On Monday night, Wes Anderson and Luke Wilson attended a celebration of the 30th anniversary of Anderson’s film “Bottle Rocket,” taking part in a Q&A at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
During the screening of the movie that followed, the pair slipped out, accompanied by James L. Brooks, an executive producer on the film, and an actor and musician known as King Orba (birth name Robert Mark Wallace), and got into an elevator to head to dinner.
That’s when things got a little complicated for the famously fastidious director and his friends.
At 7:49 p.m., the Los Angeles Fire Department received a call about people trapped in an elevator at 6067 Wilshire Boulevard, the museum’s address, according to a department spokeswoman.
The four men — as well as six other people, including security personnel and museum employees — had become trapped in a stalled elevator on their way out of the museum. The ordeal would last over 40 minutes before firefighters arrived to set them free, according to Wallace, whose video of their release circulated widely online this week.
No one was hurt, according to the Fire Department, and no one had a panic attack, according to Wallace. But tolerances were tested (“Would it help if we all started screaming ‘Help!’ Brooks wondered around 20 minutes in), as was at least one bladder (“I was worried about having to go to the bathroom,” Wilson joked, seconds before firefighters pried open the doors).
The problem started soon after they stepped into the elevator. “We start to go down, and we feel this little shift,” Wallace, a longtime friend of Wilson’s, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. All of a sudden the group was stuck between floors.
This was a new experience for Wilson, Wallace and Brooks, a longtime screenwriter, director and producer known for his work on “As Good as It Gets” (1997) and “Broadcast News” (1987), among many other projects.
Not so for Anderson, who proceeded to regale his captive audience with the tale of his first elevator entrapment. (Wallace couldn’t remember the details except that it was in New York and on a much higher floor.)
Anderson, an Oscar winner known for films like “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” seemed to take charge, pressing the emergency button on the elevator four times to ask for help, Wallace, 60, said.
When the firefighters finally arrived, they had to use a hand crank to move the elevator, which opens outside the museum, Wallace said.
Representatives for the Academy Museum, as well as for Wilson, Brooks and Anderson, did not respond to requests for comment.
After the group was set free, Anderson, quite understandably, wanted to know what had gone wrong.
“Can I ask, when you guys — with this experience, do you have any theory of what was wrong with it?” Anderson, dressed in white with a white suit jacket slung over his left shoulder and an Academy Museum shopping bag in his right hand, asked the firefighters in an exchange captured in Wallace’s video.
One of the firefighters, shining a cellphone flashlight into the gap between the elevator’s car door and the landing door, says, “You probably had too much weight in there.”
Anderson wanted to be sure. “Do you think it’s too much weight?”
“Yeah, usually that’s what it is,” the firefighter says, still focused on the elevator.
For their trouble, Wallace and his friends were offered lifetime free passes to the museum, Wallace said.
Anderson, Wilson and Brooks, it should be noted, were not the first celebrities to get stuck in an elevator.
In 2024, Jennifer Garner was trapped for over an hour in a lift at the San Diego Convention Center while making an appearance at Comic-Con International. In 2019, Jason Momoa was stuck for two hours with some friends and a bag of Peanut M&Ms in an elevator at a hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia. Both stars dutifully shared their experiences on social media.
Even His Holiness has not been spared such an indignity. In 2019, Pope Francis was trapped in a lift for nearly half an hour, forcing him to be late in delivering his weekly Angelus prayer in Vatican City, according to The Washington Post.
“I had an unexpected event,” the pope, who died last year, said to those waiting for him in St. Peter’s Square after he was rescued by firefighters. “I was stuck in an elevator for 25 minutes.”