Plot: Sam Baldwin, a Chicago architect, has lost his wife to cancer. He and his young son Jonah move to Seattle, Washington, to make a fresh start, but Sam is still disconsolate. On Christmas evening, Jonah calls into a national radio advice show and persuades his father to go on the air with him to talk about how much he misses his wife. Thousands of women around the country, touched by Sam's story, send him letters. One letter is from Annie Reed, a journalist unhappily engaged to a nice but sneeze-prone man named Walter. Jonah, who has been working his way through the flood of mail, finds Annie's missive and likes that it mentions the Baltimore Orioles. He tries to convince his father to go to New York City to meet her on Valentine's Day, but Sam loses his temper and refuses. Jonah flies to New York and takes a taxi to to the Empire State Building, saying he's going to meet his new mother. Sam, in pursuit, catches up with Jonah, who hasn't found Annie because she's busy breaking up with her fiance. Jonah and Sam get on the down elevator just before a late Annie rushes in, but with the help of a lost backpack and teddy bear, all ends well.

Billy Wilder
The Apartment (1960)


Plot: A heart-rending tragi-comedy/drama of a compliant insurance clerk (Lemmon) who secretly lends out his apartment to other company executives for adulterous sexual affairs and liaisons. The plot thickens when the clerk realizes that his building's elevator operator (MacLaine) is being taken for trysts by his married boss (MacMurray) to his apartment. The sophisticated yet cynical film of the early 60s is a bleak assessment of corporate America, big business and capitalism, success, and the work ethic, when a lowly but ambitious accountant enables his climb up the corporate ladder by ingratiating himself to his superiors - he literally prostitutes his own standards and moral integrity and allows himself to be exploited.

D.J. McHale
Tower of Terror (television film 1997)



Plot: The movie begins with a flashback to Halloween, 1939. That night, at the Hollywood Tower Hotel a group of people- aspiring singer Clair, her boyfriend Gilbert, child star Sally Shine, her nanny Emiline Partridge, and a bellhop- board the elevator in order to go the party on floor twelve. When the elevator gets to floor eleven, however, a bolt of lightning violently strikes the elevator. The guests on the elevator disappear...

Charlie Kaufman & Spike Jonze
Being John Malkovich (1999)



A puppeteer discovers a portal that leads literally into the head of the movie star, John Malkovich.

"The recurring journey within the narrative--from elevator, to tunnel in the wall, to Malkovich's mind, to a stretch of grass beside the Jersey Turnpike-- affirms that technology can serve as a non-standard but still effective gateway to the soul".

But, just when McLoughlin gets wind that there may be something wrong in Tower 2 (news which Jimeno heard on the way down), a terrible Wrath-of-God rumbling begins, and the World caves in. Having barely made a desperate sprint to the elevator shaft, which McLoughlin -- thankfully -- had known was the strongest part of the building, the surviving members of his team find themselves entombed (and partially crushed) amid a hellish morass of concrete and twisted steel. Then -- although they have no clue what's going on -- the other Tower falls, and McLoughlin and Jimeno are left alone in the dark, hopelessly pinned underneath the smoldering wreckage of the two towers.