Now that the movie's finally done, I have a little breathing room, so I went to one of the websites we shot really quickly for insert shots in the wife's Google search scene. Of the dozens of sites we shot, we included maybe 5, for a fraction of a second each (with more screen time for Google, because it's integral to the story). The page: "MIT Architecture: 9-11 and its Aftermath," with a lecture/article by Prof. HÈlËne Lipstadt titled "The Monument does not Remember."
It was probably this combination of words that appealed to Jonah and caused him to include the shot of the page, but it seemed like a nice, oblique reference to the attacks and NYC's own questions about what comes after the World Trade Center, so we kept it in. The lecture's quite interesting, but even more interesting, is a memorial I'd never heard of, built within 72 hours (!) of the attacks at MIT. Called the Reflecting Wall, it was a full-scale model of a fragment of the WTC's distinctive column/window/column wall, executed in plywood. A remarkably moving and prescient gesture, it predated the emergence of images of the twisted, remaining fragment of the actual wall that became a familiar reference (and which doctrinaire voices rapidly included in any eventual memorial on the site).
