When Katie Lee Biegel first encountered the nonfiction book about Windows on the World that would inspire the CNN documentary short Top of the World, she was still co-hosting Food Network‘s The Kitchen, which came to an end last year after its 40-season run.
Chef Marc Murphy, who had worked at the restaurant atop the World Trade Center, gave Biegel and her co-hosts copies of Tom Roston’s The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World when he was a guest on the culinary talk show hosted by Biegel, Sunny Anderson, Alex Guarnaschelli, Jeff Mauro and Geoffrey Zakarian.
“I started reading it in my dressing room between segments, and I was like, ‘Wow, this book is so captivating!’ And I couldn’t put it down,” Biegel recalls. “So I gave it to my husband [Somebody Feed Phil producer Ryan Biegel] when I finished it, and he was the same as me. He read it in like two days, and for a couple of years, we just kept saying to each other, ‘That should really be a documentary.’ And then about three-and-a-half years ago, Ryan said, ‘I’m going to do this. We’ve talked about it long enough.'”
The resulting documentary short, Top of the World, from RBG and Julia directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen, which premieres on CNN on Labor Day before streaming on CNN’s app and CNN.com and received a limited theatrical run in New York from Aug. 28-Sept. 3, aims to tell the story of the people — including chef Michael Lomonaco and restaurateur Joe Baum — behind Windows on the World, the restaurant that occupied the 106th and 107th floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center, over its 25-year history ahead of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which 79 Windows employees and 91 guests were among the nearly 3,000 people who died.
