Hollywood has told us tales of terrorism for years. On September 11, it happened for real. As the US Army consults Tinseltown's hottest writers on how to prepare for the worst, NICK HALLISSEY ponders the future of the 'blockbuster'.

THERE is panic in the War Room. Glenn Close, as America's vice president, asks: "What are our airborne scenarios?" Dean Stockwell, Chief of Staff, replies: "We don't have any airborne scenarios."

It's a scene from the 1997 movie, Air Force One. Harrison Ford is the President of the United States, forced to fight for survival when his personal jet is hijacked by "a breakaway sect" of Russian terrorists.

The film pays close attention to the War Room's response, theorising that America simply doesn't have any plans in place for this kind of contingency. They're America, it's the President; no one hijacks his plane.

It's this realisation, that Hollywood scriptwriters can effortlessly come up with the unthinkable, that has led the US military to go asking them for help.

Reports from the States say that Colin Powell's staff are indeed asking top writers to consider how they would write an horrific scenario for "rentavillains" such as Gary Oldman or Art Malik to play out.

Writers have the blessing of being able to think laterally, in a way military intelligence doesn't.

Just look at what they have come up with. In Die Hard, thieves hijack a skyscraper on its opening night in an attempt to raid its vault. In Executive Decision, Islamic extremists plan to crash an airliner on to a city.

In James Cameron's True Lies, fanatical Art Malik plans to detonate nuclear bombs off Florida. His outfit, and his methods, eerily resemble those of Osama bin Laden and his Al Quaida network.

"True Lies was almost a blueprint; in it, as with most of the films in which Hollywood treats terrorism, America wins. The concept of them not winning was pretty much unthinkable. It doesn't fit the Hollywood ethic."

These are the words of Dr Robert Edgar-Hunt, head of programme for theatre, TV and film at York St John College.

Like most people who saw the events of September 11, Robert had the icy feeling he was watching a Hollywood movie - and an implausible one, at that.

"The explosions and the angles were those we had come to expect from watching films," he added.

"It has often been said that the Gulf War was seen in a very filmic way; bombs with cameras hurtling down the street, and so on; this was even more so.

"And it's probably true that, as a film, people wouldn't have accepted it."

He said the terrorists had targeted "significant ideological landmarks", which represented America around the world. For people huddling in bombed-out huts in Kabul and Kandahar, structures like the Twin Towers and the Pentagon are possibly the only available images of America.

"The scriptwriters have written about threats against American buildings so many times that Hollywood is fairly responsible for the fact that those buildings are so ingrained in the world's psyche," said Robert.

When the unthinkable actually happened, America was caught on the back foot. The CIA had had no clue, and suddenly, thoughts turned to further attacks.

The intelligence feelers reached out, desperately trying to isolate future targets. But such thinking can only get you so far.

Robert believes it's fairly logical that the US military should turn to scriptwriters.

"It does seem to make sense. These people are involved in inventing this kind of thing on a day-to-day basis," he added.

"You might just as well ask a group of computer game-obsessed schoolkids; they'd also be likely to come up with ideas which might not seem so implausible in the light of September 11."

After the attacks, certain kinds of film became taboo. The BBC pulled Strange Days from its listings, whose plot has little to do with international terrorism. Perhaps it was simply too nasty for the climate.

Channel 5 quite bravely stuck with a screening of Terminator 2 (Cameron again), in which Los Angeles is wiped out in a nuclear attack. You may not see Independence Day, which sees New York under attack by aliens, on TV for some time.

But the situation that really had Hollywood reeling was the temporary shelving of Spiderman. The web-slinging superhero was due to be dusted off for a major big screen outing next summer, and filming was well under way at the time of the attacks.

"Teaser" material from the megabucks movie had already been circulated on the Internet. And it featured a scene in which Spiderman caught a villain's helicopter in a web slung between the Twin Towers.

The film's release is being rearranged, although when it will come out, and with what new scenes, is not known.

So does this mean we have seen the end of movies where major landmarks are threatened?

Andy Tudor, of York University's sociology department, thinks not.

"Hollywood has always been a cyclical thing," he said.

"Fashions come and go. Film production can be blipped by reality, but it all comes back in the end. Disaster movies were big in the Seventies, and they came back in the Nineties. You don't get radical sea-changes in audience perception.

"It's a dead cert that Spiderman will be back. Hollywood can't lay out that kind of money and then not see it through, because the genre is too demonstrably successful."

Robert Edgar-Hunt points out that, in Three Kings, we saw our first major Hollywood stab at the Gulf War.

"It's ten years after the event, and the film world is only now feeling that it's a decent time to make Gulf War movies."

So will we see a movie about September 11 in 2011? Both analysts doubt it.

"I'm not sure anyone would be wild enough to make a film of it," said Andy.

"You might get a film about the firefighters, or heroes in the buildings, but while there was plenty of heroism, it would be almost impossible to give things a happy resolution."

But it is perhaps the world of TV that is doing the most to provide a salve for the bruised hearts of those who watched New York's terror.

Robert said: "No one has pulled things like Friends and Sex In The City from our TV, and they are the shows which identify New York for a lot of us.

"Mayor Giuliani is continually saying New York is still working.

"The fact that Rachael, Monica and Chandler are still doing their thing is making that point again, saying: 'hey, New York is still here, we're still on TV'.

"I suppose that's the big signal that screen life still goes on," says Robert.

Updated: 10:37 Friday, October 26, 2001