Barry Sonnenfeld, director of "Men in Black II," was on the studio lot at Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles on September 11, 2001, when hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, and he soon realized he had a delicate problem on his hands: the sequel's planned ending was set on top of one of the towers.
As he tried to grasp the scale of the tragedy and find out whether friends and loved ones were safe, Sonnenfeld was especially anxious about New York, where he grew up in Washington Heights and where his daughter was living in Chinatown at the time.
Filming on "Men in Black II" was underway when the attacks happened. The sequel to the 1997 blockbuster starring Will Smith was, in Sonnenfeld's words, a true love letter to New York. The film had been shot in the city over the summer of 2001 before production moved to Los Angeles.
As he watched the news in shock along with the rest of the world, Sonnenfeld immediately thought of his film's ending. The climax was meant to take place atop one of the towers, where the agents played by Smith and Tommy Lee Jones would confront an alien villain and use the tower's roof to send a space princess, played by Rosario Dawson, back to her home planet. That option no longer existed.
Sonnenfeld said he had chosen the World Trade Center on purpose because the towers had almost seemed like a magnet. He said that as soon as the first tower fell, he knew.
A New York icon on screen
"Men in Black," released in 1997, starred Smith and Jones as agents of a secret organization policing extraterrestrial activity on Earth, and its 2001 sequel was filmed largely on location in New York City.
The entertainment industry, like every part of American life, was reshaped in the days, weeks and months after the attacks. The 1969 comedy "Putney Swope" was one of the first films to show the Twin Towers on screen, captured during the early stages of their construction. They also appeared while still under construction in "The French Connection" and in "The Hot Rock," starring Robert Redford.
When the towers were completed in 1973, they quickly became instant icons in a city already full of them, favored by filmmakers because they conveyed so much without a word of dialogue needed. After the attacks, the towers were removed from productions ranging from "Friends" and "Sex and the City" to "Zoolander" and the first trailer for "Spider-Man."
The towers had been due to appear in several scenes throughout "Men in Black II." Sonnenfeld said the plan had been for the World Trade Center to serve not only as a big surprise but also to make audiences think, "Of course, where else could it be?" He said it was all part of the film's plan and fit the franchise's own folklore, referring to how the first "Men in Black" had ended at another iconic New York City site, the World's Fair pavilion in Queens.
A rewritten ending that never worked
Sonnenfeld was with his close friend and "Men in Black II" co-producer, Graham Place, when the towers fell. With the country at a standstill, all filming at the studio was canceled that day. Unsure what to do, Sonnenfeld and Place went to the restaurant The Ivy and ordered gimlets, despite the early morning hour.
The film's climax was eventually rewritten. The final scene still took place on a rooftop, though of a generic building rather than the World Trade Center, and the crew managed to reuse much of the same storyboards, Sonnenfeld said.
He said they had almost wished they had found a completely different solution instead of simply moving the scene to the roof of another building. It is what it is, he said, but it never worked. He described the resulting scene as genuinely terrible in part, adding that the team's hearts were not really in it by that point.
The ending was not the only casualty. Sonnenfeld said the towers were digitally erased from eight to twelve shots throughout the finished film.
He said he hated making "Men in Black II" and that nobody involved wants to remember that production. He said the crew probably held a wrap party when filming ended, but that he did not go, adding that many others stayed away as well.
Sonnenfeld said he cannot help but push back on the idea that his own experience mattered much in the bigger picture, calling it a small sadness compared with the far greater sadness of that day.
