Commentary: After I published the first episode, I was fortunate to receive valuable feedback from several listeners. I also had several positive experiences when I told work colleagues and industry professionals about the podcast. Episode 2 was the first movie-based episode that I did. On top of the writing, editing, analysis, and publishing processes that I was already doing, I needed to determine how I was going to set up the movie scenes and break them down. I wasn’t sure how deep I needed to go into the analysis or how many scenes I could cover. Die Hard was probably the first time I stayed up late when I was younger. I had never seen the movie and it was on TV. My dad let me stay up until 11pm on a school night to finish it. After that, I was a Die Hard (and Bruce Willis) fan.
Notable elevator concepts in this episode:
- Car Operating Panel (COP) components and functions
- Safety circuit (“safety chain”) components and function
- Hoistway door locks and closers
- Cab shell design and structure
- Hoistway design and overhead refuge
Episode Transcript: Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai
“Welcome to those of you who haven’t listened yet to Elevators Uncut, and a very heartfelt welcome back to those of you who are returning after listening to episode one.
My overall goal is to have a new episode published monthly. Obviously, this might change depending on how busy my life gets, but you already know how that is. Again, this podcast is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, so I’m extremely grateful for all of the support.
If you haven’t listened to episode one yet, it does have some foundational elevator discussions in it, and some general references. Just like every other episode we do, it will discuss a different scenario with different elevator principles applied to it. I have received a lot of supportive feedback since episode one, so it confirms to me that a lot of the listeners are really enjoying this type of content.
I’m sure all of you are asking yourselves, what are we going to talk about today? I need to say that I’ve had a lot of suggestions from friends and supporters after episode one. When I started writing this podcast, there were six or so of my favorite movies and shows that I knew were going to be early episodes. But since then, I’ve added a few, and that will likely round out the first dozen episodes of Elevators Uncut.
But for today, we’re going to talk about the one and only Die Hard. If you haven’t seen this movie, I’ll be describing each scene that we go over, so it’s not essential to have seen it for yourself, but it might help. Die Hard was released in 1988. It stars Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia, Reginald Vel Johnson, and several others. In the movie, a New York City police officer tries to save his estranged wife and several others taken hostage by terrorists during a Christmas party at the Nakatomi building in Los Angeles. This movie went on to produce five total Die Hard films over the course of 25 years. All of this is according to IMDb. I still remember staying up late to watch Die Hard on TV with my dad when I was younger. I think this might have been the latest that I ever stayed up at that point. I enjoyed the movie so much that I actually wasn’t forced to go to bed, and I think I remember having a problem waking up the next day.
This entire movie takes place in a high-rise building, which is actually Fox Plaza, 2121 Avenue of the Stars, in Century City, Los Angeles, California. According to Wikipedia, the actual building is 34 stories tall and 493 feet. Since all of the scenes are written to take place inside of the building, there are a ton of interactions with elevators, mechanical systems, and a lot of other things inside the building. So let’s get started. We mentioned that the general plot of Die Hard is that a group of terrorists take over a building during a company Christmas party. And no, we’re not going to talk about the argument of whether or not this movie is a Christmas movie, but spoiler alert, I am happy to watch this movie whether or not it is Christmas time.
Bruce Willis plays John McClane, a New York City police officer who is separated from the rest of the Christmas party when the hostages get taken. So he spends the movie fighting terrorists in different parts of the building and generally trying to disrupt their master plan.
The first elevator scene is 35 minutes into the movie. At this point, Bruce Willis has fought one of the terrorists hand-to-hand and puts the terrorist’s body on an elevator for the purposes of taunting or distracting the rest of the terrorists. In this scene, we see Bruce Willis’s character board the elevator with the dead terrorist and run the elevator down in normal operation using a car call to one of the lower floors.
Once the elevator starts moving, he engages the in-car stop switch on the car operating panel. One note, lucky for Bruce, this is the 1980s and the stop switches are mostly the the toggle style on off switches. In the car operating panels of today, you’d be lucky to find a stop switch that doesn’t require a key.
Now of course, as Bruce turned this switch on, an alarm would likely sound as it does today and it would alert anybody in the area that the that the elevator was on stop. That information aside, Bruce manually opens the car doors after the car starts moving and it stops the elevator in flight. This is another time when Bruce is lucky he’s in the 1980s.
The car doors of today almost always have door restrictors on them that are designed to keep the car doors from being opened when they’re outside of a door zone. If that was the case, Bruce would be effectively stuck inside the elevator and would need to be outside the elevator in order to release the door restrictor and open the car doors. But overall, I’m happy with just the fact that the elevator stops in flight when he opens the car doors via the car gate switch.
Now if you remember back to episode one, we talked about the safety circuit and the fact that a lot of switches inside the elevator hoist way and on the elevator are wired in series so that when any of those switches opens up, it stops the elevator in flight and prevents an unsafe condition. So this car gate switch is attached to the car doors and it would be one of the items that would shut the elevator down in flight if it wasn’t closed or in the acceptable position. So at that point, Bruce uses a pole type object to unlock the hoist way doors.
I do like this part. It’s slightly inaccurate, but at least the filmmakers chose to use an object to manually release the hoist way doors. Now my main criticism for this part is that an elevator door lock is not an on-off style type lock that you would see on your front door where you turn a knob and it locks or unlocks the door.
There’s a weight or a spring that you have to maintain pressure on in order to keep the door open while you slide the doors open. My other criticism is that when Bruce opens these hoist way doors, they stay open. The problem is that elevator code requires that the doors close by themselves, usually with a spring closer on the sill like we’ll see later or a real closer above the actual entrance. So we’ll talk about this again in a few minutes. At this point, Bruce wedges a screwdriver in the door track, climbs out of the car, and puts the elevator back into normal operation by turning off the stop switch. Overall, I’m not really mad at the way the filmmakers did this scene.
It’s fairly accurate, some minor mistakes, but in general much better than a lot of the other elevator scenes in some other movies. If we skip forward just a little bit to 40 minutes and 25 seconds, this is the same elevator as it arrives to the main lobby. The hostages are being held here and you can hear the hostages scream as they see the elevator doors open and realize there’s a dead terrorist inside. We could assume that Bruce managed to put a lobby car call in the car operating panel before he climbed out or after he reached back in, but we really didn’t see that part. Regardless, these elevator doors seem to stay open for a long time, if not indefinitely. In real life, the car door detector would likely be set up to close unless there was an obstruction in the car door, someone was standing there, or there was an object in the way. Even then, programming would usually close the doors at a slow speed after a certain amount of time, it’s known as nudging. There would also be a buzzer that goes off while the door is slowly closed to make it for an inoperable door detector in that situation. During this part of the scene, Bruce is on top of the elevator looking down through the top exit hatch.
Now obviously there are a lot of different styles of elevator cab interiors, but I have never seen a top exit hatch with half inch diameter holes drilled in it like swiss cheese. This also implies that there’s no actual cab interior ceiling in the elevator since Bruce is on top of the cab shell looking down through the top exit and directly into the elevator cab. Now normally there would be a ceiling that divides the cab interior from the cab shell itself.
The other question I’m asking myself is how Bruce actually got on top of the elevator after he climbed out of it. We see that he turns the stop switch off and puts the elevator into normal operation. After that, he would have to access the elevator car top somehow. Based on where the elevator is positioned in the scene, the car top would be at waist level or chest level. Not too difficult to climb on top of. However, like we said before, with the car doors and the hoistway doors open, the elevator won’t move because the safety chain is broken or the safety circuit is broken.
I do like the fact that he wedged the hoistway door open with a screwdriver but the overall door tension we talked about is a little different in other scenes of the movie and he would have to remove that screwdriver in order to let the hoistway doors close and put the elevator into normal operation. At 41 minutes and 45 seconds there’s actually a very good view of the elevator car top. I’m pretty happy with this shot.
They definitely took this from inside a real elevator hoistway. Unfortunately, we’ll see that this is where the scene gets a little far-fetched. The elevator starts to move upward and we see that Bruce is holding on to the hoist cable shackles which attach the hoist cables to the elevator crosshead. I’m curious why the other elevators in the bank are running. Since no one in the building is really moving around there shouldn’t really be too much elevator traffic. You shouldn’t see too many elevators going past you. However, Bruce stays on the elevator car top until it runs to the top landing. Now this elevator runs so high that Bruce actually has to crouch down to avoid getting crushed between the elevator car top and the building steel. Now this is pretty interesting because it is almost the opposite of the scenario we talked about in episode one.
In this case the elevator cab has gone so high in the building that it’s actually above the top floor. You might be asking how do you know that it’s above the top floor? Well by elevator code when it’s designed there is a certain amount of space above the elevator car top when it is at the top floor. This is called refuge space and is part of the clear overhead space above the elevator. If the elevator were to go into this refuge space it would mean that the counterweight was physically below the counterweight buffer in the elevator pit. So mechanically this just is not possible. The other part that troubles me is that there is a lot of equipment on top of the elevator. You have the hoist cable shackles that Bruce was holding on to as the elevator ascended up the hoist way. Those are 18 to 24 inches tall and they would definitely hit the top of the hoist way before the person on top of the elevator had to worry about anything. There’s also some car roller guides up there that kind of protrude up above the elevator car top. The crosshead is about 12 to 18 inches above the car top so there’s a lot of equipment up there that would hit the top of the hoist way before any person on top of the elevator had anything to worry about.
At this point the scene cuts to Bruce climbing out of some type of shaft and over a railing. This is the other part of the scene that I have a problem with. Perhaps the filmmaker’s intent was to show him climbing out of the elevator hoist way but it’s just not possible. Besides the obvious safety issues of having an open pit and an open shaft that someone could fall into and fall down the elevator hoist way, the elevators just aren’t designed like that. The top landing or the top entrance of that elevator rise would probably be the only way for Bruce to get out of the elevator hoist way. I did notice he climbed over a railing and there were some cables hanging behind him. Perhaps these were supposed to symbolize the elevator hoist cables but just the fact that they were swaying back and forth I’d say that it wasn’t really believable. In the scene it would also mean that someone was inside the elevator and going to the top floor or someone at the top floor had placed a hall call or else there would be no reason for the elevator to actually go to that floor.
Regardless, if we assume that these high-rise elevators were designed to travel at about 800 feet per minute, Bruce would be going about nine miles per hour inside the hoist way and would travel from the main lobby to the 33rd floor in about 36 seconds. Anyway, Bruce goes out of the area through a small access door and he escapes into a mechanical area. After that scene there’s a number of events that happen in the movie.
If we move forward to about 1 hour 15 minutes and 30 seconds, at this point law enforcement have shown up on the scene at the Nakatomi building and they’ve also attempted to conduct an assault and stop the terrorist. As law enforcement drives up to the building with a tactical vehicle, the terrorists engage them with rocket munitions, high explosive munitions fired from above. Bruce Willis’s character uses an elevated position to look out the window and see this going on and decides to use an elevator hoist way to distract or deter the terrorists from inflicting more harm on the law enforcement. His plan is to drop explosives down the elevator hoist way. We can see that he’s at the 33rd floor from the braille on the hoist way door, which makes sense because the building is 34 stories high. He uses a fire axe to chop into the hoist way door and pull it open.
I’m not really a fan of this technique or how it’s pictured because the hoistway door interlock would probably prevent you from actually getting the door open this way. Zach McCain has a very good description and illustration in chapter 10.4 of elevators 101 and you can kind of picture how hard it would be to physically pry open these doors with an axe. From the next camera angle below, we can see Bruce putting his shoulder into the hoist way door opening and forcing the hoist way door open. Like I said before, the closing force of the hoist way doors in this movie goes back and forth. In the first scene, we saw Bruce pull the doors open and they stayed open. In this scene, we see that he’s actually got to force his body into the opening and push the doors open and actually wedge an object in between the opening to keep the doors open.
In elevators 101, there’s also a good description with images of hoistway doors and gates in chapter 10. We can see that the hoistway doors in this scene are left-handed two-speed doors with sill-mounted spring closers. The sill-mounted closers have a long spring that compresses as the doors open and then it provides the closing force to make sure that the doors are code compliant and self-closing. From personal experience, these are pretty wide hoist way door openings. They could be up to 60 inches wide. One sill closer is not going to put much force to close these doors. I can probably put two fingers on this hoist way door and push them open unless there was some type of corrosion or abnormal mechanical resistance. But Bruce wedges an axe into the hoist way opening to keep the doors open. Like we just said, there’s almost no way that there’s enough closing force on these hoist way doors to keep that fire axe wedged in the door opening.
My google search says that this axe would weigh between five and six pounds, so that pretty much confirms that. Besides that, I’m a little confused on the type of elevator that’s running in this hoist way. From the different camera angles, there appears to be some type of hoist cables and some type of elevator guide rails in the rear of the hoist way. But with this elevator going all the way from the bottom of the building to the top of the building, I don’t know why we wouldn’t be looking at a standard overhead traction elevator with the hoist cables in the middle of the hoist way. But regardless, we’ll assume that somewhere below there is an elevator cab in this hoist way. As a U.S. Army engineer officer, I’m definitely not going to comment on the filmmaker’s portrayal of C4 high explosives in this scene. I’m not going to comment on how to initiate them or how inaccurate the explosion from this scene is. As a general rule, I would recommend to you that you don’t take Hollywood explosions as fact. But Bruce inserts his igniters into a block of C4 explosive, puts that explosive on an office chair, and puts a computer monitor on top of that. He sandwiches all three items together and then pushes those items through the hoistway opening. They fall down the hoist way. So just for my own curiosity, I wanted to see how far this explosive chair would fall in real life.
I looked at omnicalculator.com and I found that in six seconds, which is the amount of time in the film, the chair would fall about 580 feet. Obviously, the time on the film isn’t completely accurate, but six seconds would make this chair fall about 100 feet farther than the building is tall. Overall, from the 33rd floor, I’d expect the object to land inside the elevator pit in about five seconds. On top of that, we have to assume that there’s an elevator somewhere in the hoist way. When we see the explosion on film, it comes from just above the streetlights, possibly from the third floor of the building. I think this is plausible. For instance, if there was an elevator in the hoist way parked at the lobby or the floor above the lobby, the explosion would likely initiate when it hit that elevator car top. That would put the elevator car top at about the third floor. That wraps up our analysis of the two main elevator scenes in Die Hard 1. We talked about several different things, talked about how plausible they were or how implausible they were.
That also wraps up our second episode of Elevators Uncut. I have a lot more ideas for episodes, so I hope you subscribe and that you’re also excited about the other interesting elevator scenes that are out there. So until then, try to relax.
Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate your support for all of you who have listened before and left me reviews. If you haven’t, please write a review and even let me know if there’s a certain scene that you would like to talk about on a future episode.
This episode was written, produced, and narrated by Joe Caperna. I’d like to thank 20th Century Fox for Die Hard. Also like to thank Zach McCain for his book, Elevators 101.
Finally, I’d like to thank our sponsor, Ribbon. If you’ve ever missed a birthday or anniversary, you understand how terrifying it is to forget an occasion that is special to someone in your life. Ribbon solves this problem for you.
With the Ribbon app, you can set up notifications for special occasions and soon you can automate gift purchases so you’ll never miss out on that special day again. Visit ribbonservices.com for more information. Ribbon.”
References used during Episode 2:
Silver, J. (Producer), & McTiernan, J. (Director). (1988). Die Hard [Film]. 20th Century Fox.
IMDb. (n.d.). Die Hard (1988). IMDb. Retrieved May 4, 2024, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/
McCain, Z. (2005). Elevators 101. Elevator World Educational Fund.
American Society of Mechanical Engineers. (2019). ASME A17.1/CSA B44: Safety code for elevators and escalators. ASME.
Omni Calculator. (n.d.). Physics calculators. Omni Calculator. Retrieved April 4, 2024, from https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics
Furey, E. (n.d.). Calculator Soup – Online calculators. Calculator Soup. Retrieved April 4, 2024, from https://www.calculatorsoup.com/
Just a few of the many links to this episode online:
Elevators Uncut – Podcast – Apple Podcasts
Elevators Uncut | Podcast on Spotify
Elevators Uncut – Podcast Addict
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