Engine 55 is still on Broome Street. The city is still New York.
## The Accumulation of Twenty-Five Years of Industry
To fully appreciate how Buscemi arrived at September 12, 2001 as the person he was — rather than as a different kind of celebrity who might have responded differently — it helps to trace the gradual accumulation of his career through the 1990s in slightly more detail than the broad strokes allow.
The period from 1992 to 2001 was, for him, a sustained demonstration of what a character actor can accomplish when the work is consistent and the choices are interesting. Reservoir Dogs in 1992 did not make him a household name in the way it might have made a different actor; Mr. Pink was memorable and the film was a cultural phenomenon, but the role was one among several in an ensemble that also included Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth, and character actors do not typically emerge from ensemble crime films as stars. What the role did was establish him as someone serious filmmakers wanted in their films.
The proof of this was the Coen Brothers work. The Coens were, by the mid-1990s, the most critically admired independent filmmakers working in America — the directors who had made Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, and Barton Fink, who would make The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, whose films occupied a distinctive aesthetic position between mainstream genre and art cinema. Using an actor in multiple films is a statement of confidence: it means the director finds what the actor does consistently useful, across different characters and genres. By the time Fargo came out in 1996, Buscemi’s association with the Coens was itself a part of how critics and filmmakers understood his place in American cinema.