("Richard Brooks" wrote)
Wings I don't know but I will search that one out.


[Longish ...but fun movie flying stuff about Wings (1927)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_(movie)
"The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States
Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film
Registry."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018578/
Wings (1927) Silent film
"Two young men, one rich, one middle class, who are in love with the same
woman, become fighter pilots in World War I." (Duh! That's always the plot!
g)

[Trivia link]
In contrast to co-star Richard Arlen, 'Charles 'Buddy' Rogers did not know
how to fly a plane when production began, but he learned how to do so by the
end of it. In the close-up scenes where Jack and David (and other
characters) are flying, the actors are actually working the planes
themselves. To shoot these scenes, the actors had to get the plane up in the
air, keep it up, turn on the (motorized) camera and land the plane--and act
at the same time.

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9076505
"Wings" Director - William Wellman's other films.

http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/online/wellmanextra.htm
Fun interview with the director, William Wellman. [snips]

"Wellman died on December 9, 1975, of Ieukaemia, at his home in Brentwood
where this interview was conducted. He was seventy-nine and remained vital
and feisty to the end. Respecting his wishes, Wellman was cremated and his
ashes scattered from an airplane into the clouds and sky that he always
loved."

[After you got booted out of high school, did you go directly into the
Lafayette Flying Corps?]

No, I tried various things. I tried being a candy salesman, but I never sold
a pound of candy. I tried being a cotton belting salesman but I never sold a
foot of that. Then my brother, who was in the wool business, got me into
Coffin and Gilmour, a Philadelphia wool firm, as a salesman. I never sold
any of whatever the hell you sell wool by, pound or whatever. So then I went
to work in a lumberyard, and I was a hell of a success.

I started in Waltham, Massachusetts, in the middle of the winter with great
big freight cars full of South Carolina flooring. I started out as a lumper
and then a piler and I did those things so well that they made me a
truckdriver. Then I lost control of the truck one day in Roxbury,
Massachusetts and drove through a barn. They fired me, so I decided to get
the hell out of there. I'd always wanted to learn to fly, so one of my
father's brothers, Francis Wellman, got me in the Flying Corps.

[Just because you wanted to learn to fly?]

That simple.

[Didn't the prospect of getting killed enter your mind?]

I was nineteen years old, a crazy *******. It never occurred to me until I
got into it. When I got out there, I thought to myself, "What the hell are
you doing here?" Then I wished I'd never gotten into it.

[How close did you come to getting killed?]

I had a crack-up caused by the most useless things in the entire war:
anti-aircraft guns. I and an Englishman are the only ones I know of who got
shot down by those things. It didn't hurt me, but it blew my tail off so I
had no control over the thing at all. Greatest goddamm acrobatics you ever
saw in your life.

[The courage it must have taken to go up in those flimsy crates . . .]

It wasn't courage: we all wanted to learn to fly and that was the quickest
way. We only had four instruments, none of which worked, and no parachutes.
It was wonderful!

[Are you scared of dying?]

I hate to think about it. Certainly I am. I don't want to die now and I
didn't want to then. I just didn't think about it as much then as I do now.
I'm funny that way; I'm an Episcopalian, supposedly. I'm supposed to think
there's a God. I say my prayers every night because my mother always taught
me to.

[Nowadays, lots of people look on World War One with nostalgia, as the last
of the "noble" wars.]

Balls. In that movie The Blue Max and others, these guys would come back to
these beautifully dressed dames and champagne. Goddamn! At Lunéville, where
I was stationed, there was one fairly good-looking girl and her mother. One.
All the menfolk had been killed and she and her mother took in laundry. She
wore wooden shoes, and your reputation was based on whether you were a no
shoe man, a one shoe man or a two shoe man. If, during sex, you could shake
both her shoes off, you were a hell of a lay.

[She took everybody on?]

Not everybody. She confined it mostly to flyers. But, hell, there was no one
else.

[How many pilots were left after the war?]

Out of 222, eighty-seven were killed. I flew with Tom Hitchcock, the great
polo player. Tom and I were in the "Black Cat" group.

[What happened after the war?]

During the last six months of the war, I joined the American Air Corps
because I was broke and they were trying to get us in. They made me an
officer and sent me down to Rockwell Field in San Diego. I taught combat. I
used to fly up and land on Doug Fairbanks' polo fields and spend the weekend
with him; he had met me when I was playing hockey up in Boston and he was
playing at the Colonial Theatre in a thing called "Hawthorne of the U.S.A."
He used to come up and watch us play at the Boston Arena on Sundays. For
some reason or another, he liked me and asked me to come backstage at the
Colonial; that was the start of a very wonderful relationship.

So one day he told me that, after the war was over, he'd have a job for me.
So when it was all over, he made me an actor. I was the juvenile in
"Knickerbocker Buckaroo" and then I played a sub-lieutenant in "Evangeline."

Eventually, I had guts enough to go look at myself and it made me so sick .
.. . I ran out of the theatre, went to Doug and said, "I don't mean any
disrespect, but I'm no actor." Jesus, the guys from the Lafayette Flying
Corps that were still alive were sending me the most insulting letters!

So Doug said, "What do you want to be?" So I pointed to Albert Parker, who
was the director of occasion, and said, "Well, what does he make?" So Doug
told me and I said "That's what I want to be." It was purely financial. So I
finally got a job as a messenger boy, as an assistant cutter, an assistant
property man, a property man, an assistant director, second unit director,
and eventually I became a director.


Montblack