Sparky, here is the article that Mike forwarded to me. I think the authors were a bit touchy.
RW
Subject: Trashing History: Did Hanoi Make This Movie?
Date: Published: 8/28/90 (160 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.
LEISURE & ARTS:
Trashing History: Did Hanoi Make This Movie?
----
By Peter R. Kann and Phillip Jennings
Once upon a time there were two types of war movies: those
in which the American cause was just and all Americans were
heroes and those in which our cause was just, notwithstanding
the flaws of a few individual Americans.
These days there also are two kinds of war movies: those
in which the American cause is evil and all Americans are
villains and those in which a few Americans patronizingly are
presented as idiot-innocents in a villainous U. S. cause. The
propaganda point is the same, of course, give or take a noble
savage.
Today's war movies are no more subtle or sophisticated
than back in the days of our youth. Over the years, Hollywood
has simply transferred the black hats onto Americans and the
white hats onto almost anyone who shoots them up.
The latest example of this genre is "Air America," an
airheaded aerial comedy directed by Roger Spottiswoode that
sets out to both twist and trivialize the exploits of Air
America pilots flying missions in Laos during the Indochina
war. The film succeeds in delivering pretty faces (Mel Gibson
and Robert Downey Jr. in lead roles), talented stuntmen, some
spectacular Southeast Asian scenery, ample aerial acrobatics,
and a plot so moronic and mendacious that it might more
logically have been distributed by Red Star Studios in Hanoi
rather than Tri-Star Pictures in Hollywood.
For the record, the U. S. government did indeed support a
semi-clandestine war in Laos during the 1960s and early '70s
aimed at stemming the flow of Hanoi's men and war materiel
down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and at keeping the North
Vietnamese and their Laotian puppets, the Pathet Lao, from
conquering all of Laos. The main heroes in this bloody
struggle were the Laotians, particularly the Hmong mountain
tribesmen who suffered uncounted thousands of casualties
battling the communists with a modicum of U. S. support. In
the "peaceful" postwar period, while Hollywood set about
inverting war history on Thai movie sets, these same Hmong
were victims of a campaign of annihilation carried on by
Hanoi with means including chemical warfare.
There also were American heroes in Laos, primary among
them the pilots of the CIA-funded Air America, who suffered
243 deaths in action flying military supplies to the Hmong
soldiers or relief supplies to the myriad refugees from
communist aggression.
None of this, naturally, emerges in "Air America." Rather,
the Hmong soldiers are depicted as corrupt drug dealers led
by a rapacious Laotian general employed by the CIA, which is
masterminding the Laotian drug traffic to finance its wicked
war of aggression in Indochina, in the process actively
promoting the addiction of GIs in neighboring South Vietnam.
The pilots of Air American are cast as knaves and fools,
ferrying heroin and stealing guns, between their frathouse
pranks and drunken stupors.
This drivel is scripted with all the subtlety of an
"Animal House" cast reciting passages from Jane Fonda's Hanoi
diaries. By the way, it cost Tri-Star $35 million to trash
history and heroism in Laos; Air America pilots, by contrast,
were paid about $35,000 a year to risk their lives.
Now, no one who spent time in Laos (which the film makers
didn't) could contest that this war, like any other, included
some element of humor amid pathos, human foibles along with
heroism, smiles amid suffering. Whimsy exists in war, but it
is something vastly different from the crude stereotyping and
slapstick of "Air America."
Similarily, those who knew Laos would not contest that
opium was a traditional crop of some Laotian tribesmen, that
some drugs flowed through and from Laos, or that some
corruption existed in Souphanna Phouma's Vientiane, as indeed
it does in Marion Barry's Washington.
But the fact is that the main products of the Laotian war
were casualties, refugees and postwar communist persecution
and enslavement, not opium poppies. Air America was
specifically barred from carrying any drugs for any purposes
and during the two years the pilot co-author of this article
flew helicopters in Laos, he never heard of those regulations
being flouted.
The facts also are that Air America pilots were decent,
dedicated, disciplined aviators -- among the most
professional and courageous in U. S. aviation history. Flying
little Porters, lumbering C-123s or vulnerable helicopters
into hand-hewn jungle airstrips to deliver ammunition,
medicines or food supplies was no one's idea of fraternity
pranks. It is not surprising that Air America veterans, in
their outrage over the film, resent above all being depicted
as slovenly drunkards and clowns.
The facts, too, are that the CIA operatives, AID relief
workers and other American civilian officials in Laos who
were Air America's clients also were proud and patriotic
people serving their country in this sad side-theater of the
Vietnam War. They too merit honor, not mockery.
How is it then, after all the Indochina evidence of these
past 15 years -- the communist conquest, concentration camps,
exterminations, starvation, refugee exodus -- that Tri-Star
Pictures in the year 1990 still chooses to make a war movie
planting the black hats squarely on the wrong heads? And what
is it that leads the film makers to ridicule the honesty and
professionalism of these pilots in the process?
A few clues perhaps can be found in a Hollywood-groupie
article written from the film's Thai-resort set and published
in the current issue of Premiere magazine. Here we learn how
tough the poor cast and crew had it up there in the hills:
Mr. Gibson actually getting diarrhea, plumpish Mr. Downey
having to lose 15 pounds, a camera crew getting scared on a
helicopter ride, and the constant risk of AIDS from Thai
prostitutes hired as film extras. Small wonder, given such
suffering, that the film makers were of misanthropic mind.
Then there's John Eskow, billed as screenwriter and
co-producer of the film. Mr. Eskow, Premiere bemusedly tells
us, speaks with pride of having "faked a shrink letter" to
avoid service in Vietnam. This self-identified protege of
Abbie Hoffman explains to Premiere that he wanted to make a
"yippie" movie for producer, Daniel Melnick -- "a fun, zany
thing for the whole family, with laughs aplenty and big
things blowing up."
Like the truth.
Is it worth being outraged over any of this, over what,
after all, could be dismissed as just another silly bit of
summer entertainment? This isn't by any means the first film
to get the Indochina war backward or to belittle American
sacrifice. Yet this one, more than the others, lapses from
cinematic absurdity into political obscenity. And this one,
because it focuses on a part of that war that is largely
relegated to historical footnotes, threatens to become, for
all too many Americans, the pop-historical memory of this
conflict.
The association of Air America veterans attempted, during
the three years this movie was in planning and production, to
reach the producers and plead the case for some minimal tilt
toward historical accuracy and decency to its dead. All to no
avail. So the veterans are left to protest to the few who
will listen that this film "is generally and specifically not
true to the pilots and crews, the customers, the events, the
mission, the results, the policies, and the raison d'etre of
Air America. Not since the era of Ms. Fonda have individuals
such as the makers of this film expressed so publicly their
disgust and dislike for a group of American servicemen. It is
a shame."
The rest of us are left with the prospect of Messrs.
Melnick and Eskow embarking on a sequel a few years hence.
This one presumably will be about corrupt warmongers at the
Pentagon in cahoots with Zionist racketeers, sending 50,000
drug dealing GIs to the Middle East to launch a vicious war
of aggression against Saddam Hussein and his groovy little
guys.
---
Mr. Kann, the Journal's publisher, covered the Indochina
war from 1967-75 as a Journal reporter. Mr. Jennings was an
Air America pilot.
[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]
