Autumn Marathon

Man on Wire

This weekend our family watched the documentary film Man on Wire about the 1974 high-wire walk between the two towers of the  World Trade Center in New York.  You can search online reviews of the film to read about its innovative mixing of fiction with documentary styles (the director structured it like an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist film) and its results in the ongoing 2008 film awards season.

The feat - crossing the 200-foot void between the top of towers on a cable without safety devices - was audacious, illegal and a case-study in haphazard project management.  The towers, brand new and not quite completely built-out at the time, were the tallest buildings in the world at the time, approximately a quarter-mile high.  The high-school age Phillipe Petit read about plans to build the towers as a high-school student in France in the 1960s.  He says that from that time, it was his dream to walk between the towers.

Any great vision needs to be broken down into smaller segments to reach fruition.  The film shows Petit learning the art of tightrope walking, it explains how he supported himself as a street juggler and tightrope performer, it shows a series of smaller (but still bold) feats such as walking between the two towers of Notre Dame cathedral, and it shows and tells a lot about the lead-up to the WTC walk.

To accomplish the feat, Petit and his small team had to figure out among other things:

• how to access the building which then, as later, was under tight security;
• on which beams and supports to anchor the cables and stabilizing wires;
• how to get equipment into the building;
• how to surmount various technical problems of getting a cable between the towers;
• how to cope with the high winds that occur at the towers’ altitude;
• how to overcome fear of being so much higher than he or anyone else had walked before.

The work does get done, milestones are accomplished.  But the narrative makes it clear that planning was not as systematic as it could have been.  Just before the original date planned for the walk, Petit’s main accomplice (his “director of operations”) confronts him about a number of issues that have not been resolved and the “coup” is postponed at the last moment.  The postponement lasts for three months as the final items on the tick list are completed.   As a longtime business project leader, I could not help but to appreciate this secondary, but nevertheless remarkable aspect of the story.

The film rightfully focuses mainly on Petit, his artistry, the relationships between the team members, and the way that the feat amazed and inspired New Yorkers in mid-1970s.   It also spotlights the towers and the way that their beauty was never about the buildings themselves: it was in their extreme height and the perspectives given to the city, the sky and the water surrounding  them.  I read at least one article about  the film commenting that it had restored the author’s image of the towers back from the ugly, horrifying images of September 11, 2001.  As a New Yorker whose office was destroyed on that day, I couldn’t agree more.