From well before it opened, the museum has drawn criticism. Survivors of the attacks and relatives of victims, communities that are far from monolithic, have expressed anger over everything from the existence of a gift shop to the inclusion of photographs identifying the 19 hijackers. Arab and Muslim groups have formally complained that the museum does little to distinguish Al Qaeda from the vast majority of the world’s Muslims. In a scathing 2014 review, Washington Post architecture critic Philip Kennicott accused the museum of “inviting visitors to re-experience the events in a strangely, obsessively, narcissistically repetitious way.”
Now a newly released documentary, The Outsider, expands upon Kennicott’s criticism by chronicling the debates among the museum staff about the very purpose of the project and ultimately takes the side of the titular outsider, a struggling novelist and classic New York eccentric named Michael Shulan, who served as the museum’s vaguely defined “creative director” prior to its opening.
In the immediate wake of the attacks, Shulan decided to turn his Soho storefront into a crowdsourced gallery for photographs capturing the day’s horrors, and quickly amassed what might be the largest single collection of 9/11 imagery, dubbed “Here Is New York.” It was on the basis of this collection that Shulan was invited to join a staff of more seasoned museum professionals that also included Alice Greenwald, the museum’s current chief executive, who previously worked at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, what Shulan did for 9/11 photos, a married couple was simultaneously doing for 9/11 video footage. In 2001, Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder were running Broadcast News Networks, a company they co-founded that made documentary features for TV news. On the day of the attacks, Rosenbaum directed their employees to journey downtown from their office on 28th Street and to “point their cameras in the opposite direction” from what most camera crews were filming — that is, away from the burning Twin Towers and toward the faces of bystanders reacting to an apocalyptic scene. “If you’re a filmmaker, and you think the world’s ending, which we did, you make a film,” Rosenbaum told me.
In the weeks that followed, Rosenbaum and Yoder solicited more than 500 hours of 9/11 footage from ordinary New Yorkers, which became the basis for 7 Days in September, a critically acclaimed 2002 documentary. A few years later, they donated their archive to the 9/11 Museum in exchange for access to its planning process. Thus, between 2008 and the 2014 grand opening, they were able to film key staffers, including Shulan, deliberating and debating over every aspect of the eventual museum.