After a brief and costly shutdown, Hollywood is nervously prepared to move on.

As programming executives continue to scour their slates to delay or cancel material that could be seen as insensitive to last week’s chilling attacks in New York and Washington, the entertainment industry is keeping a keen eye on the public mood and taking note.

Like during other times of national trauma, there will be an effort to reflect the shifting public mood in films and television programs.

Of course, trying to figure out what that mood might be another question.

“The complimentary nature of Hollywood scriptwriting and the American psyche are undoubtedly going to move hand in hand,” said Lee Westerfield, a broadcasting analyst for UBS Warburg in New York. “If the nation craves patriotism, then undoubtedly the studios will satisfy that urge.”

During World War II, American studios unleashed a flood of patriotic and sometimes jingoistic movies to support the war effort. By contrast, the divisive and undeclared Vietnam War spurred a new breed of war film, one that focused a lens on the horrors of the battlefield while often shining an unflattering spotlight on the government and military.

Faced with a fresh wound on the national psyche one distinguished by widespread feelings of grief, fear and anger many believe the response of the entertainment community this time around will fall somewhere in between those poles.

“I don’t think we’ll see the sort of jingoistic movies we’ve seen in the past. I think we’re beyond that,” said Jerry Isenberg, a professor at USC’s School of Cinema and Television. “Most of what is made will try to enlighten and inspire.”

It’s expected that new projects will be launched and others rewritten that speak to last week’s terrorist acts. But it will probably be some time before Hollywood directly takes on the infamous events of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I would expect the responsible media to stay away from projects that directly leap off these incidents. It’s too painful. It’s too exploitative. And there’s nothing to add,” Isenberg said.

Short-term impacts

Although mostly spared the loss of life and physical destruction suffered by other industries, the entertainment business is also experiencing widespread dislocation. The long-term economic damage will likely be moderate, according to Westerfield and others, but the short-term impacts are substantial.

“There’s going to be a complete reanalysis of everything that’s going on,” said Robert Dowling, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Hollywood Reporter. “The release of a film is one of the most precarious things you can do. If you somehow offend the public and you’re not successful right away, you’re going to disappear quickly, and the studios can’t afford that.”

Besides canceling events like the Latin Grammys and Madonna’s Staples concert the day of the attack, Hollywood responded almost immediately to the crisis by delaying the release of several projects, postponing the Emmys and pushing back the fall TV season.

“You knew this was serious (in Hollywood) when they cancelled the Emmy Awards,” said E! Online columnist Andy Jones. “Even in Hollywood, where the mantra is ‘the show must go on,’ it’s going to take a while to deal with this.”

Warner Bros. will keep the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “Collateral Damage” in the can for a month because of scenes in which an L.A. skyscraper is bombed, and Touchstone Pictures postponed the Tim Allen comedy “Big Trouble,” which includes an episode involving a bomb on a plane. Sony Pictures Entertainment pulled a “Spider Man” trailer from theaters because of a scene that depicts a helicopter becoming entangled in a web spun between the World Trade towers.

Additionally, every major network absorbed substantial losses by preempting regular programming and running mostly commercial free after the crisis in order to provide around-the-clock news coverage.

“What the media conglomerates are showing is their ability to rightly prioritize their civic commitments,” Westerfield said.

The day after the hijackings, Dowling ran a photo of the burning towers on the cover of the Reporter and canceled all display ads.

“The message of many of the ads is celebratory and I don’t think people are in a very celebratory mood,” Dowling said, declining to say how much it cost the paper. “I don’t think it’s a question of money, it’s a question of what’s right.”

Meanwhile, people like Gil Williams, a creative executive in Warner Bros.’ Future Films division, are scrambling to reassess production lineups.

“I actually have a project in development called “Designated Survivor” that is literally the same set up as what happened (last week),” Williams said. “I’m sure that project will be derailed if not totally scrapped.”

Another Warner Bros. film scheduled to begin shooting in January is a spoof on finding the perfect woman. It’s called “The Bomb,” as in “she’s the bomb,” Williams said. “That name will clearly be changed,” he said.

Reading the signs

The studios and networks have received credit for acting out of respect for the victims and for public sensibilities, but the fact that many Americans watching last Tuesday events unfolding on TV remarked that it was “like watching a movie” has not been lost in Hollywood.

In the past decade, Hollywood’s more successful war films have gravitated away from the complexity and moral ambiguity of such movies as “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now,” to gritty but far more nostalgic fare such as “Saving Private Ryan” and “Pearl Harbor.”

Joe Saltzman, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at USC, said recent depictions of terrorism in movies have been both “anti-terrorist and anti-government,” often portraying military officials and elected leaders as corrupt, bumbling and in need of rescue by anti-establishment American heroes.

Nobody expects a return to the boldfaced boosterism that characterized film and other entertainment during the 1940s, but the present mood would seem to indicate that Hollywood will be looking closely to content that taps into shared feelings of pain and anger.

“I definitely see projects being developed that have more of a sense of patriotism,” said Williams. Everybody is going to be looking for those scripts and there will be a surge in that.”