On the Set of ‘World Trade Center’

Three men stood in front of a massive pile of rubble an acre in size, lit against the dark sky by a number of floodlights as crews worked around them.

“It was surreal, it really was,” said of the tangled mess of steel and concrete that was the World Trade Center. “It looks real. We felt like we needed to dig right away because we got there at night; it brings us right back to that day, it really did. It was a really solemn moment for us.”

Strauss, along with William Jimeno and John McLoughlin had all been at the former site of the Twin Towers, then Ground Zero – Strauss had helped to pull Jimeno from the pile – but 5 years later all three were again looking at the same scene, only this time in California and entirely carved out of styrofoam and plastic on the set of Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.”

“It was amazing what these art departments can do,” Strauss said as he recalled the events leading up to his involvement in the 2006 film, which centers around McLoughlin and Jimeno experiences on September 11 and surviving the collapse of the Twin Towers.

Following his rescue, Jimeno, a Port Authority Police Officer, had been profiled in “Bow Hunter” magazine and which was read by screenwriter Andrea Berloff, who eventually sold the script to Paramount.

Jimeno had called Strauss around Memorial Day 2005 to speak about the project and working as a consultant on the film with Paddy McGee, who was Strauss’ partner in the hole. At first they were not interested, but agreed to meet with producers, Jimeno and Stone at the Mandarin Hotel in Columbus Circle. Stone ended up being an hour late, coming from another location shoot and was in Strauss’s words, “rushed.”

“Paddy and I are like ‘are you kidding me? This guy’s out of his mind. He doesn’t even want to hear the story, this is going to be a mess’,” Strauss said, leaving the meeting and wanting to wash their hands of the entire experience.

A talk with wife Pat and Gerard Keuchler put the decision in perspective, who both said: “They’re going to make this movie with you or without you. So if they make it without you and it’s a ridiculous movie, then you have nobody to blame but yourself. But if they make it with you and it’s ridiculous, at least you can honestly say that you tried.”

For their role as consultants, both McGee and Strauss received compensation, but donated the funds. “We didn’t want to make money off of 9/11, we thought that was wrong.”

A week before traveling to California, the script arrives, “and it’s ridiculous,” Strauss said, asking for a rewrite in several areas, which he undertook himself.

“To no fault of theirs... they just don’t know how New York cops talk,” he said, giving an example where when Stephen Dorf, who portrays Strauss, calls for the fire department saying “and tell them to bring the hoses and the water” whereas in real life they would have called “FD.”

“They know they need to bring the water and the hose to put a fire out, you don’t need to tell them that,” he said, noting that not everyone may know what ‘FD’ meant. “They’re thinking globally, I’m thinking of my little world.”

Still, it was nothing compared to the disagreements Strauss had with Stone on the set, especially after spending hours with set designers at his Mineola home going over what it was like under the rubble.

“It certainly didn’t look like it looked in the movie,” Strauss said. “Oliver Stone’s telling me ‘Scott, I can’t make it as dark and as cramped and as tight and confined as it was in real life because no one’s going to want to see the movie; people will get afraid of the movie, they’ll get claustrophobic sitting there so I need to expand it and make it a little bit less scary for people.’ So I understood it and like I said, it’s not about me, my job was to make it as accurate as possible.”

One of the other major conflicts was over casting, since Stone wanted Strauss to play himself. The production had invited him to the Port Authority Bus Terminal during filming in September 2005 and then set u a screen test at a building on Varrick Street, an experience which left Strauss “physically bothered” before he dropped out, apologizing and left feeling like “the weight of the world was off my shoulders; I could focus on what I needed to focus on.”

“They asked me to do a job and I want to do that job and that job is to make the movie as technically as accurate as I possibly can for my friends; for the 14 friends that I lost that day. Did I throw away a once in a million lifetimes opportunities? Yeah, but I don’t care. I needed to do the right thing by my friends.”

Before Strauss and his family’s trip to California, news came from Dorf that he had been cast to play Strauss in the film asking numerous questions while on set and pleading for him to stay an extra week. 

“He wanted to be me and it was pretty neat and he really tried to ace it a best as possible and he did a fantastic job,” Strauss said.

While Dorf’s portrayal is only on the screen for about two minutes in length, the entire sequence was shot over the course of three weeks.

“It was an incredible learning experience about how they did things,” Strauss said, showing photos of large pieces of styrofoam and plastic in the shape of rubble suspended by cables which would be lowered into position on the set when filming took place in an airplane hanger where the Spruce Goose was built. Most of the rubble pile – which cost an estimated $1 million along plus an additional $500,000 in real scrap metal for dressing – was a facade, propped up on boxcars which lined the perimeter of the one-acre site and protect nearby houses since filming routinely lasted until two or 3 a.m.

Those who know Strauss will also know at least one major continuity error in Dorf’s portrayal – that in real life he did not have a mustache. “Oliver comes to me and says ‘I thought you had a mustache’,” Strauss said. “I go ‘I didn’t have a mustache, I don’t even have hair’.”

Despite the differences between real life, the movie did give Strauss a different perspective of the attacks, especially from Jimeno’s point of view being inside when the tower collapsed.

“That was an eye-opening experience certainly for me. It was unfortunate that out of the five, only two survived, but at least two survived. And it’s about what they drew on to get through the day, the love of their family and things like that.”