Fittingly, when the Saudi terrorists were flying planes into the World Trade Center 10 years ago, I was at the movies.
Yes, even at 8:46 a.m., the time the North Tower was hit, I was sitting in a theater with a pad in my hand, for I was at the Toronto International Film Festival that fateful day. I was watching a press screening of Mira Nair’s festive Monsoon Wedding, which had begun 16 minutes earlier.
I knew nothing about how the world had changed when I left the screening just after 10 o’clock to hurry down chic Bloor Street to the Four Seasons Hotel for my interview appointment with William H. Macy.
Everything seemed normal on the street, as I recall, but in the hotel lobby a television had been set up and a small, well-heeled crowd was huddled around it. Eager to get upstairs to the interview, I did not stop to see what was on the screen, assuming it was some morning hockey match.
Upstairs, in a hospitality suite designated as the holding room for those pesky members of the media, there was Macy, sitting on a sofa, watching the towers fall, a horrific scene that the networks were replaying over and over. It was then that I learned what had happened while I was taking in Nair’s colorful ethnic comedy, and I remember slumping down next to Macy and we both looked on, incredulous.
It was too soon to know the fate of that year’s film festival, but it was obvious that my interview with Macy was canceled. (He was there to promote Focus, a minor film you probably neither saw nor heard of, based on Arthur Miller’s first and only novel.)
With the festival in limbo, I called my editor at The Palm Beach Post and was asked to head out into the streets of Toronto to get the Canadian reaction to the attacks. Maybe it was because the film festival had been consuming the city, but more than a few locals told me that seeing the replays of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers felt “just like a movie.” Duh, eh?
I typed up my notes and transmitted them to Florida, but none of what I gathered got used, probably because there were enough people there who also noted it felt just like a movie.
Walking around Toronto, stores and offices were closing, as people headed to their homes and families. I do remember stopping at the Chapters bookstore, adjacent to the festival press screening theaters, where I saw Anne Heche doing a previously arranged public reading of her memoirs, as if nothing else as important had happened that day.
In that same building was an office of the Canadian Red Cross. Since I couldn’t think of any other way to help, I thought I would donate some blood for the attack victims. After standing in line for a while, I was told that so many people had volunteered their blood, the next available appointment was two weeks later. Love those Canadians.
It soon became apparent that with all planes grounded, many of the films and, worse, all of the film talent were unable to make it to Toronto. So the festival staff had no choice but to call off the rest of the event. Now the challenge for me was to find a way back to Florida.
There were no planes flying, all the trains were reserved out and the only way one could get a rental car was by agreeing to return it to Toronto. Fortunately, a French cinephile named Francois Ravidat, who ran a cultural exchange non-profit called Children of the French Cinema from an office in Palm Beach, thought quickly and solved the problem.
If we hired a driver to take us from Toronto to Buffalo, we could then get a one-way rental from Buffalo to Florida. Despite rumors of long lines at the border, we were admitted into the States without delay. (Apparently the border police were concentrating on nabbing the escaping terrorists, not in preventing other terrorists from entering the United States. A little unnerving.)
So we got a rental car and Ravidat, one of his French colleagues and I rotated at the wheel in shifts — a 27-hour trip listening to a frequently changing series of talk radio stations, full of rabid nuts who had no idea who perpetrated the Trade Center attacks, but were eager to kill them in retaliation.
It all felt just like a movie.