NYC After 911 – No Business as Usual
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As I write this, twelve days after images I never imagined I would see flashed across my television screen, the making of movies is not business as usual, and I suspect it won't be for quite some time.
On the night of September 10th, I was up a good part of the night preparing a business proposal for a film on which I am attached as line producer. My plan was to sleep in.
At around 8:50AM, I was awakened by my door buzzer. I stumbled out of bed in my apartment in midtown Manhattan and went to my intercom. It was my superintendent telling me he was there to see about some repairs I had been asking about for three months.
I buzzed him in, and he and his assistants walked through my apartment, inspecting the repairs that needed to be made. He wanted to do the small ones then. Couldn't it wait until later, I asked? No, he responded.
Clearly, I was going to be awake now. Nothing more to do than get some work done while the workmen went about their business. I turned on my computer and went online.
To think that we had lives before the Internet where the first things we would do were more real than checking your email.
There was a notice in red across my AOL welcome screen saying that one of the financial buildings were closed and that the market was not going to open. How strange, I thought. I clicked, and saw an image of the World Trade Center on fire. I immediately turned to the source of electronic comfort I grew up with - the television.
I was in grade school when JFK was assassinated. We were sent home, and I joined my mother in watching my black-and-white television as images I could barely comprehend crossed the screen. When I was eleven years old, I sat and cheered as a hero of mine, Robert Kennedy, whose small frame I had seen hoisted aloft at the San Gennaro festival in Little Italy, who had shook my little hand, won the California Primary. I watched as joy turned to horror and a man walked up and shot him. I still see him lying there, a look on his face as surprised as I was. I sat up very late, knowing he would live, He had to. I fell asleep on the couch watching the television. I woke to find that I was wrong.
