Right now one of the top trending topics on Twitter is #onSept11 as people around the country and the world remember where they were that tragic day, whether sitting in homeroom on their first day of high school or late for a meeting at the World Trade Center. Culling through past interviews and adding a bit of reporting of its own, the Hollywood Reporter has compiled a short list of some of Hollywood’s biggest movers and shakers (and some not so big) and where they were when they heard the news, or in some cases saw it out their office window.
The Godfather’s Al Pacino, for instance, was on his way home to New York from Los Angeles — where three of the hijacked flights were originally headed — and singer-songwriter PJ Harvey recalls sitting in her D.C. hotel room and watching the Pentagon burning. Gwyneth Paltrow (not on THR’s list) was famously driving her Mercedes on Seventh Avenue after a yoga class, where she and a jaywalking pedestrian got into one of those you-go-no-you-go standoffs, which resulted in the pedestrian — Lara Lundstrom Clarke — missing her habitual subway 1 train to the World Trade Center, where she worked; Ms. Clarke insists Paltrow saved her life that day. Below, a few more memories from real-famous (and reality-famous) New Yorkers and non–New Yorkers alike.
Sir Paul McCartney:
I was on my way back to England, and we were at JFK on the tarmac, and the pilot just suddenly said, ‘We can’t take off. We’re going to have to go back to base.’ And out of the window on the right-hand side of the airplane, you could see the twin towers. You could see one plume of smoke, and then you could see two shortly thereafter.
The Real Housewives of New York City’s Alex McCord:
My husband Simon […] called to tell me to turn on the news as a ‘small plane’ had hit the World Trade Center. I did, while calling my mother in Dallas — as we stood on the phone in front of TVs, 1400 miles apart, the second plane hit.  Almost simultaneously we said that there was no way it was an accident.
Tribeca resident Robert De Niro:
I was in midtown heading downtown. It was interesting because I was going down Fifth Avenue, and everybody was standing on the left side of the street. It was very quiet. You could see the World Trade Center from there. I had an appointment uptown. My son called me — he lived actually a few blocks from the World Trade Center on Wall Street. That was the first plane. Then, when I was leaving where I was the second plane had hit. I was just trying to get home, and from my house you could see it from my window.â€
September 11, 2011, perhaps the only day so emblazoned on each of our mind’s eyes. [THR]