comment #1

erniesouchak says ...

Jeff: I'm pretty sure the towers went up in the late 1970s.

comment #2

Devin Faraci says ...

WTC One was done in 1970. WTC Two was done in 1971. I'm a native New Yorker who grew up with the Towers - I was born in 1973, so they were always there - but I wonder if this would be a dealbreaker.

comment #3

Devin Faraci says ...

Doing a little research, the Towers opened in 1973. I will bet Hallstrom mistakenly assumed they weren't complete until then and didn't bother with them.

comment #4

Craig Kennedy says ...

Most likely, I'm thinking the filmmakers guessed no one would care and for the most part I bet they're right.

About this time last year, Wells was complaining a movie theater was showing the wrong movie in a period shot of Times Square from Notorious Bettie Page.

comment #5

gruver1 says ...

Wells to Faraci & Ernie Souchack: There's a shot in Peter Yates' "The Hot Rock" (1971) in which Robert Redford and George Segal and the gang are flying over and around various Manhattan skyscrapers in a helicopter on their way north to a Harlem police station. At one point they pass right by the WTC -- one of the towers has sides and the other is still open with the beams and steel girders visible. The film was shot, I believe, in the summer/fall of 1970, so there you go.

comment #6

squealy says ...

The towers would be just as much of a distraction, or more, if they were there. Any thought of them takes you out of the movie, one way or another.

comment #7

gruver1 says ...

Wells to squealy: Bullshit...total bullshit. If you show the pre-9.11.01 NYC skyline in a period film, they're there. If you show a post-9.11.01 skyline in a contemporary film, they're not. No discussion, no wiggling around...do it right.

comment #8

renorambler says ...

I suspect that the towers are a distraction...but that is no reason not to put them there. I'm with Wells, if they were THERE, they should be THERE, so to speak.

comment #9

Jake Gittes says ...

The WTC construction is also visible in The French Connection during the scene where the Frenchmens drug laden car is loaded off a ship at a Brooklyn pier.

In the opening scene of Godfather III a title card states 1979 yet we are shown the Twin Towers along with the Winter Garden and World Financial Center which didn't exist till the late 1980's.

The Towers also created an anachronism in The Valachi Papers. Joe Valachi (Charles Bronson) drives a car off a westside pier into the Hudson.
There in the background are the towers- 40 years before they should have been.

comment #10

rocco says ...

This discussion is hilarious...with so much information readily available at our fingertips and yet this is still a point of contention...what year is this?

Quick, let me run to the library and I'll have an answer for you in about an hour...or maybe I'll knock on my neighbor's door instead, I heard his family just invested in the latest Encyclopedia Britannica...

comment #11

RoyBatty says ...

erniesouchak - sorry, but I gotta bust your chops.

" I'm pretty sure the towers went up in the late 1970s."

Let's forget for a moment that for over 5 years now we've had one story in every form of newsmedia that exists that have gone over the history of the WTC towers, repeatedly. We will assume that you are either not from this country or have been out of it.

But, you are posting to a blog. On the internet. In the 21st Century. How long could it possibly take you to either google or wikipedia the research (which is almost the same thing actually). I have Firefox's browser, so wikipedia (along with google and IMDB) are in my search windows. It took me about 23 seconds to get this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_center

Just saying...

comment #12

travis b says ...

the world trade center in a period piece is distracting? i absolutely hate this argument. grow up. do we burn pictures of dead relatives because they're distracting? do we erase john lennon from beatles recordings because it's distracting? no. just because what happened was horrific, doesn't mean that the towers never existed. i hope the filmmakers didn't neglect the towers based on distractions. if so, they should just distract themselves into another line of work.

comment #13

RoyBatty says ...

Travis - I have to agree. Now.

For a period after 9/11, I thought the opposite. Even in old shows like NYPD it was distracting to see the towers. The worse case of this was the film DON'T SAY A WORD (Michael Douglas/Brittany Murphy - what the fuck happened to her??). It wasn't supposed to be a period piece, but there was a shot, totally unrelated to the plot or characters, that had the Twin Towers.

I was instantly pulled out of the film when it played and agreed with Wells at the time that it should have been removed or reshot.

comment #14

jeffmcm says ...

Showing the towers would be distracting. Not because people would start weeping in the theater, but because of their iconographic value, the fact that depending on how you show them, the image would have thematic weight. The smart thing would have been to just not have a shot pointing at that part of Manhattan.

comment #15

Devin Faraci says ...

Yes, banish any shot of Manhattan looking south. That would work.

comment #16

jeffmcm says ...

That's not what I mean. A director's job is to craft shots that focus or revolve around the themes of the film, and to avoid distracting the audience with imagery that is not part of his visual scheme. If you're watching a movie about Howard Hughes and suddenly the screen is filled with a full shot of the two towers lasting for a full minute, your audience is going to wonder what Hughes has to do with 9/11. (I'm exaggerating) Just as if the movie's color scheme was mostly greens and blues and all of a sudden you see the red of an American flag - sure, there were American flags in the 1970s, but is that what you want your audience looking at right at that moment?

comment #17

travis b says ...

but, what about if the towers were shown in the background. . . . they're not the focus, but they are there, because in the early 70's, they were part of the cityscape. yeah, if the director chose to focus on them randomly, that would be awkward..but to just completley eliminate them from the cityscape in a pan of the city or a background shot is just as distracting.

comment #18

Josh Massey says ...

In one episode of "Lost," the director purposely showed the towers outside of a window - just to tell the viewers that this particular flashback took place before 9/11. I thought that was creative.

comment #19

jeffmcm says ...

Travis, that version would probably be fine. Like I said, I was exaggerating.
Obviously, the director's final decision was the wrong one, because we're talking about it. But I hope my point was clear.

comment #20

carla kolchak says ...

'this column is often about the "but" factor'

...To quote the estimable Pee Wee Herman, Everybody I know's gotta big 'but'.

comment #21

Mr. Muckle says ...

So, are we back to the CG argument? Here, for the sake of historical accuracy, are we to allow CG twin towers? But for the sake of emotional impact, no CG tears?

comment #22

Silverscreenvideos says ...

I lived in Florida when Godfathers I and II were released and there was a gaffe in Godfather II which a number of local people commented on. There is a car visible in one scene which clearly has a state vehicle inspection sticker on it. Only Florida did not pass a vehicle inspection law until the 1970's and the scene took place in the 1950's.

Somehow that major screwup by Francis Ford Coppola and his production design crew did not keep Godfather II from becoming one of the great films of all time.

Other than trivia geeks, long time local New Yorkers and film cultists, most people don't know when the WTC was built, don't know exactly where it was on the skyline, and, most importantly, in a panoramic landscape shot, just won't care. If people do notice things like that, then they are either exceedingly picky about things like that or the movie is not doing a good job of holding viewer interest in general.

comment #23

jeffmcm says ...

That's a good point: if you're looking at the scenery, the movie has deeper problems.

comment #24

Rich S. says ...

But most importantly, were they wearing the right underwear?

comment #25

Craig Kennedy says ...

I still don't think it matters one way or the other, but now I'm curious to hear if the thought crossed the mind of anyone behind the film and, if so, what the thought process was to leaving the towers out.

Could it be because most of the people who see the movie won't be intimately aware enough of the early 70's Manhattan skyline to even know what they're not looking at?

And I agree with Squealy. Putting them back in is as much of a distraction as leaving them out. The fact is, they're gone now and it's a reminder either way. Nothing will change that. Putting them back in is like the guy in the toupe...it looks like crap and just calls attention to the fact he doesn't have hair. He's not fooling anyone.

If the movie gets a lot of juice out of the period and locale (I don't know, haven't read Jeff's review) then it probably would've been a good idea to stick 'em in, but not having them there isn't much to make a fuss about.

comment #26

nemo says ...

Hell, somehow I managed to post this comment in the wrong thread for "The Hoax". Here it goes again ...

One of the most striking shots in "Zodiac" was the CGI time-lapse construction of the Transamerica Tower, which transformed the San Francisco skyline. Transamerica went up between 1969 and 1972, roughly the same time period the Twin Towers went up in NYC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transamerica_Tower

The scene in "Zodiac" where the tower went up in a single shot is particularly effective because it drew attention to the way the city was being transformed during the long unproductive slog of the investigation.

Even though I was a teenager growing up in Chicago during the period when the Transamerica Tower and the Twin Towers were going up, I remember well the debate they both sparked. Many people hated them both, hated the way they dominated the skylines of their respective cities. There was no way you could ignore them, even if you lived far from either coast.

I have to agree with Wells on this one -- getting the skyline right, especially with the relatively cheap CGI available today, is not a minor detail in a period film. The Twin Towers helped define New York Ciy in the 1970s, just as the Transamerica Tower helped defined San Francisco in that period. It is a major point, just as major as getting the clothes and the cars right.

And it is particularly major in a film set in a time period that people in their late 40s and early 50s remember clearly. It's one thing to cut some slack on a minor anachronism in a film set a century ago. It's one thing to cut some slack when a movie marquee advertises a film released a year after the time period of the scene. But the NY Twin Towers in the 1970s? That is not a minor point.

comment #27

nemo says ...

By the way, the Sears Tower in Chicago (still the tallest building in the US) went up during 1970 to 1973, the same time period as the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco and the WTC Twin Towers in New York.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Tower

It was the first sustained period of building new towers that redefined the skylines of American cities since the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building went up in the late 20s and early 30s.

All those buildings in the early 70s were in the news a lot. Believe me, if you were an adult or even in your teens during that time period, you could not ignore the construction of those new towers.

comment #28

Craig Kennedy says ...

The Transamerica thing in Zodiac was terrific because it had a purpose beyond period authenticity...as you've just pointed out.

I can see how a stickler for detail would want to see the WTC recreated, but I guess I'm just not that guy. I don't know for sure though I'll have to see the movie first. I agree it doesn't seem like it would've taken much to put the buildings back in and you're right that they were definitely an iconic part of the Manhattan skyline.

comment #29

Viagra Without Prescription says ...

If you're watching a movie about Howard Hughes and suddenly the screen is filled with a full shot of the two towers lasting for a full minute, your audience is going to wonder what Hughes has to do with 9/11.