Killing Fields

I read Susan Spano's "After the Killing Fields" [May 15] with much emotion. I am a survivor of the killing fields. I remember precisely the event that had me clinging to my grandmother's hand and my older brother holding steadfast to my mother's hand. Thunderous tanks passing by and Pol Pot's puppets, with rifles in their hands, ordering people to move quickly. My grandmother telling me to be quiet and to obey. This took place in the dark of night. Children's cries, footsteps moving about on the dusty road and parents telling their children to hush up were heard.

'Texas Killing Fields' MPAA rating: R for violence and language including some sexual references Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes Playing: In selected theaters

On a rainy night nearly 14 years ago, Haing Ngor parked his gold Mercedes in a graffiti-lined alleyway behind his apartment on the edge of Chinatown. The Cambodian refugee-turned-actor had won an Academy Award for his role in 1984's "The Killing Fields," but he still lived in a tiny apartment where he kept his Oscar next to a large Buddha statue. As he stepped out of his car, gunshots echoed off the alley walls. A neighbor rushed outside to find Ngor slumped on the pavement of his carport.

There's something about the combination of crime, crazy and cops specific to small-town Texas that is irresistible to filmmakers. Indulging the urge to scratch that sleazy underbelly has produced everything from classic to camp: "The Getaway," "Hud," "Blood Simple," "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," to mention a few of the more unforgettable bad seeds. The new crime thriller "Texas Killing Fields" is certainly shooting to join that crowd but misfires too many times to make the cut. It's too bad. There is enough mystery in the murdering that gives the film its name, enough through-the-glass-darkly in the style of director Ami Canaan Mann (dad is master Michael)

Dith Pran, whose ordeal in the Khmer Rouge work camps of Cambodia inspired the film "The Killing Fields," was sworn in today as a U.S. citizen, a move he says will help his mission of bringing peace to his native land. "I'm glad I made it. My dream came true," he said to the judges, immigration officials, news media and 336 other new citizens gathered in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. Dith then said a phrase in his native Khmer, which he translated as "Long live freedom."

"The Killing Fields," the movie that showed the brutality of Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s in Cambodia, will be shown in a Cambodian theater Friday for the first time, the director said today. Among those attending the screening will be Sydney Schanberg, the American journalist depicted in the 1984 Academy Award-winning film, who will make his first visit to Cambodia since he left there 14 years ago.

Cambodia is still coping with the horrors of the genocide witnessed in the 1970s, photojournalist Dith Pran said Wednesday in a speech at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. Pran, whose escape from Cambodia was dramatized in the movie "The Killing Fields," said the country is littered with about 10 million land mines, and that armed Khmer Rouge soldiers still control 20% of the nation. Even so, he said the situation has improved from what he saw working for the New York Times 20 years ago.

Most of the time, he is Mohammed, a young Saudi government employee who goes home each night to a wife, two children and a quiet meal. But much of the time these days, he is Abu Ali, a volunteer in the killing fields outside Sarajevo where, to a new generation of young Muslims, Bosnia-Herzegovina has become the newest frontier in a holy war as old as Islam. In Bosnia, he has taken a Yugoslav wife, "a good Muslim," and is teaching her the sonorous Arabic of the Koran.

Tonight's "CBS Reports: In the Killing Fields of America" is a sort of "48 Hours" in triplicate, with some of the network's top news bananas going on a three-hour blitz of U.S. cities to identify and define what Mike Wallace calls "the war we are waging against ourselves, the war of American violence." If a program that dwells largely on misery can be highly watchable, this is that program.

Mark Rosenberg, whose production credits include such box office hits as "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "The Killing Fields," "The World According to Garp" and "Bright Lights, Big City" died of a heart attack Friday morning in Stanton, Tex. A spokesman for Warner Bros., which distributes Spring Creek Productions, a company he formed with his wife, Paula Weinstein, said Rosenberg was on location with his latest film, "Flesh & Bone," when he collapsed. He was 44 and made his home in Brentwood.

I read Susan Spano's "After the Killing Fields" [May 15] with much emotion. I am a survivor of the killing fields. I remember precisely the event that had me clinging to my grandmother's hand and my older brother holding steadfast to my mother's hand. Thunderous tanks passing by and Pol Pot's puppets, with rifles in their hands, ordering people to move quickly. My grandmother telling me to be quiet and to obey. This took place in the dark of night. Children's cries, footsteps moving about on the dusty road and parents telling their children to hush up were heard.

1925: Saloth Sar, alias Pol Pot, born in central Cambodia. 1949: Pol Pot goes to Paris where he joins a group of young Cambodian revolutionaries, most of them Marxists. 1953: France grants independence to Cambodia under King Norodom Sihanouk; Pol Pot returns to Phnom Penh, trains with Vietnamese communist guerrillas, then works for his cause in the countryside. 1969: Secret U.S. bombing raids begin against Vietnamese communist guerrillas hiding in Cambodia. 1970: Sihanouk deposed by U.S.-backed strongman Lon Nol; the Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk join forces against the nationalists.

A muddy, weed-choked field in the hills of northern Cambodia is the last resting place of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, chief instigator of a communist regime that enslaved a nation, dismantled its social and cultural institutions and took the lives of 2 million or more people. In life, he was a cipher, known only to a handful of confederates. He died of a reported heart attack in 1998, with his revolution collapsed around him. While United Nations-backed war crimes trials of surviving Khmer Rouge henchmen drag on in Phnom Penh, and another strongman, Hun Sen, also considered oppressive, rules the country, the Cambodian people go about their business.

He spent much of his life consumed by what the three men on the screen before him had done. He stared at the glossy, bloodshot eyes of the man in the middle, the one who had so casually demonstrated how he slit his victims' throats, who explained how his hand grew so sore he often switched to stabbing them at the base of the neck. They were gaunt figures now, impoverished men trudging the rice ponds of northwestern Cambodia. They had agreed to confess their roles in the Killing Fields, first for a documentary film, "Enemies of the People," and then here, in a video conference with survivors in Long Beach.

The first reunion of foreign correspondents who covered the 1970-75 Cambodian civil war — and perhaps the last, given the advanced ages of many — ended Friday, 40 years after the conflict began. "A bunch of ‘ Jurassic Park' journos," one reporter said. "'Hurt Locker' meets ‘Animal House,'" another said. The self-deprecating humor belied a period that was deceptively deadly for journalists. Although the Cambodia war received far less attention than its counterpart in neighboring Vietnam, 36 correspondents working for foreign news operations were killed or reported missing during the conflict, compared with 33 in Vietnam, according to the Associated Press.

On a rainy night nearly 14 years ago, Haing Ngor parked his gold Mercedes in a graffiti-lined alleyway behind his apartment on the edge of Chinatown. The Cambodian refugee-turned-actor had won an Academy Award for his role in 1984's "The Killing Fields," but he still lived in a tiny apartment where he kept his Oscar next to a large Buddha statue. As he stepped out of his car, gunshots echoed off the alley walls. A neighbor rushed outside to find Ngor slumped on the pavement of his carport.

--Dith Pran, whose ordeal in the Khmer Rouge work camps of Cambodia inspired the Academy Award-winning film "The Killing Fields," was sworn in as a U.S. citizen, a move he says will help his mission of bringing peace to his native land. "I'm glad I made it. My dream came true," he said to the judges, immigration officials, news media and 336 other new citizens gathered in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. "I'm very grateful to the people of United States of America," Dith said.

To create the grim and gritty battle-zone gaming environment of Slayer for the action flick "Gamer," production designer Jerry Fleming drew on his early experience working for Robert Altman, where he was required to create fully dressed environments to allow the free-spirited director to shoot where he pleased. "Gamer's" Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor "are the first directors I've worked with since Altman where I had to create a 360-world and assume that everything is always on camera," Fleming says.