Lady Gaga, Pauly D remember September 11 in new video (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – As the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks approaches, the question undoubtedly on some people's minds has finally been answered: What was Lady Gaga doing on that fateful day, and what was her reaction?

The "You and I" singer has banded together with fellow celebrities Pauly D, Nas, Drake Bell, Fran Drescher and Julianne Hough to discuss what she was doing on September 11 -- and to inspire others to commemorate the anniversary by doing good for others.

"We were in a state of disbelief," Gaga recalls of the events that day. "We all watched the second tower fall together," presumably talking about herself and friends she was with at the time.

Jersey Shore guido Pauly D recalls experiencing "a sense of helplessness."

The video, produced by Viacom, is a promotion for the 9/11 Day of Service and Remembrance, which is being organized by MyGoodDeed and HandsOn Network.

You can see Gaga and Pauly D talk about the Day That Changed America in the video here: http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/lady-gaga-and-pauly-d-want-you-remember-911-video-30744

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McCartney, Pacino, Damon, other stars remember 9/11 (Reuters)

TheWrap Staff

NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Do you remember where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001?

TheWrap asked a number of actors, filmmakers, producers, writers and bloggers, some New Yorkers and others not even U.S. citizens, to remember where they were on that fateful day, and how it changed them.

PAUL McCARTNEY

"I was on my way back to England, and we were at JFK on the tarmac, and the pilot just suddenly said, 'We can't take off. We're going to have to go back to base.' And out of the window on the right-hand side of the airplane, you could see the twin towers. You could see one plume of smoke, and then you could see two shortly thereafter.

I said, 'Well, that's an optical illusion, you know.' Then one of the stewards came to me and said, 'Look, there's been something really serious happened in New York, and we've got to get you out of here.'

I ended up in Long Island watching it on TV, watching the whole story unfold -- like everyone else in the world -- wanting to go into New York, but nobody was allowed back in.

So while I was kind of sitting out there twiddling my thumbs thinking of what to do, was there any role I could play in this, the idea came to me that maybe we could do a concert, maybe get something together. And that thing grew into a conversation with Harvey Weinstein, who said that MTV was putting one together and maybe we should all get together on that. it was a kind of post-fear. We were emerging from the fearfulness of the immediate impact, and now you were seeing the emotion releasing through music, which I always think is a great thing. You could see particularly the firefighters and the volunteers and their families and victims' families were able to release this emotion that had been pent up. It was a great feeling. It was a really great feeling."

AL PACINO

"It was the most terrifying, the most heartbreaking day. I was on a plane the evening before it happened, September 10.

I was in Los Angeles, and all I wanted was to get back to my home -- New York.

I couldn't get back, the planes wouldn't move. It was devastating."

MATT DAMON

"I lived in lower Manhattan at the time. So I just remember walking out of my apartment and seeing it and then going back in and watching CNN 'cause I was so hungry for information, trying to figure out what's going on.

I just remember being glued to my television despite the fact that it was happening kind of right outside my door."

JANE ROSENTHAL (Founder of Tribeca Productions and the Tribeca Film Festival)

"I had just dropped my daughter off at school for second grade, and I was driving to the office. I was supposed to meet with Spike Lee and Harvey Weinstein to talk about "Rent," which we'd been trying to put together.

When I heard the noise, I thought it was a car crash. I turned around in my car, and went further into Wall Street, and around that time I heard the second plane hit. I was listening to New York One. My first reaction was that it was a terrorist attack.

I was on South Street Seaport going north. To get to 30th Street it took almost three hours. I called my husband from a payphone and told him to pick up my daughter. I heard the Pentagon had been hit. At that point, I thought the end of the world was coming. I was probably in a state of shock -- complete disbelief.

When I think back to that day, to how my first instinct was to get out and get to my kids, versus all the fire and police who chose to run in and save people. I think, 'What makes you run in versus run out of a disaster? That has been something I've thought about quite a bit.

That feeling has propelled me to do as much for downtown as I can. Certainly, what we've done with the film festival and the dinners downtown. In a period of duress, what's your instinct, and what does that say about you as an individual?

For me, it's been personally doing everything I can for downtown. Bob (De Niro) and I are on the national 9/11 Memorial Museum board, and the opening will be quite spectacular on September 11.

TOM HARDY

"I was at a wig-fitting. I was doing a French Foreign Legion film, and I was going out to North Africa, Morocco. We'd just done 'Black Hawk Down,' and they shelved that immediately. There were a lot of war films that year being made. A lot of work was being done in North Africa. Everyone had started panicking. And I was executing holy men in a scene three days later in a mosque in Morocco. It was a thing called 'Simon, French Foreign Legion Deserter' it ended up being called. So it was a very odd situation to be in because there I was playing a soldier in North Africa. We had a plane on standby to get us out if anything kicked off.

Immediately, it was a life-changing event. I have friends who serve, I have a lot of friends in special forces, I have very, very close friends who deal in very serious operations all over the Middle East that were affected post-9/11 ... I'm still really thrown by the loss and the amount of people on that day, and that whole situation, to be honest.

I'm a bit thrown. I've got friends who were in the building, in the twin towers. I have friends who are servicemen, what can you say?"

GUS VAN SANT

"I was living on Canal Street and out my window I could see the towers, and I heard an explosion and eventually realized that one of them was on fire. Our office was even closer, so we were eight blocks away on the roof looking at the towers falling.

And we evacuated away from the dust and smoke that was coming our way. I was sort of typical of some reactions where I wasn't really aware of how big a moment it was, which was something that happened with other people in the Tribeca area and Wall Street area. Some people continued working.

We traveled uptown from where we were, and we were on 57th Street, and we realized that people uptown felt it was a downtown problem, and people upstate felt it was a, like, a Manhattan problem.

And elsewhere it was a national problem -- I think if you were in Delaware, you saw it more objectively, like, 'This is a national emergency. This is an amazing, horrible, historical event.' But if you were there, there were many different reactions, and mine was probably one as a result of some kind of shock."

BRYCE DALLAS HOWARD

"I was on Christopher Street, below the 14th Street line, which is kind of like the cut-off, and I heard all this noise and opened my windows. I remember my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, saying, 'Where's the other tower?' The first tower had already fallen and we were just looking at one tower.

I was so used to seeing the twin towers, I couldn't even understand, really, what I was seeing. I remember it took me awhile to figure out, 'Oh my God, one of the towers is missing!' cause it's just unthinkable. And then we saw the second tower fall, and my husband was sobbing and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm going to be late to class!' I was getting ready to go outside and my husband was like, 'Are you out of your mind?! You're not going outside right now!'"

ROSEANNE CASH

"My daughter Carrie was in seventh grade, and I took her to school in a taxi because there was a meeting that morning., I went into the cafeteria and she went up to her classroom. At about 8:45, I heard a rumble overhead. The plane went right over the school, and shook the building.

I looked around the room, and one of the mothers said, 'That plane is going to crash.' About five minutes later, somebody came to the door and said a plane had just crashed into the north tower.

And I said to one of the teachers who was sitting with me, 'I bet it was that plane that just went over.' At first we thought it was just a commuter plane that had gotten lost. We couldn't conceive that an airliner had actually done it. We stopped the meeting and walked out in the hall, and a woman was out there crying. She said it was a passenger jet, and then we freaked.

I started to walk out the building to go look at the towers, because there was a straight view right down the street. Another mother was coming in, and she was as white as a sheet. She said a second plane had just hit, and I said, 'What are you talking about?' I thought that she was confused.

So I went around to the corner, and you could see both towers burning. There were these black holes, and smoke. A lot of smoke. We were standing there, and my friend Robin Rue, who's a literary agent, said, 'All this in the name of god.' That's when I really realized what had happened, that it was a terrorist attack.

NICK NOLTE

"I was watching TV when it happened. I didn't see the first plane. I saw the second plane. And then on the anniversary of 9/11, I was drunk and picked up for drunk driving.

The reason that picture got on television was, all the cameras were pointing at the place where the terrorists were supposed to hit.

And then there was no news, so they picked that picture up and sent it back."

JOEL EDGERTON

"I was at record launch at a Chapel Street in Melbourne, at a place called Revolver. I'd just finished shooting a movie and one of the locations was a place called The Twin Towers, in Melbourne. And my brother sent me a text message saying, 'A plane has just landed in the twin towers.'

And I was just imagining a two-seater plane landing in this very small building in Melbourne, thinking, 'What is he talking about?' Then the reality of what happened hit and this poor guy was on stage in the second set of his LP launch, and the room just started clearing one by one.

And I remember on my way home thinking, 'That poor guy thinks he's the worst musician in the world.' And then I spent all night watching TV. I remember feeling it was the most worried I'd felt ever in my life, just in general about humanity and about the world, even though it was something so far away from me."

PEREZ HILTON

"I woke up, went upstairs to the roof of my building in the West Village, and saw the World Trade Center with a big hole in it. Then I fell to my knees. I went downstairs, went running to the bank on Christopher Street, got all my cash out, went to the supermarket, and got in hurricane survival mode because I'm from South Florida. I thought it was the end of the world; I didn't know what to think.

"At first, I kept getting phone calls, because I was right out of college and didn't have a full-time job yet, I was so annoyed that people kept calling me early in the morning. I'm like, 'Let me sleep!' And then finally I picked up the phone and then I went upstairs and I saw and it was unbelievable.

Being in New York after that was just crazy because you were reminded of it daily for years after, but especially what I remember most vividly about that time was the smell in the air stayed for about six months or more, and then even longer because whenever it would rain there was this very specific smell from the World Trade Center disaster.

NOTE: Interviews conducted by Jordan Riefe, Steve Pond, Mikey Glazer and Sharon Waxman

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Fans flock to Graceland to remember Elvis Presley (AP)

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Silent mourners with heads bowed and yellow-orange candlelight leading the way paid their respects to Elvis Presley at his grave at Graceland, his longtime Memphis home, to remember the 34th anniversary of his sudden death.

Thousands of Elvis devotees, candles in hand, walked in the humid night to the graves of Elvis and his relatives, some wiping away tears as they filed past. Flower arrangements and heart-shaped wreaths decorated the burial site as "If I Can Dream" and other songs played softly in the background.

The vigil was to extend past midnight and into Tuesday morning, marking the anniversary of the King's death on Aug. 16, 1977. The vigil is the main draw of "Elvis Week," and some waited hours outside the stately mansion for the procession to start.

Paula Penna came with her family from Campinas, Brazil, for her sixth vigil. Penna, who met her Brazilian husband in an Elvis fan club, cried and hugged him, her sister and aunt after paying her respects.

She said Elvis songs have helped her family though good and bad. All four have Elvis tattoos.

"Elvis music keeps the family together," said Penna, who also was born on Aug. 16 and will celebrate her 27th birthday Tuesday. "I promised to come every year to pay tribute to Elvis because he is very important to the family life."

Fans like 60-year-old Joe Makowski — who claims he saw Elvis in concert 81 times — and his girlfriend, Pamela Hembree, were among the first in line and waited for hours along Graceland's outer brick wall. A New Jersey native who owns four of Elvis' concert-worn scarves and has attended several vigils, he said it was time to introduce Hembree to the Elvis Week experience honoring the life and career of the rock `n' roll star.

"I get to meet new fans and meet new people, so that's why I line up here early in the day," said Makowski, who went to Las Vegas twice a year between 1971 and 1976 to see Elvis perform. "The biggest thing I get out of it is seeing the young fans that weren't even born until years after he passed away."

Makowski said he admires Elvis because of his singing and performing prowess, of course, but also for what he called the singer's overall coolness.

"He helped me break out of my shell because I was kind of a shy kid," said Makowski, an actor who now lives in Palm Harbor, Fla.

Visitors came from Japan, England, Germany and other countries. Some wore full Elvis outfits, others just his trademark sunglasses or sideburns.

Patrick Lucas sported sideburns and pompadour going as he walked to the vigil with the rest of the Elvis Presley Fans of Alabama, a club he joined on the Internet. Hunter, 22, came from Ehlange-Mess, Luxembourg, for the vigil.

"I try to be like him, in the ways that he was nice to people and how he treated people," Lucas said. "He was a giving person."

Temperatures were in the high 80s much of the day, sharply down from the suffocating 100-degree heat that greeted Elvis fans last August. About 15,000 to 20,000 people attended, according to estimates by police and an Elvis Presley Enterprises spokesman — nothing near the 75,000-strong crowd that's expected to flock to Graceland in 2012 for the 35th anniversary of the singer's death.

The annual vigil began when some Elvis fans traveled to Graceland the year their idol died. It grew into an organized event in 1982.

This year, fans have something else to commemorate. It was 55 years ago — 1956 — when the first two Elvis albums were released. That year alone, Elvis sold 10 million singles and 800,000 LPs.

Glenys Sites said she still remembers watching Elvis perform "Love Me Tender" for the first time.

"He's got everything — stage presence, charisma; he was sexy, great voice," Sites said. "There's never been anybody like him. I don't think he'll ever die."

Many still remember where they were when they found out the singer was dead.

Debbie Moller says she was seated on her couch when her sister called that August day in 1977 at the mansion. She didn't believe her sister at first, so she turned on the radio.

"I was bawling non-stop," said Moller, who makes Elvis T-shirts and is now attending her 15th vigil.

Like many who make the walk up the hill and see the Elvis gravesite and those of his parents, Moller expected to get emotional.

"I cry," said Moller, of Colorado Springs, Colo. "The songs they play make you think back to what you were doing they day he died."

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Fans visit Graceland to remember Elvis' death (AP)

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Fans of Elvis Presley are making their way to Graceland for a candlelight vigil to honor the 34th anniversary of the singer's death.

Every year, thousands of people trek to Memphis from around the world to remember Elvis' death on Aug. 16, 1977. The main event of "Elvis Week" is the solemn candlelight vigil that begins Monday night at the stately mansion known as Graceland.

Fans start lining up for the event during the day Monday along Graceland's outer brick wall.

This year, fans have something else to commemorate. It was 55 years ago — 1956 — when the first two Elvis albums were released. That year alone, Elvis sold 10 million singles and 800,000 LPs.

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During 'Elvis Week,' fans remember pivotal year (AP)

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Elvis Presley fans love an anniversary.

Every year, thousands of Elvis devotees flock to Memphis to remember the singer's death on Aug. 16, 1977. The main event of "Elvis Week" is the solemn candlelight vigil at Graceland, his longtime home, at midnight Tuesday.

This year, fans have something else to commemorate. It was 55 years ago — 1956 — when the first two Elvis albums were released, launching an international music career that brought Elvis' mix of country, rhythm and blues, and gospel to millions of fans around the world.

"It's a documentation of what I think is rock music's most incredible year," said Ernst Jorgensen, a music producer and Elvis catalog expert. "Nobody was prepared for Elvis."

To mark Elvis' breakout year, Jorgensen and his team have assembled a five-CD box set called "Young Man with the Big Beat." Jorgensen will be unveiling the RCA/Legacy box set Monday at Graceland. The collection goes on sale Sept. 27.

The set includes not only the five CDs, but also an 80-page book that provides a daily chronology of Elvis' year though photos, postcards, fan letters, magazine covers and other memorabilia. The set also includes rare photos, posters and a replica concert ticket stub.

The first two CDs in the set are packed with music from the debut LP "Elvis Presley" and the follow up "Elvis." Those seminal albums had some of Elvis' most well-known songs: "Heartbreak Hotel," "Blue Suede Shoes," "Don't Be Cruel," "Hound Dog," "Love Me Tender" and more.

Those tunes, recorded in New York, Memphis, Nashville, Tenn., and Hollywood, Calif., helped sell 10 million singles and 800,000 LPs in 1956 alone. They also brought Elvis to television on Milton Berle's show, where he gave a hip-swiveling performance that excited his young fans and shocked their parents.

Elvis' stage presence, soulful voice and love of songs he heard growing up in Memphis put him in a unique position alongside other rock pioneers of his time: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Fats Domino.

"We were fascinated about how this one man seemed to change the entire music business in America in 12 months," Jorgensen said.

But it was the first album, which included "Trying to Get to You" and Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman," that author Peter Guralnick said is the more important of the two 1956 albums.

"I would look at the first album as an American songbook. It's an homage to all the great genres of American music," said Guralnick, who wrote two Elvis biographies, "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley" and "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley."

The third CD in the set features rare live recordings that have been re-mastered. They include songs from a previously unreleased concert in Shreveport, La., in December 1956, and a Las Vegas concert where he bombed in front of an older audience.

Jorgensen said he is always looking for undiscovered gems like the Shreveport concert that can make Elvis' music new to longtime fans.

"You try to get all the pieces to the puzzle," Jorgensen said.

The fourth CD in the set features outtakes from the first RCA recording session in January of that year, and a February session in which Elvis does 12 takes of "Shake, Rattle And Roll."

The fifth CD includes interviews and two segments of Elvis' rare monologue, "The Truth About Me." The outtakes and interviews display a sensitive, emotional side of Elvis amid a great deal of criticism.

Guralnick said the criticism didn't start until Elvis became a national star, and it was based on class and social prejudice. It really bothered Elvis when critics put down his fans, Guralnick said.

"He was extremely outspoken that this was unfair, and that every generation needs to have its own style of music," said Guralnick, who showed a documentary of Sam Phillips, the producer man who discovered Elvis, Saturday at the University of Memphis.

Fans can pre-order "Young Man with the Big Beat" for $109.99 at Elvis1956.com, or wait until Sept. 27 and pay a suggested retail price of $139.98.

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Stars Remember Elizabeth Taylor on Twitter

"Elizabeth Taylor takes final bow. Never more beautiful than as Maggie the cat. Never more actor impressive than as Martha in Virginia Woolf," Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers wrote after the breaking news that the beloved star of Hollywood's golden age had passed away this morning.

Many celebs have reacted to the legend's death on Twitter. Actress Nia Vardalos wrote: "RIP Elizabeth Taylor: thank you for your talent, AIDS fundraising, and fabulousness. There is nothing like a Dame."

See how other stars paid tribute, including Ricky Martin, Kylie Minogue, Arsenio Hall and more.
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