You would have thought they were giving money away in Allston the other day. Some 5,000 people lined up, hoping to snare a part as an extra in the movie about the Boston Marathon bombings.
Brian Pomodoro wasn’t in that line. And he won’t be in any line to watch the movie, “Patriots Day,” whenever it comes out.
Brian Pomodoro is a lieutenant with the city’s Emergency Medical Services, and he was at the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth when the bombs went off. What he and his EMS colleagues did, what all the first responders, cops, firefighters, ordinary citizens, did after those bombs went off, was nothing short of heroic and extraordinary.
Three people died on Boylston Street that day: Martin Richard, Lingzi Lu, and Krystle Campbell. But the carnage would have been far worse if not for first responders like Pomodoro. Some 90 people with life-threatening injuries were transported to hospitals within a half-hour of the bombs going off, and all of them survived.
Pomodoro says what happened that day is not and never should be fodder for entertainment.
“A documentary? Sure. The subject for a seminar, so we and others can learn from what happened that day, and hopefully save more lives in another situation? Absolutely,” he said. “But we’re talking about a Hollywood movie here, and Hollywood is in the business of entertaining people, and this should not be a source of entertainment. Ever.”
Dorchester’s own Mark Wahlberg, one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, is at the heart of the film and has promised that he and director Peter Berg will be sensitive to those who suffered because of the bombings. But Pomodoro said such promises are irrelevant. As is the fact, he says, that many first responders will be lionized in the film.
“Hollywood is a business,” he said. “They are in the business of making money. They’ll splash ‘Based on real events’ on the ads and make a fortune. I am not going to change their business plan. I’m not even calling for a boycott.”
So why not go see it?
“Because I already saw it, live,” he said. “I have been living it every day for three years. I have alienated friends and co-workers. Cut off contact with family. Seen my career path detoured. The Hollywood version will be a form of brain-washing, forcing me to remember events as they scripted it, not as it occurred in my memory.”
Pomodoro is one of many first responders diagnosed with post-traumatic stress after the bombings. Thanks to his wife, he sought treatment and it worked. But that doesn’t change the way he sees the incompatibility between what really happened, what really matters, and Hollywood.
“I know the very real traumas that occurred as a result of the bombings,” he said. “First were three tragic deaths. Then the scores of injured who kept coming and coming.”
Then MIT police Officer Sean Collier was shot to death in the middle of the manhunt for the bombers.
“Next was the follow-up care and rehabilitation the survivors had to undergo,” Pomodoro said. “Then came the behavioral impacts on spectators and residents. And finally, inevitably, the first responders who would slowly begin to show signs of post-traumatic stress. This is the stuff that’s real, still all too real for many victims. Their story might make a nice PBS documentary, but it’s not sexy enough for a money-making blockbuster film.”
Pomodoro is willing to bet his house that the movie, any movie, will emphasize the bang-bang, shoot-’em-up facets of what happened over the real-life consequences of the bombs, the grinding, ongoing reality.
“If the Tsarnaev brothers walked into a police station and turned themselves in after what they did, nobody would be making a movie about the Boston Marathon bombings,” he said.
Pomodoro imagines there will be an impressive theme song written for the movie.
“I certainly don’t remember music playing as we were applying tourniquets to gaping wounds,” he said.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.