I Watched the Towers Fall. Hollywood Has Never Felt the Same Since

Before I get back to my columnist’s brief and look at how the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001, changed Hollywood and culture — please allow a personal digression as I look back at how it changed me.  

That’s something I would have denied for a long time. But now, a quarter-century later, it feels appropriate to consider.

I saw 9/11 from much too close a seat — although, certainly, not as close as so many. I was in no danger — but this week’s reports about the air in the immediate aftermath make one wonder.

I could still pass for a youngish man back then, and I was still finding my way as a reporter. The Sept. 8 wedding of two friends brought me to New York that month, and they held the ceremony on a rooftop in lower Manhattan, with the twin towers gleaming as a backdrop in their wedding photos.

I remained in the city for a few days after, staying with a friend off Lafayette Street. On Tuesday morning, my last day in the city, I was planning to head uptown and visit, if I recall, the Neue Galerie.

But that morning, I was woken up by what sounded like an enormous crash, followed by what sounded like every siren going off.

It didn’t actually even sound like a crash — it sounded like all the cars in the world had smashed into each other at once.

I lay in bed for a few minutes trying to make sense of what I heard. 

Finally, my friend and host came to wake me and said, “You have to see what’s happening.” His living room had a giant picture window, and the Towers — maybe 20 blocks away — were the centerpiece. I came out and saw a giant hole in the side of the building with flames pouring out of it. Minutes later, as we still struggled to make sense of what we were seeing, we heard and saw another plane fly into the second tower.

At every juncture of the day, I recall now, when things happened — when terror unfolded in front of me — I didn’t respond in horror, but with confusion. My mind took a little time to make sense of what I was seeing and hearing, without the benefit of a TV anchor to narrate it for me.

A bit later, I stumbled down the stairs out onto Lafayette Street, and when I emerged, the street was full of people streaming uptown, many covered in soot and ash, and all wailing — a collective wail of shock and despair that was like nothing I’d ever heard.  

And again, I struggled to make sense of it all: What had provoked the cries that sounded that urgent? I looked up at the tower and saw it still burning as it had all morning, and something felt very wrong, but I couldn’t say what.

Then an older man standing next to me, staring up, muttered out loud, to no one in particular, “What happened to the other one?” 

And I looked back up and saw, indeed, that since I had started walking down the stairs from my friend’s apartment two minutes ago, there was now one less tower.

The rest of the day is a similar blur, and people shuffled around the neighborhood in a daze. The one memory that stands out: talking to a woman perhaps in her 60s, white with ash from head to toe, who was telling me how she had been walking out of the building with her best friend and something had hit her friend in the head and she’d fallen down. The woman tried to get her friend to move, but she wasn’t talking to her and didn’t get up. 

“Maybe she was tired,” she told me.

My flight the next day was, of course, canceled. I spent the next week in the exclusion zone, below Houston Street, which was blocked off. You could only come back into the area with ID showing you lived there — which, as a guest, I didn’t have — and that meant I couldn’t leave. So I spent the following days wandering around the strange ghost town, with the terrible smell inside and out at every moment.

I also invaded what turned into, under the circumstances, a staycation honeymoon in the excluded zone for my friends after three days of marriage. With nowhere to go and even the stores closed, I frequently broke in on their newlywed bliss with round-the-clock visits, and we went up to their roof and stared out at the ruins still smoldering, smoldering for days.

Stopping by like that would have been behavior horrendous enough to have the door slammed in my face any other time — actually, even then it was awful (belated apologies, 25 years later, to Debra and Brett). But I think we just walked through that week, that horrible smell in every breath, in a sort of stupor — not really able to make sense of what we were living amongst and not able to react much to it.  

In that week, I talked to a lot of people with stories that made your heart break a million times over, stories that had no equal in my life up to that point. But the senselessness — the way our reality was torn apart in that moment, how giant towers just disappeared before our eyes — had no answers then, or even responses; 25 years later, other than some suitable-for-framing homilies, I’m not sure I have any today.

A last memory: By week’s end, I was finally able to get out of the zone and move around uptown. I was standing in a subway station around Union Square, and for the first time in a week people seemed to unclench. There was light chatter on the platform, and suddenly – I heard laughter. A wave of just relief swept across the few people there; it was that palpable.

And then, on the middle track, a train slowly chugged through, coming from downtown, pulling open-bed freight cars, piled high with debris. And the laughter abruptly stopped, and we all silently watched the load of broken concrete and steel move by.

That is my 9/11 story. But 25 years later, I’ve come to think that day changed more than me — it changed Hollywood, too.