Hollywood is to court controversy with a film that will challenge the official version of the events of 9/11, a previously taboo topic for the industry mainstream. Martin Sheen, Woody Harrelson and Ed Asner, who have all supported conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks, have signed up to the movie, which is entitled September Morn.

Styling itself as a drama in the tradition of Twelve Angry Men, the film's advance publicity note hints at a cover-up, saying: "We the people demand that the government revisit and initiates a thorough and independent investigation to the tragic events of 911."

Details of the film, which is to be directed by BJ Davis and written by Howard Cohen, are expected to be revealed at an American Film Market conference in Los Angeles next week, Deadline.com reported.

The production has been set up by Fleur de Lis Film Studios, which has also made the documentary A Noble Lie, about the Oklahoma City bombing, and Operation: Dark Heart, a feature based on an intelligence agent's memoirs.

Until now Hollywood has steered clear of claims that the Bush administration, or other elements in the government, may have been behind the 9/11 attacks, in which hijacked passenger planes crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennslyvania. The fourth plane was apparently en route to the Capitol.

Oliver Stone, who has challenged official history in JFK and other films, steered clear of conspiracy theories in his 2006 film World Trade Center, which focused on the heroism of police and rescuers.

September Morn has assembled a cast linked to the so-called truther movement, which alleges official inconsistencies, complicity and cover-up.

Sheen, who starred in Apocalypse Now and television's The West Wing, has long questioned whether Islamist hijackers single-handedly brought down the Twin Towers, killing 2,605 people.

"I did not want to believe that my government could possibly be involved in such a thing, I could not live in a country that I thought could do that – that would be the ultimate betrayal," he told an interviewer in 2007.

Sheen grew suspicious after his son Charlie, also an actor, alerted him to apparent contradictions, such as how a structure known as "Building 7" fell.

He said: "However, there have been so many revelations that now I have my doubts, and chief among them is Building 7 – how did they rig that building so that it came down on the evening of the day?"

Asner, who has won seven Emmys, has several times urged a new investigation into 9/11. In 2010, he told an interviewer: "This country – which is the greatest, strongest country that ever existed in the world, in terms of power – supposedly had a defence that could not be penetrated all these years. But all of that was eradicated by 19 Saudi Arabians, supposedly. Some of whom didn't even know how to fly."

Harrelson, who starred recently in The Hunger Games, has also supported the self-styled 9/11 truth movement.

September Morn is also the name of a Neil Diamond album and a painting by the French artist Paul Émile Chabas which hangs in New York's Metropolitan Musuem of Art.

Predators on Pedestals

Published: October 14, 2012

America has Jerry Sandusky. Britain has Jimmy Savile.

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Bill Keller

Sandusky you know; the predatory Penn State football coach was sentenced last week to spend his remaining years in prison for raping boys who looked up to him. Savile you may have missed; a venerable British TV personality who died last year, he is now at the center of a posthumous scandal unspooling in London. His appetites ran mostly to adolescent girls, but otherwise the parallels are striking. In both cases, the story is not just one of individual villainy but of the failure of a trusted institution, if not a flaw in the wider culture.

Perhaps you’ve had your fill of these sordid accounts — the celebrity gropers, the pedophile priests, the fondling in the locker room shower, the witnesses who look the other way. But Savile’s case is worth mulling, if only because the institution in which his serial child abuse took place is one of the most respected media organizations in the world, a putative shrine to truth and accountability: the BBC. And in the early days of the scandal the revered broadcaster has faced the same questions of dereliction or outright cover-up that dogged Penn State and the Catholic Church when they experienced their respective outbreaks of infamy.

To appreciate Jimmy Savile’s place in English culture, imagine a combination of Dick Clark of “American Bandstand” and Jerry Lewis, maestro of the muscular dystrophy telethon. Savile was the longest-serving host of the immensely popular BBC music show “Top of the Pops,” and the star of another long-running show called “Jim’ll Fix It,” in which he pulled strings to grant the wishes of supplicants, mostly children. Like Sandusky, he buffed his reputation by throwing himself into charity work. Like Sandusky he seems to have used his philanthropy both to identify vulnerable children for his personal sport and to inoculate himself against suspicion. The good deeds helped earn Savile two knighthoods, one bestowed by the queen, the other by the pope. He was Sir Jimmy, confidant — or at least photo-op accessory — of royals, prime ministers, even Beatles.

Like Sandusky, he cultivated an aura of flamboyant eccentricity. The Penn State coach was a prankster and a knucklehead, a perpetual adolescent, which served as a plausibly benign explanation for all his prodding and grabbing. It was just Jerry being Jerry. Savile was a gregarious goofball who lived with his mother, and who sported a blond pageboy haircut, pink-tinted glasses, garish track suits and fat cigars. Being the man-child Pied Piper of the pubescent was his shtick, his job, and cover for a brutal cunning.

The testimony of his accusers describes what Malcolm Gladwell calls, in a shuddersome study of Sandusky’s ilk published in The New Yorker last month, “child-molester tradecraft.” You have “the subtle early maneuvers of victim selection,” the screening out of children who object or who are supervised closely by parents, the testing, ingratiating, “grooming” and “desensitizing the target with an ever-expanding touch,” the escalation of abuse.

Gossip about Savile’s fondling of young teenagers was rife, but never rose to a level deemed newsworthy during his life. But on Oct. 3 the investigative program “Exposure,” on the rival ITV network, aired a damning documentary. It included interviews with five women who described being sexually abused as teenagers and with colleagues who witnessed compromising behavior. After that, the deluge. London police now say they are pursuing more than 300 leads, and that they believe Savile abused girls as young as 13 over the course of four decades — in his BBC dressing room, in hospitals where he was a benefactor, in the back of his white Rolls-Royce.

It turns out that the BBC’s own investigative show, “Newsnight,” had also delved into Savile’s history, but ended up killing the program last December. It would have run a few weeks before a BBC holiday tribute to the memory of Jimmy Savile.

The BBC rides on the taxpayers’ subsidy — and at times rides a high horse — so the story has inspired some gloating. Media mogul and BBC-hater Rupert Murdoch, no doubt happy to have a distraction from the grubby behavior of his phone-hacking tabloids, found in the Savile uproar a chance to tweak two of his fiercest rival news organizations at once. He reminded his Twitter followers that the recent head of British Broadcasting, Mark Thompson, will soon take over as chief executive of The New York Times Company. “Look to new CEO to shake up NYT,” Murdoch tweeted, “unless recalled to BBC to explain latest scandal.”

So far no evidence has surfaced that Thompson, his successor or anyone else up top had anything to do with dropping the Savile documentary. (The BBC says it is investigating.) The editor of “Newsnight,” Peter Rippon, says he decided to shelve the program after prosecutors told “Newsnight” they had declined to bring a sexual abuse case against Savile “due to lack of evidence.” Whether the BBC fell short in its reporting and missed the story or had the story and lacked the nerve, it is a significant embarrassment, compounded by the hard question of why the widespread rumors of Savile’s behavior were ignored for so long.

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Official: Body of missing NJ girl believed found

Marianna, Florida (CNN) -- This Florida panhandle town is the home of a mystery that has been lost to time.

A small cemetery buried deep into the grounds of a now-defunct boys reform school dates back to the early 1900s. Rusting white steel crosses mark the graves of 31 unidentified former students.

Former students said the deaths were at the hands of abusive administrators, but a 2009 state investigation determined there was no evidence of criminal activity connected with any of the deaths or of abusive treatment.