By Wayman Dunlap
Editor
"Flyboys," director Tony Bill's just completed movie about American boys who fought for the French in a WW I fighter squadron called the Lafayette Escadrille, debuted for a select crowd in Hollywood last month.
The movie was shown by invitation only at the Directors Guild of America's 600-seat theater on Sunset Boulevard for the benefit of potential U.S. distributors, cast members, Hollywood celebrities and Bill's aviation friends. The crowd included such notables as actor Kevin Spacey, Hollywood billionaire David Geffen, columnist Arianna Huffington, Pulitzer Prize winner (for "Lindbergh") A. Scott Berg, producer Dean Devlin, several of the actors and cast members and airshow star Wayne Handley, recently named to the ICAS Hall of Fame.
"We actually finished this movie, such as it is, yesterday," Bill told the audience. "Now I know what you're thinking, 'Oh yeah, it's one of those independently financed movies with a limited budget, a bunch of actors that I've never seen before about an esoteric subject that I've never seen in a movie before and there's no distributor and no studio." He paused.
"It is," he added to big laughs.
Later, he added, "We have never seen what you will see tonight, never seen it from beginning to end, we've never seen it projected in the fashion you will see it tonight, never seen it color corrected in the fashion which you will see it tonight and so it's doubly exciting for us to share that evening with you."
Bill added that when Devlin sent him the script six years ago, he put on a note that said, "Tony, this is the movie that you were born to direct. I hope that I proved him right."
Although his original intent, being an avid pilot as well as an Oscar-winning producer and long time actor/director, was to make the movie as authentic as possible, some concessions had to be made. While non-aviators will pay little note and most of it is transparent, Handley was the first to mention afterwards that the Nieuport 17s used in the film didn't use the LeRhone Rotary engines of the originals - which, having no carburetors, were famous for their full on, full off engine sounds.
The only other flaw, if you could call it that, was that since all of the Escadrille's planes were painted more or less the same was it was easy to confuse who was flying what in all the furious aerial action. On more than one occasion it seemed the hero had been shot down when it turned out to be someone else.
Nevertheless, the flying scenes were just short of astounding as CGI (computer generated imagery) planes mixed it up against or flew formation with actual Nieuports and Fokker Triplanes. For example, in one scene, the squadron flies off en masse to meet a German challenge and there appears to be at least 17 or 18 planes struggling into the sky.
In actuality, four of them were real and the rest were added later. Nevertheless, you won't be able to tell which are real and which aren't.
Bill, who has been flying since he was a young man and has owned several aircraft, said during pre-production that he intended to make it the most authentic movie about the Lafayette Escadrille as possible. He shot the entire film using an all new digital process invented by Panavision using Genesis HD (high definition) cameras.
"We never had rehearsals," he said the next day. "We shot everything, unlike film, and kept what we liked and erased the rest." It was later dubbed to 35mm film for showing in theaters.
"This means the death of film," Bill said, at least for photographing the movie.
He leased a remote field outside London (which, he found out later, had actually been a WW I aerodrome), borrowed a Nieuport 17 from Kermit Weeks, had four more Nieuport replicas and four triplanes built (PF, May 2005), and also used a Sopwith one and a half strutter, a Stampe and even a Bucker Jungmann. The latter was used to introduce the non-flying actors to aviation (some reluctantly).
European replicators showed up with authentic uniforms, trucks and planes to help out.
(This film shouldn't be confused with a 2005 release called Flyboys starring Tom Sizemore and Stephen Baldwin which was about some children sneaking onto a plane owned by mobsters, nor James Bradley's book of the same name about the WW II attacks on Japanese held islands. You can't copywrite titles, unfortunately.
(There was also a 1958 film called "Lafayette Escadrille" starring Tab Hunter and Clint Eastwood which received poor reviews and the flying was said [by internet critics] to be pedestrian.)
There was also a Lafayette Flying Corps, which was Americans assigned to other French squadrons. The Lafayette Escadrille is the unit itself, originally established on April 16, 1916 and disestablished on February 18, 1918 after shooting down 57 enemy planes and losing nine of its own pilots.
Its members were made up solely of the 38 Americans and the French who flew with the Escadrille during this period. After the unit was disbanded it was reestablished as the U. S. 103rd Aero Pursuit Squadron when the U.S. entered the war.
Two of the Escadrille's most famous members were Jimmy Doolittle and Raoul Lufberry.
AND NOW, THE MOVIE
Bill's film opens with the bad boy "hero," James Franco, finding himself evicted from his southwest ranch and in trouble with the law. While he was watching a newsreel about WW I aerial battles, the local sheriff gives him 30 minutes to get out of town.
The film then moves on to the other main characters to learn their backstory and why they choose to fight for a foreign country. All but one arrive on the same ship and somehow make their way to the front where Jean Reno, playing the real Capt. Georges Thenault, greets them with a speech in French before discovering they don't speak the language.
One of the group, played by Abdul Salis, is a black American prizefighter who had moved to France "because they treat me better." He was based on a real pilot named Eugene Bullard, although oddly enough he's not listed on the Escadrille's website but is mentioned (and even has his picture) in several other sites, which may either be attributed to racism or for some other reason (he was not allowed to fly with the 103rd when the Americans took over).
The fact that most of the volunteers had apparently never been in an airplane didn't deter the fledgling aviators as Reno and his officers teach them the basics of aerodynamics, how to work the stick (no throttle, remember) and rudder and then sent them off for their first solo flight - no dual instruction. Planes in those days were little more than wood and fabric and unreliable engines, with no brakes and they always landed on dirt or grass fields with wooden sticks for tailwheels/brakes, which helped a little.
Statistically, a quarter of all pilots were killed in training (thanks partially to the bad habits of the rotary engine) but in the movie, all of them survive the training and find themselves billeted in a luxurious mansion with a lion named Whiskey; the Escadrille actually had two lion mascots, "Whiskey" and "Soda" but Bill said he could only afford one.
Martin Henderson plays Cassidy (a real figure), the last survivor of the original Escadrille (which also had five French pilots) and his somber, fatalistic view of the war is ignored by the enthusiastic newcomers until they have their first dogfight with a brace of Fokker triplanes. Although all of the Fokkers are painted red, one is not; it's black and its pilot is the heavy in this movie (he strafes and kills one of the downed American pilots after a crash).
Every afternoon, Cassidy goes out looking for him "because he killed all my friends."
Now all we need is a love story to go with the action/adventure and Bill supplies it in the form of a pretty French girl played by Jennifer Decker. Rawlings mistakes her for a prostitute when he wakes up in a whorehouse after a crash but later learns she was just delivering supplies and he falls in love.
Seemingly half the two hour and 15 minute movie is taken up with this relationship, plus the trials and tribulations of the individual pilots. First time actor David Ellison, 23 (his father, Larry Ellison, owns Oracle software and put up, reportedly, $25 million of the $60 million spent on it) plays Beagle, who loses an arm in a crash (actually, Rawlings has to chop it off before the plane explodes). The irony here is, Ellison is a top notch aerobatic pilot himself, owns a Cap 232 and an Extra 300 and flew at Oshkosh last year but wasn't allowed to fly in the film for insurance reasons.
A USC film school grad, he never intended to be in front of the cameras but was drafted to play the part of Beagle and did a top notch job.
"Now I have to put up with everyone calling me 'the hook,'" he laughed later, referring to the appendage his character had made so he could keep flying.
Chief Pilot for the film was Nigel Lamb, eight time European Aerobatic Champion, and he collected a group of 14 top tier fliers (including one woman) to perform the aerial acrobatics, which were amazing. The digital film editor must have had his hands full because numerous cameras were used and planes are everywhere, zooming in and around each other, passing within a few feet, guns blazing.
There's a chase scene through the trees and over houses which will take your breath away, and these were real planes.
Bill said he wanted white tracers to show the non-flying audience that the machine guns were truly spitting out death, but the computer couldn't do white, so they changed it to black, which looks like smoke erupting out of the barrels. The little planes are sometimes shredded, other times their wings disintegrate and the parachute-less pilots find themselves in a burning plane plummeting toward the ground.
One of the main characters, in fact, uses a pistol to commit suicide when his Nieuport erupts into a blazing inferno. A gun was given to them all for just that purpose.
At the end, our hero finds a new use for it, to the dismay of the pilot in the black triplane.
This film will, of course, be compared to the early black and white classics, "Hells Angels" and "Wings," and the modern films such as "The Great Waldo Pepper" and "The Blue Max." But none of those had the advantage of digital technology, modern CGI effects and the fanatic devotion of a director intending to make the greatest flying film (without jets) of all time.
At this writing, Bill and his producers were still trying to find a U.S. distributor (European and Canadian distributors were already lined up) and he warned that it couldn't possibly be in theaters before November. Nevertheless, he's convinced that it will find an audience, not just of pilots, but also for lovers of action, adventure and romance.
"It's the ultimate date movie," declared the younger Ellison.
At a luncheon for a few friends and cast members the next day at Santa Monica Airport's Spitfire Grill, designed to be a "critique" but which turned out to be more of a love fest by the enthusiastic aviators, Bill was asked if he was happy with his results, which was shot in just 50 days.
"I'm as satisfied as a director can be after the fact, which is a matter of percentages," he said. He referred to what he called "cringe moments" when you're watching the movie and "just cringe because you just don't like what you see or you are embarrassed that you didn't get it right ... this movie doesn't have any cringe moments for me."
Asked how he would describe the film if he had to summarize it, Bill, 64, referred to a message on his home phone from a friend who had seen the film the previous evening.
"You've made an intimate epic," he recalled. "I loved that."
Our hope is that when they do finally release it to video, they'll include a separate disc of just the flying scenes; they're like nothing you've ever seen before.
* * * *
Flyboys original story by Blake Evans, screenplay by Phil Sears and David S. Ward.
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