9/11 Through the Emotional Lens of Cantor Fitzgerald

Howard Lutnick is known best by reputation, for being a ruthless competitor, even by Wall Street’s cutthroat standards.

Those who know Mr. Lutnick, the 52-year-old chief executive of the bond trading house Cantor Fitzgerald, also agree he is an incredibly complicated person, and that side of him is explored in a new documentary on Cantor and its comeback from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

The film, “Out of the Clear Blue Sky,” tracks Mr. Lutnick’s very public journey from victim, a man whose firm lost 658 employees over the course of a morning 12 years ago, to villain, when just four days after the attack he cut off the paychecks to the families of his employees â€" some dead, some still listed as missing â€" and then back again.

The firm’s story is painfully familiar, but “Out of the Clear Blue Sky” â€" which weaves together interviews with Mr. Lutnick, family members of those who were killed, home video and rarely seen before clips of Cantor executives from the months after the attacks â€" draws Mr. Lutnick out in a way that has not been seen before publicly.

“It smelled like it, it felt like, it tasted like, I was just back there, wham,” he says of that fateful day and how it reminded him of the days after his father died. Mr. Lutnick had just started college. His mother had died when he was 16, meaning he and his siblings were now orphans.

The film opened in New York earlier this month and there is a special screening tonight in select theaters across the county.

I interviewed Mr. Lutnick in 2011 for an article on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. In preparation, I read almost every interview he had given on what happened that day and those that followed. During our initial discussion, his words began to sound familiar, borrowed from the dozens of other interviews he had given. It made him sound rehearsed at best, insincere at worst. He conceded his approach was a hazard of telling the same story over and over.

“Out of the Clear Blue Sky” covers a lot of old ground, but in this rare instance Cantor and Mr. Lutnick’s stories are told in one sitting; the film runs almost two hours. It gives Mr. Lutnick some breathing room, letting him weave in and out of memories, be they from that day, or the exchange he had with an uncle after his father died. It’s also likely that the filmmaker’s relationship to Cantor â€" Danielle Gardner’s brother worked at Cantor and died in the attacks â€" put Mr. Lutnick at ease.

In addition, the film provides fresh insight into the weeks that followed the disclosure that Mr. Lutnick had cut off the paychecks of employees who had died.

The film scrolls through some of the hundreds of messages and death threats Mr. Lutnick received after news broke of his decision to cut families off the payroll. “You must die a painful death,” one person threatened. “You have no right to be alive,” another said.

The firm also spotlights the role of Mr. Lutnick’s sister Edie Lutnick, a lawyer who had been running her practice out of Cantor’s offices, as head of a charity that administers a program that Cantor put in place to help the families of employees who lost family members, an effort that turned out to be one of the most generous of its kind.

“Denial will never ever leave you if you are directly affected by this,” David Eagan, who lost two daughters on Sept. 11, told Ms. Gardner. “You will always, in the course of a day, think this could not have happened.”