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thedrifter
10-11-06, 07:20 AM
Eastwood On 'Flags Of Our Fathers'
Director Discusses New Film About Iwo Jima In Exclusive Interview With Bill Whitaker

(CBS) One of the most famous images captured during World War II is a photo of a group of five Marines and one Navy corpsman planting the United States flag on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi.

"It was the biggest battle in Marine Corps history, the most loss of life of any Marine campaign," director Clint Eastwood tells CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker in an exclusive interview.

Eastwood's new movie, "Flags of our Fathers," based on the book of the same title, is the true story of how one image electrified the nation.

It turned the flag raisers into instant heroes. The government used the heroic pose to raise money at a critical point in the war, never publicizing that this wasn't exactly what it seemed.

The Iwo Jima battle was a bloody, inch-by-inch battle to take the volcanic island, which had airstrips that were crucial to the planned U.S. invasion of Japan. With the Japanese hiding in miles of underground tunnels, Marines said Iwo Jima was like hell.

John Huffhines was with the 5th Marine division at the time.

"You never get over it. It’s always with you," Huffhines says.

It was on the fifth day of the invasion that the Marines took the high ground and planted a flag on Mt. Suribachi. The first flag is the one the Marines remember, they said at a recent reunion.

"The fighting stopped when the flag went up... It was quiet. Everybody stood up and cheered," Bob Day says.

Raymond Jacobs helped raise the first flag. He said an officer wanted it as a souvenir and ordered a bigger one to replace it. The raising of the second flag happened so quickly, the Marines thought it was nothing special. But it was.

"We often said that the first flag raising was for the Marines on the island on combat, whereas the second flag raising was for the American people back home," Jacobs says.

The battle for Iwo Jima raged for another month. Three of the men in the famous picture lost their lives there. One of them, Sgt. Mike Strank, was fighting next to Ralph Griffiths.

"A shell dropped in front of him. It took Sgt. Strank’s heart and chest right out. Killed him, wounded me," Griffiths says.

As for the three flag raisers who survived the island, the pain of war would follow them until the end of their lives.

"I think they were all heroes," Eastwood says.

Eastwood says he's finishing a second movie on Iwo Jima, this one from the Japanese perspective. He wants the American audience to walk away from that movie thinking that "they are the good guys."

But by the same token, Eastwood wants Americans to know "that the price is pretty heavy and that the price is something the military people are always ready to stand by and pay ... and (the) American people should be appreciative of that."

Ellie

thedrifter
10-12-06, 07:41 AM
Clint Eastwood's ‘Flags of Our Fathers’: A Win-Lose Situation
Thursday , October 12, 2006

By Roger Friedman

Clint’s ‘Flags’: A Win-Lose Situation | Lennon’s Exes Meet in Iceland | Barbra’s Gang; Lorne Wins Round 1

Clint’s ‘Flags’: A Win-Lose Situation

Clint Eastwood is 76 years old, and in less than four years he’s made three remarkably good films: "Mystic River," which was nominated for an Oscar; "Million Dollar Baby," which won Best Picture; and most recently, "Flags of Our Fathers," which opens a week from tomorrow. This is a film with much merit, and it will get a lot of kudos, "Thumbs up" and the all the rest. The question is, is it as good as the other two? I’m not sure.

“Flags of Our Fathers” tells the story of what happened to the soldiers who were photographed in the famous picture of an American flag being planted on Iwo Jima during World War II. The story is based on a book written by James Bradley, the son of one of those soldiers, with Ron Powers, one of the great dramatic non-fiction prose writers of our time. I’d love to see his “White Town Drowsing” made into an HBO film. It’s wonderful.

The screenplay for “Flags” was written by William Broyles Jr. and then tweaked by Paul Haggis, who wrote the screenplays for “Mystic River” and “Million Dollar Baby.” It’s too bad he didn’t just overhaul “Flags” from top to bottom.

Broyles — who started out at Newsweek years ago — can be pretty stodgy in his delivery. Witness such lumps of exposition as "Jarhead," "The Polar Express," "Planet of the Apes" and — ugggh! — "Cast Away," in which the most memorable character was a volleyball.

Broyles also co-created “China Beach” for TV, and that’s what “Flags” reminds me of the most. It has a big ensemble cast and one self-destructive main character. In “China Beach,” it was Dana Delany’s alcoholic McMurphy, the nurse. In “Flags,” it’s Ira Hayes, actor Adam Beach’s Native American soldier whose lack of self esteem sends him into a downward spiral. Luckily Beach like Delany, finds the vulnerability. Delany won Emmys; Beach will at least be nominated for Oscars.

“Flags of Our Fathers” soars in many regards. Grisly and realistic, Eastwood’s battle scenes are incredibly exciting. He’s shot most of the movie in dull blues and grays, and black and white. In fact, the only real colors you ever see are bright blue (in a dress, in the ocean) and red (in the stripes on the American flag). Otherwise, as just about everything blows up and limbs are shorn, the picture is muted of life.

At the same time, though, Eastwood has to balance the story of the soldiers from that picture. They’re sent home to become public-relations icons; heroes who must sell war bonds to a weary, financially-drained populace. In the process, they see the act they performed diminished, and the heroism that’s projected on them becomes uncomfortable.

Ryan Phillippe and Jesse Bradford, playing Hayes’ buddies, do a good job as likeable guys caught in a tricky spot. Eastwood does everything he can for them, but the screenplay is their enemy. The pair gets no showy scenes, nothing that might illuminate their plight separate from Hayes’. And there are so many pointed digs at Hayes’ heritage (everyone, annoyingly, calls him “Chief” as in “Indian Chief”) that it almost seems that being Indian is more central to the story than having planted the flag at Iwo Jima.

There are some caveats about “Flags of our Fathers” that can’t be overlooked, and again I think they have more to do with Broyles’ script than anything else. First, there don’t seem to be any black soldiers at Iwo Jima. Outside of Beach’s character, it’s an all-white American army. This is historically inaccurate.

Writer Christopher Paul Moore talks about the Army’s 471st, 473rd and 476th amphibious truck companies in his excellent book, “Fighting for America: Black Soldiers — The Unsung Heroes of World War II” and includes many pictures of black Marines and soldiers from the month-long battle of Iwo Jima. Certainly, at least one of them could have been represented. (To be fair, black soldiers were also omitted from Steven Spielberg’s "Saving Private Ryan," as Moore notes.)

No black characters, but more than 30 actors from Iceland, where a big chunk of the movie was filmed, are credited as soldiers.

And there’s almost no mention of Joe Rosenthal, the Pulitzer prize-winning photographer who took the picture of the flag raising. An actor who resembles Sean Penn snaps the photo in the movie, but he’s uncredited and never again discussed. (There are about 40 references in the book upon which the movie is based, however.) Rosenthal died this past August at age 95.

But these are mere quibbles: “Flags of Our Fathers” remains undiminished. “Flags” also has a cast that’s a who’s who of solid actors, including John Slattery, Jon Polito, Robert Patrick, Neal McDonough, Barry Pepper, John Benjamin Hickey and Judith Ivey.

There’s also a topnotch selection of younger actors in key soldiers’ roles with Jamie Bell, Joseph Cross and Paul Walker (in a cameo) as the standouts. And the older actors who play the WWII soldiers in the present — Harve Presnell, Len Cariou, George Grizzard and George Hearn — make the whole thing that much more believable. All the actors are, as Eastwood once told me, “get up and go” kind of actors, the sort who are already so talented he says he doesn’t have to tell them much.

“Flags of Our Fathers” comes out at an interesting time. Like “Bobby,” which doesn’t hit until Nov. 20, “Flags” is a historical picture with a lot of contemporary resonance. Setting aside the tremendously grand nature of the battles, the central issue of “Flags” — how a war is sold to a country that may no longer want it — is far too important to dismiss without discussion. That the discussion comes from Clint Eastwood, an American icon (and a noted Republican), means the director earns even more respect this time around.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-13-06, 08:38 AM
Clint Eastwood on Flags of Our Fathers
Source: Heather Newgen
October 13, 2006

Legendary actor and director Clint Eastwood was greeted by a packed room of journalists applauding him as he entered the ball room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles to talk about his latest film, Flags of our Fathers. Wearing a pressed powered blue suit, Eastwood: stood at the front of the room and allowed reporters to take pictures. After a few photos he laughed and said, "Okay, that's enough of that. Well, thank you for coming here at this ridiculous hour. At least it was for me. (surveys mikes and recorders). I keep feeling I'm at Sharper Image and they have a little display."

Eastwood's new film is based on the bestselling book by James Bradley with Ron Powers of the same name. The island of Iwo Jima was one of the most crucial and bloodiest battles of World War II. It culminated with what would become one of the most iconic images in history: five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi. The novel chronicles the battle of Iwo Jima and the fates of the flag raisers and some of their brothers in Easy Company.

Eastwood talked to ComingSoon.net about adapting the book and making a companion film, Letters From Iwo Jima.

ComingSoon.net: You've often said that you pick your films based on subjects that interest you on a personal level. So why this?
Clint Eastwood:: One, there's never been a story on Iwo Jima, even though there have been pictures that have been using it in the title , but the actual invasion, it was the biggest marine corps invasion in history, the most fierce battle in marine corps history, but what intrigued me about it was the book itself and the fact that it wasn't really a war story. I wasn't setting out to do a war movie. I'd been involved with a few as an actor, but I liked this because it was just a study of these people, and I've always been curious about families who find out things about their relatives much after the fact and the ones who seemed to be the most in the front lines and have been through the most seem to be the ones who have been the quietest about their activity. It's a sure thing that if you hear somebody being very braggadocio about all their experiences in combat, sure thing that he was probably a clerk typist somewhere in the rear echelon (laughs). But there seems to be a commonality with these kind of people like James Bradley was, that they came back and it was a time in history when you didn't have a lot of psychiatric evaluation and coddling. When they came back they were just told to go home and get over it. And if they didn't have wives or loved ones to help them, they had to adjust on their own, or else they didn't adjust on their own. So it's just those experiences of being a young man thrown into the ultimate celebrity and the picture I hope makes a comment on celebrity, of being treated like a president. Maybe not always a president, but being treated like a celebrity, and they didn't feel that. They felt very complex about being that, especially when so many of their companions were killed in this ferocious battle. And this was the only famous photograph, the Joe Rosenthal photograph, was taken four or five days into the battle. It was not even a fourth of the way there yet, but it signified a unity that I've always been curious about. So that's it.


CS: Could you describe briefly the discussions you had with Paul Haggis early on... to montage it rather than go linearly.
Eastwood:: We talked very much about that, but it's a difficult book to translate into a screenplay. Paul likes to joke. After our first meeting, he said, I have about an 11 per cent chance of being successful with this. And I said, "well, it's going to work out. Don't worry. Just keep things straight ahead" and we would talk every day or so over the phone and talk about philosophy. It was a way to get started. He had a trouble getting into it and we talked about doing it like you were suggesting - doing it in various acts - but the trouble is, to show the impact that it has on the three soldiers and their recollection is that it's very difficult to work with, because you'd go from present day, which would be 1994 in this case, and back to one period of time and up to another period of time and back, and then up to the present day, and the only other time I've done that - I did it with a picture called "Bird" years ago and I had difficulty in going into flashback, then a flashback within a flashback, and then having to unwind and come back and keep the audience only moderately confused. To get back to the present day of that particular picture [which] present day was in the '40s as well. But, we finally decided this was the way to do it - through a journalistic - and because James Bradley wrote his book as he was researching - doing literally a detective story - going around and talking to people - it laid out that way. It just seemed like a logical way to do it. Otherwise it's a very big sprawling book, and it covers a lot of chapters on a lot of various items. You have to sit there and figure out, well what story do we want to do? Just the bond drive or the battle? But you have to have the impact of the battle to show the complexities of the bond drive, of the emotions of the guys, and I guess Adam Beach's character sort of sums it up when he's on the train, and says, "We shouldn't be here." There's a lot of little key places that guide you back - that is one of them.

CS: Talk about decision to cast lesser known actors and what do you think of Adam Beach's performance?
Eastwood:: We're using lesser-known actors because the average age of people sent to Iwo Jima was 19 years old. Except for some of the officers. I talked to one of the officers who was there the day before yesterday, he retired as a general but he was a captain then and he was 24. So the oldest in our group who was Mike Strank, 26 years old, and the other Marines called him "The Old Man." It's hard to be called an old man at 26, but because of his leadership qualities, he was sort of viewed that way. I think because of the age and we had to use young people it lent itself to using lesser-known actors. And also if you have big name actors coming on the screen in a situation, sometimes it takes a while to adjust and see someone who's well-known and then adjust to them as a character and it's up to that actor to romance you over into thinking that he is that character. I remember years ago seeing "Rio Bravo," in a theater and they made the decision to cast Ward Bond as a wagon master and have him ride into town and go "Wagon's ho!" and this was during the time that "Wagon Train" was on television and a very popular show, and when he did that the whole audience all came apart and it took another 15 minutes to get back into the movie. But just the presence of somebody that's well known, and also people are going to the movies to see their favorite actor, in this case, that may be the case in this movie or any other movie, but this time you can kind of accept in a faster fashion the fact that these people are the characters. Adam Beach, the story of Ira Hayes has been told before. But Adam Beach is a North American Indian, so we don't have a Caucasian playing it or somebody of occidental background. I had seen him do some other smaller roles but he came and he did a reading on tape and it was very good. You could see a lot of possibilities there. I hired him. He turned out to be even better than I expected because Ira Hayes was a complex person, a person who did sharecropping, a kid from Arizona who went to the Marine Corps, suddenly he's in the Marine Corps and he's got a uniform and he meets a lot of friends. He found sort of a family in the Marine Corps. He liked it to the point where he wanted to stay there. Everything in this picture is true. Sometimes that's an advantage and sometimes it's a disadvantage. But everything happened. He did threaten Gagnon that he'd kill him if he told them he was on the flag. He didn't want to come back to the states after combat and do what they're doing. He had a problem with alcoholism and everywhere they went, they were serving him drinks. That could be not conducive to a good situation for a person with his feelings, attraction to
alcohol. The Keyes Beach character also had attraction to alcohol and he was assigned to Ira Hayes, which made it worse because he was the liaison for the three boys. The other boys seemed to be able to handle it. But Rene Gagnon had problems on his own.


CS: What was it like filming in Iceland?
Eastwood:: I loved filming in Iceland. When it was first suggested that we work in Iceland, I could not understand how it [would] work, but really there's a lot of similarities between Iceland in the summer and Iwo Jima in the winter time. Iwo is a geo-thermal island, a lot of volcanic activity, a lot of sulphur minerals coming out of fissures in the mountains and what have you. Iceland is not necessarily that way, but it does have some of that and it has tremendous black beaches, black sand beaches, which are very hard to duplicate. We looked at black sand beaches all over the world - next to the Four Seasons in Hawaii (laughter) - comfortable places. Certain parts of it on Iwo Jima that were not too sensitive because it is considered a shrine, and the Japanese don't have tourism there. Nobody can go there without the Japanese government's approval and the Japanese government feels it's a sacred place because there are still almost 12,000 of their men unaccounted for on that island. So we couldn't do the pyrotechnics that we would have to do to actually recreate the invasion, so we went to Iceland, and Iceland was very cooperative, and then we came back and did the various cities here in the States.

CS: Would like to know your thoughts on the difference of being a marine in a war where the purpose is clear, like the Second World War and the whole country is behind you and being a soldier today where many people don't seem to know the purpose of the war in Iraq.
Eastwood:: All wars have their problems. It was a different time in history, of course. We had been fighting in the European theatre, we were at war, but when it was brought to us in Pearl Harbor, it became a reality that if we weren't careful, that if we didn't fight this one out, we might be speaking another language today. So it was sort of simple. A lot of the women went to work in factories and had to give up their life. Most of the men gave up their lives or gave up their everyday life to go, but most of them were skinny kids out of the depression. Most of the kids, the average age was 19 years old. You figured they were probably all born in 1928 or 27 or in the late 20s early 30s, and they were over there, but they all had the spirit. And it was important to tell this story for that reason. It told of a time in our history when there was a lot of spirit. I think the icon itself of the flag-raising - a candid shot which was sort of a manufactured shot at the time . . . it didn't have any significance at the moment because it was a separate flag-raising but it was just a shot that was very rare. It's a work of art. It's a work of art because it's people not looking into the camera and smiling at their aunt in Des Moines. It shows the unity of people working towards a common cause. The hands reach out, sometimes just hands just being seen, and that itself showed a time when people felt they had to - we had to be victorious in this war.

How it compares to today - I suppose war is war whenever you're in there. If you're in the front lines, there are always various problems you have to deal with that are hard for us to understand who are in a non-combat situation unfortunately. As this picture shows, the politicians are still running a certain amount of things. The men obviously were almost as much affected by the bond drive as they were by the combat. But the bond drive was a very strenuous thing for young men to be sent out and treated like kings and then to have to all of a sudden, the rug's out from under them and they go back to civilian life and there's nowhere to go. Except for James Bradley who had a profession in mind. They just drifted off into the sunset so to speak. It was time of great effort in the country. I am probably one of the few people in the room here who were around at that time. And I remember the feeling, I remember the Seventh Bond Drive, I didn't know too much about it because I was only 15 years old. You read newspapers and saw a lot of the activity on it. Everything was bonds, bonds, bonds. People would give you bonds. Your parents would give you a bond for your birthday or something. Younger kids were disappointed because they didn't get a toy, but they would get a bond that would be worth something later on. So it was a great moment in history as far as American unity. The country seems much more - I'm sure it wasn't - but it seems in hindsight certainly much more unified than it is today, because the war we're in today excluding the Iraq War in the front lines is a different kind of war. Ideology, religion - there's a lot of factors coming in to it that may make the next war much more difficult. But this one was much more cut and dried.


CS: How challenging was it making "Flags of our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima" at the same time?
Eastwood:: It goes in waves. Sometimes you think I'll take some time off, and it goes in waves. I did "Mystic River," and I was going to take some time off after that project, then I read "Million Dollar Baby," and said, boy, I gotta do that. So I went right into that. I had tried to buy this book sometime earlier and DreamWorks bought it and I ran into Steven Spielberg and he said why don't you come over and direct this film. I [told him] I liked [the book] very much. We shook hands and I said, "yes, I'll do that." He didn't have a screenplay he was happy with so we had to kind of start from scratch. I was working with Paul so I brought Paul in, and the rest is where we are. Part way into the research for the book and how to do it, I started getting interested in Lt. General Kuribayashi and I was kind of wondering what kind of person he was to defend this island in a ferocious way but also in a very clever way by tunneling the island and putting everything underground. Doing it differently than most of the Japanese defenses were at that time. Most of them were beachhead defenses and using a lot of artillery from the sea. You couldn't do that effectively with this particular battle. This particular battle by the way, had its intelligence problems as we've seen in recent times. They estimated far fewer troops than was on the island so they sent the Navy off figuring they could take it fairly easily. They thought they could take it in maybe four or five days, and it didn't quite turn out that way. I sent to Japan and got a book about General Kuribayashi. It was a book of letters, and the letters were to his wife, his daughter and his son, and a lot of them were mailed from the U.S. when he was here as an envoy in the late '20s and early '30s. He was a very sensitive man, very family-oriented, missing his family very much. In those [letters] you got a feeling for what he was like. Later on, we found out some stories, some fact and some up to a point, and then the island gets lost, because there were no survivors that we could find that knew exactly what happened at the end. But Gen. Kuribayashi was a unique guy, he liked America, he thought it was a mistake to go to war with America. He thought America was too big an industrial complex, from a practical point of view. He had a lot of resistance among his own troops about his defense of the island. A lot of his fellow officers thought he was crazy doing this whole tunneling thing. But he turns out to be an interesting person. And in our research, we found out there were many other interesting people that were there, and the young Japanese conscriptees that were on the island were very much like the Americans. They didn't necessarily want to be in the war. They were sent there being told, don't plan on coming back; something you could not tell an American with a straight face. That would be a tough sell. Most people go into combat thinking, yes, it could be dangerous and I could get killed, but I could also make it back and go back to normal.

CS: Can you talk about the recurring theme of deconstructing the hero myth?
Eastwood:: Yeah, that's very important in this movie because we, in the era we live in now, everybody's being considered a hero. In that particular era, the '40s, heroes were people of extraordinary fetes. They're people, human beings, that Americans do heroic deeds every day. You probably all read and saw that news last night where that fireman jumped out of the car and he saved these two people who were burning in the car. He was on his way back from work. People do deeds like that all the time. People also, some people say, "Well, it's not my problem." There are exceptions, but growing up, I'm trying to think of who's heroic? Joe Lewis, maybe in the war, there was General Patton of course. Maybe Eisenhower, the head of the allied forces. Gary Cooper. There were a few people, there was a handful. Movie actors that were celebrities were a handful, a handful of men and a handful of women that were names. Now you have to decipher everything because everybody's a star so you have to have superstars. But people are stars who are just heiresses or something now. [Laughs] I don't have an example of that. [Laughs]. But it's a much different era. They didn't have that sort of thing then.

CS: What was your message about propaganda in the film?
Eastwood:: I think what we tried to tell is that the propaganda, we tried to show the propaganda machine as it actually appeared. Yeah, growing up, we watched all the war movies. War movies always were very propaganda-istic. There's always the bad guys and the good guys. Most of the servicemen were portrayed by actors who were at least in their 30s, sometimes in their 40s and on up. That is inaccurate because the majority of them were in their teens and early 20s. I think the oldest person in the campaign, the oldest guy was Howling Smith who was 60 years old. He was the oldest officer, but most of the officers were probably in their 20s and most of the infantry people were in their teens.

Flags of our Fathers opens October 20th and Letters From Iwo Jima on February 9th.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-13-06, 09:16 AM
Eastwood stares down war
Updated 10/13/2006 6:59 AM ET
By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY
Clint Eastwood says he has lost interest in the fantasy of war. Now, he is consumed by the tragedy of it.

The director's new film, Flags of Our Fathers, opens Oct. 20 and tells the stories of the Marines who were famously photographed raising the American flag during the battle of Iwo Jima. That iconic photo came to represent the unflagging nature of the American spirit, but Eastwood's film raises questions about how the men and their heroic actions were co-opted by the U.S. government to raise money for the last stage of World War II.

The movie and its message are unlikely to be ignored because it comes from Eastwood, a superstar action hero whose turn to directing has produced two best-picture Oscar winners (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby) and a nomination for Mystic River.

Eastwood once starred in such war-themed romps as Kelly's Heroes, Where Eagles Dare and Heartbreak Ridge. But these days, Dirty Harry sounds like a dove. And a tough one, at that.

"World War I was there, and that was going to be the one to end all wars," says Eastwood, 76. "And then World War II came along and that was going to be the war to end all wars. Then, five years later, Korea. Not too many years after that, Vietnam. And all the little skirmishes, Yugoslavia, Gulf War I, Gulf War II ...

"It doesn't speak well for mankind. It seems like it's just inevitable that they'll go on forever. Is that the way it's supposed to be? Is man most creative when he's at war? I don't know. We're always hoping every one is the last one."

Flags celebrates the sacrifices of the thousands who died capturing the island of Iwo Jima, while simultaneously scorning what Eastwood calls "the futility of war."

He was in his teens during World War II and remembers people along the California coast painting their windows black out of fear that a Japanese destroyer might be lurking in the distance, searching for a nighttime target. He was in the Army during the Korean War, though he didn't see combat. He voted for Dwight Eisenhower for president because he thought a military man familiar with the horrors of battle would be able to settle the conflict.

That's how he became a Republican. "I guess if he'd been running as a Democrat, I'd have been a Democrat," Eastwood says and smiles — a crack in that iconic face which, even in real life, seems to be permanently marked with contempt for punks.

Not to be pigeonholed

Flags is based on the best-selling book by James Bradley, the son of the late John Bradley, a Navy corpsman who helped raise the flag.

Five Marines and a sailor raised the flag in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo shot by the Associated Press's Joe Rosenthal, but only three of them survived the battle.

The film flashes back and forth between the Pacific island conflict and the homeland tour of the flag-raising survivors, who face being drafted to a new kind of battle: public relations. They are the face men for a bond drive to finance the final phase of the war.

After the war they were generally forgotten, though the emotional scars remained.

"This thing isn't anti-war in terms of 'We shouldn't have done it,' " Eastwood says. "(World War II) is one of the wars we should have done, and we did the best we could with the knowledge we had at the time. Even today, we're doing the best we can with the knowledge we have, but obviously we don't have enough knowledge."

A lot of people think they know where he stands. Eastwood says they don't.

In 2004, Million Dollar Baby explored a patient's right to die — a year before the Terry Schiavo case made national headlines and divided the nation. Some critics denounced the film and tried to spoil the ending for audiences.

Eastwood never publicly revealed his thoughts on assisted suicide, saying at the time that his movie was "supposed to make you think about the precariousness of life and how we handle it." He says it's not bad to be provocative.

"I'm sure I'll have the same thing" with Flags of Our Fathers, he says. "One side or the other or both will put whatever they want into it. And that's OK. That's what they should do. If they want to have the take that it's a righteous war and we're doing the right thing, and they can have the take where the Marines came back and were used a little bit by a government to make the ends justify the means."

During his brief political career (he was mayor of Carmel, Calif., for two years in the 1980s), Eastwood served as a Republican. He laughs and says: "It was a non-partisan run. I think the other candidates were Republican."

Where does he stand?

"I'm not right or left. Maybe on some things I sympathize with the right, and some things I sympathize with on the left. I'm not predictable. And still, there's no harm in changing. There's no harm in updating your philosophies as you go along. As you get older, you see more and you learn more and maybe take different attitudes."

As the director of a movie about the scars of war, he knows it's impossible, though he comes across as private about such things. People as well-known as Eastwood who express their opinions can attract scorn from people with different beliefs. Eastwood acknowledges the need to fight terrorism, but says of Iraq: "I'm happy to not be of the school that thinks we should be democratizing another country that obviously doesn't care that much about it and doesn't seem to be suited for it."

He speaks with a quiet resolve, the voice of someone who, after almost eight decades, no longer takes such things lightly. In real life, he shares the intensity of his famous screen characters but not the stubbornness. He says open-mindedness and a willingness to grow are responsible for his successes.

"If I get to the point where I'm repeating myself or not progressing or taking new challenges, then I should see if I can play golf or something," he says, breaking into that disarming grin again. "Listen to different points of view and you learn something about yourself."

It's that open-mindedness that, after working on Flags, led him to make Letters from Iwo Jima, the Japanese perspective on the battle. It will be released in Japan in December and in the USA in early 2007.

"I started philosophizing on what the Japanese young guys were like. I started reading letters from young conscripts and they had the same problems: I miss my mother. I don't want to die. How's my dog?"

That's another tragedy of war, he says: "You start realizing when you look at the other side that these are people you could be great friends with."

Contemporary parallels?

A viewer could come away from Flags of Our Fathers thinking of comparisons to today, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the way the conflict has been portrayed in the media and by the military.

Tom Brokaw, the former NBC news anchor and author of The Greatest Generation books about the World War II era, says: "I don't think he was making a statement about the war today as much as he was about the idea of war. ... It will be interesting to me to see whether there'll be any contemporary political fallout as a result of this film, whether people will think about the fog of war, the decisions that were made and the use of propaganda."

The U.S. Treasury secretary depicted in the film romanticizes the story of the Iwo Jima flag for his bond campaign, and does not correct the report that one of the deceased flag-raisers was misidentified. He also doesn't want them to reveal that the photo was of the second flag-raising on the island.

"There were some lies to it or slight distortions of the truth to keep (the story) going. He didn't want it to lose the impact," Eastwood says.

For some, those elements may recall Jessica Lynch, the wounded Iraq War Army private who later said the military overdramatized her capture and rescue.

There is also Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who turned down a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to enlist after 9/11 but was later accidentally killed by U.S. forces.

"He was an All-American-looking kid and representative of the great American youth," Eastwood says. "He was idealistic about going (to war) and had a tragic end, and those stories are throughout history."

Though sometimes the powers-that-be manipulate these stories, Eastwood says that does not diminish the sacrifice.

"The big, big message," Brokaw says, is: "Who are heroes? How do you define a hero?"

The characters in the movie chafe under that title, and Brokaw says those men had an inherent modesty. "I've talked to a lot of veterans and not one of them has said, 'You know, I was a real hero that day.' They're uniformly uncomfortable with that."

Bradley, author of the book, says that was the point of the story. "These were just ordinary guys doing their duty. I wanted to demythologize the flag raising. The beauty of the photo is not that they're different from us, but they are us. They are just doing their duty."

Ellie

thedrifter
10-14-06, 09:26 AM
Posted on Sat, Oct. 14, 2006

`FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS' MOVIE TELLS STORY

Iwo Jima flag moves to Marine museum
Standard shown in famed WWII photo in storage for decades
BOB DART
Cox News Service

QUANTICO, Va. - Five Marines in camouflage fatigues formally put the flag of the book "Flags of Our Fathers" on display Friday, a week before the opening of the movie that tells the story behind this tattered, storied banner of red, white and blue wool.

"This flag symbolizes the Marine Corps' past, present and future," said Bob Sullivan, curator of the new National Museum of the Marine Corps. "The design of this building was based on the raising of this flag."

The gleaming architecture that juts abruptly above the tree line next to Interstate 95 evokes the famous photograph of six Americans raising this flag atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

The picture taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal is the most famous and most reproduced battle photo in history, said Sullivan. It also inspired the Marines' Iwo Jima Memorial just across the Potomac River from the nation's capital.

The movie "Flags of Our Fathers," directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Steven Spielberg, is based on the 2000 book of the same name co-authored by James Bradley and Ron Powers. James Bradley is the son of John Bradley, a Navy corpsman who was one of the men pictured raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

At Friday's ceremony, the museum's uniform curator, Neil Abelsma, described the flag's journey from a makeshift pole made from a drainage pipe on a bloody atoll in the Pacific to a carefully guarded and climate-controlled display case in a museum scheduled to open Nov. 11.

The popularity of Rosenthal's picture prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to bring back the flag and send it to 33 cities on a war bond drive, said Abelsma. It flew over the U.S. Capitol and in other cities before becoming part of the Marine Corps' historic collection.

John Wayne held the flag in publicity photos for the 1949 movie, "The Sands of Iwo Jima," but the flag itself did not fly in the film. For most of the decades since, it has been kept in a sealed display case in Building 58 at the Washington Navy Yard.

Also part of the new display is an autographed enlargement of Rosenthal's photo on an adjoining wall, facing a printed quotation from the photographer. Rosenthal died in August.

Abelsma said producers of "Flags of Our Fathers" talked with him to get the details and dimensions of the famous flag-raising scene right.

The wool flag was made at a military installation on Mare Island, Calif., he said. It originally measured 56 1/2 inches by 106 inches. But the widest stripe on the tattered side is now only 102 inches, he said.

The flag was tied with cotton cord to a metal drainage pipe about 2 inches in diameter before being raised during the battle, said Abelsma.

Staff Sgt. Steve Sullivan, one of the Marines who ceremoniously lifted the flag into its new display case Friday, served as a technical adviser on the movie.

In the scene depicting the dedication of the Iwo Jima Memorial, he recalled, he made sure the actual Marines who marched had the uniforms and steps from the early era exactly right. In California, he helped coordinate the scenes in which actors and actual Marines climbed down the nets used to get from the battleships to amphibious landing crafts.

An exhibit in the new museum seeks to help visitors understand part of this experience.

From the recreated belly of a World War II troop transport ship, visitors will board a landing craft on rollers to provide the sensation of surf. Then, they'll jump onto black sand amid the sounds of battle and film footage from the actual Marine landing on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945.

The six flag raisers in the famous photo were Bradley, Ira Hayes, Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Michael Strank and Rene Gagnon.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-14-06, 09:31 AM
Posted on Sat, Oct. 14, 2006
Iwo Jima flag gets a new home

Cox News Service

QUANTICO, Va. | Five Marines on Friday formally put the flag of “Flags of Our Fathers” on display.

“This flag symbolizes the Marine Corps’ past, present and future,” said Bob Sullivan, curator of the new National Museum of the Marine Corps. “The design of this building was based on the raising of this flag.”

The picture of the flag-raising in 1945 on the island of Iwo Jima is the most famous and most reproduced battle photo in history, Sullivan said.

An upcoming movie, “Flags of Our Fathers,” directed by Clint Eastwood, is based on the 2000 book of the same name by James Bradley and Ron Powers.

At Friday’s ceremony, the museum’s uniform curator, Neil Abelsma, described the flag’s journey from a makeshift pole made from a drainage pipe to a carefully guarded and climate-controlled display case in the Marine Corps museum, which is slated to open Nov. 10.

The popularity of Joe Rosenthal’s photograph prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring back the flag and send it on a 33-city tour to sell war bonds. The flag flew over the U.S. Capitol and in other cities before becoming part of the Marine Corps’ collection.

Before Friday it had been kept in a sealed display case at the Washington Navy Yard.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-15-06, 06:21 AM
Star of Eastwood film salutes heroes of World War II
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Clint O'Connor
Plain Dealer Film Critic

Iwo Jima was a scorched scrap heap when the Marines invaded in Febru ary 1945. The strategically important island was considered Japanese soil, and for the soldiers defending it, that meant no surrender.

After 31 days, 6,821 Americans were dead, and about 21,000 Japanese. Another 20,000 Americans were wounded. The most lasting symbol of that horror was not the charred, dismembered, lifeless bodies, but a photo of five Marines and a Navy corpsman rais ing a heavy piece of pipe with an American flag attached and sho ving it in the ground atop Mount Suribachi. That stirring symbol, the co-opting of its message and the truth of how it came about were at the heart of the best seller "Flags of Our Fathers," by James Bradley and Ron Powers. The movie version, directed by Clint East wood and starring Ryan Phillippe as Bradley's father, Navy corpsman John "Doc" Bradley, hits theaters Friday.

The film is a tribute to the brave, selfless souls who fought on Iwo Jima and a study of the fallout from powerful propaganda. Coming out during the Iraq War, it also spurs questions about a united war versus a divided war.

Phillippe is tuned in to both eras. His grandfathers served in World War II. His father and uncles served in Vietnam. He also benefited from input from military consultants and a Marine historian on "Flags of Our Fathers."

"World War II is something I would have given my life to fight for," Phillippe said on the phone from Los Angeles. "I don't feel the same way about this war."

But he won't bite when asked to elaborate on American involvement in Iraq.

"I don't like to hear actors talk about politics, religion, medicine," he said. "I'm 32, and I have no new light to shed. I shouldn't talk about things in public I have no business talking about. We all have conflicted and complex feelings about this war."

Phillippe, who played the young cop in last year's best-picture winner, "Crash," is best known for being Reese Witherspoon's husband. (They have two children, Ava, 7, and Deacon, 2.) Phillippe was away for three months shooting "Flags" in Iwo Jima and Iceland, among other locales.

The actor, who also starred in "Cruel Intentions" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer," is currently shooting another war- related drama: an untitled Kimberly Peirce film about an Army sergeant who refuses to return to Iraq after two tours.

If nothing else, Phillippe has learned to surround himself with first-rate filmmakers and multiple Oscar winners.

In addition to Eastwood, "Flags" was produced by Steven Spielberg, with a screenplay co-written by William Broyles Jr. and "Crash" writer-director Paul Haggis.

"Paul is fascinating to me, because he manages to tap into and understand such a diverse palette of characters and does it authentically," said Phillippe. "I had read the book first, and the script is just a masterful adaptation.

"Working with Clint Eastwood is a dream. He treats people with such respect. You adjust after a week or so that you're working with an icon, a legend. Then you get into the thing of the one take. Clint loves one take. That's a real adjustment, but then it becomes a point of pride. There's some kind of macho thing that takes over on his set, that if you have to do a second take you feel like you've failed, which is not the typical actor response, you know, 'I need more takes!' "

The real Doc Bradley was one of three surviving flag-raisers the War Department brought home in 1945 for an elaborate tour to sell war bonds. Along with Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), Bradley became a reluctant symbol of heroism.

"Being called heroes, knowing that their friends, their brothers, died alongside them fighting for their country, it was very difficult for these young men," said Phillippe. "But the money they raised helped win the war. Sometimes that persuasion, that propaganda is necessary. It was also such a different time. We weren't as cynical a society. We hadn't been as overtly manipulated by the media as we are now. People weren't as skeptical."

Because his family tree is already peppered with war veterans, Phillippe had an appreciation for what soldiers do. But working on "Flags" shed new light on what links fathers and sons and those who stormed Iwo Jima 61 years ago.

"Tom Brokaw wrote that book, 'The Greatest Generation,' and I believe that. These are children of the Depression. They went through so much as youths, and then to go into war, a world war. The stakes were so incredibly high, and the way they handled it, the humility, all those things our society loses sight of. There's a lot of value to this film. They should show it in high schools."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

coconnor@plaind.com, 216-999-4456

Ellie

thedrifter
10-15-06, 06:37 AM
Eastwood's <br />
Iwo Jima <br />
By Carrie Rickey <br />
Inquirer Movie Critic <br />
<br />
For Clint Eastwood, there is a distinction between raising the flag and waving the flag. And he's made an astute movie exploring that...

thedrifter
10-16-06, 06:32 AM
A new generation takes up heroes' flag
Actors try to follow in the bootsteps of the Marines on Iwo Jima

Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic
Posted October 16, 2006

There was a time when a young man hoping to become a movie star had to tick off items on a Hollywood list.

He had to do his gangster picture. He had to manage romances and romantic comedies. He had to look at home on a horse.

And he had to do his combat movie.

That time is very much the era of Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's new World War II drama. It's a history lesson, an eye-opener for a generation far removed from World War II or any notion of what Iwo Jima was. And it's a test for a generation of young actors, from Ryan Phillipe and Adam Beach to Jamie Bell and Jesse Bradford.

We've been watching Bell, 20, since 2000's Billy Elliot, the British comedy about a boy who only wanted to dance ballet, no matter what the other kids think. And Bradford, 27, has been around since the '80s, first earning notice as a cheerleader's lovesick brother with the hots for Kirsten Dunst in 2000's Bring It On.

Bradford plays Rene "Rainy" Gagnon, a Marine Corps "runner" who brought the replacement flag to the top of Mount Suribachi and helped raise it, a moment captured by Joe Rosenthal's famous Iwo Jima photograph. After Iwo Jima, Gagnon tried to "cash in" on the fame and died a bitter man when that didn't work out.

And Bell portrays Ralph Ignatowski, another member of the Marine Corps fighting on Iwo Jima, not a flag-raiser but part of their unit.

"The men who fought for 30-something days, we really can't know how bad that really was," Bell says. "But we shot this on Iceland, a volcanic island, like Iwo Jima, and experienced the ground conditions, to some degree. Sand and ash in everything. You can't dig foxholes, because the sand falls in on itself. There's no stability to it. It's like walking through 3 feet of water. It gets into everything.

"We got one one-hundredth of a percent of a taste of what they went through, shooting this on volcanic sand," Bradford says. "But the more we worked on this, the more I could see how that 'Greatest Generation' label really fits. These were people who sacrificed. I wonder if anybody my age or younger can appreciate that. We don't sacrifice today."

Flags, which arrives in theaters Friday, is already earning Oscar buzz, with Variety's Todd McCarthy praising this "pointed take on heroism" and director Eastwood's exploration of why members of "The Greatest Generation" "are, or were, reticent to speak much about what they did in the war, to boast or consider themselves heroes."

The actors confess that their big break, an Eastwood movie, came largely because they look like the men they portray on the screen. To that end, they learned as much as they could about these real-life Marines and the battle that was the defining moment in their lives.

"Clint wanted us to be fresh-faced and wide-eyed," Bell says. And there's a line in [James Bradley's] book about these guys, 'Iggy was just a regular bicycle kid.' "

The "regular bicycle kid" was friends with one of the flag-raisers, something of a unit mascot. Bradford had the trickier role to play. History hasn't been kind to the way Gagnon responded to the war-bonds tour he and the other surviving flag-raisers went on in 1945. The other men, Ira Hayes and John "Doc" Bradley (played by Beach, 34, and Phillippe, 32) suffered "survivor's guilt." But not Gagnon. Bradford thinks he knows why.

"Say you or I are fighting in Iraq right now, and a sergeant comes up and says, 'You and you are going home,' " Bradford says. "Who wouldn't take him up on that? So who can blame him for being relieved to be plucked out of one of the bloodiest battles of the war to go see his mom, his girlfriend, people he didn't think he'd ever get to see again?

"Rene's defining moment in the movie comes in Times Square, when he's giving a speech," Bradford adds. "He knows he was just a runner. He was straightforward about what his role was, and he makes it clear that it's not about him or the other two. It's about the guys still fighting, the guys who would never make it off that island."

Bradford thinks the story and movie's muted colors mirror the theme Eastwood and company sought, "a movie about Morality with a capital 'M,' and morality that's a little more relative. A lot of people try to make every story black and white, the selling of this war or that one, this man is a hero, that one isn't. This is a war movie that finds the gray in that."

Roger Moore can be reached at 407-420-5369 or rmoore@orlandosentinel.com.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-16-06, 01:59 PM
Flag of Our Fathers
Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford

Directed by: Clint Eastwood

Rolling Stone: 3.5 of 4 Stars

If you like movies that spew clichés, Clint Eastwood will not make your day. Since winning his first directing Oscar, for 1992’s Unforgiven, Eastwood has been on a creative roll with the unsparing Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby (Oscar number two). At seventy-six, he’s doing risky work while his contemporaries retire or, worse, conform. Even when the plot of his new Flags of Our Fathers steers him toward Saving Private Ryan rah-rah and “Greatest Generation” sentiment, Eastwood holds the line.

Flags of Our Fathers is a film of awesome power and blistering provocation. An amazing feat, since Eastwood is tied to the nonfiction best seller that James Bradley wrote about his father, John “Doc” Bradley, the last survivor among the six soldiers who raised the flag on Iwo Jima.

The bloody 1945 battle on Japan’s volcanic island left 6,800 Americans dead, but the public was rallied by a photo, taken by Joe Rosenthal, that became an iconic emblem of World War II: five Marines and one Navy corpsman (Bradley) planting Old Glory on top of Mount Suribachi in the midst of the carnage. It was the second flag-raising that day, but the only one caught on camera. Eastwood hits you hard with that image. As the soldiers struggle to get the flag aloft, you can almost hear cheering.

Actually, you do hear cheering. The scene, a shocker, is a re-creation of the photo staged for an enthusiastic crowd at Chicago’s Soldier Field in the spring of 1945 as part of a fund-raising drive. As the camera pulls back, we see that the mountain is fake. The only reality is the men in the uniform: Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach). Since the other flag-raisers (Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block and Michael Strank) died in battle, the government exploits the surviving trio to drum up money and bolster flagging support for the war in its final months. No longer asked to be heroes in battle but to play heroes Hollywood-style, the men embark on a nationwide tour. It’s pure showbiz. Hide the truth, pump the myth.

It nearly destroys them. Gagnon, 19, adjusts better to fame than the others, mistakenly believing that being a good propagandist will win him jobs after the war. Bradford (Happy Endings) deftly uncovers the doubt lurking under Gagnon’s surface charm. As Bradley, Phillippe (building on strong supporting turns in Crash, Gosford Park and Igby Goes Down) provides the quiet emotional center the story needs. Eastwood wants the reticent Bradley to be our eyes into the film. Phillippe draws us in with a nuanced portrait of a man who bravely administers first aid to soldiers under fire but can’t find words for the horror he’s seen, including the death of his friend Iggy (Jamie Bell). Phillippe’s hauntingly implosive performance makes it clear why Bradley hardly spoke of the war to his family in later years, prompting his son to write the book.

As Hayes, Beach (Windtalkers) burns up the screen, finding the soul of his tormented character. He’s a lock for a supporting-Oscar nomination. Hayes, a Pima Indian bruised by racism in and out of battle, numbed his pain with booze. He died in 1955, at thirty-two. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan both covered a song about him: “He died drunk one mornin'/Alone in the land he fought to save/Two inches of water in a lonely ditch/Was a grave for Ira Hayes.” Flags of Our Fathers needed to be a sprawling epic to take in all these stories. The ambitious script by William Broyles Jr. (Jarhead) and Crash Oscar winner Paul Haggis jumps back and forth in time in ways that could have been a jumble if Eastwood wasn’t so adept at cutting a path to what counts. That would be the ferocity of battle, edited by Joel Cox and shot in desaturated hues by Tom Stern to show what Eastwood sees as the brutal darkness of it. That would be the parallels to the Iraq War and the lies being perpetrated in the name of blind patriotism. That would be the honor due the soldiers who fight in the face of death on foreign shores and then face disdain at home.

Right at the start, before the first image, we hear a few bars of a 1940s song, “I’ll Walk Alone.” The voice is a whisper, but the lyrics (“If you call, I'll hear you/No matter how far”) resonate. Eastwood’s film, a fierce attack on wartime hypocrisy and profiteering, is also an indelibly moving salute to the soldiers who don’t deserve to walk alone for following their own sense of duty.

After Flags, Eastwood directed Letters From Iwo Jima, a feature that tells the story from the Japanese side. The film won’t be out till February, but one thing is for damn sure: Eastwood will do it his way. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the gold standard.

PETER TRAVERS

(Posted: Oct 16, 2006)

Ellie

thedrifter
10-17-06, 06:44 AM
Iwo Jima flag-raiser's widow to see film

By ROBERT IMRIE, Associated Press Writer

Elizabeth Bradley's husband was among the servicemen who helped hoist the American flag at Iwo Jima, but the couple rarely talked about the moment captured in one of the most famous of all military photographs.

"Our life did not revolve around the flag-raising after we were married," she said.

On Wednesday, the 82-year-old Bradley plans to join about 200 invited guests for a screening of "Flags of Our Fathers," the Clint Eastwood film based on the book of the same name co-authored by Bradley's son, Jim.

"From what I have heard from other authorities, it is going to turn out to be a wonderful movie," Elizabeth Bradley said in a telephone interview from her Wausau home. "I am not nervous. We did see Ryan Phillippe play in some scenes. I think he is doing a marvelous job."

Phillippe portrays John Bradley, a Navy Corpsman. The film documents the lives of Bradley and the five Marines who raised the flag atop Iwo Jima's highest peak on Feb. 23, 1945 — an historic moment captured by Joe Rosenthal, an Associated Press photographer, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning picture.

Bradley said her husband shared very little about the event after the war. Her son's book likely would never have been written had the family not discovered boxes of memorabilia after her husband's death, she said.

"That is what started my son's writing," she said. "If my husband was still living, we never would have found those boxes."

"Flags of Our Fathers" opens nationwide at theaters Friday. Its premiere was Oct. 9 in Los Angeles, and some reviewers are predicting another Oscar nomination for Eastwood. Wednesday's screening will be held in Antigo — 40 miles northeast of Wausau.

The film examines both the ghastly chaos of battle to life on the homefront in a story about both heroism and propaganda.

Bradley said she went to Chicago with some of her children for a day last October to watch some of the scenes being shot. She also met Eastwood.

"I have a lot of respect for him," she said.

Although her husband didn't want attention for being one of the flag-raisers, she would like people to see the film.

"I am very happy that the movie has been made," she said. "And I would like it if every young fella and girl could see it because when they think of joining up any branch of the service, they think of the uniform and of how smart they will look. And they think of the excitement of going to battle.

"But they don't really know what's ahead of them. But if they see movies like this, it might help them make a better decision. And maybe if nobody would go, we wouldn't have wars. That would be nice."

On the Net:

"Flags of Our Fathers": www.flagsofourfathers.com

Ellie

thedrifter
10-17-06, 04:01 PM
Movie Review: 'Flags of our Fathers'

By CHRISTY LEMIRE, AP Movie Critic

The battle scenes are harrowing in "Flags of Our Fathers," the black-sand beaches exploding again and again with artillery fire, filling the gray sky and forming an even darker vision of hell.

But it's what happens to the men after they've come home from Iwo Jima — and been hailed as heroes, whether they deserve it or not — that can be just as devastating in a more intimate, internal way.

With its awesome scope, "Flags" is by far the most ambitious picture Clint Eastwood has made in his 35 years as a director. Yet in following up his Oscar-winning "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby," he balances the quiet intensity of those films with sequences that are breathtaking in their epic proportions.

Comparisons to the virtuoso storming of Normandy at the opening of "Saving Private Ryan" are inevitable: same World War II, different theater, with "Ryan" director Steven Spielberg serving here as a producer. "Flags" is just as brutal and gritty, just as technically impressive, immersing you just as deeply into the action. But by jumping back and forth in time, and in and out of the battle itself, "Flags" features its own unique brand of chaos and confusion.

Working from a script by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, based on the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers, Eastwood follows the men featured in the iconic Associated Press flag-raising photograph and those who grapple with the guilt of being linked to that shot, even though they might not have been there.

This is a visceral war movie and a moving drama, raising themes that resonate today as Americans are fighting an unpopular war in Iraq. But it's also a complex mystery as the government, the worried mothers at homes across America, even the servicemen themselves try to figure out who planted the flag on that mountaintop and who didn't.

In the haze of battle, it's hard to tell. And that's the point. Broyles ("Jarhead") and Haggis (who also wrote "Million Dollar Baby" before directing and co-writing this year's best-picture winner, "Crash") keep us wondering the whole time. They alternate between the Japanese island and the handful of surviving Marines and a Navy corpsman, who go on tour once they return to the United States.

Superficially, the tour is intended as a celebration of courage, of national pride. In reality, it's also an effort to drum up support for the war, an extended infomercial for government bonds. Either way the tour events are pure propaganda, and they function as a crucible for the shaken, reluctant heroes.

Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach and Jesse Bradford lead the excellent ensemble cast of military men, with John Slattery among the standouts back home as the cynical Treasury Department official urging them to milk the inspirational worth of that photo for as long as they can.

Phillippe stars as John "Doc" Bradley, an earnest, steadfast Navy medic trying to maintain a grasp on who he is amid the hoopla. (Turns out it's Bradley's son, Jim, conducting the present-day interviews which are interspersed throughout the film, trying to solve the puzzle of who really appears in that picture.)

Beach plays Ira Hayes, a Native American and Marine who's managed to keep his alcoholism at bay during the war, but falls completely and irreparably off the wagon as he lurches from one city to the next, still rattled by what he's seen and done in Japan. Beach gets arguably the showiest role of all, and his anguish is palpable.

Then there's Bradford as pretty boy Marine Rene Gagnon, who not only doesn't mind the attention he's receiving back in the States, he thrives upon it — as does his girlfriend (Melanie Lynskey) who shamelessly inserts herself into the campaign. Bradford makes you want to dislike his character and root for his redemption at the same time, a difficult task.

Broyles and Haggis keep us off guard for much of the film, right alongside the characters, which does make "Flags" slightly difficult to get into at first, until you realize what they're doing with this structure. And the film drags on a bit at the end, the epilogues that trace the main characters' final paths winding on more than they should.

But consistently the film is, while not exactly patriotic, at least respectful. And even though it focuses on a battle and a war that took place some 60 years ago, it remains all too resonant and relevant today.

"Flags of Our Fathers," a Paramount Pictures release, is rated R for sequences of graphic war violence and carnage, and for language. Running time: 131 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.


Ellie

thedrifter
10-17-06, 04:05 PM
Print the Legend
Clint Eastwood's WWII drama strips away the myths surrounding the Greatest Generation

by Scott Foundas
October 17th, 2006 1:33 PM

A single photograph, we're told early on in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, can win or lose a war. But sometimes that photo shows us only part of the story, whether it's the part we don't want to see—slaughtered villagers at My Lai, tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib—or the part we do, with heroes front and center and the carnage out of view.

In Flags, the image under scrutiny is one of the most iconic in American photojournalism: five U.S. Marines and one Navy corpsman planting Old Glory atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima during the fifth day of the 35-day battle. That picture, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, helped rally American support for the war, won a Pulitzer for its photographer (Joe Rosenthal), and made overnight celebrities out of its subjects. But the soldiers didn't feel like heroes, and with good reason.

Based on the bestselling book by James Bradley, whose father, John "Doc" Bradley, was the Navy corpsman in Rosenthal's photo, Flags of Our Fathers is about the three flag raisers who survived Iwo Jima—Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), the dashing and mildly pompous Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and the proud Pima Indian Ira Hayes (Adam Beach)—and how their moment in the spotlight irrevocably altered their lives. For these men were not the first to fly the Stars and Stripes, but rather a secondary team, assembled after the smaller flag erected earlier by a different group was claimed as a souvenir by a naval officer. It was this second flag, though, that was seen around the world, its raisers plucked from duty and ferried hither and yon by wily politicians who saw the makings of an inspired PR campaign. It was not the first—or last—time that perception trumped reality in the selling of wars to the American public.

According to the press notes, in his later years John Bradley was plagued by hallucinations and night terrors, and Eastwood's movie unfolds as if it were one of them, flashing back and forth between the charcoal sands of Iwo Jima and the clinking banquet rooms where the flag raisers shill for the war bond effort before patriotic well-wishers. Executed in stark widescreen compositions all but drained of color, the battle scenes are as visceral as anything in
Saving Private Ryan—no small feat given that Eastwood is 76 this year and has never before directed a film of this physical scale. The landing on Iwo Jima is a master class in controlled chaos, as bullets stream out of camouflaged pillboxes and mortar fire turns bodies into sizzling piles of flesh and bone. But the most surreal, unsettling images come later, when the three heroes are pressed into re-enacting their storied feat as a vaudeville spectacle before a cheering crowd, and when, at a celebratory dinner, they see their huddled likenesses transformed into an ice cream sculpture.

To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western—a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains. But what Eastwood really does is call into question an entire way of reading history, by which the vast and incomprehensible are reduced to digestible symbols and meanings. In war—Eastwood offers us a timely reminder—who is just and unjust depends on where you're watching from. And to further the point, his next movie, Letters From Iwo Jima, tells the story from the perspective of the Japanese.

With Flags, Eastwood has made one of his best films—a searching, morally complex deconstruction of the Greatest Generation that is nevertheless rich in the sensitivity to human frailty that has become his signature as a filmmaker. You feel this most in the characterization of Hayes, whose postwar descent into alcoholism and near madness has been told before, in song ("The Ballad of Ira Hayes") and on-screen (1961's The Outsider), but never with such haunted intensity. Beach's agonizing portrait is made all the more poignant by the film's revelation that Hayes, like the other men who raised the second flag, did show extraordinary bravery on the battlefield, just not in the way for which he was remembered. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but for men like John Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, there were thousands more that went unspoken.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-18-06, 07:17 AM
Obsessed with the battle
At 15, Eastwood was riveted by the photo of Marines raising the U.S. flag
- John Stanley, Special to The Chronicle
Wednesday, October 18, 2006

In order to co-produce and direct the epic war movie "Flags of Our Fathers," which opens Friday, Clint Eastwood first had to be nominated for an Academy Award. The actor-filmmaker had contacted DreamWorks when he learned that the company had bought the movie rights to James Bradley's 2000 best-seller about the Marines who raised the U.S. flag during the battle of Iwo Jima. "It was a book I couldn't put down," recalls Eastwood, "and I knew from the first page it was something I wanted to make." But "I never heard a single word back, so I went about my business."

"Business" was directing "Mystic River," the 2003 crime drama for which Eastwood was nominated for an Oscar. Although he didn't win (his stars Sean Penn and Tim Robbins did), Eastwood came out a victor that night because backstage he bumped into DreamWorks' Steven Spielberg, who invited him to direct "Flags of Our Fathers." "We'll produce together," he told Eastwood, "but it'll be your baby. You'll run with it." Eastwood remembers "we shook hands and had a deal."

At the time Eastwood was working with screenwriter Paul Haggis on "Million Dollar Baby," a film that would bring him an Oscar in 2005 for best direction (and win three others).

"I liked Paul's writing very much, and although he felt he had only an 11 percent chance of turning such a complex book into a movie, we both became fascinated with it." There was the epic military scope of "the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history," but they also were engrossed in the personal story "of the men who raised a flag -- even though you couldn't even see their faces -- and were turned into celebrities and heroes."

The three survivors of the six "became symbols of America's determination to win the war in the Pacific. They were sent out on the 7th War Bond drive in mid-1945 but didn't consider themselves heroes, or wanted to be looked on as heroes. To them the real heroes were the Marines who never left the island alive. They just wanted to be back with their units."

The price that survivors of war pay was just as relevant: "What happened to those men after the war, their personal problems, how they were haunted by the deaths of their buddies" also consumed Eastwood and Haggis.

What came to obsess Eastwood the director was the "look" of the battle, fought in February and March 1945. Taking that small volcanic island in the Pacific had cost the United States almost 7,000 lives. His main concern was re-creating the ferocity and chaos of the invasion on Feb. 19, 1945, when the Marines hit the beaches and were suddenly caught in a deadly crossfire, much of it coming from the heights of an extinct volcano, Mount Suribachi.

He studied movie footage and photographs and tried to bring these visual elements into his own depictions. Eastwood also talked to veterans, including Maj. Gen. Fred E. Haynes, who had landed on Green Beach at the foot of Suribachi. He found four vets in Monterey County as well as a medic named Danny Thomas, who told him of a recurring nightmare that became dramatically incorporated into the film. "We couldn't stage the major battle on Iwo itself," Eastwood explained, "because the island is sacred to the Japanese. Of the original garrison of 22,000 Japanese soldiers, 12,000 are still unaccounted for, buried away in the tunnel systems beneath the island. So we filmed in Iceland. It's a geothermal island like Iwo and has long stretches of terraced beaches made up of black sand. We built an army of about 900 men -- Americans, British, Icelanders. It took about five weeks to get all the combat sequences."

Although some of it might look like documentary footage, Eastwood insists that everything was re-created. "It was impossible to put together an armada of 880 ships," he admitted, so computer-generated imagery was needed. He also needed CGI to create a burning B-29 as it makes an emergency landing on Iwo, a jarring reminder that an estimated 10,000 of our airmen were saved once Iwo was in American hands.

The flag raising, during which Joe Rosenthal snapped a picture atop Suribachi that a few days later would grip the nation with its symbolism of victory and win the Associated Press photographer a Pulitzer Prize, also had to be a key sequence in the film.

"I wanted to tell the whole historic incident in detail. About how a special unit worked its way up to the volcano crater to place a small flag, and how that flag inspired the Marines down below. And then, step by step, how a larger flag was ordered to be raised. That famous picture was taken spontaneously, in the middle of a battle. No one knew what it would lead to or what it would mean to America."

Eastwood's obsession with Iwo Jima became so great, he decided to shoot footage for another film simultaneously with "Flags." Originally called "Red Sun, Black Sand," but now retitled "Letters From Iwo Jima," it portrays the Japanese point of view and how a determined army under the command of Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) defended the island from within a concealed system of caves and tunnels that forced the Marines to root them out a position at a time. It opens in Japan in December and in America in February.

Eastwood insists that while "Flags" is a statement against war and its lasting effects on those who fight it, and "I have in no way glamorized war," he realizes it's difficult to watch his film without thinking about America's current place in the world and the war in Iraq.

"We've become a softer country, a different society from the America of 1945, when we were solidly united. Those were hardworking kids who came out of the Depression to fight for their country without question. I have to ask: Would we have the resolve to fight a major war like that today? This current war on terror is about religious differences, and those have never been resolved at the bargaining table. Now we've been attacked from within and we're going to have to learn how to deal with the threat."

Eastwood did film on Iwo Jima and found it profoundly moving. "I hiked up and down the initial beachhead. I thought about what it had to be like to carry a hundred-pound pack and rifle. And run through the sand dunes with that volcano looming over you. Everyone shooting at you. There is a humbling sense that comes over you."

Eastwood, who prefers not to do many interviews these days, did accept this one as a way of honoring the memory of Joe Rosenthal and his 35 years as a staff photographer for The Chronicle. "I was 15, living in Oakland, when I first saw Joe's picture in the paper. My parents gave me a book for stamps and I filled it and then turned it in for a war bond. To this day I've never forgotten how that experience, and the photo, made me feel."

Ellie

thedrifter
10-18-06, 08:28 AM
Curiously Timely Flags Is
Ego-Lite, Except for Eastwood

By: Andrew Sarris
Date: 10/23/2006
Page: 16

Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, from the screenplay by William Broyles Jr. with Paul Haggis, seems to have captured the spirit of our time with its mixture of cynicism and idealism, irony and conviction, satiric skepticism and red-blooded patriotism. In the end, it leaves newspaper reporters—the media mavens of their time—unsure and suspicious about what really happened at the top of Mount Suribachi on the blood-drenched island of Iwo Jima on Feb. 23, 1945, when Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took the picture of five Marines and one Navy Corpsman raising the U.S. flag after one of the fiercest engagements of World War II.

At the time, I was in high school, just below draft age at 16. It was around then (or later) I heard that the official footage of the battle, which had raged for over a month, had been kept from the nation’s movie-newsreel outlets because of the depressing effect it would’ve had on the civilian population’s morale. (Censorship was tighter then than it is now, even under President George W. Bush—and no one complained.) The battle scenes reproduced in Flags of Our Fathers were shot in Iceland, and I have no way of comparing them to the real thing, since, to my knowledge, the official footage has never been released. Over the course of that single battle, 6,821 Americans were killed and 20,000 were wounded. The island’s Japanese garrison suffered even heavier losses: Out of 22,000 defenders, there were only 1,083 survivors. And the nuclear horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still to come.

Of the six heroes of the world-famous, endlessly recycled photograph entitled “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima,” three died in subsequent combat on the island. The three survivors were paraded before huge crowds for a short time as war-bond-selling patriots, after which they returned to obscurity and varying degrees of disenchantment.

This is essentially the curiously timely story of Flags of Our Fathers. Enough of the film, of course, concerns itself with the warfare on Iwo Jima to qualify it as a contemporary “war is hell” statement. And Mr. Eastwood and his many collaborators have told it with enough crisp authority to make it a strong candidate for this year’s Oscars, though not for the acting from an ego-lite ensemble—except possibly for Adam Beach’s strikingly aggrieved incarnation of the ill-fated Native American soldier, Ira Hayes, already the subject of a creditable Tony Curtis vehicle, Delbert Mann’s The Outsider (1961).

As it happens, the scenes in which Hayes is the victim of racial prejudice in the midst of his bond drive are doubly ironic in view of the rigid segregation of the U.S. Armed Forces during the war (which may explain the total absence of African-American faces among the U.S. Marines in the film, though there were black Marine units that fought at Iwo Jima). Ultimately, it was Harry Truman, not F.D.R., who desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces, during the Korean War. Truman is presented warmly and sympathetically here at an audience with Hayes and his fellow flag-raisers.

The production notes trace the genesis of the project through its high-powered sponsors: “Eastwood was initially attracted to the project after reading the best-selling book, Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley with Ron Powers. Bradley is the son of John Bradley, the Navy Corpsman in the photograph.

“Bradley was inspired to write the book after his father’s death; realizing that he knew only that his father had been a flag-raiser and nothing else, he began interviewing the families of the other flag-raisers. ‘I never set out to write a book—I set out to find out why my dad was silent,’ says Bradley. ‘I decided to write a book when I realized that everyone knows the photo but nobody knows the story.’ His goal was to break down the hero myths about the men in the picture: According to Bradley, because of the way the photo is shot, with every man’s face obscured, it is easy to think of the subjects of the picture as supermen; instead, of course, they’re everyday people. ‘To me, the beauty of the photo is that they are us—six ordinary Americans doing their duty.’”

I’m sorry, but what the photo and the film tell me is that the six initially anonymous fighting men have been frozen, by an artist’s accidental improvisation, into a timeless tableau of heroism, patriotism and self-sacrifice. It is not “us” up there in the photo; it is, as always, a select few who are chosen to transcend their own “us-ness” so that the rest of us can live in peace and comfort. This is truer today than it was back in 1945, when a larger percentage of us were physically and emotionally involved in a major war on five continents. The memory of Pearl Harbor may have been a greater inspiration than the memory of 9/11, but if Flags of Our Fathers has any contemporary kick at all, it is because Mr. Eastwood, Mr. Broyles Jr. and Mr. Haggis, as well as the late production designer Henry Bumstead, the late casting director, Phyllis Huffman and many others, have managed to make most of us see ourselves not in the six men who raised the flag, but in the throngs of cheering noncombatants and well-heeled well-wishers—all with very short memories.

The film has been dedicated to the memory of Huffman, Bumstead and Rosenthal, the man who took the famous picture. Unfortunately, there is no Mount Suribachi in Iraq to inspire us anew. For the record, the six flag-raisers are played by Ryan Phillippe as Navy Corpsman Bradley, Jesse Bradford as Rene Gagnon, Adam Beach as the aforementioned Ira Hayes, Barry Pepper as Michael Strank, Benjamin Walker as Harlon Block, and Joseph Cross as Franklin Sousley. (I have much more to say about Mr. Cross in my review of Ryan Murphy’s Running with Scissors, below.)

All in all, Mr. Eastwood’s skillful direction of Flags of Our Fathers makes it such a model of grace and lucidity that the only mystery arising from it is why the film has been slapped with an R rating.

Cut to the Quick

Ryan Murphy’s Running with Scissors, from his own screenplay, based on the personal memoir of Augusten Burroughs, struck me as one of the funniest movies I have seen this year—though that may just be me. I have a weakness for crazy people just this side of homicide and suicide, but I have also encountered otherwise reasonable people who fervently hate this movie. So the reader is duly forewarned.

I hadn’t read Mr. Burroughs’ memoir (or even the film’s production notes) when I saw Running with Scissors at the critics’ screening. Afterward, I looked everywhere to find the name of the child actor who played the 6-year-old Augusten, who seems to hang on every word spoken by his delusional mother, Deirdre (Annette Bening), an unpublished confessional poet with fantasies of selling out Carnegie Hall with her readings. The production notes asked me to believe that Joseph Cross—the same actor who played one of the six soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers, and who plays Augusten through his teenage years in Running with Scissors—also played the 6-year-old Augusten. Then I started thinking that I never saw the child Augusten in the same frame as his mother whenever they had a scene together, and that he was always sitting down. Moreover, I doubt there is a child actor alive with features identical to Mr. Cross’ (who is reportedly a student in real life at Trinity College).

In any event, the movie starts in 1971, when people were recovering from the let-it-all-hang-out 60’s with all sorts of primal-scream therapies to repair the psychic damage. Deirdre, a terminal case of psychic damage, is perpetually arguing with her heavy-drinking husband Norman (Alec Baldwin), a math professor. For his part, Norman never even pretends to understand Augusten because he is so much like his loony mother.

Before giving up on her marriage completely, Deirdre insists that Norman accompany her to a joint consultation with her new shrink, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), a wildly unconventional and peculiarly passive-aggressive therapist. The two men take an immediate dislike to each other, which makes the session a madhouse, like something out of the comic strip The Lockhorns. This effectively terminates the marriage—which doesn’t bother Augusten very much, since he never communicates with his father. What does bother him enormously, however, is Deirdre’s growing dependence on Dr. Finch, whom he distrusts. Matters come to a head when Dr. Finch persuades Deirdre to leave Augusten in his care while she moves to a motel where she can recuperate from her attacks of paranoia with a steady dosage of Valium.

Augusten quickly realizes that Dr. Finch’s home—to which Deirdre has thoughtlessly consigned him—is a veritable shambles of damaged psyches belonging to the rest of the Finch family: badgered, dog-food-eating Mrs. Finch (Jill Clayburgh); her “Bible-dipping,” humorless daughter, Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow); her “disco-rebel” daughter, Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood); and Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes), Dr. Finch’s manic-depressive 35-year-old “adopted” son, who lives out his tortured existence in a shed in back of the house.

Augusten immediately bonds with Natalie, in whom he confides with teen-age bravado that he is gay, without understanding the implications of what he says. When he repeats the same casual boast as if it were a mantra to the all-too-understanding Neil, Augusten is immediately seduced in a shockingly carnal fashion. Along the way, Dr. Finch is repeatedly exposed as a cheat, a fraud and a swindler without ever losing any of his aplomb.

I know already that many viewers and reviewers will be disturbed by the film’s lack of moral accountability on any level; yet the glorious multiple charismas of a dream cast have completely won me over to the skewed vision projected by Mr. Murphy. For starters, the magical versatility of Ms. Bening in the role of one of the worst mothers imaginable stirred me immensely, even though her character never knows a moment of moral indignation except as it concerns her egocentric delusions. She is brilliantly supported (though that may not be the right word for it) by the rest of the cast: Mr. Cross, Mr. Cox, Mr. Fiennes, Mr. Baldwin, Ms. Clayburgh, Ms. Paltrow and Ms. Wood.

One of the funniest lines in the film takes as its premise Dr. Finch’s casual reference to his “masturbatorium,” the room next to his office to which he repairs for relaxation after—or even during—a tedious session with a patient. One can say, after Running with Scissors, that now one has heard almost everything.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-19-06, 08:02 AM
Posted on Thu, Oct. 19, 2006
Former Marines gather in Macon to recall Iwo Jima

By Matt Barnwell
TELEGRAPH STAFF WRITER

The U.S. Marine Corps tattoos inked into the forearms of some of the dozen men reminiscing Wednesday in a Macon hotel are reminders of their past, when they were young, when they made their mark in history.

Now the men, most of them octogenarians, wear thick glasses, have hunched-over postures or use walking canes to get around.

Just more than 60 years ago, these same men were among the Marines who stormed the southern tip of a tiny Pacific island halfway between Tokyo and Saipan.

These are the men of Iwo Jima.

"When that flag went up, it was like the Fourth of July," said Danny Thomas, who was at the base of Mount Suribachi when the American flag was raised above the island's highest peak. "You never heard such racket and whistles and horns blowing."

The image Thomas recalls was captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, and the story behind the flag raising is told in the film "Flags of our Fathers," which opens Friday.

Thomas and a handful of the remaining members of Charlie Company, of the 28th Marine Regiment, came to Macon's Crowne Plaza this week for a three-day reunion. The company, whose members come from across the country, has been reuniting in different cities each year since 1985.

The men gather to commemorate a late February morning in 1945, when 30,000 Marines flooded the beach of Iwo Jima, launching an attack that was supposed to last only three days. Charlie Company was among the first wave.

Iwo Jima, part of a chain of three volcanic islands, had become a central staging area for Japanese attacks on U.S. bombers. But in American hands, it would provide a base for fighter planes and an emergency landing field for B-29s returning from long-distance bombing raids.

In their youth, while World War II raged, the company's 250 men were refined into well-trained warriors at Camp Pendleton in California and then later while stationed in Hawaii. The veterans at the reunion all volunteered to serve in the Corps.

Still, they recalled, as they approached the precipice of invasion, the fear was difficult to control.

"They gave each one of us a shot of brandy - and they didn't ask how old we were either," said Thomas, who enlisted when he was 15. He graduated high school at 19 - after his military service.

Going into the battle, "the intelligence was terrible," Thomas said. Nobody knew that Japanese bunkers were connected to an underground network of tunnels wide enough for railroad cars.

Added Chick Davis: "There is not a man in here that was as scared as I was."

On the third day of fighting, the regiment wrote its way into the American story. Word was passed to Charlie Company Marines to hold their fire. From the base of Mount Suribachi, they watched as members of their sister company scaled the island's largest peak.

They reached the top, and hoisted the red, white and blue.

The flag was actually raised twice - the first time commanders deemed it too small to be seen easily from the beach. On the second try, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the iconic moment when six Marines planted the flag into Iwo Jima's ashy soil.

Three died before the battle was over.

The picture instantly became a symbol of patriotism to war-weary American citizens, and at the end of the battle, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the three surviving men home to accompany the picture on a nationwide tour to raise war bonds.

The human cost of taking Iwo Jima was immense. When the Marines arrived, nearly 20,000 Japanese were firmly entrenched. An operation that was scheduled to last a few days stretched longer than a month. Most of Charlie Company suffered casualties, and more than 6,000 Marines were killed. All but three attending the Macon reunion had been wounded in that battle.

Among those was Tony DeWendt. A runner for the company's lieutenant, he topped a ridge early in the battle and unexpectedly came face-to-face with the enemy.

"They shot my rifle out of one hand, my radio out of the other one," he said. "My total combat career lasted almost 30 minutes."

At another point during the fighting, Davis took a load of shrapnel to the face. It took three days to be taken from the middle of the island to the beach, and another three days to reach the hospital ship. When he finally got there, he recalled, the doctor looked at him and said "Ain't no use fooling with him - he's gonna die."

Another one of the injured, Al Eutsey, offered this assessment: "When you got wounded there, you were lucky. That was a ticket off the island."

Not all of the injured fared so well. Some Marines died from wounds that were not immediately life threatening, but later became infected and gangrenous. Medics where overwhelmed by mounting casualties, and simply could not attend to everyone fast enough.

"It was just a fiasco," said Vic McAtee.

Few recalled the fate of Japanese prisoners of war. More than 18,000 died, and more than 200 were captured.

"I didn't take any," McAtee said. "If they didn't stop running at me - and I gave 'em the sign - it was too late."

Iwo Jima ended as the only major battle of the war where Marines took on more casualties - 26,000 - than their enemy. But its capture allowed 2,000 bombers to land there during the next five months as they struck targets in Japan.

"The heroes did not leave that island," said Charlie Company member A.J. Shelley. "The heroes were left in the cemeteries."

To contact Matt Barnwell, call 744-4251, or e-mail mbarnwell@macontel.com.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-19-06, 04:11 PM
Flying the flag for the reality of war
BY JAN STUART
Newsday Staff Writer

October 20, 2006

On Feb. 23, 1945, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped a war shot that would become an icon for American valor: five Marines and a Navy corpsman hoisting a heavy Japanese water pipe bearing the Stars and Stripes. Most of those who read the moment as a signal of victory, however, were indulging in a bit of collective wishful thinking.

The famous flag-lift occurred on only the fifth day of a fierce and protracted 30-day campaign for the sulfurous island of Iwo Jima. Within days of being immortalized by Rosenthal, three of the six soldiers were dead. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning image served to stem the rising cynicism in a U.S. bankrupted and weary from war. "Looking at it," says a witness in "Flags of Our Fathers," "you could believe the sacrifice wasn't a waste."

Any links one might infer between the needs of a nation limping toward the end of World War II and the anxieties of America deep in the soup with Iraq are purely intentional. As documentary filmmakers expose the chaos in Iraq with unflinching vigor, Clint Eastwood has chosen to address the miasma obliquely, not to say extravagantly, with an epic deconstruction of a symbol.

Adapted by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis from James Bradley's No. 1 bestseller, "Flags of Our Fathers" examines the fates of those six American idols, in particular the three survivors: Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Bradley's father Doc (Ryan Phillipe).

Still reeling from the trauma of Iwo Jima, Hayes, Gagnon and Bradley are pressed into service as public relations stooges for a war bonds tour. Reluctant to assume the heroic mantle foisted upon them by a military bureaucracy that knows a cash cow when it sees it, the trio stifles their embarrassment as they ascend paper mache Mount Suribachi's before adoring stadium crowds.

The tour takes its greatest toll on Hayes, an American Indian whose remorse for his fallen buddies is compounded by the racism he encounters at every turn. Eastwood and his scriptwriters err on the side of overselling Hayes' victimization at the expense of giving him multifaceted personal shadings, a flaw that reflects the lack of dimension in Gagnon and Bradley as well. Despite intensely felt performances, the men remain almost as faceless as film characters as they do photographic subjects.

The movie's overemphatic tendencies point up what has often seemed like a disconnect between Eastwood's minimalist acting style and the belabored, more-is-more bent of his directing: As a storyteller, Eastwood has rarely seen a period that he couldn't transform into an ellipsis or exclamation mark.

That propensity serves him well in the justifiably expansive staging of Iwo Jima, which rivals the Omaha Beach sequence in "Saving Private Ryan" (Steven Spielberg is a producer on "Flags") in communicating the incommunicable savagery of the battlefield. It betrays him in the film's sentimental windup, which attempts to heal a battered audience with one of those nick-of-time family reconciliation scenes that could only happen like that in the movies.

As with Eastwood's "Unforgiven," a revisionist Western that rebuked our hunger for violence and fed it at the same time, "Flags of Our Fathers" allows everyone to eat his cake and have it, too. It's not anti-war so much as anti-idolatry, a philosophical position that plays to both "stay-the-course" and "cut-and-run" camps without depriving war-movie lovers. When it comes to the art of compromise, Washington has nothing on Hollywood.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-19-06, 04:33 PM
Capturing the flag
It's a meeting of American icons as director and quintessential U.S. hero Clint Eastwood turns his lens to the myths and the men behind the raising of Old Glory on Iwo Jima

Bob Thompson
National Post

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Clint Eastwood has nothing left to prove as a filmmaker, but a great deal to show for himself.

His first few examples of his new approach, 2003's Mystic River and 2004's Million Dollar Baby, received Oscar nods and decent box-office returns despite their bare-bones styles. Flags of Our Fathers is the third in the series, and it may be the most controversial.

Opening on Friday, the film profiles the events surrounding five U.S. Marines and one Navy corpsman who are immortalized in a Pulitzer Prize-winning Second World War picture of the American flag being raised during the bloody 35-day battle for the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima.

Based on a best-selling book by the son of Navy corpsman James Bradley, the Eastwood version re-creates the author's modern-day quest to find the truth, along with the nasty Iwo Jima fighting and intermittent sequences of the three flag-raising survivors travelling stateside promoting a bond drive for the U.S. war effort.

While the ensemble includes Ryan Phillippe as the Navy corpsman, not to mention Jesse Bradford, Jamie Bell and Joseph Cross as three of the Marines, Vancouver's Barry Pepper has a pivotal part as a tough sergeant. Ottawa's Adam Beach, a Native Canadian, plays the key role of Marine Ira Hayes, a Native American who eventually succumbs to alcohol after being exploited as one of the flag-raising heroes.

Beach's Hayes is the emotional core of the film, serving to demythologize the events on the fundraising home tour and at the Iwo Jima front, where 7,000 U. S. Marines died and 20,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors lost their lives .

"The deconstruction of the hero?" says the 76-year-old director. "Yeah, that's very important in this movie."

Don't get Eastwood wrong. He's not belittling the battle or the men who fought there as the American forces pushed their way toward Japan. "It was the biggest Marine Corps invasion in history," he says. "But what intrigued me about it was the book and the fact that it wasn't really a war story, but a study of these people."

They were the reluctant ones, who were emotionally and physically scarred by war and unwilling or unable to verbalize it.

"I've talked to many vets, and the ones who were on the front lines are the quietest about their activities," says Eastwood, who was 15 at the time of Iwo Jima and never fought in a war. "It's a sure thing if you hear someone's braggadocio about their experiences in combat that they were probably a clerk typist in the rear echelon."

Besides, the filmmaker wasn't interested in making another war movie, anti- or otherwise. He had already acted in three -- Kelly's Heroes, Where Eagles Dare and Heartbreak Ridge. That said, he still needed to find battlefields to film, a challenge as the black-sand beaches of Iwo Jima were off limits.

"We looked all over the world, but especially next to The Four Seasons in Hawaii," he says smiling. Instead he eventually chose Iceland, which has the required beaches and a necessary starkness.

It was during that part of the shoot that the crew of young actors marvelled at Eastwood's strength, stamina and one-take artistry.

"He is a director like he's an actor: lean and minimalist," says Pepper. "First take is the take, so you have to be ready. I remember I had a pattern to run by explosions with machine-gun fire zippering down the field, and I said to him, 'Just to be clear ...' And he said, 'We've come this far, let's not ruin it by thinking.' "

And while their are graphic moments of violence, even Eastwood acknowledges he balances that with comments on the futility of war, a definite shift away from his 1970s Dirty Harry action persona.

"I just kind of go along with it as I've matured, which is essentially a way of saying ageing," Eastwood suggests. "But as I got to this stage in my life, I felt that it might be time to address things that are closer to me than the fantasy characters I've been involved with."

To that end, Eastwood is currently putting together Letters From Iwo Jima, set for release in February. It's a film account of the battle from the Japanese perspective, specifically the Iwo Jima commander, Lieutenant General Kuribayashi. Why do that? It seemed like the right thing.

After all, instinct led Eastwood to Flags Of Our Fathers in the first place. He did Mystic River and was ready to take some time off. "Then Million Dollar Baby came around and I thought, 'Ah, I have to do that,' " he recalls.

Then Steven Spielberg, who then owned the Flags Of Our Fathers film rights, spoke with Eastwood.

"He said 'Why don't you come over and direct this film?' " Eastwood says. "So I shook hands and said, 'Yes. I'll do that, too.' "

Lucky guy. After 50 years and more than 40 films, Eastwood couldn't agree more.

"I've been lucky enough to work in a profession I enjoy," he agrees. "I still enjoy it -- obviously so because I'm still doing it. And I don't seem to have any ambitions about retiring. Maybe I'll just wait until they retire me."bthompson@nationalpost.com

Ellie

thedrifter
10-20-06, 05:43 AM
Review: C-
Eastwood's 'Flags' doesn't measure up
By Michael Sragow
Sun Movie Critic
Originally published October 20, 2006
Flags of Our Fathers purports to tell the story of Marines raising Old Glory on Iwo Jima and the iconic photo that was snapped of the event during the battle to take the island during World War II. The film has all the coherence and lucidity of a fragmentation bomb.

Attempting to replicate the war-is-hell but soldiers-are-honorable mode of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg is one of the producers), it spews out cliches about the ambiguous nature of heroism - failed cliches, at that - and they fatally wound any authentic character or artistic notion that it has. Using a time-hopping technique that kills any momentum to the taking of the island, the movie mostly focuses on three men. The three survivors from the photo - Navy medical corpsman Doc Bradley (Ryan Philippe), "runner" Joe Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a Pima Indian - go on a war-bond tour to raise morale as well as money as the war in the Pacific drags on. Two of the leads have little to do except embody modest virtue (Philippe's Bradley) and would-be opportunism (Bradford's Gagnon), while Beach's Ira Hayes at least gets to face down U.S. racism as he blubbers and drinks his way to tragedy. What they share is a sense that the truest heroes in war are the men who die in action - the men they left behind.

The movie is meant to show how the propaganda bazooka tore these three up inside almost as much as their war experience. Director Clint Eastwood and his screenwriters, William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis (who directed and co-wrote Crash and wrote Million Dollar Baby), say war is hard and real, selling it is hard and unreal. They hammer home the ironies of having the men perform the mounting of the flag on a football field and eat themselves as part of an ice-cream mold at a fundraiser.

The filmmakers are incredibly pompous about their "revelations." They make a big deal about two flags being raised on Mount Suribachi; when the first was lowered for safekeeping, photographer Joe Rosenthal took his historic photo of the second flag raising. Pop culture alert: That was never a secret. Even the specious 1949 smash, Sands of Iwo Jima, which won John Wayne an Oscar nomination, acknowledged in its opening credits that there was a previous flag.

Flags of Our Fathers makes an even bigger deal about the misidentification of the soldiers in the photograph. That would mean more to an audience if you could identify more people when they're not raising the flag. In this movie, you get to know too many good men only at the point of death. "Hey, Harlan!" Bang! Long close-up of Harlan's body. Oh, that was him.

Meanwhile, as if the film weren't already out of Eastwood's directorial control (or, worse yet, in it), there's a third strand of action involving Bradley's son, James (Tom McCarthy), interviewing witnesses to his father's wartime experiences. For all his ersatz realism and toughness, Eastwood uses this ploy to invoke the nostalgia for "the Greatest Generation" that permeated pre-Sept. 11 culture - and may now come back stronger than ever in the wake of disillusionment over the war in Iraq. Sure, Eastwood ups the ante with shots of carnage such as the remains of Japanese soldiers who've blown themselves up with grenades. But that makes our fighting men seem only more valorous.

Doubtless dozens of dime-store movie-critic philosophers are leaping at the chance to use their favorite quote from John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to proclaim Eastwood's supposed brilliance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." But Flags of Our Fathers fails as fact or legend. It's woefully incompetent as narrative moviemaking. "If you can get a picture, the right picture, you can win a war," says a retired captain. Having already gotten a 21-gun salute from the newsweeklies and the trade papers, Flags of Our Fathers shows that if a revered director can get a subject, the right subject, he can win rave reviews without earning them.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

Ellie

thedrifter
10-20-06, 05:46 AM
Hero worship <br />
<br />
By JEFFREY WESTHOFF - sidetracks@nwnewsgroup.com <br />
<br />
On Feb. 23, 1945, five Marines and one sailor planted a makeshift flagpole atop Mount Surabachi on the tiny isle of Iwo Jima. <br />
...

thedrifter
10-20-06, 05:51 AM
Separating heroes from the hype

'Flags' explores myths of war

By Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News
October 20, 2006

Photographs don't get much more famous than the one in which five Marines and a Navy corpsman raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi during the battle for Iwo Jima. The photograph still stands as a defining image of World War II in the Pacific.

And, yes, it was a re-creation of an earlier moment. Photographer Joe Rosenthal took the picture shortly after the real event happened and the first flag had been removed from the scene.

In Flags of Our Fathers, a movie about the war and the propaganda that was generated to finance it, Clint Eastwood has taken an often-acute and ultimately moving look at what has been dubbed "the greatest generation." Eastwood pays his respects to those who fought in World War II by refusing to apply the lacquer of heroism to their stories.

At 76, Eastwood continues to turn his back on his early image as one of the screen's meanest butt-kickers. With Steven Spielberg as co-producer, Eastwood uses Flags of Our Fathers to explore the mythology of war. Although it may disappoint some moviegoers, Eastwood seems to be saying heroism is manufactured by propagandists for their purposes, while courage under fire is something mysteriously real and generally understood only by those in the horrifying thick of things.

In essence, Eastwood fuses two movies. The first involves a graphic, harrowing depiction of the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima, which was fierce, bloody and terrifying. American deaths numbered 6,891. More than 20,000 Japanese soldiers were killed.

The second of Eastwood's stories expands on the first, showing how the battle was exploited (through use of the photograph) to sell war bonds. Eastwood doesn't seem to think that this was entirely wrong, only that we need to honor the reality of the lives of the men who fought, not the iconography that has built up around them.

Basing his script on a book by James Bradley, the son of Navy Corpsman John Bradley, one of the people in the famous photo, Eastwood takes us on tour. Three of the photo's flag-raisers are shuttled around the country as part of an effort to spur war-bond sales.

To tell this story, Eastwood employs a youthful cast that doesn't boast big names. Ryan Phillippe plays Doc Bradley, one of the flag-raisers. He's joined by Marines Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), an American Indian who was overcome by guilt and alcoholism during a tour that both honored and used these men.

Ironies abound, particularly in the way that Hayes was patronized and insulted. His guilt had something to do with the fact that the PR show took place while the 35-day battle for Iwo Jima still raged and his comrades were dying.

The script by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis doesn't entirely solve the structural problems involved in switching perspectives from the battlefield to the home front. Structural problems are further complicated by the fact that Doc Bradley's grown son (Tom McCarthy) is occasionally seen interviewing people who knew his dad, small scenes that take place long after the war has ended.

To re-create the period, Eastwood has had to use some computer-generated images that have a slightly unreal look, but the battle sequences certainly drive home the horrors of war. The stark brutality of these images sometimes makes it difficult to tell the characters apart. That seems right because a major part of the Iwo Jima story involves chaotic slaughter. About 2,000 Americans died on the first day of the assault alone.

I've never thought of Eastwood as a social satirist, but he does capture the frenzy that swirled around the flag-raising image. He creates a particularly keen sense of absurdity at a massive event at Chicago's Soldier's Field; the men are asked to storm a mock Mount Suribachi.

So what's at the heart of war? Fear, devotion to buddies, more fear and killing that will forever haunt the sleep of those who must do it.

If the film occasionally falters, Eastwood ultimately brings us to a point of stillness, reflection and sorrow. During the movie's final credits, he shows us photographs of the real men who fought, of real battle scenes and of the real propaganda effort at home. But it's the faces of the Marines on Iwo Jima that stayed with me.

After Eastwood's movie, they no longer looked quite so jaunty. They looked like what they were, young men in a deadly situation from which far too many never returned.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-20-06, 05:57 AM
Jesse Bradford: The kid stays in the picture
Actor Jesse Bradford hopes that 'Flags of Our Fathers' sets the record straight on a misunderstood Iwo Jima flag-raiser.

Jeff Strickler, Star Tribune
Of the six young men who took part in the legendary flag-raising on Iwo Jima, history has been particularly unkind to one. Rene Gagnon, a New Hampshire teenager who served as a message runner for the Marines, often is accused of trying to cash in on unearned fame. But Jesse Bradford, who plays him in "Flags of Our Fathers," doesn't think that's entirely fair.

"I hope that my portrayal treats him with a little more kindness," he said. "He wasn't a bad guy. He was just a kid trying to do what was right."

Gagnon, 18, was standing off to the side as five men struggled to raise the flag. They called for him to help, which he did, in the process ending up in one of the most famous photographs of the war.

A week after the picture's publication in virtually every newspaper in the country, the flag-raisers were ordered to return to the United States to promote war bond sales. Three of them already had been killed in action, and the other two, Ira Hayes and John Bradley, were reluctant participants in the bond drive. So the effervescent Gagnon stepped forward to become the primary spokesperson. Soon he was being heralded as a war hero, much to the others' irritation.

"Rene [pronounced RAIN-ee] never saw himself as a hero," Bradford said. He married his high-school sweetheart shortly after he returned stateside, and "she was the one who pushed him into the spotlight. When I talked to Rene Jr., I warned him that the movie's portrayal of his mother might not be very flattering. And his exact words were, 'Oh. Good.' "

Besides interviewing Gagnon's son, Bradford read extensively about the battle, starting with the book by Ron Powers and James Bradley [John Bradley's son] on which the movie is based.

"That book made me cry, and that's not something I can say about a lot of books -- about a lot anything, actually," Bradford said. "It had a lot of great information in it that I used. But I also read six other books, watched a number of documentaries and found several first-hand battle accounts."

Bradford ("Bring It On") didn't do any research on Gagnon until after he had the part.

"I was afraid that I was going to look up Rene and discover that he was blonde with blue eyes and looked nothing like me," he said. "I was shocked the first time I saw his picture. There is quite a bit of resemblance."

Director Clint Eastwood left it to the actors to build their characters, an approach Bradford appreciated.

"Clint trusts his actors tremendously, and that's a huge compliment," he said. "He's not one of those directors who tries to shove something down your throat. That's the way I like it: Let me do it; it's my job."

When Gagnon died in 1979, his family was denied permission to bury him in Arlington National Cemetery, the home of the Marine Corps War Memorial (the official name of the famous statue of the flag-raising). His wife appealed the decision, and two years later he was moved to Arlington.

Bradford doesn't think that the initial rejection had anything to do with backlash against his wartime activities.

"He was rejected on a technicality" that no longer exists, he said. "I've seen his grave. The headstone has a bronze plaque showing the statue."

Asked if the movie might change the way Gagnon is remembered, Bradford said he hopes so.

"I'm proud of the way Rene comes off in the movie," he said.

Jeff Strickler • 612-673-7392 • jstrickler@startribune.com

Ellie

thedrifter
10-20-06, 06:01 AM
Wisconsin Has Tie To Hollywood Feature Film

Fri Oct 20, 1:09 AM ET

The story behind the feature film "Flags of Our Fathers" began on a World War II battlefield 61 years ago, as well as in Wisconsin's northwoods.

Many say it's the most famous photograph in American history -- six American servicemen raising the American flag on a small Pacific Island, known as Iwo Jima. It was taken on Feb. 23, 1945, by an Associated Press photographer.

The man pictured second from right, the most visible, is Navy Corpsman John Henry "Doc" Bradley of Antigo, Wis.

Thursday afternoon, Bradley's widow and son Mark shared their story during an interview with News Three's Eric Franke in Wausau. They had just seen the movie for the first time -- at a special premiere in Antigo -- and spoke about the reluctant hero, the inspiration behind "Flags of our Fathers."

Sixty-three years ago, Betty Van Gorp went on her first date with the man she would marry seven months later. "It didn't take long at all for me to realize that this wasn't something he wanted to talk about, so we didn't," she said. "It wasn't something that was part of our daily life."

Betty Bradley said even their eight children would grow up, unaware of the story behind the photo.

"I never had one single in-depth conversation, about what that whole experience was," said son Mark Bradley, who is vice president of Wisconsin's Board of Regents. "I knew the bits and pieces, which was his standard line -- we were just standing there and somebody said, 'Grab that heavy pole, put that flag on it, and get it up in the air.'"

John Bradley died at age 70 in 1994. He was the last survivor of the famous photo and took with him many of the stories behind the famous photograph. The stories, though, began unraveling again soon after Bradley's death.

"We were looking for his will, and in the course of doing that looking through this closet and we found this box," said Mark Bradley, who explained it was his younger brother Jim who took it one step forward. "He looked at the box and said, 'Well, what are these things?' He then was very curious about my dad keeping those items, and yet always saying the event didn't mean anything."

Betty Bradley further explained: "What struck Jim was the letter home that [John] sent to his mother and dad. He wrote, 'By now you might have seen the flag raising picture in the paper. I had a little to do with that. It was the proudest day of my life.' Well, this stunned all of us, especially Jim. This was so out of character to say it was the proudest day of his life when he avoided all of that."

Jim Bradley spent five years digging up the details about his father and the five Marines pictured alongside him. The Bradley family told News Three it was Jim who, at the urging of former presidential candidate Ross Perot, decided to turn his research into a book. "He submitted that manuscript all over the East Coast, to all the publishing houses. He had 27 rejection letters," Mark Bradley said.

Eventually, a young assistant editor at Bantam Books took a chance and, after 43 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, "Flags of Our Fathers" caught the attention of director Clint Eastwood. The Bradleys believe he has masterfully adapted the story to the big screen. "I was very happy that he didn't make these people bigger than they were in real life. He just told the story of these kids who said, 'This is my duty to jump in and help,' and that's what the movie's all about," explained Mark Bradley.

Betty added, "I'm sure [John's] still with us in spirit, but he's thinking, 'If you wanna do that, you go right ahead; I don't want to be there to be embarrassed by the attention.'"

Mark Bradley laughed while adding: "He would say, 'Am I gonna have to answer any of these questions?"

The family also hopes the movie about the past has a modern-day message. "I would hope that every high school student would see this and see movies like 'Saving Private Ryan' because that tells the real story," said Betty Bradley. "They should see these movies and see what war's really like before they make that decision, and then, you know, if nobody would go and none of the enemies would sign up either, we wouldn't have war."

The movie "Flags of Our Fathers" opens in theaters nationwide on Friday. The role of John Bradley is portrayed by actor Ryan Phillippe. Betty Bradley said the family met Phillippe and Eastwood during a day of filming near Chicago last fall. Bradley said Phillippe did a great job and even wore the exact ring her husband wore in the 1940s.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-20-06, 07:11 AM
‘A Hell of a Job’ <br />
A Hawaii vet who took part in the Iwo Jima battle praises the film for its realism <br />
» Heroes by chance <br />
<br />
By Burl Burlingame <br />
bburlingame@starbulletin.com <br />
<br />
There was some...

thedrifter
10-20-06, 07:24 AM
Inspected & approved

Filmmakers often march in review to get military cooperation
By James Hebert
UNION-TRIBUNE ARTS WRITER

October 20, 2006

As Marines invade Iwo Jima in the new World War II film “Flags of Our Fathers,” some of them hit the beach on a vintage landing craft borrowed for the shoot from Camp Pendleton.

The military has something of its own riding on the Clint Eastwood movie: the public's understanding of one of the Marine Corps' most famous battles, a bloody struggle that yielded the iconic image of six men raising the American flag above Mount Suribachi.

So when the producers asked the Defense Department for help in making the movie, the military agreed to pitch in not only with technical expertise and equipment – such as the LVT-5 from Pendleton's World War II and Korea LVT Museum – but also with a contingent of 50 Marine extras from the historic “8th and I” barracks in Washington, D.C.

Cooperation, though, came with a catch or two: The military got to review the script, ask for changes and station an adviser on set to ensure authenticity and monitor any straying from the two parties' formal agreement.

Any moviemakers hoping for the Pentagon's help and seal of approval, from “Pearl Harbor” to “War of the Worlds” to “Star Trek IV,” have to accept that kind of trade-off. For moviemakers who need resources they won't find in the studio prop department, it can be the only way to get hold of the goods.

“Where can you get an aircraft carrier? I mean, hey,” points out Maj. Jeff Nyhart, who heads the Marine Corps film and TV liaison office in Los Angeles. “Or submarines, that type of stuff.”

And for the military, such pacts can offer powerful leverage over how the armed services are portrayed on the big screen.

“It's a great deal for both sides,” says David L. Robb, author of the book “Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies” and a former reporter for Variety. “And for Hollywood, the only thing they like better than a good movie is a good deal.”

While “Flags of Our Fathers” did land the military's help, it turned out to play a minor role in getting the picture made.

“There wasn't a terrible amount they could do for us, being that this was a period picture,” says Robert Lorenz, who produced the film with Steven Spielberg and Eastwood, the director. “They didn't have all the equipment and uniforms and so forth that we needed.

“We definitely wanted (cooperation), and appreciated it. But from a practical standpoint, securing equipment and uniforms and personnel, we ended up having to go to private individuals anyway to get it.”

That fact may have lent the producers more leeway in negotiating with the military. Lorenz says that while the Pentagon's reps “respectfully asked for several (script changes), a few of which we accommodated,” they did not insist on any.

“I will say there was some concern on their part as to how some of the historical figures, some of the Marine brass were portrayed,” he adds. “But ultimately, they were respectful of the fact this was Clint, and this was a story they wanted to be told.”

It's a story that looms huge in Marine Corps lore. The image of the five Marines and one Navy hospital corpsman hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima, as captured by the late photographer Joe Rosenthal, has become the very personification of “Semper Fi.”

“Flags of Our Fathers” is based on the book by James Bradley, whose father, John, was the corpsman immortalized in the picture. The movie takes aim at the mythology surrounding the flag-raising and is unstinting in its depictions of combat casualties.

Iwo Jima was one of Japan's last strongholds in the Pacific when the Marines invaded in February 1945. The heavily fortified island bristled with hidden bunkers, and nearly 7,000 Americans died in its taking, including three of those who had raised the flag.

That hoisting of the colors actually was the second to take place; the movie depicts the almost offhanded way it was organized so that a high government official could have the first flag as a souvenir.

Once Rosenthal's photo gets publicized, the three survivors are taken off the island and trotted around the United States on a hokey war-bonds PR tour. They're conflicted over the adulation, saying the real heroes are the men who died on the island. One of the three, Cpl. Ira Hayes, eventually drinks himself to death.

The military's guidelines on movie cooperation cite the impact on recruiting and retention as a potential factor in deciding whether to assist a film. It's hard to imagine a would-be enlistee feeling gung-ho about war after seeing the battle scenes in “Flags.”

But Marine Maj. Stewart Upton, a Department of Defense spokesman in Washington (movie agreements have to be approved first by a branch of service and then by the Pentagon), says films about past wars aren't considered as crucial to recruiting. It helps, he adds, if displays of courage counterbalance the carnage.

“You would hope the film, even though it's very graphic, accurately depicts those who fought valiantly in the battles of our history,” Upton says. “And the Iwo Jima flag-raising was one of them.”

If you're a filmmaker, of course, it also helps to be named Eastwood or Spielberg.

“There's a level of trust here,” Upton says. “Those are two very well-known and respected names in the industry.”

But even for Eastwood, who has been on an Oscar-winning run from “Unforgiven” to “Million Dollar Baby,” it hasn't always been so easy to get a helping hand from the Pentagon.

As Robb details in the book, the director first landed the support of the Marines for his 1986 movie “Heartbreak Ridge,” then saw it yanked by the military after he screened the film.

Eastwood had grudgingly removed a reference to the 1983 terrorist bombing in Beirut that killed 221 Marines (the highest single-day death toll for the Corps since Iwo Jima) because the military feared it would be linked in viewers' minds to the Grenada invasion dramatized in the movie.

But the relationship fell apart over other conflicts after the screening, and the Pentagon refused to grant its imprimatur or screen the film on military bases.

That case is one of many Robb cites in which the military withheld its help over the content of a movie, or provided it only after getting the filmmakers to agree to significant changes.

Among them is “Space Cowboys,” the 2000 comedy that Eastwood directed and starred in and on which Lorenz served as an assistant director. The Air Force declined to support the film because of the way it portrayed some pilots as reckless and lacking in decorum, Robb says.

Even an innocuous comedy like “Stripes” has been through the mill; Robb quotes memos from military archives to chronicle how the 1980 movie was rewritten, altering everything from drug references to the makeup of Army recruiting ads to the behavior of a drill sergeant.

But beyond changing the shape of movies that do get made, Robb argues that the military's power to grant or withhold these taxpayer-funded resources also leads to self-censorship, discouraging some projects from being undertaken at all.

“When the government has its thumb on the scale and they're rewarding pro-military and pro-war projects, there's going to be a natural tendency for Hollywood to make more of those,” says Robb.

“You have to compete in the marketplace, and if you're making an anti-war film, you're competing against films that are essentially subsidized by the government.”

The military holds that its requests for changes to movies have more to do with fidelity to facts than to ideology, although Upton acknowledges the power of the medium to influence public opinion.

“When we do that (request changes), most of the time it is for accuracy, and also for putting (forward) the proper perception” about military personnel and their actions, says Upton.

“Because when people go and see a movie, then all of a sudden that can become a perception.”

Upton says the military doesn't keep a tally of how many projects it accepts and how many it rejects.

“We receive dozens of requests each year for a wide variety of products and types of support requested,” he says. “And we probably end up working on fewer than half.”

In researching his book, Robb found the Marine Corps more open to talking to him and providing files than were the other branches of service.

He says he recalls a rep from the Marines' film office telling him, “We've got nothing to hide.”

Robb believes that “part of it is just fearlessness. They're not afraid of a little reporter. And the others are.”

Lorenz's experience seems to back up the perception of the differences among the branches.

“Some of the requests for changes actually came from the Navy, as I recollect, and not so much from the Marine Corps,” Lorenz says. “The Marine Corps really did embrace this project.

“I mean, it is their story. This is just my point of view, but I do get the sense the Marine Corps has a more down-to-earth, realistic point of view about these things.”

Lorenz believes that over time the military has become more open-minded about how it's portrayed on film.

“I think in terms of the media in general, there's much more awareness by folks in the government that it should be embraced and turned to an advantage, as opposed to (being adversarial),” says Lorenz.

But Robb is not so sure. He recalls Phil Strub, the civilian head of the Pentagon's film liaison office, telling him that today the military would never support a movie such as the 1953 classic “From Here to Eternity” because “it showed officers in a not-very-good light. And one guy hooked up with a prostitute.

“They would never (allow) that. So the standards have gotten stricter.”

When the military has cooperated on a movie project, there's generally a credit line at the conclusion, acknowledging the assistance. Robb says when he's at the movies, he likes to wait to that point, to see if the military gets thanked. But doing so isn't actually necessary, he maintains, to figure out if the filmmakers got a hand from the Pentagon.

“You can always tell,” Robb says. “If it's positive, they got it. If it's not, they didn't.”

Ellie

thedrifter
10-21-06, 07:19 AM
Hero worship <br />
<br />
By JEFFREY WESTHOFF - sidetracks@nwnewsgroup.com <br />
<br />
On Feb. 23, 1945, five Marines and one sailor planted a makeshift flagpole atop Mount Surabachi on the tiny isle of Iwo Jima. <br />
...

thedrifter
10-21-06, 07:44 AM
With twin films, Japan and US let go of Iwo Jima scars <br />
<br />
by Shaun Tandon <br />
Fri Oct 20, 10:08 PM ET <br />
<br />
As he took his first stroll in six decades on the sulfuric sands of this Pacific island, a...

thedrifter
10-22-06, 09:23 AM
Posted on Sun, Oct. 22, 2006

Marine vet remembers service, sacrifice at Iwo Jima

DAVID ROGERS
Cox News Service


PALM BEACH - United States Marines, Joseph Dryer Jr. will tell you, are more than comrades in arms.

They are brothers, members of a close-knit, well-disciplined family. And members of that family make sacrifices to serve their country and protect one another.

Dryer, a 45-year resident of Palm Beach, is pleased that Clint Eastwood has directed a film that will educate generations unfamiliar with the World War II battle of Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest battles the Marines ever faced.

On the eve of the release of that film, "Flags of Our Fathers," Dryer could not share memories with any of his Marine buddies. Of the friends he landed with, all but Dryer and one other man were killed on that tiny island.

"Flags of Our Fathers," which opened Friday, tells the story of the battle and, in particular, of the six U.S. servicemen - five Marines and one Navy corpsman - who were immortalized by a single snap of a camera shutter.

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize-winning image of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, became an indelible symbol of the Marines' victory on the craggy, 8-square-mile island. The win was a key moment in the Pacific campaign and foreshadowed Japan's surrender Sept. 2, 1945.

From the invasion of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945, through March 26 of that year, about 70,000 Marines scoured the island to rout an enemy that was frantic to defend its territory.

Operation Detachment, initiated by heavy Air Force and Navy shelling of the island, was waged to take control of Iwo Jima and its airfields. The island is about 670 miles south of Tokyo.

Capturing Iwo Jima would give U.S. fighter and bomber planes an emergency refueling site during long-range attacks on mainland Japan and also would knock out the Iwo Jima radar system.

Though the Japanese forces were outnumbered, their determination to hold Iwo Jima and prevent an invasion of Japan made them deadly opponents. They used the time before the American invasion to train, construct hundreds of protective concrete pillboxes, dig about three miles of tunnels, establish sniper sites and operations in caves, set mines on roads and stockpile food.

The offensive, fought yard by yard, cost the lives of 6,821 members of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions. Some 20,000 other Marines, including Dryer, were wounded. Of the more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers entrenched on the island, 18,000 died.

Twenty-two Marines and five sailors were awarded the Medal of Honor for their heroics on Iwo Jima, the most awarded to date for a single battle.

"It is the best example of the Marine Corps' combination of esprit de corps, brotherhood and training that I can think of," Dryer said.

Rosenthal's photograph made celebrities of the six U.S. servicemen who planted the flag on Mount Suribachi. But every Marine who fought in that battle made a tremendous sacrifice, Dryer said.

He recounted memories of Iwo Jima recently in the library of the large, welcoming home he shares with his wife, Nancy.

Though Dryer went on to become a hotel proprietor, stockbroker and automobile security company chairman, Iwo Jima remains a defining moment of his 85 years.

He was 23 when the amphibious units began their invasion. Many of the Marines in the platoon he led were very young, he recalled.

They were on edge day and night because the Japanese snipers were everywhere. Japanese soldiers also made nighttime incursions into the American camps, dropping grenades and firing machine guns. Their orders, Dryer said, were to fight to the death and not be taken captive.

"In the beginning, it takes time to get adjusted to the people you are losing, the friends you are losing," Dryer said.

Dryer says the thousands who died in the battle for Iwo Jima sacrificed their lives for the mission and each other.

"It's very hard to imagine someone in Palm Beach, West Palm Beach or Fort Lauderdale, if they saw a grenade, throwing themselves on top of it so nobody else would be hurt by it, but that was not uncommon" at Iwo Jima, he said. "It's the way people thought. It's training."

Ellie

thedrifter
10-22-06, 09:26 AM
10/22/2006
Film omits Genaust’s Iwo Jima effort
BY BILL WAGNER
STAFF WRITER

The motion picture “Flags of Our Father” contains some stirring scenes of patriotism and military derring-do as U.S. Marines wrest the island of Iwo Jima from Japanese during a bloody campaign in February 1945.

It’s what the film doesn’t show that bothers Bob Bolus, a Scranton businessman. He thinks there’s a real hero, his deeds unsung, still on the island.

The movie, which opened last week in theaters across the U.S., depicts an event that rallied American fighting men on Iwo Jima and cheered the hearts of people back home.

That was the raising of the American flag atop Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the island, from which the sight of Old Glory waving in the Pacific breeze was visible from one end of Iwo Jima to the other. It’s also a high point and the focus of the motion picture.

A photograph of that event made by Joe Rosenthal of The Associated Press thrilled readers when newspapers across the nation printed it. Mr. Rosenthal, who died only recently, received a lifetime of praise for his achievement.

But Mr. Rosenthal was not the only photographer recording the event, Mr. Bolus points out. A Marine sergeant, Bill Genaust, had his Bell & Howell motion picture camera trained on four fellow Marines and a sailor as they labored to raise the flag in the stiff breeze sweeping the hilltop.

Mr. Rosenthal returned home to little less than a hero’s welcome.

Genaust’s film went on to Hawaii for processing. He died two days later when he and a buddy encountered enemy troops in a cave. Marines cleared the cave with flamethrowers and bombs, then sealed the opening. Fearing booby traps, they did not recover Genaust’s body. He never saw the result of his work.

If Mr. Rosenthal’s picture cheered the folks back home, Genaust’s film caused a sensation. It was shown again and again in movie houses, being all the more effective because it provided a continuous record of the action. It still appears on televised historical programs.

“Credit was given to Joe Rosenthal, but the man we left behind never received his just recognition,” Mr. Bolus said. “That was a patriotic symbol that I watched as a child growing up. Very impressive.”

So impressed was he as a child that when he read an article about Genaust in The Sunday Times Parade magazine Feb. 20, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the battle, he decided, “That’s somebody who needs to come home.”

Since reading the Parade article, Mr. Bolus has tracked down every bit of information available to him about Genaust, corresponding with relatives and enlisting the support of the U.S. Department of Defense and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command at Hickam Air Force Base, Oahu, Hawaii. Its mission is to achieve the fullest possible accounting of all Americans missing as a result of this nation’s conflicts.

He has submitted his recovery plan to the Defense Department and the joint accounting command. “They are now critiquing it for me.”

He was on Iwo Jima in March with a Marine remembrance tour and briefly explored the area around Hill 362A, where the Genaust cave is. Now he hopes to return, possibly in November, with a forensics team. “I’m totally confident we’re in the area now.”

He has requested a three-week bivouac area on the island, he said. Japan will not object “as long as we’re not running all over the island digging holes.”

“We’re just now finalizing the recovery plan,” he said. “I have my own medical people, demolition people, I have to have a geologist, a forensic anthropologist, a park surveyor.”

He said since he began his search, officials have checked a cemetery on Hawaii where Genaust’s remains would have been buried. DNA testing could be inconclusive, he was told, because chemicals used in embalming would have destroyed DNA.

“Flags of Our Fathers” may not show Genaust, but Mr. Bolus believes it can re-energize the search for his remains.

“They have now about 90 percent confirmed that Genaust is still in the cave on Iwo Jima,” Mr. Bolus said. He intends to find him. And bring him home.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-23-06, 07:52 AM
Eastwood Stumbles with Flags
October 22nd, 2006

General George Patton once said that the best strategy ever devised can be quickly rendered useless by the application of lousy tactics, while a flawed strategy can be rescued by practicing sound tactical principals. In the case of moviemaking, the technological marvel of computer generated images (CGI) and the performers are the tactical tools used to accomplish the strategic objective of bringing a movie’s story and action to the screen. Unfortunately, the amazing CGI effects and the strength of the cast can’t entirely lift Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers out of the realm of mediocrity.

The movie revolves around remembrances of the survivors of the six men who raised the US flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in February of 1945. We see that informal interviews are being conducted about the battle and its aftermath, but don’t fully understand the connections until the end of the movie, when it’s finally revealed that the son of the Navy Corpsman accompanying the Marines, John “Doc” Bradley, has actually been visiting each of the surviving members of his father’s unit.

Right off the bat, viewers endure a clumsy and historically inaccurate attempt to weave in a comparison to the Vietnam War. During the first interview, Dave Severance, played by Harve Presnell (who portrayed Gen. George C. Marshall in Saving Private Ryan), says that from the moment the photo was published of a Vietnamese officer shooting a VC in the head, that the war was lost, and that “we just pretended otherwise” until our withdrawal from Southeast Asia. Likewise, he says, the Joe Rosenthal picture of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi won the war for the US.

This is simply propagandizing to a new generation of Americans without providing context or any modicum of historical accuracy. That the shooter was the town’s sheriff, who was understandably enraged that the VC he executed was part of a unit that had kidnapped and brutally murdered the sheriff’s family is never mentioned.

It is odd then, that a movie ostensibly concerned with debunking myths and legends concerning the flag-raising on Iwo Jima would perpetuate a favorite myth of the 60s-era anti-war left without an iota of skepticism. But it’s maybe not so strange, when one of the screen writers turns out to be William Broyles, Jr., who also wrote the screenplay for Jarhead, another horribly inaccurate war movie that focused on the selfish needs of a lone, dysfunctional Marine.

At any rate, Joe Rosenthal’s famous picture on Iwo did not win WW II any more than one photo of a VC execution caused the US to lose the war in Vietnam. And for Eastwood and Broyles to draw such a flawed comparison, or to push the courage and determination of our service men and women to the fringe, is enough reason to avoid the movie altogether.

After the initial interview, the film is a confusing jumble of vignettes that leaves the audience busy trying to decipher a triple flashback format. But the real problem is that Eastwood can’t figure out if he wants a rehash of Saving Private Ryan, or if he wants a remake of The Outsider, which examined the psyche and post-war troubles of Ira Hayes in a far more straightforward and sober manner.

The most inane segments of the movie occur when the “non-heroes” return to the States to pump up war-weary Americans to buy War Bonds one more time or else, it is intimated, the entire war effort will collapse before final victory is achieved. The looming financial disaster of a wartime US, barely scraping by, is horribly overplayed in the film.

One might chalk it up to the exaggerations in the pep talk by the men’s handler prior to their appearances at the bond rallies. Yet, this notion is reinforced when they meet President Harry Truman, played by veteran character actor David Patrick Kelly. This is not one of his best outings. As Truman, he comes across as Ken Lay redux, the polite, firm, and somewhat greasy CEO-type, announcing that the country’s fate hangs in the balance if “you boys” don’t get Americans to pony up $14 billion dollars.

This is ludicrous on its face. The Manhattan Project had been going gangbusters and the US would detonate the world’s first A-bomb in a couple of months, all accomplished with the expenditure of many billions of dollars. Germany would surrender in a few short weeks, and troops, ships, tanks, and planes would start to converge on the Western Pacific as required. War manufacturing was at its peak, and showed no signs of letting up any time soon. And most of all, Harry Truman, who had assumed responsibility from FDR for carrying out the policy of unconditional surrender, who would later decide to drop two A-bombs on Japan to ensure victory, is now reduced in the movie to a nervous money-grubber, hatching some Rube Goldberg scheme to grab one last buck from tired American investors.

Anyone buying any of this dreck? Apparently, Clint Eastwood thinks you will.

The Corpsman’s son narration finally makes some sense of this mess, and it never hurts to remind Americans about the sacrifices of our service men and women both past and present. At this, Flags does very well, even if it saves this important message until the end.

Hollywood has, at least for the moment, seemingly lost its Germany/Hitler fixation and finally realized that we also fought a war in the Pacific. It was a fight against a far more brutal and inhumane enemy, who carried the Warrior Code to fanatical extremes. In this sense, The Great Raid and Flags of Our Fathers provide a necessary reality check by depicting the horror of battle in the Pacific against an enemy not unlike the jihadists of today.

Nevertheless, Flags simply has too much post-modern baggage to effectively and consistently convey what’s at stake when the US goes to war against an extremist and suicidal foe. For my tastes, I’ll stick with The Great Raid. Better yet, Eastwood might even consider a movie about the battles for Fallujah, Najaf, Kandahar, or… never mind. That’s probably in the too hard to do category.

Douglas Hanson is the national security correspondent of American Thinker.


Douglas Hanson

Ellie

thedrifter
10-23-06, 08:08 AM
Oct. 23, 2006, 1:15AM

As lights dim, war memories replayed
Film depicting Iwo Jima binds two Marines who lived through it
By JEANNIE KEVER
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

Technically, Ken Whitfill and John Wilson were strangers when they walked into a movie theater on Friday afternoon.

But they were Marines and, more than that, Marines who fought on Iwo Jima. And so it was with a comfortable camaraderie that they settled into the theater seats to watch Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's rumination on that World War II battle and the myth-making photograph of American soldiers who raised the flag during the fighting.

They liked the movie, although they had no illusions that any film could have captured perfectly their experiences. "I have never seen a movie that depicted battle as I know it and think it is," Wilson said. "But different people can see the same thing and know it differently."

The men are in their 80s now — "He's just a kid," the 85-year-old Whitfill joked about Wilson, who is 81 — long retired and dependent on canes to steady their gaits.

But when the theater lights dimmed, an unforgettable chapter of their youth flashed back to life.

The black sands of Iceland served as a stand-in for the volcanic rock of Iwo Jima, where Whitfill and Wilson were among 30,000 Marines who initially landed upon the beaches.

The 35-day battle during February and March 1945 gave the United States control of the island, providing an emergency base for B-29s flying to and from Japan, and, perhaps more important, stopping the Japanese stationed there from sounding the alert.

The Marines lost 6,821 men during the battle; about 21,000 Japanese soldiers were killed.

Flags of Our Fathers centers on the battle's first days, capped by the placing of a U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the tiny Pacific island. That moment was captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal and published in newspapers around the country. The film shifts between the battle and the government's use of the three survivors among the six men in the photograph to raise money for the war effort.

It is by turns brutal and sentimental as it looks at both the reality of war and the marketing of war. But Whitfill and Wilson watched without flinching.

"I think the beach scenes, they were quite realistic," said Whitfill, an East Texas native who joined the Marines after graduating from Texas A&M University in 1942.

He had read the book upon which the film is based, Flags of Our Fathers, co-written by James Bradley, whose father helped raise the flag, and had met the younger Bradley.

"As graphic as it was," he said, no film could capture the reality of that sustained battle.

Different perspective

Whitfill, who rose through the ranks at the Fuller Brush Company to retire as manager of the Gulf Coast region in 1987, was a member of the Marines 3rd Division.

"It was hard to believe when you were there, how anything could survive," he said. "It had been bombed by the Air Force days ahead of time. You'd think (the Japanese) would have been pulverized, but they were dug in. Just as soon as we quit firing and tried to move forward, up came the Japanese out of their caves. It was a matter of digging them out, almost inch by inch."

Eastwood plans to release Letters from Iwo Jima, told from the Japanese point of view, next year, but Whitfill is skeptical that it will portray the ferocity he remembers.

Wilson was an infantryman with the 5th Division. A native of Nacogdoches, Wilson asked to be drafted into the Marines when he turned 18. Two years later, he was on Iwo Jima.

The worst part, in some ways, was waiting to go ashore, Wilson said.

He jumped into a Higgins boat at 10 a.m. Feb. 19, 1945, the day of the invasion. He didn't make it to the beach until 4 p.m.

"Virtually everyone got sick and threw up from all the bouncing around," he told Whitfill as they traded stories.

Whitfill nodded. "That was bad," he softly agreed.

Seventeen days later, Wilson left the island on a stretcher, one of 47 casualties from an explosion set off by the Japanese. He spent the next six months in various hospitals, recovering from a shattered left arm and other injuries.

"I had my machine gun set up covering a draw, in case (the Japanese soldiers) were flushed out. ... Suddenly, a ridge just went up, and I was buried there."

Wilson dug his way out, but his fighting days were over.

Most of the fighting took place elsewhere on the island, and neither man was on Mount Suribachi when the flag was raised a few days into the battle.

Whitfill was on a ship in the island's harbor when an announcement went out over the loudspeaker. "We rushed out, and I still remember what a thrill it was," he said.

About the flag
Wilson, who later finished college at what is now Stephen F. Austin University and began a career as a newspaperman, didn't notice the flag until the following day, when a fellow Marine spotted it during a lull.

"It did give us a good feeling," he said.

They didn't see the photograph until later, of course.

Wilson, who retired as a sportswriter from the Houston Chronicle in 1982, was in a hospital in Guam when he saw it on the cover of Time magazine.

"I realized that was a photograph that had an impact on the United States," he said. "I'm proud of the image and the picture, and that it was this battle I was in and that it was the Marine Corps. But I always realized it was just a symbol.

"Hell, the battle was just beginning."

jeannie.kever@chron.com

Ellie

thedrifter
10-23-06, 07:30 PM
[October 23, 2006, 4:24 pm]
"WWII Marine Remembers Famous Battle"

More than 60 years ago, the World War II battle on the island of Iwo Jima was captured in one of the most famous news photos of all time. The photograph that shows marines and navy corpsman raising the victory flag now serves as inspiration for the new movie "Flags of our Fathers."

One marine was at Iwo Jima for the famous event and it has dictated his routine for the last 50 years. Everyday Lee Copeland raises his American Flag in tribute to the fellow Marines he served with on Iwo Jima. He said, "Sunshine in the morning you put it up... About 5 p.m. in the evening you take it down."

Copeland said he was 15 the day he decided to become a marine. It was the morning of December 7 1941. He was delivering papers in North Nashville. Nearly four years later he was standing at the bottom of Mt. Suribachi, watching the now famous scene take place.

Now, over 50 years later, Copeland, now 80 years old, still finds it hard to express the emotion he felt that day. He said there isn't a day that goes by that he doesn't think of what he witnessed on that island. He is proud to have played a part in the image that moved a nation.

Copeland said what haunts him today is the sacrifices his friends made to achieve it. He said he doesplan on seeing the new movie "Flags of our Fathers" that is in theaters now.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-23-06, 07:38 PM
October 24, 2006
After Weak ‘Flags’ Debut, Studio May Face Costly Oscar Battle
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and ALLISON HOPE WEINER

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 23 — Clint Eastwood’s World War II movie “Flags of Our Fathers” lumbered ashore this weekend weighted with the expectations of a studio needing to win big. Looking for Oscars and a payoff on the film’s $90 million budget, Paramount, its distributor, put the film in nearly 1,900 theaters, and still plans to add hundreds more as early as this week.

By Monday morning, however, the studio and its partners found themselves facing a costly fight to save their showcase awards entry, as “Flags” took in just $10.2 million at the box office — a relatively tiny beachhead that did not match expectations or its mostly strong reviews. The picture had failed to excite enough older viewers who could remember, readily identify or relate to its subject, the bloody battle for Iwo Jima, to make up for its lack of appeal to younger audiences and paucity of recognizable stars.

For Paramount, which inherited the movie when it bought DreamWorks last year, the combination of a weak opening and good reviews made for a problem that has become all too familiar to major studios offering big dramas at awards time: it now will have to mount a costly Oscar campaign, but it hasn’t yet made the money to pay for it.

The fate of “Flags” in the moviegoing marketplace could also provide the clearest test yet of the DreamWorks-Paramount marriage. The movie’s marketing is being run by Terry Press of DreamWorks, overseeing a Paramount team, and its distribution is being overseen by Rob Moore, a top colonel to Brad Grey, Paramount’s chairman, relying on a staff of former DreamWorks employees. To complicate things further, Warner Brothers, which helped finance the film, holds international distribution rights, and is expected to release a companion movie depicting the battle from the Japanese point of view early next year.

Still, even as they vowed to battle into the winter for “Flags,” hoping for awards nominations to rally its box-office performance, studio executives left broad hints that they were not willing to shoulder the blame alone if their efforts were for naught. Mr. Eastwood, they noted, held contractual rights to approve both the marketing and distribution plans for his movie. “Every step of the way, we are working with Clint or being directed by Clint,” Mr. Moore said.

“Flags” seemed like a sure bet on Paramount’s schedule when the studio and DreamWorks combined forces last December: Mr. Eastwood was coming off best-picture and best-director nominations for “Mystic River” in 2004, and wins in both categories for “Million Dollar Baby” last year. Paul Haggis, the screenwriter of “Flags,” won the Oscar (along with Bobby Moresco) for the screenplay for “Crash,” named best picture this March, and also wrote “Million Dollar Baby.” And Steven Spielberg, who had originally wanted to film “Flags” as a bookend to his own “Saving Private Ryan,” had decided to take a rare producer’s credit for a movie he did not direct.

Mr. Spielberg did the same with “Memoirs of a Geisha,” another Oscar aspirant that disappointed at the box office and came up short in the awards race for Sony Pictures last year. Following a different path, “Munich,” which was directed by Mr. Spielberg, was not a major audience hit, but did end up with a best-picture nomination.

True to form, the pedigree of “Flags” produced some blurb-worthy raves: Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it “a film of awesome power”; David Ansen of Newsweek called it “tough, smart, raw and contemplative”; and Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that it said “something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight.”

But the movie posed several marketing challenges that Mr. Eastwood’s last two films did not face. Unlike Mr. Spielberg, who cast Tom Hanks in “Private Ryan,” Mr. Eastwood wanted to give a sense of the youth and ordinariness of the marines who fought at Iwo Jima, so he deliberately avoided casting major stars. Ryan Phillippe is the biggest name in “Flags,” though hardly a household one. Some critics even wrote that the movie’s characters were almost indistinguishable in the mayhem of battle.

As Mr. Moore summed up: “The biggest draw of the movie is its director, who’s not in the movie.”

Some industry insiders also questioned the timing of the film’s release in late October — a time when audiences are mainly young and mainly interested in Halloween fare like next weekend’s release of “Saw III” — rather than closer to Thanksgiving, when audiences have been conditioned to expect more adult-themed movies with awards potential.

But Mr. Moore said the timing was nearly identical to that of “Mystic River,” which opened in mid-October 2003 in a platform release of 13 theaters before expanding to 1,467 theaters a week later. Any thought of a similar platform release a week or two ago was dropped, lest “Flags” go up against Martin Scorsese’s “Departed,” Mr. Moore said. But he and other executives said the calendar ahead looked forgiving, with youth-oriented movies like the “Saw” sequel and “Borat,” and family fare like DreamWorks’ and Paramount’s own “Flushed Away” on Nov. 3.

Counting on that window of opportunity, Mr. Moore said Monday morning that Paramount, DreamWorks and Mr. Eastwood had agreed to expand by 300 screens nationwide this week. He cited the movie’s reviews, as well as exit polls of audience members that were 50 percent better than average — a sure gauge of word of mouth, he said.

Robert Lorenz, Mr. Eastwood’s longtime producer, said the opening weekend box office, while lower than some projections, was not disappointing at all. “It’s on track with what Clint’s movies have done in the past,” he said.

Executives like Mr. Moore said they were counting on the many fans of Mr. Eastwood’s dramatic and darker recent movies to show up as they always seem to — in their own good time. “They come out slower,” he said. “Therefore, we roll out slower.”

And Ms. Press, of DreamWorks, said that the film’s reviews held out hopes that, once the movie made it to December, it could wind up on the year’s-best lists and start piling up the kind of accolades that might prompt moviegoers to give it another look.

“When you have that level of respect, you have to go the distance here,” Ms. Press of DreamWorks said, referring to Mr. Eastwood. “There is no other choice for a movie like this but to go the distance.”

Ellie

thedrifter
10-24-06, 08:35 AM
Tuesday October 24, 2006
'Iwo Jima was enough'

by ERIN CUNNINGHAM
erinc@herald-mail.com

HAGERSTOWN - They were preparing to watch what has been said to be a very graphic war film.

Those sitting in the theater Monday were familiar with the battle depicted in "Flags of Our Fathers." A few are World War II veterans, and one fought in The Battle of Iwo Jima.

But most of those interviewed at the special screening of the film at Hagerstown 10 Cineplex theater said they weren't there to see another war film. They've seen them all. And they weren't there for the memories.

"I don't need to see any more of that stuff," said Bernard Leasure, 85, of Saint James. "I don't need to see any more war pictures."

They were there for Clint Eastwood.

"Frankly, I'm just here because I like Clint Eastwood," Leasure said.

Leasure served as a combat engineer with the U.S. Army during World War II.

Eastwood directed the film, which follows the life stories of the six men who raised the flag at The Battle of Iwo Jima, a turning point in World War II.

The theater and the Disabled American Veterans, Chapter 14, sponsored the screening Monday, which offered free admission to World War II veterans and disabled American veterans. All other veterans received a reduced price.

Stephen L. Hansen, commander of the local chapter, helped organize the screening and said he was pleased that nearly 300 people attended.

Earl Blair, 90, of Rouzerville, Pa., served in the U.S. Navy from 1943-46 and is a World War II veteran. Blair said he wanted to see "Flags of Our Fathers" because he knows many of the Navy ships that brought the Marines ashore.

"I'm very interested in seeing the film," he said.

He said he expected the film to bring back memories from his tours with the European and Pacific theaters.

Arnold Gozora, 82, of Williamsport, was at The Battle of Iwo Jima and said he served in the Marines from 1943-46. The battle was fought in 1945 and, as a result, the United States gained control of the island of Iwo Jima. Perhaps the most famous image of that battle is of the Marines raising the United States flag at Mount Suribachi during the battle.

Gozora said it was hard to say why he chose to see the film Monday.

"I had enough of it," he said. "Iwo Jima was enough."

He said he read the book the film was based on, and that brought back many memories of the battle.

After seeing the movie Monday, he told his wife, Catherine Gozora, that it was very well done, and that the story of the flag was a wonderful story.

"You know, they don't like to talk about (the battle,)" she said. "They can't understand how they got back because everybody died around them. He used to say always that the ocean was red with blood. He doesn't know how he ever made it."

Before the movie began, Gozora was recognized as being the only one in the theater who was at The Battle of Iwo Jima. His wife said her husband stood, was recognized and everyone applauded.

Ellie

thedrifter
10-24-06, 02:16 PM
October 30, 2006

Film Review: ‘Flags of Our Fathers,’ 3 ½ stars
Heroes, for a time: Eastwood’s film shows the reality behind war’s most legendary photo

By Chuck Vinch
Staff writer


Every war needs heroes — people who do extraordinary things that inspire others in support of the grand and glorious cause. And, sometimes, if real heroes can’t be found, they must be manufactured.

For proof, we need look back no further than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s supply convoy was ambushed in Iraq, the Pentagon initially spun a startling story about the diminutive soldier mounting a ferocious defense, emptying her M16 rifle before being overwhelmed and taken prisoner. It was later revealed that she never got off a shot.

Then there’s Cpl. Pat Tillman, the square-jawed former pro football star who supposedly died from enemy fire while in combat with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan — until the military admitted that he was accidentally shot by U.S. troops.


What, then, is a hero? Can anyone ever really “be” a hero, or is heroism merely a thin and flimsy label that others slap on and tear off at whim? And what price do both heroes and hero-worshippers pay for that?

Those questions form the heart of “Flags of Our Fathers,” the eagerly awaited film adaptation of James Bradley’s best-selling book about his father’s role in the legendary World War II flag-raising on Iwo Jima. The second of two flag-raisings on Feb. 23, 1945, yielded one of the most famous wartime photographs in history — an image that is credited with helping to turn the tide of the war in the Pacific.

It’s a deeply moving, beautiful film, shot in a bleached, monochromatic color palette that is gorgeous in its stark simplicity.

But it’s not the film that many people have been expecting; it’s not really the Marine Corps version of “Saving Private Ryan.”

Yes, it has plenty of graphic combat footage. But lead-slinging carnage is not what Bradley’s book is about, and it’s not what this film is about. Rather, the film is about the way we eagerly build up and callously discard “heroes.”

From that perspective, it’s quite easy to see what made Clint Eastwood want to direct this project. He’s spent decades exploring various hero and anti-hero archetypes — and the mythic overtones that have enveloped the flag-raising on Iwo Jima over the years surely hit him right in his sweet spot.

As its framing device, the film has Bradley (Tom McCarthy) interviewing Iwo survivors about the battle as research for his book, which he undertook in an effort to better understand his father, Pharmacist’s Mate 2nd Class John “Doc” Bradley, a Navy corpsman who was one of the six flag-raisers.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning photo that made them all famous was shot by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal on Mount Suribachi, the high point of the desolate, 8-square-mile pile of volcanic ash and rock.

Eastwood cuts back and forth between events on Iwo, a battle that lasted more than a month and became the single bloodiest engagement of the war, and the subsequent struggle of the three surviving flag-raisers to come to terms with their complex legacy.

Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Pfc. Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Cpl. Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) had that legacy forced upon them when they were shanghaied by Washington bureaucrats to serve as poster boys for the war-bond effort on the home front.

Trotted out at stadiums and other public venues to be celebrated by an adoring nation, they were forced to take part in embarrassingly hokey stunts such as re-enacting the flag-raising on a papier-mâché rock, all in an effort to bolster the sagging national morale and refill the Treasury Department’s dangerously diminishing coffers.

All three felt like undeserving impostors; all felt that the real heroes were their buddies who died on Iwo. None was more reluctant to embrace his newfound fame than Hayes, a Pima Indian who was pursued by inner demons well before he hit the beach at Iwo and afterward quickly lost ground in that race.

And when the government had squeezed all it could from them, they were tossed aside. In that pre-dawn prelude to the age of celebrity worship, their descent into obscurity seemed to happen as quickly as that flag had gone up back on Iwo.

Given the meatiest role, Beach makes the most of it, poignantly tracing Hayes’ descent into an alcoholic drifter’s life that ended tragically in 1955 when he died of exposure.

The others didn’t have an easy road, either. Gagnon tried to cash in on his fame, but opportunities promised him by powerful men eager to rub shoulders with a hero quickly evaporated, and he worked menial jobs — mostly as a janitor — until his death in 1979.

Only Bradley managed to find some semblance of normalcy, raising a family and working as a funeral home director. But even he was plagued by nightmares and hallucinations for the rest of his days until his 1994 death.

As their story unfolded on screen, the shifting mood of the packed house at my screening proved quite interesting.

Early on, a noticeable buzz filled the theater. But when the film ended, a brief smattering of applause quickly morphed into solemn silence as historical photographs of the battle for Iwo Jima appeared on screen, accompanied by elegantly spare music composed by Eastwood.

That seemed only fitting; this is a movie that invites reflection. It’s not without flaws — sorting out the characters in the early going is tricky, and the frequent hard U-turns between the battle scenes and stateside sequences may cause mild whiplash.

But if Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima” — the companion film told from the Japanese perspective that is due out early next year — is as good as this, he will have fashioned quite a set of bookends to cap his storied career.

Rated R for graphic violence. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.

thedrifter
10-25-06, 03:41 PM
Real screen drama: Rescuing 'Flags'
By David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner The New York Times

Published: October 25, 2006

LOS ANGELES Clint Eastwood's World War II movie "Flags of Our Fathers" lumbered ashore this weekend weighted with the expectations of a studio needing to win big. Looking for Oscars and a payoff on the film's $90-million budget, Paramount, its distributor, put the film in nearly 1,900 American theaters, and still plans to add hundreds more as early as this week.

By Monday, however, the studio and its partners found themselves facing a costly fight to save their showcase awards entry, as "Flags" took in just $10.2 million at the box office - a relatively tiny beachhead that did not match expectations or its mostly strong reviews. The picture had failed to excite enough older viewers who could remember, readily identify, or relate to its subject, the bloody battle for Iwo Jima, to make up for its lack of appeal to younger audiences and paucity of recognizable stars.

For Paramount, which inherited the movie when it bought DreamWorks last year, the combination of a weak opening and good reviews made for a problem that has become all too familiar to major studios offering big dramas at awards time: It now will have to mount a costly Oscar campaign, but it hasn't yet made the money to pay for it.

The fate of "Flags" in the moviegoing marketplace could also provide the clearest test yet of the DreamWorks-Paramount marriage. The movie's marketing is being run by Terry Press of DreamWorks, overseeing a Paramount team, and its distribution is being overseen by Rob Moore, a top colonel to Brad Grey, Paramount's chairman, relying on a staff of former DreamWorks employees. To complicate things further, Warner Brothers, which helped finance the film, holds international distribution rights, and is expected to release a companion movie depicting the battle from the Japanese point of view early next year.

Still, even as they vowed to battle into the winter for "Flags," hoping for awards nominations to rally its box-office performance, studio executives left broad hints that they were not willing to shoulder the blame alone if their efforts were for naught. Eastwood, they noted, held contractual rights to approve both the marketing and distribution plans for his movie. "Every step of the way, we are working with Clint or being directed by Clint," Moore said.

"Flags" seemed like a sure bet on Paramount's schedule when the studio and DreamWorks combined forces last December: Eastwood was coming off best-picture and best-director nominations for "Mystic River" in 2004, and wins in both categories for "Million Dollar Baby" last year. Paul Haggis, the screenwriter of "Flags," won the Oscar (along with Bobby Moresco) for the screenplay for "Crash," named best picture this March, and also wrote "Million Dollar Baby." And Steven Spielberg, who had originally wanted to film "Flags" as a bookend to his own "Saving Private Ryan," had decided to take a rare producer's credit for a movie he did not direct.

Spielberg did the same with "Memoirs of a Geisha," another Oscar aspirant that disappointed at the box office and came up short in the awards race for Sony Pictures last year. Following a different path, "Munich," which was directed by Spielberg, was not a major audience hit, but did end up with a best- picture nomination.

True to form, the pedigree of "Flags" produced some blurb-worthy raves: Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it "a film of awesome power"; David Ansen of Newsweek called it "tough, smart, raw and contemplative"; and Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that it said "something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight."

But the movie posed several marketing challenges that Eastwood's last two films did not face. Unlike Spielberg, who cast Tom Hanks in "Private Ryan," Eastwood wanted to give a sense of the youth and ordinariness of the marines who fought at Iwo Jima, so he deliberately avoided casting major stars. Ryan Phillippe is the biggest name in "Flags," though hardly a household one. As Moore summed up: "The biggest draw of the movie is its director, who's not in the movie."

Some industry insiders questioned the timing of the film's release in late October - a time when American audiences are mainly young and interested in Halloween fare like the release Friday of "Saw III" - rather than closer to Thanksgiving, when audiences are conditioned to expect more adult-themed movies with awards potential.

But Moore said the timing was nearly identical to that of "Mystic River," which opened in mid-October 2003 in a platform release of 13 theaters before expanding to 1,467 theaters a week later. Any thought of a similar platform release a week or two ago was dropped, lest "Flags" go up against Martin Scorsese's "Departed," Moore said.

But he and other executives said the calendar ahead looked forgiving, with youth-oriented movies like the "Saw" sequel and "Borat," and family fare like DreamWorks' and Paramount's own "Flushed Away" on Nov. 3.

Counting on that window of opportunity, Moore said Monday that Paramount, DreamWorks, and Eastwood had agreed to expand by 300 screens in the United States this week. He cited the movie's reviews, as well as exit polls of audience members that were 50 percent better than average - a sure gauge of word of mouth, he said.

Robert Lorenz, Eastwood's longtime producer, said the opening weekend box office, while lower than some projections, was not disappointing at all. "It's on track with what Clint's movies have done in the past," he said.

Executives like Moore said they were counting on the many fans of Eastwood's dramatic and darker recent movies to show up as they always seem to - in their own good time.

And Press, of DreamWorks, said that the film's reviews held out hopes that, once the movie made it to December, it could wind up on the year's-best lists and start piling up the kind of accolades that might prompt moviegoers to give it another look.

"When you have that level of respect, you have to go the distance here," Press said, referring to Eastwood. "There is no other choice for a movie like this but to go the distance."

Ellie

thedrifter
10-26-06, 07:11 AM
10/26/2006
World War II movie hits home for area Marines
By: Jamie Ward

JWard@News-Herald.com

While more than 60 years is enough time to cloud a memory, four Northeast Ohio men will never forget their experiences on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima during World War II.

The men met Wednesday at Gunny's Hall, 8720 Twinbrook Drive, Mentor, to talk about Clint Eastwood's new movie, "Flags of Our Fathers."

"No comment," was the response of 86-year-old Frank Smolinski of Concord Township. "It's Hollywood. They make money off us poor guys who went over there."

The director's many Academy Awards meant nothing to Charles "Gunny" Malinowski, 84, of Mentor.

He was not impressed.

"Clint Eastwood ought to stop making movies," Malinowski said. "No Marine general would ever use those four-letter words with their troopers. We never used that kind of language. I thought it stunk."

George Dorko, 85, of Chester Township, wasn't as certain in his criticism.

"It was all right," said Dorko, who went to boot camp with Malinowski and served in the same division. "There was a lot of propaganda. It ain't what I seen."

Bob Cain, 83, of Willowick, was a bit kinder.

"(I was) a little disappointed," Cain said. "But it had interesting parts, like the scenes of battleships and destroyers. But it was pretty accurate."

Cain said the language was a little over the top, and the movie bounced around a lot.

"It was hard to understand," he said.

All the men said they could see the flag made famous from the photograph on the island after it was hoisted.

"The ships started blowing the whistles, and then we had to go about our business - which was staying alive," Cain said.

Malinowski, who said he often watches the History Channel, was startled by some of the movie's more graphic battle scenes. He said he had "rubbed off" some of the grim recollections after all of these years.

But two hours in a movie theater brought back reflective stories of friends lost.

"I was proud of being a Marine. I did what my country and I wanted to do," Cain said. "When you lose a friend, it's a different ball game."

Eastwood is currently making another movie, this one from Japanese soldiers' perspective.

While Smolinski, who gave this one a zero rating, said he would not go, the others said they would give it a try.

"If we're alive - we will," laughed Dorko. And the others laughed with him.

Ellie

thedrifter
11-03-06, 06:51 AM
Another WWII film, another open wound

More than 700 African-American Marines served on Iwo Jima in World War II, running ammunition to the front lines and burying the dead, among other harrowing duties.

These men, in addition to facing the Japanese, had to endure bitter racism from their white counterparts. When they came home they received no respect or honor for their sacrifice. These elderly warriors are asking why they are being made to feel the same neglect again.

Hollywood has made another movie, called Flags of Our Fathers, about the Iwo Jima battle. It's directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Eastwood, Steven Spielberg and Robert Lorenz.

Unlike Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, this movie shows a couple of African-American soldiers briefly in a cutaway shot on one of the ships heading toward Iwo Jima. At the end of the film, if you hang around long enough, you'll see one photograph that features a few black Marines in prayer.

Lorenz told me that blacks who are burning up the phone lines on talk radio and angry bloggers have it wrong. He said 12 black extras were used in the landing scenes. "They are there in this film ... but the focus of this film is the story of the flag raisers. This film is very much about racism and the treatment of Ira Hayes, the Native American flag raiser. "

But these extras are difficult to find, and for black veterans this movie is like a bloody wound being reopened. Those who served on Iwo Jima were among the first black Marines, trained in a segregated boot camp at North Carolina's Montford Point.

Joe Geeter, national president of the Montford Point Marine Association, has seen the film. He says this perceived slight doesn't affect just the vets but all blacks whose contributions to U.S. history are too often ignored.

Iwo Jima survivor Gene Doughty, 81, says that he realizes the movie is about the flag raisers, but that blacks and Hispanics on Iwo Jima were just as heroic. "This is vital history," he says. "This movie tells the story to the world, but we are not included, and it hurts."

It's time for black movie producers, directors and screenwriters to step up so that surviving black WWII veterans - and indeed, all African-Americans - won't have to feel slighted again. Their service triggered desegregation in the military, the civil rights movement and the emergence of a strong black middle class. Their service changed America.

We owe them - and future generations - this recognition.

Yvonne Latty, author of We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, from World War II to the War in Iraq, is a journalism professor at New York University.

Ellie

thedrifter
11-04-06, 06:09 AM
Fight battle of Iwo Jima from comfort of home

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff | November 4, 2006

Film director Sam Fuller , a veteran of World War II, once said that to make a truly realistic war movie you'd have to have snipers shooting at the audience during the picture. The History Channel isn't going quite that far -- after all, it's a cable TV network pumped into millions of homes, and there's no way to get hold of that many snipers.

So the History Channel will settle for a piece of software -- a free, downloadable computer game that'll let viewers re enact the violent struggles depicted in the channel's military documentary series, "Shootout."

With Clint Eastwood releasing not one but two movies on the World War II fight for Iwo Jima this year, it's no surprise that the bloody struggle for this volcanic island was picked as an episode of "Shootout." But Dolores Gavin, the show's executive producer, wanted to engage the audience more deeply than any documentary could achieve.

Then she learned about Kuma, a New York company that makes free, advertising-supported action games based on incidents from military history. Kuma has cranked out dozens of short games inspired by events in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has even been denounced by the government of Iran for a "what-if" game about a US raid on an Iranian nuclear weapons site.

Gavin contacted Kuma CEO Keith Halper , and together they began to design a series of games based on episodes of "Shootout." "This series was really developed by people who are gamers," Gavin said, "and we always had gamers in mind."

Kuma doesn't design each game from scratch. The company licenses the technology used in the superb 2004 action game Half-Life 2, then builds specific game scenarios on top of it. This means that developing a game takes weeks instead of months or years. Still, Halper admitted, "It turns out to be a little more challenging than we originally set out." So Kuma will do games for just three episodes of the series -- the assault on Iwo Jima, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War.

As each episode airs, the related game will be posted at HistoryChannel.com. The games run only on desktop computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system. Each is designed to require about one hour of game play. But you can extend the fun by selecting a multiplayer version. This lets you connect over the Internet with other military buffs, and even play on opposite sides of the battle.

The events in each game will be based upon actual events during these battles. The Iwo Jima game features three specific incidents -- storming the beach, capturing Mount Suribachi, and fending off a ferocious Japanese counterattack. "We're looking at several discrete segments of the battle of Iwo Jima," Halper said, "to create not just the terrain and the emplacements but the actions of those who were there."

As the game opens, you're put in the shoes of Tony Stein, a legendary US Marine. Your mission is to clear out a series of bunkers from which Japanese troops are spraying your buddies with machine gun fire. Your weapons are a handful of grenades and an improvised machine gun called a "stinger." The Marines, desperate for better weapons, invented stingers by ripping machine guns from the wings of damaged US Navy fighters,

Just as well; completing the mission requires all the firepower you can muster. But with a gun that fires 1,300 rounds a minute, you have to reload a lot, and you can carry only three magazines. So you must attack a bunker, wipe it out, run back to the beach for more ammo, then come back and hit the next bunker.

Yes, it's difficult. Now try doing it barefoot, under fire, and carrying a wounded Marine to safety on each trip. That's how Stein did it -- eight times. That's why they gave him the Medal of Honor.

An early version of the game had a few glitches, like dreadful lighting that made the battlefield so dark I couldn't see who was killing me. But my biggest problem was simply staying alive. Kuma's game designers don't take it easy on the player, and it takes serious effort to achieve your objectives.

Sure, it's fun to try and die and try again; but it's also an informal education in American heroism, the kind of lesson that may stick in the mind far better than an hour in front of the TV. Kuma hasn't quite managed to put snipers in our living rooms, but you'll find yourself ducking for cover all the same.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.

Ellie

thedrifter
11-04-06, 06:11 AM
Another WWII film, another open wound

Fri Nov 3, 7:10 AM ET

More than 700 African-American Marines served on Iwo Jima in World War II, running ammunition to the front lines and burying the dead, among other harrowing duties.

These men, in addition to facing the Japanese, had to endure bitter racism from their white counterparts. When they came home they received no respect or honor for their sacrifice. These elderly warriors are asking why they are being made to feel the same neglect again.

Hollywood has made another movie, called Flags of Our Fathers, about the Iwo Jima battle. It's directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Eastwood, Steven Spielberg and Robert Lorenz.

Unlike Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, this movie shows a couple of African-American soldiers briefly in a cutaway shot on one of the ships heading toward Iwo Jima. At the end of the film, if you hang around long enough, you'll see one photograph that features a few black Marines in prayer.

Lorenz told me that blacks who are burning up the phone lines on talk radio and angry bloggers have it wrong. He said 12 black extras were used in the landing scenes. "They are there in this film ... but the focus of this film is the story of the flag raisers. This film is very much about racism and the treatment of Ira Hayes, the Native American flag raiser. "

But these extras are difficult to find, and for black veterans this movie is like a bloody wound being reopened. Those who served on Iwo Jima were among the first black Marines, trained in a segregated boot camp at North Carolina's Montford Point.

Joe Geeter, national president of the Montford Point Marine Association, has seen the film. He says this perceived slight doesn't affect just the vets but all blacks whose contributions to U.S. history are too often ignored.

Iwo Jima survivor Gene Doughty, 81, says that he realizes the movie is about the flag raisers, but that blacks and Hispanics on Iwo Jima were just as heroic. "This is vital history," he says. "This movie tells the story to the world, but we are not included, and it hurts."

It's time for black movie producers, directors and screenwriters to step up so that surviving black WWII veterans - and indeed, all African-Americans - won't have to feel slighted again. Their service triggered desegregation in the military, the civil rights movement and the emergence of a strong black middle class. Their service changed America.

We owe them - and future generations - this recognition.

Yvonne Latty, author of We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, from World War II to the War in Iraq, is a journalism professor at New York University.

thedrifter
11-06-06, 01:54 PM
'Flags of Our Fathers' vs. reality
Monday, November 06, 2006
By Dave LeMieux
CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER

Charles W. "Chuck" Lindsay of Muskegon was just 40 yards away when Joe Rosenthal took the famous World War II photograph of six Marines raising the U.S. flag over Iwo Jima.

Lindsay, now 81, knew most of the six and was pals with one, Ira H. Hayes.

According to one Marine Corps historian, Rosenthal's photo captures "the very embodiment of the American war-fighting spirit on film."

Asked what the photo means to him, Lindsay says, "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's just another picture of the war, you know," he says, his voice trailing off.

"A lot of people got the idea the flag-raising ended that battle, but that flag-raising started that battle," Lindsay says. "It was really hell from then on."

Lindsay landed with the first wave on Feb. 19, 1945, and was in combat in one of the bloodiest battles in America's history continuously until he was wounded on March 10.

"It was quite an experience," Lindsay says. "I don't think I would take a million dollars for it and I wouldn't give a nickel to go through it again."

Lindsay also wouldn't give a nickel for Clint Eastwood's film adaptation of the bestselling World War II memoir "Flags of Our Fathers."

Lindsay left a recent screening of the movie after 45 minutes.

He was upset by what he says is the film's inaccurate depiction of the actions of U.S. Navy corpsmen -- the Marine Corps battlefield medics -- in combat.

"I was getting a little angry as I was watching the movie," Lindsay says. "Finally, I said, 'The hell with this! I can't see any more of this crap!' "

Lindsay says the movie may also have stirred old memories buried deep down inside him.

"I wouldn't want to pan the movie. A lot of people who like war movies will probably enjoy it. It was just too close to me, too personal," Lindsay says.

Flag raising

When Rosenthal shot his famous photo of the flag-raising on Feb. 23, 1945, Lindsay, then a 19-year-old Marine from Detroit, was nearby using bits of C-2 explosive to heat up a cup of coffee.

"Somebody says, 'Oh look. They changed that flag over there. We all looked, 'Oh, yeah. That's right.' We had no interest in it at all," Lindsay says.

Rosenthal's photograph shows the second flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi. The first had taken place three hours before, at 10:20 a.m.

Both were greeted with cheers from the Marines fighting around the foot of Mt. Suribachi.

Lindsay's 28th Regiment of the 5th Marine Division suffered 900 casualties in the five days it took to fight up the steep black sand slopes to the volcano's 550-foot summit.

D-Day

Iwo Jima was the 5th Marine Division's first battle.

For almost two years leading up to the battle, Lindsay and the other men in D Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Regiment had lived and trained together.

There were few men Lindsay knew better those in the fire team he commanded -- riflemen Carl Amato and 'Red' Jackson and automatic weapons specialist 'Pappy' Nettles.

Within 15 minutes of landing on Iwo Jima, Nettles was wounded and Amato and Jackson were dead.

Amato was killed climbing over the side of the landing craft. Nettles was wounded near the beach.

"There was a bunker, not too far in. We were trying to get to that. 'Pappy' crawled up in there and it blew up on him. Man, his face had that black sand in it. He was just peppered with it," Lindsay says.

Jackson was killed by a sniper as he ran for cover.

"We had these gas masks you strapped on like a old West holster," Lindsay says. "The damn things, as you're running along, they get twisted around. Red was trying to move up and stopped for a minute to get that damn thing out of his way, and they caught him."

Lindsay's fire team advanced just 30 or 40 yards from the water's edge, he said. It would take D Company another four hours more to cover the next 60 yards.

"There was some talk, that first day, that they were going to pull us off that island," Lindsay says.

Mt. Suribachi

Over the next days, the 28th fought its way up the mountainside.

The Japanese had honeycombed Suribachi and the whole island with countless caves.

"Every morning, at 8 o'clock, the word would come down, 'Jump off.' And the Japanese knew that, so they would have everything all set and be there to greet us," Lindsay says.

Japanese resistance was fiercest on Feb. 22, the day before the flag rising.

"Oh man, I swear I saw that kitchen sink go by. We lost a lot of people that morning. Then, all of the sudden, the firing stopped. So we're sitting there and everybody is trying to figure out what's going on. How come they quit shooting at us?"

The Marines didn't know it at the time, but the Japanese defending Suribachi had been ordered off the mountain. They used an extensive network of tunnels to slip through the Marines' lines to the northern half of the island.

The following morning, after a 40-man platoon secured the summit and raised the first flag, Lindsay and the rest moved forward.

When he reached the summit, Lindsay turned to take in the view.

"I looked back down and I could see the LSTs (Land Ship Tank) moving in to the beach. They couldn't move in until we got that mountain because (the Japanese) were looking right down on 'em," Lindsay says.

An LST like the ones Lindsay was watching unload tanks and supplies onto the beach -- LST-393, a D-Day veteran -- is now moored on the Muskegon waterfront.

"I was thinking, 'Now I wonder if I could get down into one of them LSTs and get something to eat?' "

The battle for Iwo Jima would last another 23 days.

"We had as many Japanese behind us as what we had in front of us," Lindsay said. "After a while they were behind us trying to infiltrate to get back to their own lines. At night you had to watch both ways."

Lindsay's fight on Iwo ended on March 10, just days before the Marines secured the island. He was later evacuated by air.

Home again

Lindsay returned to Detroit after the war.

"I had the world by the tail. Things were going smoothly," he says.

He enrolled at Wayne State University. He had a good job selling insurance and was driving a cab on weekends to earn a little extra spending money.

"Then, all of the sudden, I didn't want no more school, I quit (the insurance agency), then I started drinking, drinking awful heavy," Lindsay says. "Just all of the sudden the whole world turned over on me. Nothing was important to me."

"I suppose it was that delayed stress syndrome that they talk about it. At that time, though, there wasn't no answer for it. They just said, 'Ahhh, you're nuts.' "

He said there was no medical understanding of the combat roots of his problem and no help dealing with it. "That's when I started wandering around the country working construction and drinking heavily."

By the 1960s, Lindsay's travels landed him in Muskegon. Marriage and the birth of his daughter, Karen, set things straight for a while.

But his drinking and the acrimonious divorce that followed led to a long estrangement from his daughter.

Lindsay's life changed again when he married his second wife, Evelyn, in 1970. He's not had a drink in more than 30 years.

He and Karen are now close.

Hollywood's Iwo Jima

It was at Karen's urging that Lindsay went to see "Flags of Our Fathers."

"I was a little reluctant," he says.

Once in the theater, Lindsay became angry. It may be a good war movie, he says, but it doesn't show what he saw on Iwo Jima.

Lindsay was particularly upset by the film's portrayal of Navy corpsmen.

"They had more guts than anybody had a right to have," Lindsay says.

A scene early in the movie shows a corpsman and another Marine together in a foxhole at night.

"There's just the two of them and the corpsman goes to sleep," Lindsay says. "Those kinds of things just did not happen."

Any squad leader worth his salt made sure there were two combat Marines in every foxhole, Lindsay explained -- one to stand watch while the other slept. Leaving a single exhausted combat Marine to stand watch over an unarmed corpsman all night could get them both killed.

"To me, that was an insult, not only to the Marine but to the NCOs," Lindsay says. "I got a little touchy about that. I guess I got a little over-critical."

In another scene, a corpsman goes to the aid of a wounded Marine at night in no-man's land.

"There are several riflemen around there with the wounded man," Lindsay says. "The corpsman says, 'I'll take care of it.' Those riflemen disappear. They leave a corpsman in the middle of the night out there with a wounded man?!,"' Lindsay says, indignantly.

"Who the hell's watching over that corpsman? That was part of our job -- to watch over these guys!"

The unprotected corpsman is forced to defend himself in a knife fight with a Japanese soldier. There was no way a corpsman could have won that fight, Lindsay says.

A promotion company for the studio sent Lindsay five "Flags of Our Fathers" movie posters because of his service on Iwo Jima. He gave one away, but the rest went into the recycle bin when he got home from the theater.

"If they can find me to send those posters, and they probably did to everyone in the 5th Marines Association, why couldn't they have found somebody to act as technical director who knew what the hell they were doing?"

The film also does a disservice to Ira Hayes, one of the six Marines photographed by Rosenthal, Lindsay says.

"I knew Ira pretty well and I liked him. He was a crazy bastard," Lindsay says. "They portrayed Ira as an intellectual, as a serious dude that was worried about his outfit. That was not Ira. He was fun-loving. He was always pulling (practical) jokes on people in the outfit."

Reunion

Lindsay plans to attend the 5th Division reunion in Branson, Mo. next year.

"It's going to be the last one. We're getting too old. Too many of us don't show up any more. Karen is looking forward to it. She's going because her old man's going."

While Lindsay looks forward to sharing a good time with old friends, he says he will never go back to the battlefield they shared.

"I'm proud of having been there. But if you asked me to go back, I wouldn't ever do it. Too many memories, too many ghosts over there," he says. "I've heard it said before that the real heroes never came back from there. That might be a clich&eacute; now, but it's true, it's actually true."

Ellie

thedrifter
11-07-06, 01:26 PM
November 13, 2006
Keeping the legend straight
Press surrounding Iwo movie perpetuates inaccuracies

By Charles A. Jones

I want to address the hyperbole and misinformation that have accompanied the recent film “Flags of Our Fathers.”

The characters in the movie repeatedly state that the dead left on Iwo were the true heroes. Those heroes deserve no less than the truth when their story is told.

I can judge these aspects because I have seen the movie; I went to Iwo Jima in 1995 for the battle’s 50th anniversary commemoration; and I have attended almost all 5th Marine Division reunions since 1995. Also, I have interviewed numerous Marine and Navy Iwo veterans.

NBC Nightly News featured interviews with two of the movie’s actors. Ryan Phillippe, who portrays corpsman John “Doc” Bradley, said: “One of the commanders wanted that flag because he knew what it would represent in terms of securing the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps was fairly new at that time, and he knew that it meant the Marine Corps would last forever.”

Wrong. Navy Secretary James Forrestal, not a commander, expressed interest in the flag and observed that the flag-raising would secure the existence of the Corps, although the battalion commander wanted the flag because his battalion raised it. Also, the Marine Corps was not “fairly new” during World War II. The first two battalions of leathernecks were created Nov. 10, 1775. Congress made the Corps a separate service in 1798.

In the same interview, Barry Pepper, who portrays Sgt. Michael Strank, said, “Iwo Jima is a memorial site. Nothing has been touched since ’45. ... It is just absolutely the way it was left when Iwo Jima was waged.”

Wrong. Three Marine divisions had cemeteries on Iwo, but the dead were removed circa 1947-48. Also, the U.S. maintained a military presence on Iwo for years after the battle. The U.S. returned the island to Japan in 1968; the last U.S. presence was a long-range navigation station maintained by the Coast Guard until 1993. The island is now home to Japanese military installations. These developments hardly left the island untouched.

The Wall Street Journal’s film review stated that the famous photograph of the second flag-raising “was the second of two flag-raisings snapped that day by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal; a do-over was required when, supposedly, the secretary of the Navy demanded the first flag as a souvenir.” The review also states that Strank, one of the second flag-raisers, was a “commanding officer.”

Wrong. Marine photographer Louis Lowery photographed the first flag-raising; Rosenthal was not present during that event. Rosenthal accompanied the second patrol ascending the mountain when he took his famous photograph. As a sergeant, Strank would never have been a commanding officer, although sergeants later had to command companies when officer casualties required junior enlisted Marines to take control until replacement officers could be found.

Accompanying the movie is the saying, “A single shot can end the war.” I also read words to this effect: “The right picture can win or lose a war.”

Wrong. The idea that Rosenthal’s photograph could or did shorten or end the war is fantasy. What ended the war was relentless combat at sea, on land and in the air, along with two atomic bombings.

Marine Corps Times’ review of the movie noted that it “became the single bloodiest engagement of the war.”

Wrong. The Germans and Soviets suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties at Stalingrad. Iwo Jima was the bloodiest engagement for the U.S.

In his Parade magazine essay about the movie, director Clint Eastwood writes that “nearly 7,000 American soldiers died” on Iwo.

Wrong. Those familiar with the military know that a soldier is a member of the Army. While the Army undoubtedly lost personnel at Iwo, most of the casualties were not soldiers but “sea soldiers” — Marines — and Navy support personnel accompanying them.

In the final analysis, an event as important to the Corps and its image as “Flags of Our Fathers” should be evaluated by facts, intelligent commentary and promotion that is true.

The writer is a lawyer and Marine Corps Reserve colonel in Norfolk, Va. He is an associate member of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines, 5th Marine Division, an infantry company that fought on Iwo Jima.

Ellie