Name an iconic scene from the first Spider-Man movie, the one directed by Sam Raimi that came out in 2002. You’re saying it’s the upside-down kiss? Yeah, that’s fair.
Let me ask my question in a different way: What’s the most iconic line from the first Spider—OK now that I’m saying it out loud, it’s definitely “With great power comes great responsibility.” Which I know is not a creation of the film but it did popularize it and … we’re already getting off-topic.
Let me try this again: Hey, remember the part in the middle of Spider-Man that’s about 9/11?
It’s in the scene where Spider-Man is fighting the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) on the Queensboro Bridge, trying to simultaneously save Mary Jane Watson and an aerial tram full of children. And just when you think he’s toast and Goblin is about to land the kill shot, a bunch of New Yorkers start hurling trash at him to throw him off-kilter.
“I got something for your ass! You mess with Spidey, you mess with New York!” one of them yells. A second man in a thick, broadly New Yawk accent adds, “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!”
It’s weird, right? For nearly 25 years I have been obsessed with this scene for how clumsy and unsubtle it is. The movie basically stops in the middle of a climactic fight with a few different spinning plates so that a couple of no-name characters can all but look straight at the camera and say, effectively, “We cannot continue with this story set in NYC without acknowledging the events of Sept. 11 and the resiliency of New Yorkers throughout the five boroughs.” Clearly, I am not alone. On YouTube, one version of it has 4.3 million views, and a clear spike in replays at the pivotal moment.
There is art explicitly about 9/11—music like Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising or The Beastie Boys’ “An Open Letter to NYC,” and films like 25th Hour—but the attacks also produced countless less-direct acknowledgments. “I talk about this all the time: Season 8 of Friends, there are American flags everywhere,” said David Sims, a co-host of the film podcast Blank Check. “Suddenly, everyone liked the Yankees in that World Series? Everyone was just like, ‘I think we’re going to be pro-New York for a minute.’”
“There was a point after 9/11 when every movie set in New York had to have a moment acknowledging the attacks,” said Max Rivlin-Nadler, lifelong New Yorker and co-founder of the local news outlet Hell Gate. His favorite example of this phenomenon comes at the beginning of Stuart Little 2, which opens with a lingering shot of the altered New York City skyline at sunrise set to “Put A Little Love In Your Heart.”
But the Spider-Man moment has stuck with me in part because of how you can feel the filmmakers stretching to do something, anything. Spider-Man was filmed before the attacks, and in the summer of 2001, released promotional materials featuring the Twin Towers. There was a poster featuring the Twin Towers reflected in Spider-Man’s masked eye, as well as a now-infamous teaser, never intended for inclusion in the final film, in which a helicopter full of bank robbers is strung up between the towers.
But the attacks altered the film’s rollout. On Sept. 13, 2001, the website Spider-Man Hype (editorial mission self-explanatory) reported that the film was being retooled:
Although it is hard to go on, believe us – we’re still tuned into CNN 24 hours a day, we have received so many questions from fans everywhere that we hope this will answer some of them.
Sony Pictures has told us they are redoing the Spider-Man teaser poster, which was pulled because the World Trade Center was reflected in Spider-Man’s eye. We do not have a date that the new one will be available yet.
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Sony will also use computer technology to remove images of the World Trade Center from the final movie in respect to the tragic events.
“Well, as I feared they’re going to remove the W.T.C from the final film…” wrote Harry Knowles, the tastemaking proprietor of Ain’t It Cool News. “I kinda knew in my heart that they were going to do this, but there was a part of me that just wanted to see them in the film… I just felt that it would be a beautiful impression to have of the buildings, but I understand how so many would only see pain in their image… I suppose it is for the best.” By Sept. 19, he was back to posting set photos.
An early October column from that year in USA Today, written by Susan Wloszczyna, begins:
Before the world changed forever, Sam Raimi likely wouldn’t have worried about what to label the lead character of his latest movie. But after seeing firefighters and others risk themselves to save others and comb through the remains of the World Trade Center, the director hesitates to call a mere comic-book creation like Spider-Man a hero. “It’s a holy word now,” Raimi says. “I don’t want to denigrate it.”
But Raimi did want to do something, which brings us back to the bridge scene. A large part of my minor fascination with this moment is the fact that it is, informationally and relevant to its overall notoriety, a total black hole. For 25 years, there has basically been no publicly available information about how the Spider-Man 9/11 scene came together. (I did find one quote from 2022, when Raimi told Yahoo, “In its own tiny little way, the way escapist entertainment can take us away from our problems, I thought that Spider-Man tried its part to take New Yorkers away from the horror that was 9/11 [with] brief entertainment.” Insightful.) It’s not difficult to imagine that had the scene been produced today, there’d be at least a couple of blog posts or articles with headlines like, “How Spider-Man Pays Tribute to 9/11” or “The Spider-Man Cast and Crew Explain That Powerful 9/11 Moment.”
To find out more, I reached out to various Spider-Man production members, most of whom—and I’m jumping to conclusions here based on the majority of requests going unanswered or getting declined—did not seem eager to participate in a retrospective article tying their artistic output to the most infamous terrorist attack in history. But I was able to get in touch with the two most crucial people: actors Joe Virzi and Michael Edward Thomas, who play characters identically named “New Yorker On Bridge.” How does one get involved in such an undertaking, and what was it like, as a day player in a movie that made $114 million in its first weekend, to deliver the film’s most obvious applause lines?
Virzi is the man who yells the iconic “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.” A Detroit native who began his showbiz career in stand-up comedy, he was connected to the production by Bob Murawski, the film’s editor, who got him an audition for the first film. “I didn’t get it,” he said. “But Sam was gracious and his assistant called me and said, “Hey, we really liked you. You just look way too young for this part, but we’ll keep you in mind.’” Virzi went back to doing comedy and voiceover work.
Thomas, who declares, “You mess with Spidey, you mess with New York!” recalled that he was working at a restaurant in Los Angeles in 2001 when the attacks happened. His friend, a coworker’s husband, was friends with Grant Curtis (a Raimi collaborator who now works at Marvel Studios), and he got an invite to audition. “They called me and said ‘You got it,’ and I was like, ‘Cool.’ It was kind of weird, you know, because, I mean, I was happy, but I wasn’t happy about 9/11.”
Virzi remembers being called in sometime in December 2001. “I got a call from Sam’s assistant who said, ‘Hey, can you come up to Sony real quick? We got a new ending to the movie. We don’t have any dialogue.’ They showed me the storyboards and they’re like, ‘OK, come up with some dialogue for this. Bob says you’re an improv guy.’
“So I just started to spit out, you know, with a Brooklyn accent, this kind of ‘One for all, all for one’ stuff. And so they go, ‘OK, be here at 5.30 in the morning. We’re shooting the scene tomorrow.'”
“I kind of remember Grant telling me and explaining it to me, and then basically what I remember was [them saying] ‘We have to kind of do this quick,’” Thomas said. “I didn’t realize how big it was going to be. It was just another job, I was happy to have a job.”
The shoot took place in a single day on the Sony lot with just the day players. None of the film’s stars (Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Dafoe) or stand-ins were present, but Raimi was there. “Sam was great. I just remember him being great,” Thomas said. “He talked me through the vibe. He had this whole vibe about, like, this movie being, as New York as its own little kind of comic book city. He had this idea that it was a city where you see [the same] people all the time. It was a big city, but it was a small city. That’s why I could be in the first one, and the second one, and the third one.” (Thomas reappeared in Spider-Man 2 and was invited back for the third. Virzi acted in all three.)
A large part of the scene’s function, Virzi said, was to position street-level New Yorkers opposite figures of authority: “You’re New Yorkers and you’re behind Spider-Man. The police are against him and the paper is against him. But you guys understand what’s happening and so you understand the value he has.”
The main thing Thomas remembered was the rallying speech Sam Raimi gave to the actors that day. “He had this whole speech about ‘you’re fighting for New York, this is how New York’s gonna heal, you’re saving New York,’ you know? I don’t remember if he mentioned Twin Towers or not. But he gave this speech that was just so inspiring that all the extras and everybody clapped. Because on so many movies, they’re just kind of like cattle. He talked to you like you’re actually part of the scene, and what he needed from you, and what he needed everyone to do, and they clapped.”
As Virzi recalled, there were a few actors running through lines on set (only he and Thomas made the final cut) but he shouldered some of the creative burden. “Sam calls me over and he was like, ‘Hey, tell these guys what to say, would you?’ And so I just started coming up with all of that stuff.”
When the movie finally came out, Virzi and Thomas enjoyed their moment in the spotlight, but even a glaringly prominent bit part wasn’t enough to earn bigger roles. Thomas still acts occasionally, but it’s not a full-time profession. Virzi similarly moved into voiceover and sound work, and then into other work after the pandemic upended the film industry.
“It’s like, if you’re a high school athlete, and you win the state championship. The next day, you just go back to regular life,” Virzi said. “And that’s pretty much what it was. It helped me definitely voiceover-wise, because I could do accents and whatever. But as far as in front of the camera, I did independent crap movies, and a crappy TV show here and there. I was on Friends and I got cut out of that.” When he worked on the Sony lot, tour guides would sometimes stop the tour and ask him to say the line, which he would do begrudgingly. At some point the balance shifted, and more parents than children started to recognize his reenactment.
The moment and Virzi’s line had staying power, for better or worse. It lives on in GIF form and in YouTube clips and Reddit threads, where the comments are filled with memories of crowds erupting in the theaters in 2002. The line is oft-repeated online, and particularly in moments where New York City takes focus. When Zohran Mamdani (age 34, millennial) won the mayoral election last November, more than a few people saw reflections of Spider-Man in his declaration that “to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”
The moment was cited as emblematic of the film’s humanity in Rolling Stone’s review. “The cold technology of the FX, like the Times Square battle between Spidey and the Goblin, can freeze off feeling,” Peter Travers wrote in 2002. “Raimi counters by showing a New York crowd booing the Goblin with a moving, post-9/11 fervor: ‘You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.’”
Shortly before the movie came out, Virzi recalled getting a phone call from Raimi, which became a running joke between them in the following years. As he reenacted with an imitation of Raimi’s Midwest-nice accent…
RAIMI: Hey, you’re in Rolling Stone magazine. They quoted your line!
VIRZI: Oh, cool.
RAIMI: Yeah, too bad no one will ever know you wrote that!
Hopefully, they know now.