9-11 movie should be seen, hero's father says
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/...orl-home-promo
from the Orlando Sentinel . . .
Jerry Bingham understands how painful it may be for Americans to watch United 93.
It was especially agonizing for the Wildwood retiree, who saw the Universal Pictures movie twice in New York City this week prior to its nationwide release Friday.
His son Mark Bingham, 31, was among the passengers who fought back against the terrorists who hijacked the United Airlines plane Sept. 11, 2001. The plane crashed in Shanksville, Pa.
"I cried like everyone else," Bingham said. "The end is the hardest part to take."
Bingham, 63, said the country needs to see how his son and 39 other heroes on board prevented the plane from hitting its intended target, possibly in Washington, D.C.
"It's not all that glitz and glamour of Hollywood," Bingham said. "It's a true tell-it-like-it-is story."
Bingham and his wife, Karen, 55, returned Wednesday to Central Florida from New York, where they attended the premiere Tuesday night at the Tribeca Film Festival. On Monday, family members of those who perished viewed the movie, written and directed by Paul Greengrass, at a private showing.
"They got it pretty accurate," Bingham said. "It's not about any one person. It's about 40 people."
Dressed in a new black suit with pinstripes, Bingham walked the red carpet at the film festival created by Robert De Niro and others in 2002 in an effort to revitalize lower Manhattan after 9-11.
Mark Bingham's mother, Alice Hoglan, of Los Gatos, Calif., and his aunt also attended.
Now that Bingham has seen United 93 he can exhale a sigh of relief knowing that filmmakers have honored the victims. It was during last year's Sept. 11 remembrance in Shanksville that Bingham heard about the movie from producers Lloyd Levin and Kate Solomon.
Solomon traveled to Wildwood a few weeks later to talk to Jerry Bingham about his son. The two sat in the 18-by-26-foot room Bingham built in 2002 to hold pictures, flags and other displays in honor of his son, a public-relations executive who grew up in Boca Raton and California.
He told her stories about Mark, a 6-foot-5 University of California, Berkeley graduate who once tackled the Stanford University mascot -- a tree -- at a game.
Movie officials sent periodic updates on the two-month long filming, which took place in London.
Cheyenne Jackson, the actor playing Mark Bingham, contacted Jerry Bingham in December. Jackson, a 6-foot-3 Broadway actor who lived in Seattle on 9-11, wanted to learn more about the man he was playing.
"I've never been asked to play a real person before," Jackson said. "I was nervous."
He read everything he could find about him -- "every article and every e-mail and every forum posted on his Web site," Jackson said.
Earlier this week, the actor met Jerry Bingham for lunch in a deli in midtown Manhattan.
"It was kind of surreal," Bingham said. "He has a lot of Mark's mannerisms. . . . He did a wonderful job."
Bingham will encourage people to go see the movie and plans to refocus on working with other families in getting a Flight 93 memorial built in Shanksville. Ten percent of box-office revenue collected from the first three days of the movie's release will go toward the memorial.
"It was time," Bingham said of the movie. "We can handle it. We lived through Sept. 11, didn't we?"
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