The Cuban Missile Crisis may have been over in Thirteen Days, but ads for the Kevin Costner film touted as a "by-the-numbers re-creation" of the events didn't even last a weekend.

New Line Cinema, which just expanded the new drama into nationwide release over the weekend, was forced to pull print ads for the movie after historical inaccuracies were found in two-page advertisements in some major newspapers across the country.

While Thirteen Days took great pains to paint a genuine picture of the 1962 showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union that nearly led to nuclear war, print ads circulated in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times weren't nearly as faithful. They featured several F-15 Navy fighter jets and a Spruance-class destroyer--military muscle that wasn't even around back then.

The AOL Time Warner-owned New Line, which was unaware of the error until the New York Times called, defended the veracity of the movie but also acknowledged that some slipups were made on the print side by an ad agency charged with creating the campaign for Thirteen Days.

"Every ship, plane, truck and craft that moves in the film is absolutely authentic to the time period," said New Line spokesman Steve Elzer. He refused to name the offending ad agency.

The print ad for Thirteen Days contained the usual high-caliber quotes from critics, along with a collage of the film's stars. In one image, actor Bruce Greenwood stood alone as President John F. Kennedy beside an American flag, while Kevin Costner, playing Kennedy's trusted adviser Kenny O'Donnell, walked alongside the President and his brother Robert Kennedy, played by Steven Culp.

But where the Thirteen Days advertisement goofed was in two images that were from a completely different era. The first image was a montage of stills surrounding an airbrush of a not-yet-in-existence Spruance-class Navy destroyer suspended beside the white dome of the Capitol. A Navy spokeswoman said the Spruance-class didn't go into service until the mid-1970s.

The second image, depicted above the anachronistic ship, was of three Navy pilots leaving a pair of parked F-15 Eagles--fighter jets that, according to the spokeswoman, weren't even deployed until July 1972.

New Line is already retooling the ads to reflect reality. "We are in the process of withdrawing and correcting these photographs," said Elzer.

Yahoo Daily News 1/16/01