9/4/2023 0 Comments First motion picture![]() ![]() ![]() Warner gave Crump the idle Vitagraph Studios lot, where silent films had been made in the 1910s, and Crump set out to turn it into a military post.Ĭrump began recruiting from the Hollywood studios. They decided Crump would put together a separate studio devoted to serving the Air Forces. Requests from Washington for more recruitment movies started to pile up, and Warner and Crump realized the studio wouldn’t be able to satisfy its military obligations on top of its normal production schedule. The film played in theaters all over the country-and more than 150,000 men signed up to join the Air Forces. The scene cuts to a young actress ditching her ground-bound Army date for a boy with wings on his jacket, as Stewart’s voice-over claims that flyboys always get the girl. He radiates cool in his leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, and he waxes poetic about the importance of winning the war. Winning Your Wings opens with Stewart flying aerobatics in a BT-13 Valiant trainer, which he then lands and taxis up to the camera. ![]() Stewart apologized for the blow-up, knocked out his scenes in a few days, and flew back to his post. Crump took Stewart across the street to a café and explained what he and Warner were up to. Stewart took his service in the Air Forces seriously, and thinking the studio had pulled him away for a publicity stunt, he arrived on set irate. Actor Jimmy Stewart, an accomplished pilot who had enlisted the previous year, was given orders to star as the film’s on-camera narrator. John Huston, who had recently made The Maltese Falcon, was brought on to direct it. On the airplane back to Hollywood, Crump wrote the script for Winning Your Wings, the recruitment film Arnold had commissioned within days, it was in production. He remembered that after Warner agreed to throw his studio’s weight behind the idea, Arnold turned to Crump and said, “You’re in this too” he promised both men officers’ commissions on the spot. Crump, who died in 1998, recalled the meeting in an interview recorded during 19 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Since before Pearl Harbor, he and Warner had been making propaganda films for the military, intended to promote the armed forces to an American public reluctant to enter the war in Europe. To make all these movies, he proposed building a USAAF motion picture unit, staffed entirely with recruits from Hollywood.Īlso in the room during that meeting was Owen Crump, a scriptwriter with a reputation, developed during a career in radio, for speed and accuracy. After that, he’d need effective training films to get all those recruits flying and fighting as soon as possible. Arnold needed men to fly them.Īrnold wanted 100,000 pilots, and he told Warner he needed a powerful recruitment movie. Anticipating an air war on two fronts on opposite sides of the globe, the service was rolling out tens of thousands of new airplanes. The United States had entered World War II the previous December, and Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold had spent the past four months shaping his air force into one of the most formidable in the world. office with Jack Warner, vice president of Warner Bros. Army Air Forces was sitting in his Washington, D.C. On a Sunday morning in march 1942, the commander of the U.S. ![]()
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