Like most people of a certain age, I stood on the top of the World Trade Centre in New York before the Hamburg Boys decided to rearrange it. Like most people I admired the view of Uptown, admired the view of Liberty, marvelled at the Twin Towers stupendous height, and beat a hasty retreat for the elevator.
Frenchman Philippe Petit first saw the WTC in an architectural magazine before it was even built, and naturally decided he simply had to string a wire between the towers and walk across. One of the year’s most engaging and amusing films, Man on Wire is a Sundance winning documentary coming soon to a cinema near you. Through interviews and reconstructions, it tells Petit’s story of Petit’s walk between two giant skyscrapers 1350 feet up. A walk he dubbed “the artistic crime of the century.”
In particular, I liked that the stunt took place on August 7, 1974, nine day before I was born.