Reach for the Sky

What kid hasn't gazed at the night canopy of stars and wanted to reach out to touch the heavens? We have eyed the sky with envy for ages. Our mythologies created a god of the sky and thunder - Zeus to the Greeks, Jupiter for Romans. The traveling sun and his sister, the moon, were deified. We connected stars in patterns of constellations commemorating legendary exploits of heroes and gods.

A baroque drawing of the constellation Orion.

According to the Old Testament, between the Great Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, people, when they spoke one common tongue, settled in a plain in Mesopotamia, where they declared, "Let us build ourselves a city and a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves."

Flemish Renaissance painter Marten van Valckenborch created
a number of depictions of the biblical Tower of Babel, including
this work, painted circa 1600.

God said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." Genesis 11:9: "That is why it was called Babel - because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world." The people abandoned the tower and scattered "over the face of the whole world."

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the twisted minds behind "South Park," gave the biblical tale a skewed update in a sixth season episode called "A Ladder to Heaven." Hoping to retrieve a prize-winning ticket for a candy store shopping spree from the deceased Kenny, the boys decide to build a slapdash ladder to heaven (pictured below), initiating not just nationwide attention (which prompts a visit by country artist Alan Jackson, who performs a parody of his 9/11 anthem, "Where Were You") but sparking, as well, a hilarious, high-tech ladder-to-space race between Japan and the U.S. military.

Historically, the tallest construction in ancient times was the 481-foot Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt (pictured below), built in the 26th century BC as a tomb for Pharaoh Khufu. It stood unsurpassed in height for a few thousand years.

England's 14th century AD Lincoln Cathedral (pictured below), with spires that towered 484 feet, was the world's tallest building for 238 years, until the imposing central spire collapsed in 1549.

Over three centuries later, the Washington Monument became the world's tallest stone structure, standing over 555 feet. Construction began in 1848 but was put on hold due to lack of funds, infighting among monument society members, and, most significantly, the Civil War. The obelisk was intended by its designers to loom 600 feet over the landscape, but doubts regarding the stability of its foundation restricted the height by its completion in 1888.

Members of the crew pose near the ongoing
construction of the Washington Monument.

The contemporary skyscraper conveyed a sense of pride and achievement. It has been said that in its name and its social significance, a skyscraper is a modern expression of the ancient symbol of the world center, or "axis mundi," visualized as a pillar that connects Earth to heaven and unites the four compass points - an image recognized by philosophies, religions, and mythologies around the globe.

In a practical sense, skyscrapers first rose in American cities where real estate was limited, such as New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and St. Louis. The term itself began to be applied in the late 19th century to buildings of steel-framed construction at least ten stories tall. The crucial element in the design and building of skyscrapers was, in fact, the framework of metal; otherwise, walls of brick or stone on the lower floors of a tall structure would be too thick to be practical.

The first steel-frame skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building, erected ten stories high at 138 feet in Chicago in 1885 (pictured below). Some regard Philadelphia's ten-story Jayne Buidling, constructed in 1850, as a proto-skyscraper, while others point to New York City's seven-story Equitable Life Building from 1870, noted for its innovative use of a kind of iron skeletal frame.

In an 1896 piece titled "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," American architect Louis Sullivan, dubbed the "Father of Skyscrapers," wrote, "What is the chief characteristic of  the tall office building? It is lofty. It must be tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line."

An interesting side note in the history of the construction of skyscrapers is the remarkable contribution of Native North Americans, specifically Mohawks of the Iroquois confederacy from the Kahnawake reservation near Montreal. Originally proving themselves as fearless iron-walkers while working on chasm-spanning railroad bridges in the late 1880s, they branched out into general steel construction, including office buildings.

During the late 1920s, a number of Kahnawake crews started working on skyscrapers in New York City, a tradition that has continued over generations. Edmund Wilson, who wrote essays about the Iroquois for the New Yorker in the 1950s, quoted one Native American steel jockey's claim that he had "an uncanny sense of balance" attributed to his people's skill from "their earlier life." More than likely, the courage displayed in walking the iron had nothing to do with nerves of steel or the alleged ability to deftly place one foot directly in line with the other, but rather with a daredevilish, foolhardy frame-of-mind and a desire not to be looked upon as a scaredy-cat.

Distinctively designed in Art Deco, the Empire State Building (pictured above) was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986. It has a roof height of 1250 feet (a total of 1454 feet counting the antenna spire), looming 102 stories over Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. It was the world's tallest building for nearly 40 years, from its completion in early 1931 until the topping out of the original World Trade Center's North Tower in late 1970.

Workers on the construction of the Empire State Building pause
for a lunch break. Construction began mid-March 1930 and was
completed early April 1931.  In that period of just over one year,
only five workers perished. One was struck by a truck, another fell
down an elevator shaft, a third was killed in an explosion, a fourth
was struck by a hoist, and the fifth fell from scaffolding.

Your humble scribe nearly got lost during a childhood visit to New York City as he froze in his tracks, craned his neck and gawked in awe at the monolithic skyscraper while his parents and older brothers moved down the sidewalk... not unlike Jerry's first visit to the Big Apple in the 1945 Hanna and Barbera cartoon "Mouse in Manhattan."

As much as it stands as a cultural landmark, the Empire State Building has earned a special place as a cinematic icon as well, nowhere more evident than in the original 1933 "King Kong," when the gigantic ape, Ann Darrow (played by Fay Wray) in hand, scales the building for a last stand against bi-winged Curtiss Helldivers (pictured below). The producer-director team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack portrayed, respectively, the pilot and gunner of the biplane that fatally wound Kong after Cooper said, "We should kill the son of a bitch ourselves."

While the campy 1976 reboot of "King Kong" had the oversized simian shimmy up the World Trade Center (more on that later), the gargantuan gorilla returned to the Empire State Building in the nostalgic 2005 remake, "King Kong," co-written, co-produced, and directed by Peter Jackson, the innovative filmmaker responsible for the epic "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" trilogies, who returned the story to its Depression-era roots, including the final face-off between Kong and U.S. Navy Helldiver planes atop the singular skyscraper (pictured below).

Peerless motion-capture performer Andy Serkis (Gollum in Jackson's
Tolkien pictures and rebel chimp Caesar in the "Planet of the Apes"
retreads) was the model for Kong, while one of the biplane pilots in
the 2005 film was a cameo by Rick Baker, the multi-Oscar-winning
special-effects makeup wizard who played the man-in-the-ape-suit
in the 1976 version of "King Kong."

The eighth season episode of "Family Guy" titled "Hannah Banana," which reveals pop singer Miley Cyrus to be an android created by Disney Imagineering, ends with an inspired homage to Kong's final rampage on the top of the Empire State Building. Stewie's attempt to reprogram Miley sends her into a hyper-cyber rage as she drags Chris Griffin's closet-dwelling Evil Monkey to the top of a Quahog skyscraper, only to be shot down by Peter and Quagmire in a biplane.

The Empire State Building served as a crucial plot point in the 1939 romantic drama "Love Affair," starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, as a French painter and an American singer, who, despite being engaged to others, decide to rendezvous six months later at the top of the Manhattan skyscraper. The meeting doesn't happen when an automobile accident cripples Dunne's character. (Don't worry, the couple ultimately reunite, happily ever after.)

Aboard a transatlantic liner approaching New York City, Irene
Dunne points out the Empire State Building to Charles Boyer
in "Love Affair."

"Love Affair" director Leo McCarey remade the film in 1957 as "An Affair to Remember," starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in what the American Film Institute considered one of the most romantic movies of all time. McCarey used the same script as the original picture in the nearly identical scene-for-scene remake.

The second time around, it's Cary Grant who points to the Empire
State Building as Deborah Kerr looks on in "An Affair to Remember."

 Nora Ephron was largely inspired by "An Affair to Remember" when she co-wrote and directed "Sleepless in Seattle," a 1993 romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Roger Ebert confessed, "'Sleepless in Seattle' is as ephemeral as a talk show, as contrived as the late show, and yet so warm and gentle I smiled the whole way through," while The New York Times' Vincent Canby admitted, "Not since 'Love Story' has there been a movie that so shrewdly and predictably manipulated the emotions for such entertaining effect."

This time, the rendezvous atop the Empire State Building works,
in "Sleepless in Seattle," with Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, Ross
Malinger, and Ross' teddy bear.

In 1994, Warren Beatty produced a remake of the original "Love Affair" as, appropriately, "Love Affair," casting himself and his real-life wife, Annette Bening, as the almost-star-crossed couple, directed by Glenn Gordon Caron (best known as the creator of the Cybill Shembpherd-Bruce Willis series "Moonlighting"). Roger Ebert noted, "When the chemistry between" Beatty and Bening "really seems to be working, no wonder: This is one of the most famously happy couples in Hollywood."

Warren Beatty waits in vain for Annette Bening on the Empire
State Building's observation deck in "Love Affair."

Beatty coaxed Katharine Hepburn out of retirement for her final screen appearance as his elderly aunt, a role that, more or less, was a reprise of the grandmother played in the original film by Maria Ouspenskaya, a Russian-born character actress noted for her appearances as a gypsy fortuneteller in the 1940s horror movies "The Wolf Man" and "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." Unlike Miss Ouspenskaya (who received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination), Hepburn's character dropped the f-bomb, a first in the venerable star's career.

In 1964, Andy Warhol produced and "directed" "Empire" (depicted below), an eight-hour black-and-white silent film featuring a stationary shot of the Empire State Building. The footage was shot from the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building.

Intentionally unwatchable, the film's use of the long-take-to-the-nth-degree was an extension of Warhol's "Sleep" from the previous year, an "anti-film" that presented a five-hour 20-minute take of slumbering performance artist John Giorno.

"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (2004), a so-called "dieselpunk" fantasy, with Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie performing on computer-generated sets and locations, amid CGI effects, opened with the fictitious airship Hindenburg III mooring atop the Empire State Building (pictured below). Historically, the top of the building was designed as a docking station for dirigibles.

Most spectacularly, the Empire State Building, like so many other iconic landmarks, national and global, came to inglorious ruin in a number of popular science-fiction debacles. In 1996's "Independence Day," hostile, misanthropic aliens vaporize the White House, the U.S. Capitol Building, the Statue of Liberty, London's Big Ben, Paris' Eiffel Tower, and, among others, the Empire State Building (pictured below).

In reality, the Empire State Building was the site of a disastrous encounter with an errant B-25 Mitchell bomber on a July morning in 1945. Addled by a thick fog, pilot Lieutenant Colonel William Franklin Smith Jr. flew into the north side of the structure, between the 79th and 80th floors. One engine opposite the impact detached and landed on the roof of a building a block away, where it started a fire that destroyed a penthouse. The other engine and part of the landing gear pitched down an elevator shaft. In another elevator, operator Betty Lou Oliver survived a plunge of 75 floors after weakened cables snapped, which remains a Guinness World Record for the longest recorded survived elevator fall.

News photos show the black smoke rising from the fire caused by
the 1945 plane crash and the aftermath of the impact.

The fire caused by the crash was extinguished in 40 minutes. Fourteen people lost their lives, including Lt. Col. Smith (whose remains were discovered at the bottom of an elevator shaft), the two crewman aboard the bomber, and 11 people in the building. The building was open for business on several floors within two days.

In a much lighter vein, the iron framework of skyscrapers under construction became almost a prerequisite backdrop incorporated by popular screen comedians of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, none more prominent than silent film star Harold Lloyd, who cut a contradictory figure as a bespectacled nerd and a reckless daredevil, defying dizzying dilemmas on suspended I-beams, a broken-down high-rise clock, and other precarious sky-scraping predicaments.

Big secrets to the success of landing lofty laughs are forced
perspectives and what the audience doesn't see, illustrated here
in behind-the-scenes photos from 1919's "Look Out Below,"
with Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels.

Harold Lloyd hangs onto one of his favorite costars, an iron
I-beam, in 1921's "Never Weaken," costarring his future wife
of 46 years, actress Mildred Davis.

The shot of Harold Lloyd desperately hanging onto the skewed
hands of a detached wall clock in 1923's "Safety Last!" is one of
the most famous images from the silent film era.

When this scene from 1930's "Feet First" was included in the
1962 compilation film "Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy"
(produced and narrated by Lloyd), a title card proclaimed,
"This sequence was made without trick photography...The
action - at all times - actually occurred as high up as you
see it happen."

Harold Lloyd shows off his natural athletic prowess with
a perilous headstand beside a teacup high above traffic.

The 1929 Laurel and Hardy comedy short "Liberty," directed by Leo McCarey (who would go on to make the aforementioned "Love Affair" and "An Affair to Remember"), featured the "Boys" as escaped convicts who wind up atop a skyscraper under construction (pictured below).

After Laurel and Hardy were assured that the safety platforms
put up around the girder set were safe, Ollie leapt down onto one
and crashed through the wood, fortunately landing in a safety net
that was erected as a backup.

The 1940 Three Stooges short "How High Is Up?" found conmen Moe, Larry, and Curly weaseling their way into jobs on a skyscraper construction site after Curly boasts that they're "the best riveters who ever riveted," despite his debilitating fear of heights (pictured below). The film features footage of the then relatively new Empire State Building.

Falling short of the status of a remarkable structure like the Eastern seaboard's Empire State Building, the Capitol Records Building stands - at all of 13 stories - as a nonetheless distinctive skyscraper on the West Coast, on Vine Street in Hollywood, to be precise. At the time of its construction (completed in 1956), the tower-shaped structure, coincidentally resembling a stack of LP's on a turntable, conformed to the 150-foot zoning restriction.

Portraying a reckless superhero with a severe p.r. problem, Will Smith, as the titular "Hancock," handily lifts a carful of bank robbers and shish-kabobs the vehicle on the spire of the Capitol Records Building (pictured below).

In the middle of the disaster movie cycle of the 1970s, the nearly-all-star "Earthquake" (Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greeme, Genevieve Bujold, Richard Roundtree, Victoria Principal, and Marjoe Gortner) depicted a catastrophic quake that wreaks havoc throughout Los Angeles, including the destruction of the Capitol Records Building.

(Hold the screen close to your nose and vigorously shake it for
the effect of a 9.9 tremor breaking off pieces of the Capitol
Records Building in "Earthquake.")

Adding insult to injury, in the lollapalooza of disaster pictures, 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," a climatic anomaly of tornados in Los Angeles damage the Vine Street landmark (pictured below).

Heading back to the East Coast, the epochal twin towers of the World Trade Center were the tallest buildings in the world (1368 feet and 1362 feet, both 110 stories) from their opening in April 1973 to their destruction in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Accommodating 50,000 workers and 200,000 visitors daily, the towers loomed over the hub of New York City's bustling Financial District for 28 years.

On the entertainment website The Dissolve (which has since dissolved), founder and editor Keith Phipps wrote a piece called "The Scarred Skyline," stating, "New, huge, but little-loved, the twin towers impressed New Yorkers with their size...but not their beauty. (If nothing else, they screwed up TV reception.) But their absence from the New York skyline since 9/11, and their replacement by the new, single One World Trade Center, gives the towers a new power when they turn up in old movies."

With such an ominous presence dominating the horizon, it was inevitable that the Twin Towers - as they became known - would be a familiar sight in film and television productions set in New York City, but there were a number of movies that featured the World Trade Center as a prominent element in the storyline.

The 1972 heist comedy "The Hot Rock," based on Donald E. Westlake's novel, starred Robert Redford, George Segal, Ron Leibman, and Paul Sand as a quartet of unlucky jewel thieves repeatedly thwarted by New York City. In one scene, a helicopter carrying the gang buzzes past the World Trade Center, where the South Tower is visibly under construction (pictured below).

The North Tower was still being topped off when Victor Garber, as a clown-faced Jesus, led his equally motley-costumed disciples in a show-stopping number called "All for the Best" in the 1973 screen adaptation of the hippie musical "Godspell," based on parables from the Gospel of Matthew. Not unlike the 1961 film version of "West Side Story," "Godspell" benefitted from utilizing Big Apple locations, like Times Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, and the World Trade Center - the latter without the safety of a guardrail.

The songs for "Godspell" were composed by Stephen Schwartz,
best known for writing the music and lyrics for the hit Broadway
musical "Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz."

When the captured giant ape ran amok in New York City in the cheesy 1976 remake of "King Kong" - produced by Dino De Laurentiis as a ham-fisted satire of the contemporary oil embargoes and gasoline shortages of the era - he shuns the Art Deco stone facade of the venerable Empire State Building for the glass and steel of the World Trade Center, the symbol of Western corporate greed.

Unfortunately, unlike the movie poster, the
1976 version of "King Kong" did not actually
straddle the Twin Towers, although he did
make a spectacular leap from one tower
top to the other.

Producer Dino De Laurentiis famously said, "No one cry when Jaws die. But when the monkey die, people gonna cry." That's why he said he remade "King Kong," starring Jeff Bridges and introducing Jessica Lange. A few years earlier, De Laurentiis produced "The Valachi Papers" as a rushed, low-budget "Godfather"-wannabe, starring Charles Bronson as Joseph Valachi, a real-life Mob informant in the early 1960s. Valachi was the first to publicly acknowledge the existence of the Mafia, as well as turning "Cosa Nostra" into an everyday phrase.

Directed by Terence Young (a British filmmaker best known for directing the James Bond pictures "Dr. No," "From Russia with Love," and "Thunderball"), "The Valachi Papers" (1972) is notorious among movie buffs for its glaring historical boo-boo during a nighttime car chase in 1920s New York when one of the autos crashes into the river (pictured above). It might have been dark, but those were clearly the Twin Towers under construction in the background. The movie's promotion even contained the anachronism, as seen below in a French poster.

The centerpiece of the 1977 sketch comedy picture "The Kentucky Fried Movie," written by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker (the team responsible for "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" comedies) and directed by John Landis ("National Lampoon's Animal House"), is an extended spoof of Bruce Lee's kung-fu classic, "Enter the Dragon," titled "A Fistful of Yen." The parody comically opens on a familiar skyline (pictured below).

"The Wiz" (1978) was adapted from the multi-Tony Award-winning musical, featuring an all-African-American cast in an urban retooling of "The Wizard of Oz." Sidney Lumet, a director who had a long-running love affair with New York City ("The Anderson Tapes." "Serpico," "Dog Day Afternoon,""Prince of the City," "Q&A," "Family Business," "A Stranger Among Us," "Night Falls on Manhattan"), transformed the plaza of the World Trade Center into the Emerald City (pictured below).

American and Russian eggheads reluctantly form a detente-era brain-trust in a sub-Manhattan control center to contend with a five-mile wide slab from a humungous asteroid targeting Earth in 1979's "Meteor," yet another all-star disaster flick, featuring Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Karl Malden, Brian Keith, Martin Landau, Henry Fonda, and Sybil Danning on skis. A large fragment from the approaching space rock strikes New York City, destroying the World Trade Center (pictured below), eerily presaging events 22 years later.

Things hadn't changed much in a couple decades as the high-tech disaster picture "Deep Impact" (1998) depicted a seven-mile long comet on a collision course with Earth, threatening to eradicate humanity. Morgan Freeman plays the U.S. president in a cast that features Robert Duvall, Elijah Wood, Tea Leoni, Maximilian Schell, and Vanessa Redgrave. The Twin Towers are engulfed by a gigantic wave from a mega-tsumani (pictured below).

"Deep Impact" was more of a downer than its summer box-office rival, "Armageddon," the asteroid-impact movie with Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck. "Armageddon" made more money, but "Deep Impact" was deemed more scientifically accurate by astronomers. And yes, "Armageddon" depicted the destruction of the World Trade Center (pictured below). However, when "Armageddon" was shown on ABC-TV in 2002, the scene was removed.

In the dystopian future of "Escape from New York" (1981), Manhattan has been transformed into a sprawling maximum security prison. When antihero Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is railroaded into rescuing the U.S. president (Donald Pleasence) from kidnappers inside the urban lockup, he pilots a stealth glider across New York Harbor and lands atop one of the towers of the World Trade Center (pictured below). Unfortunately, hopes to use the glider on a return flight are dashed, literally, when a gang of "crazies" pitch it off the tower.

We're pretty sure those are supposed to be the Twin Towers Paul Hogan was depicted as straddling in the "King Kong"-like artwork for 1988's "Crocodile Dundee II."

The sequel does open with transplanted Outback poacher Michael "Crocodile" Dundee blast fishing in New York Harbor, with very familiar landmarks in the background (pictured below).

"New York Stories" (1989) was a cinematic curio, an anthology of three short films directed by Bronx-born Woody Allen, Queens-born Martin Scorsese, and Napa Valley, California vintner Francis Ford Coppola (huh?).

"One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong..."

The original theatrical posters for "New York Stories" featured a peek-a-boo appearance by the World Trade Center (pictured below), a "cameo" that disappeared in artwork for the 2003 DVD release of the picture.

In 1974, 24-year-old French high-wire daredevil Philippe Petit shot to international fame after his aerial walk between the Twin Towers, 1350 feet above the ground. He made eight passes on the wire, performing for 45 minutes. Predictably, he was arrested afterward, but charges were dismissed when he agreed to perform for children in Central Park.

Thirty-four years later, Petit recalled the experience as "an immense, profound pleasure." He referred to it as "meeting the gods," telling ABC News, "I'm nonreligious...but it was a sacred presence, an amazing piece of theater." After resisting offers to film a documentary over the years, Petit finally decided to collaborate with James Marsh, a director who had made TV documentaries about Elvis Presley and The Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale, as well as the later, acclaimed feature film "The Theory of Everything," which garnered Eddie Redmayne the Best Actor Oscar for his role as physicist Stephen Hawking.

The resulting documentary, 2008's "Man on Wire" (the title comes from the police alert), recounts the daring, and mischievous exploit like a heist picture. Director Marsh called Petit's stunt "the artistic crime of the century." The film (pictured above) reaped numerous awards, including the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Innovative filmmaker Robert Zemeckis (whose phenomenally impressive track record includes "Romancing the Stone," the "Back to the Future" trilogy, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," and "Forrest Gump") came across the story of Petit in a 2003 children's book titled The Man Who Walked Between The Towers.

Initially doubting the validity of the story, Zemeckis, who claimed he "somehow missed it," eventually recognized its potential as a theatrical feature. "To me," he said, "it had everything that you want in a movie. It had an interesting character who's driven, and obsessed, and passionate. It had all this caper stuff. He was an outlaw...and then he did this death-defying thing."

Robert Zemeckis' films progressively pioneered the use of computer-generated special effects as valued means to a film's dramatic and narrative ends. (Remember actor Gary Sinese's metamorphosis in "Forrest Gump" from a fatalistic Vietnam lieutenant to an embittered, wheelchair-bound paraplegic, or the transformation of Tom Hanks into at least a half dozen motion-captured roles in the 3-D holiday film "The Polar Express.")

The green-screen effects in "The Walk" (pictured above) entailed the soundstage construction of the top two stories of the Twin Towers, with a wire approximately 12 feet off the floor. From the get-go, co-writer, co-producer, director Zemeckis wanted actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt (cast as NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone's 2016 biopic "Snowden') to portray the Gallic imp Petit.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (right) delivers an eye-popping performance
as Philippe Petit (left) in "The Walk."

For 2001's "Zoolander," writer-producer-director-star Ben Stiller deemed it necessary to digitally remove the World Trade Center from any footage based on his logic that the sight of it after the 9/11 attacks would distract from the alleged comedy. For The Dissolve, Keith Phipps wrote, "Here was New York without the twin towers, by then a familiar sight from the news, but looking peaceful on a sunny day, as if the buildings had never been there. Anyone seeing the movie now, out of context from that moment, wouldn't give it a second thought. At the time, it looked obscene."

Likewise, in the 2001 release "Serendipity," starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale, images of the World Trade Center were digitally removed from shots of the New York City skyline. The original ending of 2002's "Men in Black II" included the depiction of the World Trade Center towers opening up to release a swarm of UFOs into the air. The climactic scene was changed to the Statue of Liberty. Footage of the World Trade Center in the 2003 crime drama "People I Know" (filmed in 2001), with Al Pacino and Kim Basinger, was cut out but restored for its release on DVD in 2011. 

The original preview for 2002's "Spider-Man" (the first entry in the first of three - so far - 21st century film franchises based on the Marvel Comics character) included a scene of a getaway helicopter caught in a web and suspended between the Two Towers. Post-9/11, the trailer was changed. In the film itself, any images of the World Trade Center were digitally erased. Nevertheless, the reflection of the towers could still be seen in posters for the movie (pictured below).

Conversely, some films have digitally added the World Trade Center, including Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" and "United 93," both from 2006, the latter directed by Paul Greengrass, a British filmmaker who directed three movies in the "Bourne" franchise, as well as "Captain Phillips." "Watchmen," released in 2009, is set in the 1980s and features digitally restored Twin Towers in a number of scenes (pictured below).

One World Trade Center (aka the Freedom Tower) is the anchor building of the rebuilt World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan. Reaching a total height of 1776 feet (the number is a direct reference to American history), compared to the original 1 World Trade Center's 1368 feet, the 104-story structure is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, the sixth tallest in the world.

The nation's tallest lightning rod: One World Trade Center

The building's architect, David Childs, is chairman emeritus of the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which was also responsible for designing the Burj Khalifa (Arabic for "Khalifa Tower") in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. At a staggering 2722 feet (over a half-mile), the Burj Khalifa (pictured below) is the tallest structure on the face of the globe.

In motion pictures, the Burj Khalifa was featured prominently in Tom Cruise's fourth outing as IMF agent Ethan Hunt in 2011's "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol," the first live-action picture directed by animation filmmaker Brad Bird ("The Iron Giant," "The Incredibles," "Ratatouille"). Cruise proudly performed his own stunts, including a scene that has Ethan Hunt scaling the outside of the Burj Khalifa, apparently free soloing with the help of special gloves, although the fact of the matter is he was securely attached to the building at all times by multiple cables, which were digitally erased in post-production.

In the 25th season episode of "The Simpsons" titled "YOLO" (as in "You Only Live Once"), Homer dons a wingsuit and promptly flies smack dab into Springfield's tallest building, which unmistakably resembles the Burj Khalifa (pictured below).

When a 3000-mile wide mothership starts collecting iconic landmarks from across Asia with its anti-gravity pull in 2016's "Independence Day: Resurgence," one of the structures dumped into an alien landfill in London is the Burj Khalifa (pictured below). 

"In the twentieth century, as in the twelfth, men's aspirations and longings may be correctly interpreted by the monuments they erect. For now as always the seen reveals the unseen...thoughts are hidden until they find expression in tangible form. As the Gothic cathedral during the Dark Ages voiced the deep yearnings of devout souls, so the modern skyscraper as unmistakably reveals the secret springs of the world's ceaseless activity, showing clearly what are the most important factors in the life of this age. The deity of today is the supposedly almighty dollar, and the towering structures of modern cities often serve as temples dedicated to mammon worship. They point a moral and teach a lesson as truly as the churches and castles that dotted medieval Europe."

- Reverend Professor John S. Festerson, editor, Universal Engineer, May 1910

The Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan nears completion
in 1912. More than 100 years later, the skyscraper remains one
of the 100 tallest buildings in the United States.