For the 28 years that they stood in lower Manhattan, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were among the defining icons of New York City and the nation. The buildings came to symbolize America’s strength, economic power and (let’s be honest) hubris. They were enormous, imposing and cold, but also a beacon visible to residents all over the Big Apple. Hollywood had a love affair with the WTC almost from the start, and the towers appeared in hundreds of films spanning their construction, their skyline dominance and eventual collapse. It’s now been 10 years since they fell, but the towers continue to appear on the silver screen — though the feelings they evoke have changed.
The twin towers were just beginning to loom over the surrounding office buildings in the early 1970s, and an under-construction WTC can be glimpsed in films like 1971’s The French Connection and Klute, and the 1972 Barbra Streisand vehicle Up The Sandbox. In 1973, the cast of Godspell performed a musical number on a tower roof before construction was completed, and the buildings began to appear as local color — an easy way to say, “Hey, look, it’s New York!” in films like Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, DePalma’s Sisters and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor.
But the towers crossed over into pop culture legend in the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis-produced remake of King Kong (with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges). Rick Baker in a monkey suit replaced Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation, and the WTC replaced the Empire State Building as the site of Kong’s climactic skyscraper ascent, the great ape jumping from rooftop to rooftop before falling to his death in the plaza below. Beauty may have killed the beast in the 1930s, but by 1976 it was cheesy special effects and Hollywood-disaster-movie bloat that did him in.
Through subsequent decades, the twin towers popped up in films as diverse as Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains The Same, The Wiz (the plaza stands in for part of the Emerald City), Saturday Night Fever, the Christopher Reeve Superman movies and Escape from New York (Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken hang-glides onto the roof). As the 1980s came and went, the towers were sometimes used to invoke America’s economic might — as in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street or the Dan Aykroyd/Eddie Murphy comedy Trading Places — but more often than not they were used simply as background, visually striking, universally understood obelisks that screamed “urban jungle” to the audience.
That started to change with 1988’s prescient Shakedown, in which a plane in the process of making an emergency landing nearly crashes into the WTC. After terrorists tried to take down the towers for real in 1993, Hollywood repeatedly picked at our collective psychic scar by threatening the buildings with alien invasions (Independence Day), meteor showers (Armageddon), tidal waves (Deep Impact), nuclear bombs (The Peacemaker), global warming (A.I.) and a giant lizard (Godzilla). Then September 11, 2001 rolled around and Mohammed Atta and his band of assholes illustrated once again that movie fictions are nothing compared to real-world heartbreak and tragedy.
It’s been said that 9/11 changed everything, and those changes were certainly reflected in the movies. The first trailer for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man appeared in the summer of 2001 and featured Spidey slinging a web between the twin towers to capture an escaping helicopter. Post-9/11, the filmmakers debated removing the towers from the film completely before its summer 2002 release, but ultimately decided to leave in a few glimpses. More interesting is how 9/11 bent the climax of Spider-Man, which features a band of ordinary New Yorkers pelting the villainous Green Goblin with rocks and debris, and shouting dialogue like, “You mess with Spidey, you mess with New York,” and, “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!”
Since Spider-Man, the towers have been largely relegated to movies about the September 11th attacks (United 93, World Trade Center, 9/11, A Few Days In September), but they turn up in the closing shot of both Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and Spielberg’s Munich, though the messages attached to those appearances are very different. More recently, 2009’s Watchmen features a number of shots of the twin towers in an alternate 1985 universe, and the 2010 Robert Pattinson vehicle Remember Me ends with the twist realization that R. Patz is standing in the WTC on 9/11 and is about to be killed in the attacks.
Much, much better is the 2008 documentary Man on Wire, which captures tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s 1974 stroll between the towers on a thin wire suspended between the rooftops. Directed by James Marsh, the film plays more like a caper movie than a documentary, and in highlighting Petit’s obsession with the WTC allows us to revel in our own.
Check out WTC in Movies for an impressive list of hundreds of other films that featured the World Trade Center, and let us know your favorite WTC cameos at in the comment’s section below.
This article appears in Sep 8-14, 2011.
