I meant to commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11. The day was full of the usual nonsense, yet another awful bullying moment on X involving two people who used to write for this site. It’s a strange thing to have people you thought were your friends treat you like that. The country before 9/11 was a different America. Hollywood was different, too, which should go without saying.
My daughter was three when the towers were hit. This site was called Oscarwatch, and studios had not yet begun to advertise. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. After 9/11, we’d all feel a lot more afraid, and we’d spend more time inside. This was just as superhero movies, video games, and eventually streaming hit. There were other reasons, like mass shootings, that scared us into a fantasy world inside.
Hollywood has never really been able to process what happened on 9/11, except to demonize people like Sarah Palin, who used the controversial phrase, “Radical Islamic Terror.” By 2008, we didn’t see things that way, as we were building what we believed was a new America where everyone had a seat at the table, and criticizing Islam, radical or otherwise, was strictly verboten and “Islamophobia.” So how do you really tell the story of 9/11? You can’t.
There was United 93, a story of heroism in which several passengers diverted the plane to avoid hitting the Pentagon. What an awful day that was. What a terrifying day for this country, and we still can’t find a way to find the enemy. Zero Dark Thirty showed the killing of Osama Bin Laden, but even that, back in 2012, was hit with accusations that it apologized for torture. It has always been hard to name the villain and the victims for a country that was evolving to see us less as Americans and more by how we rank and how we’re categorized based on our immutable traits.
But the America on 9/11 was much different. People came together as one. Politics didn’t matter, nor did race. One of the best films about this is called The Great Boatlift, and if you have never seen it, it is available on YouTube:
Watching these brave men, this Boatlift that was the largest in history – rescuing 500,000 New Yorkers — makes me yearn for that America before we knew everyone’s politics, when people didn’t scream at you because of what you think and say, and when Hollywood didn’t believe that half of this country was worth telling stories for.
This film captures the spirit of New Yorkers who had each other’s backs and did what they could to save as many people as possible. We don’t think of them enough. We don’t talk about them enough. But at least this movie got made, directed by Eddie Rosenstein and Rick Velleu, narrated by Tom Hanks.
I met Tom Hanks once. It was for a screening of a film he was in. I can’t remember which one by now – maybe it was Captain Phillips, but I met him only because my boyfriend at the time, Rick, loved going to screenings and Hollywood parties. Me, not so much. So I took him to this one. He often drank too much and made a bit of a spectacle of himself, and sometimes it was embarrassing. I remember him getting a cold look from Pierce Brosnan at a beach party once. So I was worried when he approached Tom Hanks. I thought, oh no, this is gonna be bad.
But Tom Hanks gave him the kind of look you give someone you know. He seemed to clock that Rick was a certain kind of guy who had too much to drink, and he was nice to him. He was nicer to him than anyone I’d introduced him to at any party. Usually, they endured him. Tom Hanks, I thought, was a stand-up guy.
Much has changed in 25 years since the towers fell. My daughter is almost 30 and moving to New York. I am 61, and the industry I once relied on, the people I knew- all of it has changed. But there is no point in saying things were so much better then because there is no going back. There is only going forward. This is just to say a belated Thank You to Tom Hanks and to all of the good Americans who came together on 9/11.
In 2020, Rick would be overcome with the loneliness of lockdowns and would overdose. He’d texted me the night before, saying he didn’t know what to do with himself, and that was it. He was gone. We’d broken up by then, and I never really got to say goodbye. It’s hard to think about 9/11 and not think about missing goodbyes. I still can’t even imagine what that would have been like.
