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Two New Yorkers Who Lived Through 9/11 · Boomer Has It!

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: We weren't going to do this episode, but there's been a lot of talk about the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_04: And both of us were there on that day in New York.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_04: So we thought we might put out some of our thoughts about that event.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of people are too young to remember it, or were born afterwards, as our children were.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: So it's a historical event for them, which has a very different resonance.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_03: You were thinking that for maybe that cohort, it was a little like the assassination of JFK was for us.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_03: But you and I were both three years old when JFK was assassinated.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: So really it would be too young to process as someone who experienced it.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: But we grew up in a very, very heavy wake of it, didn't we?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's right.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_04: But even then, unless you were lining the streets of the motorcade in Dallas, you know, on November 22nd, 1963, you probably didn't feel that event as viscerally as we did on September 11, 2001, actually witnessing the towers attacked and then falling.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_04: I'm JB Miller in London.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm Jim Jolamis in Brooklyn.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_04: This is Boomer Hasn't.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_04: So Jim, Jim, when you think back 25 years to that, it wasn't even today.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_04: It was a period.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: But I I think about living life after the event.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_03: It was life after wartime, wasn't it?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: And how the city had had built partitions east to west on major avenues leading leading up from the World Trade Center all the way to I think Midtown Manhattan.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_03: This the streets were shut down, but crossing east to west on Canal Street, Housing Street, 14th Street, 23rd, 34th, those were those were uh cordoned by various types of law enforcement.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: And to get to your apartment, if you were above one of those cordones, you had to show your ID and a bill, like your phone bill or your gas bill to prove you actually lived below that partition.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's funny you you remember that.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_04: I do too.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_04: And it's funny because we lived pretty close to each other.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_04: I was in the West Village, uh, right at McDougall Street.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_04: You were on Spring Street, just a few blocks away, but we had a border between us.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_04: And we had to we had to negotiate that border just to visit each other to hang out.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_04: And um there was uh the yeah, it was like the big it was like sort of east and west Berlin just before the wall went up.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_04: Although luckily the wall never did go up.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I can't remember how long that lasted.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_04: It may have only been a week or something.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_04: I and I guess it was to control the movement of the city, the the um the people, the emergency vehicles had to get an access.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_04: They were the only people who could go all the way from uptown all the way downtown.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I remember the posters that went up almost immediately.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_04: The what there were, you know, the missing posters, and I I it seemed heartbreaking and kind of naive at the same time because I remember thinking there's nothing left of these of these people, you know, it's just but the but the loved ones and friends who lost lost their loved ones without any physical, you know, there were there were just nothing left.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_04: There were no bodies found.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_04: It was such a it's such a definitive event.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_04: But you let's go back to when it actually happened, because you you I think witnessed uh the the planes crashing into the towers, which I didn't I didn't see.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_04: What did you see?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you know what?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: When I when you think back on it, and if you look at the if you if you look at the sequence of events, I I used to think, why does everyone think this was so brilliantly planned?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, why did Bill Maher get in trouble for saying that they weren't cowards?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: But if you if you look at the if you look at the sequence, it was 8 46 in the morning when flight American Mary Alliance Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center, followed by um the next strike on the South Tower at 9.03.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: The Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9.37.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: Then the world, the South Tower collapsed at 9.59.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: At 10.03, Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, PA.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_03: And at 1028, the second tower collapsed.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_03: That's all in a span of an hour and 49 minutes unfolding on television, in person, all across the country.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: 149, you know, hour 49 minutes of terror as planned for for you know citizens of the US.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_04: It was it was extraordinary to put that in context.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_04: If it was in the morning, if it had been in the evening and somebody went to the movies, that's the length of a movie.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_04: You would have missed the entire thing.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_04: You've gone, you would have gone to a cinema, watched your movie.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_04: I suppose it would have stopped the movie, but I mean, theoretically, you'd come out and the whole world had changed, seemingly.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: Seemingly.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I I I was asleep, but I was woken up by a plane flying so low over really, yeah.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_04: It woke me up.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_04: It woke me up.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_04: I had been doing something the evening before that made me very tired, and it was an unusual event.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_04: And that was I went to the gym.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_04: That was a rare event for me.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_04: And uh, it meant I overslept the next morning because I was so exhausted.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_04: But I meant that was the last time you've been to the gym.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_04: That's the last time I thought I'm never going to the gym again.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_04: There's no good's gonna come out of it.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_04: That was just like and I and I was woken up by the was the most extraordinary sound.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_04: It was sounded as if the plane was like six feet above my building, my tenement building.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_04: And I got I got dressed, uh, I went up to the roof, and I got to the roof just uh it's either seconds or minutes after the second tower had been had been hit by the plane.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember watching with there are people on rubes all around the village.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_04: Uh uh, you could see rooftops, people standing roof, just staring at the at the at the fire.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_04: It was so eerie.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_04: It's just watching the fire and this this big gash in the buildings where the planes had gone in.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_04: But yes, it was a pretty short period of time.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, time meant nothing.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_04: I they were not even aware of time.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_04: I could have been standing up, we could have been standing up there for what it seemed like some hours.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_04: What also I remember is when the towers fell, it was silent.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_04: You couldn't hear them because I think the wind was blowing in in the opposite direction.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_04: So it could have been if you were south of the towers, you could hear it north of the tower.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_04: We're only blocks away.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um I don't know what you're I don't know where where you were at that time, but I I was standing on my roof and I we couldn't hear, and we we could see the towers collapse straight down, and it was silent.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_04: It was so eerie.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_03: It was just bizarre.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: The other, the other, the other aspect of this is it it was visible for everyone to see.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: New York City is uh laid out on a grid.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so you can find an opening anywhere to see it.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_03: I I happened to be in Union Square on my way to work.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: I was working in a boutique PR firm.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: I had just come back, I think from Europe.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_03: So I was fresh, and it was, as everyone likes to reflect, it was a gorgeous fall day.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's a beautiful day.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: It was and then, you know, and for a lot of our listeners who don't live in big cities, or unless you live in Europe, you know, you're not used to seeing big squares where people gather.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: And Union Square is not the biggest square in the world, but it's a it's a gathering spot and it's open.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: There's a park in it, there's a farmer's market, and I was crossing across the asphalt, and I saw this red.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: It looked like a giant cinder from a barbecue stuck right in the middle of the North Tower.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I I just thought, wow, bad accident.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_03: Couldn't I couldn't imagine the scale of it?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_03: I thought maybe a commuter plane hit it.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: Then I wandered up to the office, which was at 21st Street, and I was with a small group, and we were asking questions.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: We had a young one, young woman who worked in the office.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_03: Her dad was in the World Trade Center.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_03: She was concerned, couldn't get calls to him.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I remember a little while later, I looked out the window, I said, why is that plane flying so low to the Hudson River?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_03: And we all looked out the window, we looked at the window, we could see the Hudson, and then we we scrambled to see uh a southern view, and we saw that plane hit.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_03: And oh my goodness, it was a just a moment in time that is um sort of static in my inside my skull of all of us, sort of four of us, arms raised, sort of in reaction, and that's when it hit home.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: We were under attack.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_04: Can I ask you a question?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_04: Having actually seen the second plane smash into the tower, did you have a sense memory from films?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_04: We'd seen so many disaster films, you know, it was such a common, it's a weird common meme of American movies that that um you know, signature, you know, iconic buildings and structures in the US get smashed by you know aliens or often aliens, yeah, but um, or you know, natural events.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_04: Did it did it how did you process seeing something that was real that maybe you've seen a version of in films and special effects?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's interesting that you make that distinction.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: I I think about that there was an alien movie called Independence Day, and the popular trailer showed the White House being blown to bits.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, people cheering ranking.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_04: I remember seeing people cheering in the audience because it was a big event it was present.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: It was spectacular, you know, sight gag in a way.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, but the you know, the weird part of seeing it hit, and listeners of the pod, you've you've seen the famous video.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: It looks like the plane is sucked inside the tower.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's not a spectacular explosion.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: You see it hit the tower and it looks like it's been sucked inside it.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_04: Uh it was and you could see the you know, the everything above just above where the planes had smashed was on fire.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I was too far to see people leaning out the window.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_04: We saw later saw a video and and the photographs of that was just so shocking.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, uh it is hard.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_04: That was hard to hard to process.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_04: But even watching it was hard to process and didn't well, you know, that makes sense, right?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_03: The visit the visibility part of it is it's it's why it's interesting to me because I we were, you know, we had a lot of anxious, nervous energy, not sure what to do with ourselves.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_03: And I I called a friend of mine who is um we will have on the pod someday.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_03: He was the editorial page editor at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe not quite at the time, but I called him up just to see, like, hey, what are you hearing?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: And uh then he asked if I would be a source for an article.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_03: And so I gave an interview as someone, you know, on the ground in New York.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_03: And I remember, you know, they the reporter asked, she asked, How far are you away?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_03: I said, Well, I'm at 21st Street, and it it happened down at the tip of the island, so probably like about 30 or 40 blocks, and we sort of calculated that it was a couple miles away, maybe.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_03: Does that sound right?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's probably about right.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_03: Although the but the weird thing is it's hard to translate.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: If you know, if you live in a suburb and you think two miles away, you're thinking of circuitous roads, malls.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but in in this little island, this man skinny island of Manhattan, it is everything is just in view, especially when it's elevated.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: You could see every single thing.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_04: They're very close to each other.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_04: Everyone's very packed in in Manhattan.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it's um, I remember the World Trade Center before the attacks was not a well-loved um, you know, collection of buildings.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_04: It was, it was, I think, considered uh too tall.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_04: It wasn't that interesting.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_04: They never rented out all of the floors, even though it had been uh up for uh what 20, 20 years by then, 25 years, to the point where they gave, they handed over one of the highest floors to visual artists as free studio space.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_04: Do you remember this?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_04: And there were some artists killed.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: I don't remember that.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they were the the it was never completely rented out, and I remember feeling having more um feeling more love for the building the way at night, because at night you could see uh floors that were lit up, and you which meant people were you know working at night, and that to me always warmed the building up because you could it had more of a personal uh uh sort of human sense to it, if that makes any sense.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_03: It was kind of an awful experience being uh walking among or between the towers because it was a lot of concrete and these megaliths.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: And by the way, it's I mean, talk about brutalist design.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: What a cold, cold towering structure dehumanizing and it was very cold.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_04: It was cold.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_04: The only time I ever went down there was to get theater tickets because there was a TKTS half-priced ticket booth in one of the towers.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_04: So I remember the last time I went down there was to was to buy some uh inexpensive theater, theater ticket.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_04: There's no other reason to go in that building unless you unless you work there, right?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_04: Or were visiting a friend who worked there.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_04: It was not really a uh a destination.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I do remember um they dug up so much dirt to build it on that site that they uh they used it as landfill to extend part of Manhattan.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember seeing before they built, was that Barry Park City they built on that?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_03: Before that was well remembered, Londoner, Mr.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: Londoner.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_04: In the late 70s, when I was when I first moved to New York, that hadn't been built on yet.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_04: And it was like a desert.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_04: It was like it was like uh, and I remember seeing the jet set orchestra, Sun Ra, Sun Ra's Jet Set Orchestra, play in on a bandstand in that in that kind of desert of dirt before they built Battery Park.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_04: It was just sort of amazing because it was sound like a big space, but that was the landfill from the World Trade Center, which was just lying there, hadn't been built on yet.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, it was not a very successful uh you know development.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_04: It took a long time to develop downtown.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_04: You know, when we first moved to the city, Soho was still a district of light industry warehouses which were no longer uh used for light industry.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_04: Well, no, there was still some light industry there, but it were there artists uh living in these big cold water flats.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_04: And Tribeca, which wasn't Tribeca yet, uh, when I first moved to New York, it was a wasteland.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_04: It was uh it was it was like especially at night.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_04: There were no shops then, there was nothing, everything was shut down.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_04: There were a couple nightclubs because no one lived there.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: Because no no one lived there, so they could sustain a nightclub culture.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and no one would complain about the noise because no one lived there.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_04: One of my uh children's favorite films, and one of mine is um uh Desperately Seeking Susan, which was well, that was late, that was 1983, but it was still even then.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_04: There was um it was a much colder area and it was a hip hip part of the city.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_04: Um you know, in 2001, it was more developed, but the World Trade Center was, I can say it was more loved and missed.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_04: It was more loved after after it it was it was lost.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_04: And I thought it was.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, that had the ape on the in the World Trade Center.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: It was there was uh a restaurant called Windows of the World.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: Windows on the world, Windows on the World.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: And when I was a young, we don't even say this anymore, I was a young stockbroker, um, having a having a pointless career on Wall Street.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I a friend of mine who I worked with said, let's go to Windows on the World after work.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I said, gee, can we do that?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: But it was easy to get up there, it was easy to get a seat.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: This view was dazzling, amazing views, and the and the cocktails were quite affordable compared to even other places because I thought year was that this would have been 1980.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: I'm scared to say 1986 or 1987, yeah.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and it was you know, it was walkable because Wall Street was still a financial nerve center of the United States.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: There were still financial uh investment banks down in the Wall Street area.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_03: Oh now it now it's completely residential.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_04: There was another there's another thing that that was um of cultural interest, uh, interest at World Trade Center.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_04: Now it was was his name Philippe Petit, the French tightrope walker, who there was a famous film made about this, and he he put it totally illegally um installed a um tightrope between the two towers and famously walked across between the two towers.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I think was it uh what it became a documentary called Man on Wire.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_04: That's right, Man on Wire.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_04: And and very thankfully, in in retrospect, because there were, except for the um King Kong film and Philip Petit, there was really nothing of cultural interest.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um, the way I think the Empire State Building in its 100 years, almost hundred years of life, or the Chrysler Building have been have featured in so many films and and um you know aspects of culture, I think.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_04: And for the original King Kong climbed up the Empire State Building, which was brand new at the time.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_04: But the World Trade Center needed um cultural cachet, which it didn't have very much of.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_04: I think people who didn't grow up in New York, people who who didn't live in New York at that time probably don't have a sense of what the World Trade Center, you know, meant to New Yorkers.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of international people uh worked in the it was which was true, you know, world it was a World Trade Center, the people from all over the world worked there.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_04: You knew people who were killed in that attack.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_03: You went to several funerals and I attended two or three funerals, and it was you know, it was a different time.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um, technology was a lot different.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_03: So I was living in the apartment, we were somewhat newly married.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, there was no streaming service, so I borrowed a film called Love Me or Leave Me, right with James Cagney and Doris Day from my my 80-year-old super, who's a you know, uh a lady who was raised in the neighborhood, who we called the mayor, and we watched it six times, and we duct taped our windows to avoid the air.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: I did have an air cleaner at the time, and uh I also had so at that time cell phones were new.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: There was no iPhone until 2007, but we were there was a a mad race between the competition of who would win the cell phone battle.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: There was also modernization of phones.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I think there was something called VoIP VOIP, and uh residence residential homes had batteries.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: But I lived in an old true cold water flat on Spring Street, and therefore I had a copper wire to New York telephone at the time.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I had to do it.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't even Verizon, and because of that copper wire, I could call anywhere without fear of a battery going out, without an internet.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, the phone, and all my neighbors wanted to use my phone.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: I Was the most popular guy in town posting?
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_04: I I was I was always a uh a late adopter, so I didn't think I had I'm not sure.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not sure if I had a cell phone at that point.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_04: I wasn't on the internet until after 9-11.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, but I remember getting phone calls from family members who were concerned for my for my welfare.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, people reaching out, people I hadn't heard from for a while, um, as one would do.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_04: I did the same thing to a friend in Mexico City after there was an uh there's an earthquake there.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember during the damn my damnedness to reach her, and I hadn't spoken to her in a while.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_04: I just wanted to make sure she was okay.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_04: So people reached out.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, it was um it was an odd let's not for and then there's I have some couple of interesting memories of the day.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I was again, I was at 21st and 5th, the whole office vacated and went to um the owner of this boutique firm, my my very close friend Frank.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: He hosted everyone as a sort of a meeting place.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I stayed behind with uh we had there was a young man who was an actor who was our uh receptionist, and we were looking out the window, and again, we had a great south view, and we could open the windows, and there before our eyes, one of those things collapsed.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I couldn't, I just couldn't believe it.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_03: Because part of the hype was the safety feature of the World Trade Centers, that they were engineered in a way that they could they could uh withstand the impact of what we used to call jumbo jets.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_04: And they've been bombed before.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_04: There was a there was remember there was a bomb that went off right in the garage.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, I can't remember what year it was, some years before, was it 10 years before?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: Possibly, yeah.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_04: And um it did you wouldn't even know that the bomb had gone off.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_04: The buildings hardly hardly moved.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I think that was when terrorists learned learned their lesson.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: I guess so.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: But when that thing fell, like I said, we had the window open.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: And as you pointed out, it was silent.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_03: You didn't hear a crash, but I heard everyone on every rooftop groan.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that reaction was just shocking.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_04: Also, the the the the sound all day long, you were we were hearing the the the sirens of the fire engines from all over the city heading down all week, all all week.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_04: It just went on and on and on and on.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_04: That was such a tragic story because it was firemen going into the towers.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_04: I wonder if they knew that it was a lost cause.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um they had to walk up the stairwells.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_04: They couldn't, you know, they couldn't take a lift, they couldn't take an elevator.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_04: How many firemen were killed?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_04: It was over 300, I thought.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_04: It was 300 or something.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: I don't have that, I don't have that number in front of the case.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_04: It was just um that was one of the real additional tragedies of that of that day.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_04: And also, we should mention this name that people will be familiar with, and that's Rudolf Giuliani, who was the mayor at the time.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_04: We didn't like him.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_04: He was a conservative Republican, but he was a hero on 9-11.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_04: He was brave, he was he was uh very level-headed, even though was it his idea to have the emergency center um in case there was any any emergency disaster in the city actually located in one of the World Trade Center towers.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_04: I think that was his call.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_04: And of course, they lost that, that what doubt.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_04: But he was very grounded and level-headed and calm, and he was a unifying president, people who didn't have any respect for him beforehand, like uh like I I didn't, um, really admired him.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so children, remember this.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_04: He lost that um well of um of goodwill very quickly.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_04: He went for the money.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_04: He he his association as the mayor of America, America's mayor, he was you know knighted and it was the cover of all the magazines.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_04: He whittled that away very quickly, ran for president in 2008, uh very soon.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, was out of the primaries, and then associated with um Trump, uh big Trumpy guy, near got no end of he got nothing for it, right?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_03: Let's I mean let's just go back, let's just go back in time prior to September 11th.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: All right, critics and political analysts frequently accused Giuliani of operating with a paranoid siege mentality in in his governance every day, every municipal disagreement was like an existential battle.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_03: He actually bullied a man on his radio show.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um the man was an advocate of ferrets, ferrets as pets, see the pets.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_03: Keeping ferrets as pets, and he Giuliani was so vindictive.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_03: He it became a thing.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_03: He stormed, he stormed out of the radio station at WNYC, went straight to the health department, and created uh a new statute that banned wild animals from New York City, thus shutting down the whole ferret discussion.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: But but you know, I remember I was listening to WNYC.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_03: These were early days.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_03: Brian Lair was guiding us through falsehoods, um clearing up the air in terms of what was happening on the ground.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: And I remember it was so early, he said, I think we don't have a name for this yet, but I think what we can call it accurately is an attack.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_03: We had an attack on the World Trade Center, and that's that's the word we use today.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_03: But he regarding Giuliani, I remember he was taking calls and he said, Do you agree that since the bear is has been uh governing the city with a siege mentality that all of a sudden he's uh he's he's matching uh the conditions of the city now?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and it was true.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, he was he he he was at his best for yeah um a few moments, ushering in ushering in the Bloomberg administration shortly after that.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_04: He rose to the moment.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_04: We can say that Giuliani rose to the moment on 9-11, and he was a unifying, calming um presence.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_04: He was a strong mayor, unifying, unifying in this being New York City.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_03: I remember I went to a vigil a few days later in Union Square, and I happened to have uh a friendly relationship with John Leonard, the book critic and reporter, and through through through friends.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I remember, you know, he's a a frequent contributor to the nation, not exactly a bastion of conservative thought.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_03: And he said, I said, What do you think, Giuliani?
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_03: He said, He's doing great.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_03: And that's how unifying.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_04: That's John Leonard of the Nation, of the left-wing nation.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_04: And yeah, and we all really appreciated that.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_04: It's amazing how quickly Giuliani just whittled that away, became an ogre, an absolute ogre.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_03: An absolute ogre.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I but before we get to the polarization, I want to share one more memory, and that was that it it there was so much confusion.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_03: I had talked about how these the you know city law enforcement had built these sort of partitions that that um cut the island into segments.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I I was uh with a young guy in his 20s who also worked at this PR firm.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_03: And he he lived below he lived below Housend Street too.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_03: And we met up.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_03: I said, what do you say we try to get a little closer?
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_03: This would have been three or four days after the attack.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: We walked to Canal, there were the police on Broadway, there were the police on Center Street, we walked across and we found a parking lot, and at the parking lot was a a chain, and we walked under the chain, and soon we were below Canal Street, and where it was a like a battle zone.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_03: And the the thing that was most distinctive about it were piles and piles of this smelly ash, uh six inches a foot, uh, where it accumulated in corners, piles of ash, broken windows, and it was it was the Wall Street area that catered to high salary customers.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: So I remember walking on Broadway and seeing where there was once a fancy jewelry store where you could buy expensive watches, windows broken, watches on display where you could reach and take if you liked.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but we didn't because that would be tasteless.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_04: Was this with were these windows that have been broken from um from impact actually?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_03: From impact, yeah.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_03: And and uh at one building where Merrill Lynch had had been headquartered, I forget the address, there was uh a Brooks Brothers.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: The door was open, we walked into Brooks Brothers, these gorgeous shirts on display, covered in ash.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_03: And and uh a photographer had gotten down and and gotten the photo of the Brooks Brothers shirts, and it's it's easy to find today.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: We ventured even further down.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_03: There were abandoned cars, destroyed cars, there were abandoned uh food carts where someone was selling donuts and coffee that morning.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_03: And even further down, I would guess we were probably 10 blocks from the site, we could see hoses in the air putting out this ever, ever burning fire.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: And there was George Stephanopoulos with a camera crew.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: He was in a in his shirt sleeves and a tie, and they were sort of waiting for something to happen.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_03: Their eyes, their eyes were fixed on what they called the pile.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: And there was my Evan and I, Evan Lerner and I breathing in this smoke.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_03: And just just out of sense of good taste, I think we just decided, wow, we're here.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: Why'd we do this?
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_03: Let's go home now.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_03: But well, now I have a now I have a story to tell.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you know, it's an amazing story, but that was very um carcinogenic, you know, dust.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_04: You would not really want to be around that too much, as a lot of the first, remember we call them first responders, and a lot of them died in the years uh afterwards from from cancer.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, right.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_03: And there's they're still many of them are still ill.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_04: That's that was um, they should have given them uh masks right away to work with a you know uh oxygen or whatever the filter out, but they weren't.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_04: They were told it was safe and it wasn't.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, I think there are lawsuits associated with that.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_04: It it's I we I don't want to get in too co into the complicated after effects of it, but it 9-11 did in a circuitous way contribute to the election of of Trump uh 16 years, 15 years later, um, because it led to the Iraq War, which we were against.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_04: We marched against it even before it twice trying to stop it.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_04: We didn't believe about these weapons of mass mass destruction.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_04: It was so so obviously um George W.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_04: Bush, who had just been elected less than a year before 9-11, if you remember that, a very contentious election where he lost the popular vote, as happened 15 years later, so uh 16 years later, uh, with Trump.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_04: It was a very close election.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_04: He lost the uh popular vote by about half a million, and it came down to the state of Florida, which just happened to have a governor who was the brother of one of the two candidates.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_04: George W.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_04: Bush's brother um was the governor of Florida, and that that recount vote went to him.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_04: He became president.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_04: We were all very distrustful of him.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember that summer of 2001, before the attack, of just seeing George W.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_04: Bush constantly on the golf course, which uh it may seem familiar to people now, a certain president who was at the on the golf course a lot.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_04: He seemed like a lightweight.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_04: And luckily, he wasn't dealing with any uh major catastrophe, but we all worried that he would not be equipped to do so.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_04: And sure enough, he wasn't.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_04: He wasn't.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_04: He launched this uh ridiculous well, the the first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, claiming that remember that Saddam Hussein was the attack on 9-11, which he wasn't, and then there were weapons of mass destruction which didn't exist, which did not exist.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_04: They lied about that, so there was all this anti-government sentiment, distrust of government, and um conspiracy theories, and it really laid the groundwork for this this what this sort of fomenting distrust of government that was calling out for an outsider.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_04: And we had in Trump a Republican who called who who criticized his own party, uh the Republican Party, which was subnominally his party, called called them on it and and got rid of Jeb Bush, who was the leading contender in uh leading up to the 2016 election.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_04: And uh he got elected um yeah as an outsider who who was you know criticized what had happened under uh George W.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_04: Bush.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_04: That's a that's a nice recap.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: That's a nice recap, Mr.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_03: Miller.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_03: My my hat if I had a hat, it would be off to you right now.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_03: I I will make one point though, and it's to make a distinction between the pre-9-11 world we lived in.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_03: We had a new president, I think he'd barely been in elective office as governor three years or something.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think he he so he was a little bit, he was very inexperienced.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and what what did we have that year?
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: The summer before, there was a um a young woman, an intern, who worked for a congressman named Gary Condit, who who who was murdered, sadly.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um that was that was one of the big big events of the year, right out of the gate to to prove his cr conservative credentials, they liberalized the amount of arsenic.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the EPA or some industrial standards was reset to allow more arsenic and water.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_03: And um that's Republicans for that that was uh that was the you know that was the year we had.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, otherwise it was, you know, it's an attack like that happens in the media during the silly season, uh journalists like to say, when we're all writing about sharks and um, you know, uh all the important uh policymakers are are on vacation and um Capitol House.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_03: It was a quiet year, and then it erupted into a weird time.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I you guided me to an article in the New York Times about younger generations of Americans who are who live among us right now.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_03: They have jobs and responsibilities, and they're too young to remember 9-11.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_03: One of them was quoted as saying, We lost something that day that can't be measured, said Joseph Smith, 22, who lives in Northern Virginia.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_03: He believes the attacks made America more distrustful and divided.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: Quote, we as a country didn't heal, and we still haven't healed from all the things that have happened since 2000.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_03: You agree with that?
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_04: I do.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, if we talk about 2001 as a quiet year before 9-11, I think you could probably say we haven't had a quiet year since.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe under Barack Obama things seem to quiet down a little bit in the sense that we weren't always focused on, certainly weren't focused on the White House the way we are now, drawn to it constantly, probably because it's being shredded before our very eyes.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_04: But um, I don't think there's really been maybe a quiet year since then.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's it's hard to say, and and I remember thinking of all, I remember anticipating ugliness that would come out of the leadership and finding it hard to imagine.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_03: But to his credit, but we might we might say was he was he sincere or not, Bush came out and said, hey, it's not nice to attack Muslims about this.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's not and you know, and unfortunately, the populace in the United States mostly doesn't know the difference between an Arab, a Muslim, or even someone from South Asia, because there were attacks, you know, people worry about AI, but I think humans are the problem, don't you?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_03: They were attacks on Sikhs.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_03: Sikhs are neither Muslim nor Arabs.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_04: That was that was a good moment for uh George W.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_04: Bush.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_04: I think otherwise there's not much to credit him.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I I've often thought that um for George W.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_04: Bush, in a way, maybe it's hard to put this in words now, but in a way, Trump was the best thing that ever happened to him because Bush was considered the worst president ever when he finally left office in 2008, well, early 2009.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_04: He was right at the bottom of the list.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_04: He disappeared from view.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_04: It was after the remember uh Hurricane Katrina, which I always thought if that had happened in his first term, he would not have gotten re-elected.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_04: But it happened, it was Tuck did it just the second term.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_04: He handled that very, very badly.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_04: He was a terrible president.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and there were the the watchdogs on on Wall Street were out to lunch, asleep at the wheel.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: He ushered in a financial crisis that was handed over to the next administration, and that next administration doesn't really get credit for for fixing the economy, fixing Wall Street.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, cleaning up that mess.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_03: Cleaning up that mess.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_03: If you, you know, if you had a thousand, you know,$100,000 in the S P 500 the day that Obama was elected, uh, at the end of that time, you'd have$300,000 in the SP$500.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's how well um he uh a good custodian he was of uh uh our financial system and the economy.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_03: But something happened nine years after 9-11 that had been building up, and it was the intense national controversy over the downtown Islamic center, referred to by chiefly the Murdoch organization, the New York Post, Fox News as the ground zero mosque.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_03: Do you recall any of that controversy?
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_04: Uh yes, I do.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_04: But um, you saying it was it was 10 years after after 9-11?
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_03: Almost 10 years, but it was something that was the the anti-Islamic uh sentiment in this country just slowly built, became out of control.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I rem I do remember that, but uh of course I had left New York by then, but I remember it anti, I remember um, yes, wasn't they were trying to build an Islamic center and people thought it was too close to ground zero.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_04: Was that the controversy?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_03: It was a con it was a it was a cultural center.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah um it was proposed quietly in 2008, uh became a firestorm by 2010, and uh the whole project collapsed.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's now it's been redeveloped.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's that space.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_03: I think the address is 45 part place, it was redeveloped into luxury condos as what as is what happens to everything eventually.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, uh that controversy actually surprised me because I've always thought of New York as sort of the ultimate sort of melting pot multicultural center in the sense that it everyone's from somewhere else.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_04: And unlike London and Paris, which I spent some time in, you know, you can become a New Yorker easily.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_04: I always put the the time as six months.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_04: If you move to New York in six months, you are a New Yorker and accepted as such.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_04: I've been in London now for 20 years.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't not accepted as a Londoner.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I have a friend, I have a friend in Paris who's half Spanish, half German.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_04: Um, she's lived in Paris for over 40 years.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_04: Her French is perfect.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it and she's not accepted as a as a as a prison.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_04: Or a French person.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_04: So New York to me is a very welcoming city made up of people from all over the world.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_04: So that controversy about the Islamic Cultural Center really surprised me.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um it was it was pretty ugly.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it was it was quite disingenuous, uh coming out of probably whipped up by the right wing press.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_04: I'd imagine like we get things whipped up here by the right wing press.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_03: It was it was whipped up in a in a sort of a pre Fox News, probably you know, pre-Twitter, you know, pre-Instagram, pre, you know, YouTube was still around, but the you know the the major networks still had a lot of power, and so did the major physical newspapers.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and and Fox News really took ownership of that.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_04: Fox News would have uh really demonized.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_04: By the way, speaking of Cultural Center, this is interesting because I was thinking of how what culture and art has been has come out in the wake of 2000 uh of 9-11.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_04: And the only thing I could think of was Jonathan Saffron Fowers' fatuous novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which got um really uh ridiculed when it came out.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_04: At least, yeah, I guess you could say it was an attempt at writing fiction that was inspired or based on the collapse of the attacks of the World Trade Center.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's made into a pretty awful film.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I mean it was just too soon, maybe an event.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_04: But it now it's been 25 years since the 9-11 attack.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_04: Can you think of any art it's inspired?
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_03: Two two of my favorites.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_03: One one is a um I think it was an HBO series with Jeff Daniels called, and it was adapted from an excellent book called The Looming Towers.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_03: And it takes the viewer from uh the initial attacks in Kenya, um and describes it it illustrates how the whole conspiracy unfolded uh in New York City.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's terrific, it's really well, really well made.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_03: The other one was a feature film called Flight 93 that focused on the one plane that um that um people on the plane foiled.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: They the passengers overtook it foiled the attack, and it's yeah, it was it was interesting because the drama, a lot of it obviously takes place on the plane, but uh the interesting part I I always love behind the scenes is what happens with um in Conning Towers and with air traffic controllers and how slowly they began to understand that um these four planes were missing, that they were uh uh they they were skeptical about what you know what their purposes were and finally determined that they were they were a terrorist.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, there was a pretty good film.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_04: There was a musical, wasn't there a musical about uh a plane that was forced to land in like Newfoundland or or somewhere?
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, and that's still that's still they're staging it everywhere to this day globally.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you're right.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_03: What is it called?
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_03: What's the name of year or something like that?
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and I I that was interesting because of course that was one of the um tangential uh effects uh after uh one of the things that caught was caused by the 9-11 attacks was uh planes were grounded everywhere.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_04: And so this was about a flight that was what headed for New York and it was forced to land where was it in Newfoundland.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_04: In Newfoundland.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_04: Newfoundland, Newfoundland, Newfoundland, and welcomed, I think, by the locals.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_04: And right, I haven't seen the musical, but there was something, it sounded very uh very charming.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_04: But that was art that was influenced, that was affected directly by 9-11, inspired by it, but uh not a lot, right?
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_04: Same with the COVID, it's I mean, it's only six years after COVID.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_04: It might be take some years um for art to uh to develop based on these events that are kind of amorphous when you're in the middle of them.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_04: It's hard to understand them.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you know, I I have a I'm having a memory of going to the Larry Gagosian gallery for an opening of the work by Sai Tuambly, and it was a series of 10 oversized paintings using those strange colors that look a little like toothpaste or jelly.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_03: And it was based on a historic naval battle between European forces and what were once Islamic countries, and uh attending with my friend Richard Beanan and Mary Mose, Mary Moseman, and Carol, who got us into the show, and uh so it it was inspired clearly from 9-11, but I remember thinking about the price tag that came with it.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_03: I think we calculated that Gagosian made about$15 million that night.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my god.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_03: Which was which was good money then.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, that was when it actually meant something.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_04: The new I just looked it up.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_04: The musical was called Come From Away.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_04: Is this that is that really nice work you're doing?
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_03: You're you continue doing good work on this podcast, Mr.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_03: Miller.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_03: Good work.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so I mean that's most it's mostly it's a historical event.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_04: Does it does it feel like a quarter century ago?
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_04: Does it seem that long ago?
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_04: Well, think about the 25 years before 9-11, before 9-11, 2001 would be what?
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um nine, what was that the 1976?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_04: Have I got that right?
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_03: The bicentennial of the United States?
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, that would that would that would figure two years before I moved to New York.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_03: No, we were such we were so naive before 9-11.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_03: It was like, oh my god, there's they're gonna add, they're gonna increase the amount of stuff in the water.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_03: What's going on?
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_03: We were just we were like these colonials wandering around in the territory.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_03: We we were because uh we had the Oklahoma Bond bombing.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, a native, the native bombing.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_04: But I mean, growing up in London as a kid, you know, there was uh um we had you know IRA bombings all the time in the city, and there were the uh uh there were the Basque separatists in Spain was terrorist movement, and the Meinhoff was the Meinhoffer Meinhof.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_04: Baden-Meinhof gang in Germany, um, you know, the Red Brigades.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_04: There was a lot of terrorism around the world, around the world, and it came, it came to us in New York and the Pentagon, which here in the UK is pronounced the Pentagon.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's funny how to pronounce it.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_04: The Pentagon, the attack on the Pentagon and the airplane.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_04: That was shocked.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_04: It was it was that's a good way to put it in perspective.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_04: It it shocked us out of our out of our naivete.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_04: You could say the same thing in a way about World War II.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_04: The only part of America that was directly attacked during the entire Second World War was Pearl Harbor, which was right at the beginning.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_04: You know, uh London was bombed constantly in the Europe, the cities in uh in Europe, you know, it's directly affected, but but people had been allowed to live um disassociated, disassociated in a way, if I can use that word, from the terror around the world.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_04: And it really came home um on that on that day.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_04: Do you think it's fair to say America lost a sense of its of its innocence, or is that too pat?
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_04: Is that too reductive?
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_04: Is that too much?
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_03: Would we have said that on Pearl Harbor Day?
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_03: Would we have said we lost our innocence?
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_04: Well, the war was already you know raging around the uh in Europe and the invasion of uh China, uh America.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_03: We we think of it as a good war and welcoming home the doughboys, but I you know, I I mentioned earlier, you know, there there was paranoia after World War II, and there was suspicion about uh the veterans who came home that they had been tricked into something or that they represented some strange interest.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_04: No, you're just thinking about that movie and the Manchurian candidate.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_03: No, I'm thinking about I'm thinking about I am thinking about a movie.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's a great World War post-World War II movie.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's called The Best Years of Our Lives.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, right.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_04: But they weren't a doctor.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_04: That was a fair one.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_04: That is a wonderful film, uh, William Wyler, I think, 1946.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_04: It was a huge hit when it came out.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_04: That was the bigger hit at that year, not It's a Wonderful Life, which everybody thinks about now.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_04: That was a flop when it came out.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Best Years of Our Lives was about returning GIs um and the suffering, what do you call it?
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_04: Post um post-traumatic stress of civilian life.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_04: It's battle fatigue.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_04: That was the first time alive.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's a long film, but it's great.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_04: Three hours.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_04: It is a really terrific film.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_04: Brilliant film.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_04: Samuel Goldwyn produced it and made a fortune, and it it deserved to, because it was quite a downer of a film, but it was a film that everybody wanted to see because they recognized something of themselves in it.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_04: Um was what was the best years of our lives after 9-11?
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_04: You said uh Flight 57.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think 93 was not the equivalent of the best years of our lives.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_03: No, it is you know, the the you know, the whole battle between Islam and the United States, terrorism versus the you know, good people of our country, it's been a theme in just about every film you can think of, from Iron Man to the TV series homeland.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's everywhere.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_03: But I think it permeated our culture that you know we're under attack.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_04: No, that's true, but also also President Bush made it murky the re the afterwards.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_04: He murkyfied, if I can make up a word, he murkyfied 9-11.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_04: He sees, I remember resenting this as a New Yorker at the time, that President Bush seemed to seize what happened to us in New York.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_04: He sees that event for his own means as an excuse for this foreign adventure of uh these forever wars that he started in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_04: And I really and remember the flag, we've talked about this.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_04: I felt that that he grabbed, that he uh he took the stars and stripes and wrapped it around himself, you know, metaphorically.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, and it was to be patriotic, he had to be pro, pro-Iraq war.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_04: I remember really resenting this and and wishing that we could have like a New York flag that we could fly as opposed to what had been uh sort of bastardized out of stars and stripes.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_04: We've had this this discussion, right?
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_04: Uh in the the New York, New York State has a flag, uh New York City has a flag, but it wasn't it wasn't well known enough, I guess, to be used as a New York um as a New York symbol.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_04: But um we There's a beaver.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_03: There's a beaver on it.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_04: Have we talked about this already?
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we talked about it.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_03: I kind of wish we had a a separate flag uh for people who live here.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_03: A New York City flag, maybe, but yeah, we should have someone should have come up with one.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_03: I have a friend who says that the the polarization makes him more patriotic than ever.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_03: And his name I will not mention, except it's Matt.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I but I I it's hard for me.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_04: I don't understand what you mean by that.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_04: What does it mean?
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_04: Polarization makes him more patriotic.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_03: In what sense?
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_03: In the sense that he I'll have you'll have to explain it.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_03: It it makes him fight for what's right, the rule of law, eliminating conflicts of interest, uh eliminating cruelty in our government, all those things that America means to other people.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_03: So that's a positive thing.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_03: He's willing to fight for it, and it's very positive.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's made him more patriotic than ever.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_03: But I, you know, I have I have a hard time bypassing my own disgust at how many people are signing on and remain signed on this cruel, incompetent, and corrupt government.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_03: I have spoken.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_04: You have spoken, you have spoken.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_04: Um, we've connected 9-11 to this horrible corrupt government that we're all suffering under now.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_04: We'll see what happens in November.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_04: But um, that was um how often can I ask you this?
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_04: How often do you think about 9-11?
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_04: You're still in the city, I'm not.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_04: Is do you think about it often?
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_04: And what kind of what kind of resonance, what kind of um recurring resonance does it have to you?
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I like it's hard to say.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think I think it's with us every moment in certain ways.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_03: But every year there's a memorial service and we we get reminded about it.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but what's hard for me, what's hard for me to fathom, which is is also the hard thing to fathom about old age, is that you know, the people who are in their 20s and 30s around here don't remember it in their adult or even juvenile minds because they were too young to remember it.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_03: And so totally understand remembering other stuff now.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, I can I totally give that um give that to them.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_04: It's an abstract, it's abstract to them.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_04: Um, unless you live through it.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_04: Or I I knew a girl who was an NYU freshman that year, and her entire first year of uh college was essentially um, you know, disfigured by what had happened on that day on 9-11.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_04: It was not a typical college, it was a rough time to be starting school, just like COVID.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_04: You know, COVID affected how people uh people's schooling and their college experience.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_04: Uh 9-11 did that as well.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_04: Uh COVID is a is a is the event that younger people are gonna are gonna remember, I think, right?
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_04: The people that you you know, young people, that's uh that's well, you know, that's just a few years ago and everybody was affected by that.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_04: They sure were.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_04: 9-11 is history.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_04: It's history.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_04: And um on this 25th anniversary, it's uh it's just well worth remembering, you know, what what actually what actually happened and what it led to.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_04: I think those are two important things.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_03: And with those thoughtful words from a very well-prepared and impassioned JB Miller, should we transition to headquakes?
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, you have a headquake.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_04: What is your headquake?
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_03: Do you do you think we should reinstate the sound effect of the headquake?
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_03: I think we hurt we hurt people's eardrums the last time we tried.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_03: And we've been scared.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_03: All right, I'll put what listeners.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_03: Would you like the would you let us know if you'd like to have the sound effect?
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, all right.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_04: Should I wait until I hear from listeners before I I put in the sound effect and shock people's systems?
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, maybe wait.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_03: What is your headquake, sir?
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_03: So um this is a follow-up to our Woody Allen discussion.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_03: So the question is, who carries the torch in film directing after Woody Allen?
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_03: And is that is that even a reasonable uh request to make?
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_04: No, you're asking who in a way to be more precise about it.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_04: You're really asking who is the new Woody Allen?
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_04: Who's the new Woody Allen?
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_03: There you go.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_03: Who's the Woody Allen?
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_03: Who who will take up the mantle?
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_03: And all right, I think I think it's important to sort of sort of encapsulate what is a what is a Woody Allen film, and if there's a way to say it generically.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_03: You know, on our last podcast, we talked about his his evolution, but there's a foundation for all of it.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_03: I'd say they're thematically driven by anxiety, neurosis, romance, and and comedy.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_04: And New York.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of it's and and it's uh urban intellectual life, I would say.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_03: That's atmospherically, they blend sort of nostalgia, it's kind of a brand cynicism, right?
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_04: It's there's a he has sort of a brand to him, Woody Allen.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_04: Although the early Woody Allen films aren't the same as some of the later ones, but um all right, do you have a list?
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_03: I have a I have a modest list of three.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_03: A modest list, three, okay.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um from from the you know, maybe sort of like the least relevant to the most controversial.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_03: First, I would say um we re-watch the film This Is 40.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's an incredibly long, funny, emotional, terrific comedy by Judd Apateau.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe what Judd Apateau does for Los Angeles is sort of the equivalent of what New York uh of Woody Allen does for New York.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they are dense with dialogue, like Woody Allen films, right?
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_03: That's a you know, cinematically, Woody Allen likes he likes long conversational takes.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_03: Uh there's a lot of that in the Judd Apato film.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_04: But but but Jed Apateau maybe is more visual jokes.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_04: Woody Allen, I think, of his dialogue jokes.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_04: They're they're they're um you know, they're spoken jokes.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you see, this is where my proposition falls to pieces.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_04: No, it doesn't fall apart.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_04: It's very good.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_04: I like it.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_04: I like it.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, what are the other two?
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_04: And you you um I'm gonna give you my three afterwards because you uh you told me you were gonna spring this headquake and you said come up with your own three.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_04: So I'll list my three after after yours.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um next one is is one of my favorite film directors, even when he makes bad movies.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_03: He's made a ton of them, just like Woody Allen.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_03: And that man's name is Noah Bombach.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_03: Noah Bombach, yeah.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_03: And uh again, they're dense conversational films, they're very mannered, they tend to be urban.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, there's romance, and that you know, the comedy isn't it's not along the you know the lines of the the borsch belt jokes that come rapid fire in in in the funniest Woody Allen films, but they're funny, they're comedians.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, and he's the uh New York, New York based too.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_04: Um, right?
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_04: Uh that's another similarity to Woody Allen.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yep.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_04: Noah Bumbach.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_04: So you've got Jed Apato, Noah Bumbach.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_04: Who's your third?
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_03: My third is the controversial third choice.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_03: Wait for it.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_03: Lena Dunham.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, good.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I like it.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, I wouldn't have thought of that.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I would say, let's just take a look at her work.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_03: In 2010, she had a film called Tiny Furniture, which is kind of groundbreaking, kind of very interesting film.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_03: And then she had um five years of the the TV show Girls, which attracted eyes like nothing before.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_03: Again, groundbreaking revealed the inner lives of young women of a certain generation, a certain age, and New York-based, although it was Brooklyn-based, but it was New York-based, yep.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_04: Jewish, Jewish New York.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, there are similarities there.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_04: Very creative.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_04: Their concerns were quite uh upper middle class, I would think.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um, they all wanted to be artists or creatives in some ways.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_04: Is that right?
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_03: Very very sophisticated, and and her own upbringing is interesting.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, she was basically raised uh in Soho on Broadway.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_03: Her parents were both highly respected artists, Lori Simmons and Carol Dunham.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_03: Carol with two R's.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's not a same-sex couple.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um she's and like Woody Allen, she's a she's a pretty prolific writer.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_03: She's had two books.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_03: She has articles.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_03: You you stumble across an article in Vogue or The New Yorker by Lena Dunham.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's always interesting.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_03: Very interesting.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's and then I the other the other thing, and she just co-wrote and directed um a Netflix comedy series in which, like Woody Allen, she creates a surrogate for herself.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, the younger surrogate.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_04: The younger surrogate with a younger surrounding.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_03: With with the actress, very hot actress, Megan Stalter from Hacks, and now cast in uh O'Mary, um uh in theater, in a theater here in New York.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, yeah.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_03: She has a new novel called Fame Sick, or sorry, it's a new memoir.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_03: But you know what made me what I think made me realize that she was kind of a singular talent.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_03: We'd been through the drama of girls.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_03: I saw Tiny Furniture, but there's a HBO series called Industry.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's one of my favorite shows.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's kind of messy, it's kind of hard to watch.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_04: Here is a BBC drama set in London, right?
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_03: Set in London.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_03: And you're the one who pointed this out to me is when when it when uh when a new show selects its director for the pilot, it sets the tone for the whole series.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_03: And she directed the pilot, and it the whole the whole tone followed consistently in a in a characteristic style that takes DNA from girls and from her writing and everything else.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_03: Fair enough.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, so she's your third third Woody Allen of the.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_04: Your turn.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_04: My first one is maybe the most obvious one, which I share with you, which is Noah Bombach.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_04: Ah, oh, wow.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_04: We overlapped.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_04: We overlap on that one.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, we both really like his film while we're young from 2014.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_04: It rang true to me as a boomer.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um, trying to understand terrific film.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_04: Befriending, right?
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_04: They befriend millennial millennials, I think, and uh try to keep up with them, a younger couple.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_04: It's very funny.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_04: We can recommend that's good recommend firm recommend from us Noah Bob Box film while we're young.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_04: The next one is my wasp Woody Allen, and that's Witt Stillman.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_04: Interesting.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_04: Metropolitan film.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_04: He's not as prolific.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_04: We're waiting for another film from him, but he's written a novel.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_04: Um, he's made about three films, but he's his films are very uh he's not in any of his movies, but they're very dialogue-driven, they're very witty, they're very clever, they're very New York, or at least the first one, Metropolitan's New York-based.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_04: And the third one, of course, is the black Woody Allen, who's Spike Lee, who's uh New York.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_04: Uh he's a fair of a famous Brooklynite.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_04: But I I think he I think it's probably a mutual respect between um Woody Allen and Spike Lee, because Spike Lee is such a New Yorker, they probably run into each other a lot at Knicks games.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_04: I imagine they're both big Knicks fans, right?
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I I'd love to know what their relationship is like.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_03: Do they share?
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_03: Do they share industry gossip?
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_03: Do they share professionals?
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I didn't know.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_03: But I were I will say that when when Spike Lee, when he took the city and the country by storm with She's Gotta Have It, again, very, very Alan-esque in that it it's experimental, it's shot in black and white, it turns to color.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_03: On a tiny budget.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, he made it.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_03: But I remember that that Cinephiles and people who go to the movies like to say he's the black Woody Allen.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, he would he came back and he came back from that with such force.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, he would recoil.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_03: He did not want to be that.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_03: No, fair enough.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_03: And in many ways, he's not, but in some ways he is.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_04: I know, I know.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_04: I mean I'm be being reductive.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_04: I do is my personal salute to Spike Lee, really.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_04: But I think they do share some similarities.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_04: They're both very prolific, they're both New York-based in a lot of ways.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_04: Uh uh, Spike Lee is much more political.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_04: Obviously, Woody Allen doesn't sh have much politics uh to be spoken of in his film.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_03: Well, he's always liberal.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_03: He he always reflects a liberal, liberal point of view.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_04: I I don't think any um any or any director of any strike would particularly want to be compared to Woody Allen or called Woody Allen, um, both for artistic reasons and for his personal scandals, I think.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um maybe Lena Dunham maybe would identify.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_04: Uh she hasn't had any sex scandals as far as I'm aware.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_04: Um, she's a very public, private life, uh, both uh by design and by um it forced upon her.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_04: Uh she's very out there.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_04: Um she's very confessional.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_04: And she's also she's also a resident of the UK.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe she's your neighbor.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_04: She is my neighbor.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know exactly where she lives in London, uh, but she is uh she's another Do you ever do you ever bump into her at Tesco's?
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_04: No, I'm trying to reach her.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_04: I'm trying to reach her.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_04: I want her to, I'm trying to get my book Dutch to her because I think she should direct an adaptation of it.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm trying to get my Lena Denham.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_04: If you're tuning in, contact me.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_04: I want to get you a copy of my book.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_04: Um but uh these are all talents.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Witt Stillman, I'd like to hear more from.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, Noah Bumbach is uh is a great a great talent.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_04: These are all uh good filmmakers, whether or not they're like Woody Allen, uh they they would probably um push back on that.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_03: But I would say, and you know, the the thing about Woody Allen is he can we call him a genre in itself?
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it the the genre would be sort of urban intellectual uh hijinks uh that attracts a educated, uh sensitive, yes, emotionally um you know high EQ audience.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think it's a very it's a rarefied audience together.
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think you can.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_04: And we we forgot uh there was a the New Jersey, that Irish Catholic, American New Jersey um director, writer director, who's in his own films and made one film that was a real rip off of Woody Allen's husbands and wipes.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_04: What's his name?
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_04: He was in Saving Private Ryan.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, the the director of The Brothers McMullen.
• 1:11:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, yes.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_04: He's uh a Woody Allen acolyte to the point of uh He is yeah, and I I don't think he's a very big talent, but he's certainly been influenced by Woody Allen.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_04: See, he's admitted it himself.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, I would have thought so.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_04: Ed Burns.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_04: Ed Burns, I think banged the rights, he's uh a bit of a copycat.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_04: He doesn't have the facility with language that Woody Allen has or had.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but yes, I think but uh but I think that's just evidence that Woody Allen has exerted a real influence on other other directors, whether they like it or not.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_04: Lena Lena Dunham, I'm sure, is very familiar with Woody Allen's work.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_04: She must have grown up with it.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_03: I would uh with a I don't I it it would be hard to uh if you're a certain age, it would be hard to not have encountered Woody Allen somehow.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I I in a way I think I feel sorry for our younger listeners and viewers who who are getting the tail end, what we call here the fag end, meaning the cigarette end of um of his career, which are are minor, minor films.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we would in our in our Woody podcast.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_04: Everyone go back to that if they haven't, if they haven't watched it yet.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_04: We go into detail about his career and his early films really captured uh a zeitgeist.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_04: And also there's a 9-11 tie-in here, if I can make that.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_04: And that was he was the one time Woody Allen turned up at the Academy Awards, was that was the year after 9-11 where he delivered this amazing monologue.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_04: They were raising uh money, consciousness for I think one of the do you remember this?
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_04: One of the charities, and he made he wrote a very funny monologue.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_04: And uh it was it was in the wake of of 9-11.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_04: It was after the concerts in Madison Square Garden that Bruce Springsteen was involved in uh raising money, I think for the firemen, the firemen's families, maybe is that right?
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_03: Let's not forget the policemen either, and the policeman.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_04: So um there, there we've tied Woody Allen into 9-11.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_04: How about that?
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that was that was that was very facile of you.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_03: Fasile.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_03: Very facile.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_04: Hopefully artfully done.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_04: Well, that's it uh for us.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_04: Remembering that event 25 years ago.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_04: I'm JB Miller in London.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm Jim Jelamis in Brooklyn.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_03: Boomer has it.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_03: All right,