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After 9/11, New York movies like ‘Men in Black II’ were never the same
- Director Barry Sonnenfeld was filming Men in Black II in 2001 when the September 11 attacks forced him to rewrite the sequel's climax. He had intentionally featured the World Trade Center as a visual focal point.
- Since their 1969 construction, the Twin Towers were favored by visual storytellers, appearing in films like The Putney Swope, The French Connection, and The Hot Rock because they accomplished so much with no words at all.
- Sonnenfeld erased the towers from 12 shots throughout the film and relocated the final scene to a nondescript roof. He admitted the reshot ending "never worked" because his heart was not in it.
- Productions including Friends, Sex and the City, Zoolander, and Spider-Man also removed the towers from their scenes. These edits reflected a world transformed so drastically that fictional characters could no longer inhabit the pre-attack landscape.
- Sonnenfeld noted that while losing the iconic location was difficult, "ours was a small sadness compared to the big sadness" of the national tragedy. The removal served as a reminder of how the attacks fundamentally altered New York.
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Total News Sources8
Leaning Left1Leaning Right0Center7Last UpdatedBias Distribution87% Center
Bias Distribution
- 87% of the sources are Center
87% Center
13%
C 87%
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