attacks, as Americans were grappling for the first time with similar issues - for instance, in each new lethal strike on a suspected terrorist leader by a C.I.A. Predator drone aircraft. In Mr. Kushner's script, people who have read it say, the Israeli assassins find themselves struggling to understand how their targets were chosen, whether they belonged on the hit list and, eventually, what, if anything, their killing would accomplish….

"I don't know how many of them actually had 'troubling doubts' about what they were doing," said Michael B. Oren, the historian and author of "Six Days of War." "It's become a stereotype, the guilt-ridden Mossad hit man. You never see guilt-ridden hit men in any other ethnicity. Somehow it's only the Jews. I don't see Dirty Harry feeling guilt-ridden. It's the flip side of the rationally motivated Palestinian terrorist: you can't have a Jew going to exact vengeance and not feel guilt-ridden about it, and you can't have a Palestinian who's operating out of pure evil - it's got to be the result of some trauma."

And Efraim Halevy, a veteran Mossad agent who headed the organization, Israel's intelligence agency, from 1998 to 2002, warned against reading too much into the misgivings of Israel's hit men. "I know some of the people who were involved," he said. "Maybe people have doubts. If they have doubts, I think it's to their credit. It's not an easy thing to do. But it doesn't mean it's wrong. I'd be very happy to see the doubts on the other side, the fierce debates going on about whether they should or should not do it."

Yet Mr. Spielberg's advisers say he is studiously avoiding the most glaring potential trap: drawing a moral equivalency between the Palestinian attack and the Israeli retaliation.

While people who have read various versions of the script praised Mr. Kushner, the author of "Angels in America" and "Homebody/Kabul," for humanizing the film's hunted Palestinians and giving a fuller sense of their motivation, they said the terrorists would hold little claim to the audience's sympathies. One scene added by Mr. Kushner, who was commissioned last year to rework an earlier draft by the writer Eric Roth, places an Israeli assassin, posing as a terrorist sympathizer, at a safe house where he listens as Palestinians give voice to their anger but also to their hatred of Jews, two people connected with the film said.

Moreover, Mr. Spielberg is making sure to provide enough historical context to explain what impelled Israel to make killers of its sons, as Golda Meir was said to have lamented at the time. "It's easy to look back at historic events with the benefit of hindsight," he said in his statement. "What's not so easy is to try to see things as they must have looked to people at the time."….

Mr. Spielberg originally announced that he would begin production last summer of the script by Mr. Roth, the writer of "Forrest Gump" and "The Insider," but hired Mr. Kushner to humanize what he felt was too procedural a thriller in Mr. Roth's telling, people familiar with both scripts said. In Mr. Roth's script, for instance, the Munich killings dominated the first 15 minutes of the movie. Mr. Spielberg, the readers said, was still weighing how to depict the massacre without minimizing its power, but also without overpowering the audience.