New Battle of Midway film

[Russ Matthews]

Matt, I need to digitize my E & M manual; it will be a few weeks ...

Lynn, I can save you the time and trouble as I already have the complete TBD-1 Erection & Maintenance Manual as a PDF file. I'm happy to send it to you and any WIXer who PMs me with an outside email address (I'm not currently aware of any way to attach documents to internal forum personal messages)

**edit(2 June 2017) I forgot that the file is truly massive .. 459 pages (taking up 307MB of memory) .. much too big for most email servers (including mine) to handle. Anyone who contacted me (or plans to) will need to use a file sharing service like Dropbox or, at last resort, we'll go through the good old fashioned post office!

Last edited by Russ Matthews on Sat Jun 03, 2017 12:43 am, edited 2 times in total.

[Jim MacDonald]

Lynn & TBDude,

Glad one of you guys could help Matt out. I wouldn't have been able to find the time for a while to scan mine for him.

Thanks,

Mac

[JohnB]

Come on, it will be great seeing Ken Jeong playing Admiral Yamamoto and Tom Cruise playing Admiral Nimitz.
I hear they're trying hard to get Kathy Griffin to play Mrs. Roosevelt.
Obviously Alex Baldwin will reprise his role of Jimmy Doolittle since he did so well in Pearl Harbor...and looks just like him.

[Richard W.]

Ha ha. Pearl Harbor movie was great fun but yeah, bad history.

“'That was a horrible movie,” said David Thatcher, 91, who served as an engineer-gunner on Crew No. 7.'

(2012 Wash. Times interview: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... rst-movie/ )

[Russ Matthews]

Latest (3 May 2018) news from the Cannes Film Festival states that actors Woody Harrelson and Mandy Moore are in negotiations to join a "strong ensemble cast" for the upcoming Midway movie. We can be fairly certain that Moore will help humanize the cost of this pivotal battle as "the girl back home." It's more fun/possible to speculate on Harrelson's possible role. I doubt he'd portray a pilot (due simply to his age), but perhaps Jack Fletcher? Yorktown Captain Buckmaster? Joe Rochefort? Ray Spruance?

https://www.google.com/amp/deadline.com/2018/05/roland-emmerichs-wwii-epic-midway-sets-sail-with-woody-harrelson-mandy-moore-agc-studios-1202374631/amp/

The article mentions an August 16 start date with shooting to take place in Hawaii and Canada. That likely means location work at Joint Base Pearl Harbor and perhaps on the Missouri and/or Bowfin. Canada only makes sense to me if they are doing extensive stage/green screen work (which they undoubtedly are). This list could also be incomplete as you imagine there will need to be some practical ship and plane work that can only reasonably happen in the (continental) United States.

[JohnB]

If it's filmed in Canada can we expect a lot of Moths and civil types with "CF" registrations....like the recent Amelia Earhart film?

[JFS61]

Doesn't sound very promising - Looks like I'm going to pass on this one.

Would be better to go back to the old Charlton Heston film and rework the battle sequences with CGI than serve up another yet another helping of the usual Hollywood war movie tripe.

[T6flyer]

Working for a Replica Aircraft Manufacturer (GateGuards who previously built for Red Tails, Allied and Dunkirk) we have heard nothing at all for ages and presume that most if not all aircraft will be CGI'd. We did submit some design paperwork to the production company last year, but since then nothing.

Wouldn't mind having a go at building a Devastator.

Martin

[Saville]

There's absolutely nothing wrong with CGI - PROVIDED they don't have the craft doing the impossible and violating the laws of physics - like making hairpin turns with a radius of 100 feet at 400 mph. Or even doing the improbable. This is where, in my opinion, CGI breaks down....it's the way they use it, not its capabilities.

The Battle of Midway itself is kind of hard to portray without falling into the documentary/exposition trap. It takes a lot of
writing skill to avoid that trap.

Same is true for the upcoming Battle of Britain movie.

[Russ Matthews]

Saw a small article today (3 July 2018) that claims Woody Harrelson will be playing Admiral Chester Nimitz, while Luke Evans (Beauty & the Beast, Fast and Furious 6) has signed on to portray Air Group 6 CAG, LCDR C. Wade McClusky.

[Dan Jones]

Doesn't sound very promising - Looks like I'm going to pass on this one.

Would be better to go back to the old Charlton Heston film and rework the battle sequences with CGI than serve up another yet another helping of the usual Hollywood war movie tripe.

Rework the battle sequences some (lose the F6F's and the Panther), ditch that whole "I'm in love with a Japanese girl" crap and replace it with something more believable like "I got the clap from a dirty hooker in San Diego and I don't want Mom to find out" or something similar, find a -5A PBY instead of the tall-tail -6, but please, please keep the Japanese C-130 seaplane!

[Michel Lemieux]

As long as they do not remake the same cheesy ending....

The original BoB and Pearl Harbour movies were almost documentaries....... just delightful....

And I have distant memories of seeing Midway as a kid in a theater.....I even had the French movie poster in my room as a kid.....great promo poster....

But recently I watched it again.......boy the last scene......is some of the worst acting I remember seeing in a long time....

[dbrown]

PLEASE! No angle deck IJN Carriers!

LOL

Here's a thought - get some very well done models mixed with CGI.

Imagine what TTT could look like today if done seriously. 20th Century Fox's full size mock ups and scale models still pass the test today in comparison to that horrendous Pearl Harbor remake.

BUFFIE
http://www.buffiesbest.com

[JohnB]

The original BoB and Pearl Harbour movies were almost documentaries....... just delightful...

But neither film was that warmly received, and neither was a huge financial success.
The purpose of show business is:
-to make money
-to entertain

Neither film did that well in either category for the general public.

[Saville]

The original BoB and Pearl Harbour movies were almost documentaries....... just delightful...

But neither film was that warmly received, and neither was a huge financial success.
The purpose of show business is:
-to make money
-to entertain

Neither film did that well in either category for the general public.

Yeah the problem with "almost documentaries" is that it's like sitting in a lecture hall and all information you receive is spoken:

"Now we're down to the Observer Corps"

Unless you like airplanes the movie isn't entertaining. And if it's not entertaining it doesn't make money. And if it doesn't make money the kinds of things we like to see on the screen don't get made.

And that's the second aspect of this: people who love to see movies with airplanes represent a small fraction of the movie-going public We like the flying iron: to most people they are no more important than the cars used in other movies.

As I wrote earlier in this thread, writing a WWII air combat movie script that is both informative and entertaining is really hard. So I'm not getting my hopes if for this movie or for Ridley Scott's BoB.

I would be most pleased if I was wrong in not getting my hopes up for these two flicks.

One writer who figured out how to both tell an entertaining story as well as inform was Martin Scorsese. If you look at Goodfellas or Casino, you had the characters talking to you off screen while you watched them. They explained stuff to you. You learned about the mob culture or Las Vegas casinos at the same time you saw what you were learning in action: you were hugely entertained.

I don't think that scheme would work with Midway or BoB. It' d be funny though. Imagine Yammamoto talking offscreen filling you in on how great the plan was though maybe yeah it's a little complex but we can't lose; or "Stuffy" Dowding talking off screen.

But now that I think of it. It just might be a winner to have, say, Keith Park talking to you offscreen while you are watching the info go from the radar station to the filter room to the WAAF's at the Big Board to the squadrons climbing out. Scorsese did exactly that when he showed how the skim from Vegas gets collected and sent back east. Park could explain to you what was happening, and how the Dowding System worked WHILE you were watching it happen. That could actually work.

But it'd have to be Joe Pesci doing it