'Taxi's' difficult route to an Oscar

When your cause involves something nobody wants to see, it's a problem -- particularly in Hollywood.

The industry, after all, always has been about moving pictures. But what do you do when those images make people squirm right out of their seats?

That's the problem documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney and other Hollywood activists, concerned about the Bush administration's use of torture in its war on terror, have had to confront from the start.

When Gibney's powerfully shocking and profoundly unsettling documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side" won the Academy Award on Sunday, it was the culmination of an effort on his part and that of supportive organizations such as the ACLU and Amnesty International to mobilize people against what they regard as the unthinkably inhumane treatment of detainees in America's foreign prison camps.

"Truth is, I think my dear wife, Anne, was kind of hoping I would make a romantic comedy," Gibney, a longtime maker of serious documentaries, told the Oscar audience. "But honestly, after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, 'extraordinary rendition,' that simply wasn't possible."

He knew getting such a film before the public would be difficult, but he never realized just how hard it would be. The path from conception to screen was nothing short of difficult.

Gibney started work on "Taxi to the Dark Side" more than two years ago (with financing from a group of attorneys and others outraged by the policy on torture). For him, it was only way to take the subject from the abstract (with pundits these days throwing around terms like "torture light," as if they were ordering some new coffee drink) to the real.

"I had been a little bit surprised how little outrage there had been on this issue, " he said this week in a telephone interview from New York. "In part I attribute that to the fact that there is a tendency to say, in order to protect us, our government has to do bad things. Just don't tell us about it.

"People don't really understand what a big deal it is. It's not just about torture and illegal detention; it's about throwing overboard certain fundamental values we have as a nation."

Gibney struggled at first to get access to prisoners and soldiers inside the foreign lockups. Eventually he broke through (he is, after all, the director who documented corporate corruption in the documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room").