Press & Media

Twin Towers Movies is an independent archive documenting where the World Trade Center's Twin Towers appear on screen, from their construction in the early 1970s to the last films that caught them before September 2001. Each entry is a specific film, a specific appearance, a timestamp where one is known, a representative frame, and a line of context. It is researched and maintained by one person.

What this archive is not

Worth stating plainly, because it shapes any accurate piece about the site: this is a film-history project, not a 9/11 memorial site, and not a place for footage or discussion of the attacks. Every film here was made while the towers stood. The subject is the buildings as they appeared on screen during their thirty years, usually as unremarkable background nobody was looking at.

The towers were never the real loss. Nearly 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001, and thousands more responders and recovery workers have died since of related illness. That history belongs to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, not to this site.

Story angles

Four directions the material genuinely supports, rather than one pitch stretched four ways:

• Watching a landmark get built. The earliest entries catch the towers half-finished. In Klute (1971) the North Tower is visibly ahead of the South and still wearing its red primer. The archive tags every appearance by construction stage, so the skyline can be read as a rough timeline.
• The few films let inside. Access to shoot in the towers was rare. Three Days of the Condor filmed a CIA office on an upper floor of the North Tower; Dressed to Kill shot inside Windows on the World; Trading Places used the real COMEX trading floor at 4 World Trade Center.
• Accidental preservation. The great majority of these shots are incidental — an establishing shot, a background, a skyline nobody framed on purpose. That is exactly what makes them worth cataloguing: hundreds of films quietly kept a piece of a skyline that can't be photographed anymore.
• The Final Films. A reverse-chronological look at the last films to capture the towers before September 2001 — the closing stretch of a thirty-year screen presence.

A few notable finds

• Godspell (1973) staged a musical number on the roof of the unfinished North Tower. Cast members have recalled riding an elevator as high as it then went, then climbing through construction scaffolding to reach the top.
• King Kong (1976) replaced the Empire State Building with the towers for Kong's last stand — the most prominent role the World Trade Center ever had in a film.
• The Wiz (1978) turned the World Trade Center plaza into the Emerald City, reportedly the most expensive scene ever filmed there.
• Godzilla (1998) caught a real lightning strike on the North Tower's antenna by accident during a skyline pass, and kept it in the finished film.
• Home Alone 2 (1992) sent Kevin to the observation deck. After 2001, U.S. television broadcasts initially cut the World Trade Center scenes; they were later restored.
• The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) shows the towers behind a catamaran far out on Long Island Sound, dozens of miles from Manhattan — an atmospheric effect letting the camera see farther than the ordinary sightline allows.

Using material from the site

The screenshots here are single representative frames from copyrighted films, published as documentation and commentary. The archive doesn't own them and can't license them onward — for anything beyond similar editorial use, the rights holder is the place to go. Text written for this site (the commentary and context lines) may be quoted with attribution to Twin Towers Movies and a link.

Every film page carries a share image sized for social and article embeds. Happy to pull specific frames, timestamps, or a list cut a particular way — by decade, by construction stage, by how the towers are used in the shot — on request.

Contact

David Vandiver — david@twintowersmovies.com. Interviews, specific frames, data cuts, or fact-checking: all welcome.