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| 911 Families in film furor |
| 2006-02-13 |
| Angry about WTC pix in sleaze flick Families of 9/11 victims reacted with anger and outrage yesterday over the revelation that the city Department of Design & Construction failed to secure control of photos and video of Ground Zero that ended up in a documentary with topless women and naked men. "To me, it sounds like the DDC made a colossal blunder," said Lee Ielpi, a member of the September 11th Families Association, whose son died in the terrorist attacks. "My concern is how do you copyright a tragedy? To me, nobody should copyright 9/11." The Daily News reported yesterday that photographer Gregg Brown, who was paid about $300,000, refused to sign an agreement that would have given the city ownership of 30,000 photos and countless hours of videos - all captured while he was in an NYPD helicopter. Instead, Brown registered the material with the U.S. Copyright Office for himself, then used some of the video in a documentary, "Words," The News reported. Some of his photos are being sold through a major photo agency. Ielpi was especially critical that the general public is being denied unfettered access to the material, paid for with taxpayer dollars by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It's forever lost - and it's his whim what he does with it," Ielpi said. "What a shame." Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son Christian died doing his job that day, said Brown's juxtaposition of footage of a still-smoldering Ground Zero with scenes of topless women talking about their breasts and naked New Yorkers participating in a Native American sweat lodge ceremony "is certainly sacrilegious." "It's really denigrating what happened that day - and the lives of the rescue workers and the innocent victims," she said. "This is history that the DDC lost and this man is using on his Web site. This belongs to the City of New York and the federal government." Mike Burke, who lost a brother, FDNY Capt. William Burke, saw Brown's use of the material as further proof that "everybody uses this for their own purposes." He pointed to Brown's claim that his experiences of flying over the ruins somehow allowed him to "know" what Sept. 11 families were going through. "What did he say, that this affected him as much as anybody? The narcissism of that." And Alice Hoglan of California, whose son Mark Bingham was one of the heroic passengers of Flight 93, said she was "horrified" that Brown would "take such an egregious advantage of a tragic situation. ... I'm really sorry that he's chosen to use his gripping photographs for commercial gain. It really disgusts me that someone would use this material in this manner." Meanwhile, for much of yesterday, a Web site promoting "Words" was unreachable because too many people were trying to access it. A link to Brown's site had been included in the online version of The News story about his movie. |
| Posted by:Phiper Glolulet5272 |