Yet another name-that-movie question

March 28, 2008 6:22 AM

Can you name this movie?

I was flipping channels in the late 90s, possibly watching HBO, when I saw a movie scene where a couple of characters, both male, I think, were in a high-rise office with a large, floor-to-ceiling window. They were ramming themselves into it, seeing if they could bust it out, and, presumably, fall to their death. I remember absolutely nothing else about the movie. Any ideas on what it was?

posted by kimota to media & arts (8 comments total)

Permanent Midnight.
posted by bingo at 6:27 AM on March 28, 2008

Crap, bingo; that means I actually watched the whole movie but only remember that one scene, which is just like me. Do you care to jog my memory by contextualizing the scene?

Thanks for the quick answer!
posted by kimota at 6:53 AM on March 28, 2008

Scene in question.

Context: They're high as fuck.
posted by dogwalker at 6:56 AM on March 28, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

There's a scene just like this in The Darwin Awards (2006) where some up and coming exec is showing off his new penthouse apartment to his buddies and runs into a big plate window, with forseeable results.
posted by subajestad at 8:12 AM on March 28, 2008

Thanks, dogwalker!
posted by kimota at 9:34 AM on March 28, 2008

The Darwin Awards scene (and probably the scene in Permanent Midnight) was based on the real-life tragedy of Garry Hoy, a partner at a Toronto law firm who fell 24 stories out of the Toronto Dominion Centre after taking a run at a window. As mentioned towards the bottom of this article about a more recent law firm wind-up, the firm, Holden Day Wilson, didn't survive long after the incident.
posted by Dasein at 9:35 AM on March 28, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Tending towards irrelevant, but the Hoy incident is also (presumably) referenced in The Hudsucker Proxy (with an early successful attempt to break the glass and a later less successful one).
posted by Shepherd at 1:06 PM on March 28, 2008

There was also an incident in (I think) Chicago in the 1980s where a guy not wearing his glasses ran down a hallway and through a window.

But in general, skyscraper windows may or may not be that easy to smash. In other words, the PM scene may be entirely realistic.
posted by dhartung at 4:00 PM on March 28, 2008