After Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger ditched his US Airways Airbus in the Hudson, landing around 50th Street on Jan. 15, 2009, and creating one of the most famous emergency landings of all time, the wreckage was towed to Battery Park City, where it was tied up to the bulkhead for a couple days. (It’s worth checking out Carl Glassman’s photos of that day here.) But there is another Tribeca connection to that event.

Tribecan Todd Komarnicki wrote the screenplay for the movie “Sully,” the 2016 biographical drama film directed by Clint Eastwood and based on the 2009 autobiography “Highest Duty” by Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow. And he wrote it at Walker’s. (Tom Hanks stars as Sullenberger, who was able to save all 155 passengers and crew after a flock of Canada Geese destroyed both engines. The feds and city would end up exterminating about 1200 birds later that year to avoid repeating that situation.)

Todd doesn’t like to play favorites with his projects, but in the Portrait of the Artist Q&A with Claudine Williams in 2016, he had to give a shout-out to “Sully.”

“[That story] got to show excellence in Sully’s flying and an act of heroism from the entire city of New York—it took only 24 minutes to get everybody off the wings of that plane while they easily could have frozen to death in the water,” Todd said. “So that’s deeply resonant for me as a New Yorker and a movie writer.”

Photo by Claudine Williams

(He also added “Elf” as a favorite for many of the same reasons: “They’re both set in New York and they’re both true stories… ‘Elf’ is essentially just a documentary of how Christmas really works. That’s why people like it.”)

Todd’s production company is called Guy Walks into a Bar, and one of his favorites is Walker’s, where he wrote a good part of “Sully.” To commemorate the release of the film, he signed a poster that hangs in the bar still.

“There’s two places in the world where you can go into a dark room and hear a stranger tell you their story and that’s a bar and a movie theater,” Todd said. “I also do a lot of my writing late at night in bars after the kids are down, and I’ve met the finest people I know often in bars. Bartenders and people that make small businesses, and the waitstaff, they become sort of like family and deep friendships can come out of these things.”

And clearly so can a good screenplay.

Read the whole Q&A here.