FIVE CAME BACK
“World
War II “marked the government’s first attempt at a sustained program of filmed propaganda,
and its use of Hollywood filmmakers to explain its objectives, tout its
successes, and shape the war as a narrative for both civilians and soldiers
constituted a remarkable, even radical experiment. Movies brought tens of
millions of Americans out of their homes every week and stirred them to
laughter, tears, anger, and, increasingly, patriotism. Filmmakers could not win
the war, but Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William
Wyler had already shown they could win the people.
“[The
five men] would honor their country, risk their lives, and create a new visual
vocabulary for fictional and factual war movies. By the time they came home,
the idea they had once held that the war would be an adventure lingered only as
a distant memory. They returned to Hollywood changed forever as men and
filmmakers.”
-- From Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the
Second World War, by Mark Harris
INTRODUCTION
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, more than half of adults
in America went to the movies at least once a week. Included in their viewing
were the extraordinarily popular, award-winning films made by a quintet of
artists already among the era’s master filmmakers: John Ford’s Stagecoach , The Grapes of Wrath, and How
Green Was My Valley; Frank Capra’s Mr.
Deeds
Goes
to Town, You Can’t Take It With You, and Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington; William Wyler’s
Jezebel,
Wuthering Heights , and The Letter ; George
Stevens’ Gunga Din , Penny Serenade,
and Woman of the Year ; and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and Across the Pacific, and Sergeant York, written by Huston.
A typical weekly movie theater
program consisted of cartoons, short subjects, serial dramas, coming
attractions, and features. And newsreels: The only source of visual news at the
time, they showed increasingly disturbing images from Europe, where Germany’s
Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini formed the Axis Powers, and from East
Asia, where Japan’s Emperor Hirohito was at war with China. Britain, France,
and a half-dozen other countries were being drawn into battle. President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that the United States “stood on a threshold,”
but within Hollywood’s film community, questions about their role in a
potential war effort gripped the men who made the movies: What did audiences
want, and what would its fighting forces need? Could patriotism and industry
exist side by side? What part could they play in mobilizing a divided, and
wary, America?
After Dec. 7, 1941, Hollywood’s
greatest directors sprang into action.
‘TO BRING THEM TO LIFE’
Following the release of his
lauded 2008 book Pictures at a
Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood – an incisive, wide-ranging examination
of the generationally seismic 1967 Best Picture Academy Awards race – film
journalist Mark Harris was looking for his next topic. He landed on one when he
realized that, throughout his life as a filmgoer and cultural critic, he had
never given immense consideration to the movie years 1939 to 1945, when America
was at war and much of its talent was in uniform. Harris decided to focus on
the directors who, without hesitation, interrupted their successful and honored
careers to serve their country: Capra, Ford, Huston, Stevens, and Wyler.
In February 2014, Harris’ Five
Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War was published to
great acclaim, becoming a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for
History. Almost immediately, Oscar-winning executive producer Scott Rudin (No Country for Old
Men, The
Social Network, Fences) and Barry Diller thought of the next step: Bringing Five Came Back to the screen. When filmmaker
Steven Spielberg came aboard as an executive producer, it was his idea to turn
the project into a documentary under the auspices of Amblin Television. To helm
it, Spielberg recruited Laurent Bouzereau, a prolific filmmaker who has
directed documentaries about Spielberg’s films for over 20 years.
“We talked about various running
times for this film, as long as five hours and as short as 90 minutes,” says
Harris of the three-episode docuseries format. “We wanted to tell it
chronologically and keep the interweaving stories. It’s one big story with five
main characters. We needed a lot of length to preserve that.”
“Both the book and the making of
the documentary were like one long journey to really try to understand who
these five were as men,” adds Harris. “I always felt I had a good handle on who
they were as filmmakers, but to get to know them, to try and understand their
personal furies and frustrations and ambitions and disappointments – that was,
from the very beginning, what I had most wanted to do. To bring them to life.”
“Being faithful to the structure of
Harris’ book was crucial, says Bouzereau, whose extensive filmography includes Don’t
Say No Until I Finish Talking: The Story of Richard D. Zanuck, Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, and TCM’s
documentary series A Night at the Movies .
“We were going to preserve the
amazing intercutting between the stories of those five men,” Bouzereau says.
“But as a film, you have to make sure you balance them so you don’t lose their
stories and how they interacted with each other at the time. Or even,
sometimes, didn’t interact: Stevens and Huston, for instance, didn’t really run
into one another during the war. How do you make that feel effortless? Mark’s
immense knowledge and writing skills were there throughout the project to guide
it.”
THE HIGHEST CALIBER
To guide us through the different personalities,
interweaving chronologies and globe-trotting locales, the Five
Came Back team turned to the voices of five modern cinematic geniuses.
“Early on, we seized on the idea
that we could have one director serve as sort of a surrogate storyteller for
each World War II filmmaker,” says Harris. “Then it was a complicated game of
trying to pair them all up. They talked about who they wanted to talk about.”
The new group is made up of some
of the heaviest hitters in cinema, with a deep well of knowledge about the
artists they speak about. Spielberg himself provides insight into Wyler;
Francis Ford Coppola delves into Huston’s narrative; Lawrence Kasdan discusses
Stevens; Paul Greengrass handles Ford; and Guillermo del Toro comments on
Capra’s story.
The work of the
interviewed filmmakers is, of course, filmmaking’s top rank. Spielberg’s
extraordinary career includes E.T. The
Extra-Terrestrial ,
Schindler’s
List, Saving Private Ryan, Munich,
and Lincoln,
among his many achievements as a director and producer. Coppola’s masterworks
include the Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, Apocalypse
Now, and Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Kasdan is the acclaimed
writer-director of The Big Chill , The Accidental Tourist and Grand
Canyon and screenwriter of The Empire
Strikes Back,
Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star
Wars: The Force Awakens. Greengrass has brought his piercing skills as a
documentarian to dramas including The
Bourne Supremacy , United 93, and Captain Phillips . And
del Toro is the visually and emotionally exhilarating director of The Devil’s Backbone , Pan’s Labyrinth, and Crimson Peak
.
“Throughout those interviews, I
was continually blown away by how much they all knew,” says Bouzereau
admiringly. “They all came in with very deep knowledge of the subject, as well
as very strong opinions and experiences.”
There were personal perspectives
as well, Bouzereau notes. “We were never shy about stepping out of the story.
Those moments were precious, bringing in a personal perspective. Like when
Francis talks about making Apocalypse Now
and the survival nature of filmmaking.
Or when Steven talks about not only his dad’s experiences in World War II, but
also about how, as a young filmmaker, Steven had actually met Wyler. Paul,
coming from the documentary world, was able to relate to Ford in unexpected
ways. Guillermo talked about Capra from the heart – identifying with the fact
that he, like Capra, is an immigrant, and how that affected his position in
Hollywood. Larry called me on several occasions before his own interview to
discuss George Stevens’ complex and moving journey during the war – he brought
great knowledge and perspective.”
“Looking at these directors’
careers and what they symbolize in the film business,” says
Bouzereau, “gives us yet another
layer of what Five Came Back is all about. All of them bring who they
are to the table in a very interesting way. They have a unified voice in some
sense, but they also come at filmmaking from different areas of cinema, as well
as different generations.”
These five contemporary directors
whose interviews help take us through the story “chose themselves more than we
chose them,” says Harris. “By which I mean, we didn’t say, ‘Who is the modern
equivalent of George Stevens?,’ or ‘Does Francis Coppola somehow equal John
Huston?’ When you’re talking about Frank Capra, what matters is that Guillermo
del Toro feels in sympathy with Capra, and so his comments were thoughtful and
insightful in ways that you might not have predicted. I was thrilled that
directors of their caliber were willing to do this, because we probably don’t
talk enough about how the influence of these World War II-era filmmakers
resonate in unexpected ways through generations.”
To capture the interviews,
Bouzereau chose to use the documentary-filming device known as the Interrotron.
Invented by filmmaker Errol Morris, the device is a camera that consists of a
video monitor with a two-way mirror under it. The Interrotron allowed
Bouzereau, as he asked questions, to make eye contact with the filmmakers while
shooting them straight-on, as if they are addressing the audience.
“Interviews are about
establishing a connection, so I was hesitant. But then, from an aesthetic point
of view, it made sense,” says Bouzereau. “When Steven came to his interview, we
were joking. I said, ‘Steven, this is my first time with the Interrotron!’
Steven said, ‘Yeah, me too!’ But it worked beautifully. It can help make a
provocative statement.”
‘100 HOURS OF FOOTAGE – THEN EVEN MORE DIGGING’
With essential
assistance from Five Came Back editor Will Znidaric (Winter on Fire ), as well as
Oscar-winning filmmaker Angus Wall’s (The Social
Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ) company Rock Paper Scissors Entertainment and
John Battsek’s ( One
Day in September, Restrepo, Searching
for Sugarman) Passion Pictures, Bouzereau began the long process of
assembling copious footage and audio recordings to accompany Harris’ script.
Over 100 hours of archival and newsreel footage was gathered as Bouzereau and
his team watched over 40 documentaries and training films directed and produced
by the five directors during the war; over 50 Hollywood studio films; and over
30 hours of outtakes and raw footage from their war films.
“Then there were the late-in-life interviews
they did, and all the general footage, audio, and cultural clips from that
time,” says Bouzereau. “I had worked with George Stevens, Jr., on a documentary
about his father’s film of The Diary of
Anne Frank , so I had the footage Stevens
shot during the war, but
his son continued to be very helpful. We received clips and audio from
the Wyler family, from official libraries, from Ford’s grandson, author Dan
Ford, and from the John Ford collection at the Lilly Library at Indiana University
in Bloomington. There was all of the material at the National Archives in
Washington, D.C. And then, there was even more digging! Five Came Back presents all of this
footage in a way that’s never been showcased before.”
The opening and closing credit music, from multiple Oscar
nominee Thomas Newman (Bridge of
Spies,
WALL-E,
American
Beauty, Angels in America, Skyfall and Spectre) and original score by
Jeremy Turner, were other major
pieces in the puzzle. (Making things even more cyclical, Newman’s father,
composer Thomas Newman, scored several films each for Wyler, Stevens, and Ford
from the 1930s through the ’60s.) Bouzereau describes Newman’s themes for Five Came Back as “A beautiful, slightly
more modern score than what you’d expect for a documentary about the World War
II era.” Turner, for his part, “Faced the huge task of coming up with close to
three hours’ worth of music, and worked really fast and hard to create a
terrific score,” says Bouzereau.
When the three-part docuseries
quickly found a home at Netflix, it was clear to the entire team that it was
the perfect union of project and platform.
“Through
Netflix, Five Came Back will expose a new generation of viewers to the
classic films of these directors,” says Bouzereau. As well as the wartime work:
In conjunction with Five Came
Back, Netflix will feature 13 documentaries on the platform, including
Ford’s The Battle of
Midway, Wyler’s The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying
Fortress, Huston’s Report from the Aleutians, Capra’s The
Battle of Russia, Stevens’ Nazi
Concentration Camps , and Stuart Heisler’s The
Negro Soldier.
Bouzereau, who
also valued the input of Amblin Television co-presidents Darryl Frank and
Justin Falvey, says that Spielberg – who, in the mid-’90s, assigned Bouzereau
to make a documentary about Spielberg’s film 1941 , starting a professional
relationship on behind-the-scenes documentaries that continues today – was a
true mentor in every sense.
“Steven was always so curious and
interested,” says Bouzereau. “He watched all of the cuts, and gave clear notes,
right down to things like, ‘Can you slow this down by two more frames,’ or
‘Give that one more beat.’ And his encyclopedic knowledge was essential. He
also had thoughts about scoring and placement of music; he’d say, ‘Let this
moment breathe here,’ or ‘Bring it up there.’ He and Amblin TV gave us the
chance to make this documentary, and Steven was truly there with us 5,000
percent.”
Rudin’s crucial contributions was
always something Bouzereau could count on as well. “Scott was always so
accessible,” says Bouzereau. “If I sent an email at 1 or 2 in the morning, he’d
reply a minute later. And Scott encourages you to say anything that’s on your mind,
even if it’s a crazy idea. Early on, I’d say, ‘This is my idea, and it may be
wrong but maybe it’ll lead to the right one.’ Sometimes those ideas worked, and
at other times Scott was good at saying, ‘Let’s rethink this or that.’ He and
Steven were respectful of my being the director, but their guidance was
invaluable.”
There was another perspective
Bouzereau found surprising: His own. “I didn’t grow up in the U.S., which
perhaps makes me the right director for this,” says Bouzereau, who was born and
raised in Paris. “I knew the cinematic part of the five World War II-era
filmmakers very well, but not so much the political and war experiences. I was
able to infuse my curiosity and sense of discovery into the film.”
VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
To provide the
narration for Five Came Back, three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep joined the
cause, and in doing so provided even more layers of humanity, talent and grace.
“We had discussions early on
about how much narration to have, and Mark had written such beautiful scripts
for each episode,” says Bouzereau. “The narration was to help us through the
stories, including some of the ones that were the most complicated to talk
about or explain. And Meryl came in with such amazing notes. She really
provided a grand finale to two years of hard work.”
Harris remembers the day of
Streep’s recording as one filled with significance.
“After all this time, it was kind
of strange for me to go into that recording session and finally hear what I
wrote, and to hear it ideally realized by the world’s greatest actress,” Harris
says. Echoes of the pre-war era’s divided political culture can be seen in
2017, as America’s creative community is again moved to speak up in important
ways during a polarizing time.
“Most crucially, Meryl always
symbolizes incredible cinema,” says Bouzereau. “But she also reflected the
artist’s social conscience when she expressed her political thoughts as she
received the Cecil B. DeMille award at the Golden Globes ceremony in January.”
Adds Harris, “These discussions
of ‘Hollywood versus Real America’ are debates we’re having right now. A
version of that dispute was already very much in place in the lead-up to World
War II, and it was entangled with things like anti-Semitism. World War II
rebooted Hollywood as being central to America. In fact, Hollywood was America.
It was the repository of American values and the American war effort. Hollywood
was the way Americans learned about the war.”
That solidarity only got stronger. “I think
everyone could see Western civilization was at stake, and they needed to fight
or die,” Spielberg says. “The documentaries these five made were powerful. And
these filmmakers who came back with footage about the truth of that war, were
changed forever.”
FIVE CAME BACK, EPISODE 1
“Film was an
intoxicant from the early days of the silent movies,” says Spielberg in the
opening moments of Five Came Back. “And early on, Hollywood realized that it had a
tremendous tool or weapon for change, through cinema.”
But in the 1930s, it was the
nations to be known as the Axis Powers who had weaponized it. “Power to the Nth
power, proclaimed by Hitler at the Nuremberg Nazi Congress,” we hear a newsreel
narrator says over chilling visuals of a German rally. “The Nazi Party above
the state, and Hitler above the Nazi Party – affirmed by thundering cheers.”
“Cinema in its purest form could be put in the service of
propaganda,” says Coppola, referencing, among other films, Triumph
of the Will, director Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous celebration of Nazi
Germany and Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg rally. “Hitler and his minister of
propaganda Joseph Goebbels understood the power of the cinema to move large
populations toward your way of thinking.”
In 1941, John Ford sensed what
was coming, and had been serving as a lieutenant commander in the Navy for
almost a year before Pearl Harbor. “Ford felt more certain than a lot of his
colleagues, and a lot of other Americans, that war was inevitable,” says
Harris. “Of the five directors showcased in this story, Ford is the oldest and
the only one who could have fought in
World War I, but didn’t. So I
think in many ways, the arc of what was going on in America, Europe and the
world was clearer to him.”
But America was divided.
“Isolationism was, from 1938 to ’41, a real strain not just in rural America
but in Congress,” says Harris.
After Pearl Harbor, everything
changed. “Each of those five filmmakers wanted to respond as so many millions
did,” says Greengrass. “They chose to serve.”
Capra went to Washington, D.C., joined the Army with the
rank of Major (soon to become Colonel), and was the head of Gen. George C.
Marshall’s wartime propaganda-film program. Huston, now a Captain in the Army
Signal Corps, and Ford prepared to go overseas. Stevens would follow, going
into the Signal Corps after he finished filming his comedy The More the
Merrier. Wyler became a Major in the Army Air Force and left Europe after he
concluded making 1942’s pro-British drama Mrs. Miniver.
Ford was assigned to the Pacific’s Midway Islands in June
1942. Harris describes the director’s resulting documentary, The
Battle of Midway, as “100 percent a John Ford movie.”
“The Battle of Midway is a great moment in terms of the
American war effort,” says Harris. “It was received so strongly and seen so
widely, that that moment of mid-1942 was probably the apex of the War
Department feeling of, ‘These films will help us, and will be a powerful tool
in our arsenal.’”
As different as their individual
reasons were for going into the war, notes Harris, the five filmmakers “Shared
a kind of confidence. That sounds strange, since you’re dealing with everyone
from Huston, famously full of bravado and swagger, to Stevens, who was
soft-spoken and modest. But to varying degrees, they all felt like they had
been in battle all their professional lives – they saw their fights to make
good movies in romantic, somewhat confrontational terms. Yet they were all to
learn, in very vivid ways, how different actual war was from the war of making
movies.”
For Capra, the two battles would blend. Based in
Washington, D.C., he was assigned by Marshall to instill in the troops a sense
of the urgency of why they were in uniform. Capra created a series of films,
one under the umbrella title Why We Fight
and another under the title Know Your Enemies, to explain the
origins of – and the players in – the geopolitical turmoil. Stymied as to what
to do and struggling with Army rules, a tight budget, and a bare-bones staff,
Capra, went to New York to see Triumph of the Will.
“He comes out of
Triumph
of the Will saying, ‘We can’t win this war, these guys are going to beat
us,’’ says del Toro. “That’s how effective a weapon that film was.”
Five Came Back describes how Capra decided to use the Axis footage
for new purposes, using narration by actor Walter Huston – father of John
Huston. “Capra, maybe more than the others, really trusted his emotions,” says
Harris. “He feels making his films will be an uphill battle against Army
bureaucracy, and he encounters Triumph of
the Will at a very low moment. Capra was
always so susceptible to propaganda, and that rocked him. But it’s a
commendable leap to go from ‘We’re going to lose’ to ‘Why is this making me
feel this way?’ to ‘How can I use this to make people feel we’re going to win?’
That’s an extraordinary way to take a punch in the gut and turn it into a
brilliant strategic solution.”
FIVE CAME BACK, EPISODE 2
In the first year of the war,
upwards of three or four narrative movies a week would use World War II as a
backdrop. “Hollywood made a lot of movies about the war. They were basically
made to get people out of their seats and write a check,” says Spielberg.
“Audiences were very used to a sterilized Hollywood war, with bloodless combat.
It was exciting, but it was nothing like the real thing.”
The first of
Capra’s seven entries in the Why We Fight series, titled Prelude to War, was created for incoming
soldiers but released theatrically. Huston made Report from the Aleutians for the War Department, but
as Five
Came Back shows, his next feature, The Battle for San Pietro, had a
checkered backstory in which Huston recreated scenes (albeit with the
endorsement of the Army).
“There was
manipulation in San Pietro and in another film, Tunisian
Victory, as events didn’t allow them to
shoot what they wanted,” explains Kasdan.
Though San Pietro, at the behest of the
government, was a recreation of an actual battle – though Huston never publicly
acknowledged it as such – the film nonetheless was a leap forward for realism
in war films. Says Harris, “There is a real discussion to be had of the ethics
of San Pietro, and I don’t write that off. But the aesthetics of it are
undeniable. It helped create a new standard of cinematic realism.”
Five Came Back highlights watershed
moments in fiction as well as documentaries. Wyler bridged both, as his London
Blitz drama Mrs. Miniver opened to massive success in Britain and the U.S.,
going on to win six Oscars at the 15th Academy Awards ceremony, including Best
Picture and Best Director. The event also saw Capra and Ford both win Best
Documentary Oscars for Why We Fight: Prelude to War and The Battle of Midway, respectively; it was the first year for
that category, and the only time it had 25 nominees and four winners.
While Wyler’s
wife accepted his Oscar on his behalf in March 1943, Wyler was preparing to go
up in a B17 with an American crew on their 25th bombing mission to film Memphis
Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortess, a huge hit and the first film ever to
be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times.
“Memphis
Belle is absolutely a Wyler movie in its precision and attention to
detail,” says Harris. “He wanted to let you know what it’s like to fly that
mission. He felt his duty wasn’t to just propagandize. Wyler also wanted to
emphasize that these missions are scary, and it’s such a better movie because
of it.”
There are lighthearted elements in Five Came Back as well, including a
glimpse of the jokey
“Private
SNAFU” animated short films made for G.I’s. For those, Capra brought in
cartoonist Theodore Geisel – later to become famous as Dr. Seuss – as well as
animators Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng and voice actor Mel Blanc. The shorts
were created to help soldiers avoid a
SNAFU, or Situation Normal All
Fouled Up. (Perceptive soldiers knew exactly what the word “fouled” was a
substitute for.)
“The ‘SNAFU’ shorts were an
entertainment tool, but they also drove home with humor the vital principles of
soldiering and living through the war,” says del Toro. “They were funny,
raunchy, and incredibly accessible cartoons that really resonated with the
average soldier.”
Including stories about “SNAFU”
and such ancillary but noteworthy wartime events as Bette Davis’ founding of
the Hollywood Canteen was crucial for Harris. “I hoped to have enough room to
create a sense that the five filmmakers this documentary focuses on were not
the only people involved with the war,” he explains. “Right on the margins of
it you have people doing really interesting or complicated things, from Davis
and Geisel to 20th Century Fox chief Darryl Zanuck on assignment in Africa.
Just like it was important for me to have The Negro Soldier included.”
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, a poll showed that Harlem
residents thought they would be no worse off if Japan won the war. That was a
concern to the War Department and to Capra, and it led to the historic
recruitment film The Negro Soldier , written by playwright Carlton Moss and
directed by Stuart Heisler, who took over when Wyler rejected the Army’s
offensive guidelines for the film.
“I was
fascinated by issues of race and racism in the Army and its filmmaking effort,”
says Harris, “and the two places we get to touch on it in the documentary are The Negro Soldier
and in the depiction of the Japanese people in both the ‘hate movies’ – which
is what those types of films were called then – that Hollywood produced, and in
documentaries.”
“But the story of The Negro Soldier is really inspiring,”
says Harris. “It’s this incredibly rare instance from that time of a white
creative artist and a black creative artist collaborating to make something
that not only had to change the perceptions of white Americans about what was
going on, it had to overcome deep skepticism among African-Americans. It also
had to overcome the institutional racism of the Army, which, initially at
least, issued terrible instructions as to what that movie could and couldn’t
do.”
“When you do any
adaptation of a book, you keep thinking, ‘I hope we can keep this, I hope we
can keep that.’ And keeping The Negro
Soldier in the documentary was very high
on that list for me.”
The film’s
thoughtful portrait of African-American life and refusal to traffic in
stereotypes was notable for 1944. While several of the documentaries made by
the subjects of Five Came Back were successful, the genuinely massive
crossover appeal of The Negro Soldier was extraordinary.
“It’s one of the few freestanding
World War II American ‘propaganda movies’ that turns into a genuine hit,” says
Harris, who notes that the film accomplished not just its initial goal of
reaching G.I.’s, it contributed to the greater good. “Even today, the hope for
anyone who makes a documentary with a point of view about something
contemporary is, ‘Can I move the needle in terms of what the public thinks?’ The Negro Soldier
absolutely did that. This was really, for its time, such a remarkable movie.”
Though The Negro Soldier wasn’t directed by one
of the five directors at the center of Five
Came Back, including it, Harris says, added to “a sense of the size
of this collective effort.”
Barely two years after Pearl
Harbor, however, audiences’ film appetites changed. “In 1942 and ’43, three or
more movies a week had some war-related content, whether they were combat
movies, service comedies, spy thrillers, or the Invisible Man battling Nazis,”
says Harris. “Because of the sheer volume of movies and shorts and the speed of
production – where features could go from concept to finished cut in five or
six months – you could see the war progress almost in real time. At the start
of 1944, as things overseas get bloodier and darker, there was a
counter-reaction to the glut of war movies.”
Then George Stevens and John
Ford were assigned to cover the Normandy Invasion.
FIVE CAME BACK, EPISODE 3
Ford and Stevens were chosen by
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces
in Europe, to film the D-Day landing. The filmmakers went with hundreds of
cameras and dozens of men to the shores of France on June 6, 1944. “They knew
some of those men would be sacrificed,” Kasdan says. “There was no protected
place to film the invasion.”
Five Came Back sheds light on this, one of the most dangerous
moments for any of the filmmakers. Yet their footage was crucial.
“Think about it: Without the
efforts that Stevens and Ford oversaw, 75 years later, we wouldn’t know what
D-Day looks like,” says Harris. “We’ve had clean D-Day depictions in World War
II movies, which then gave way to Saving Private Ryan, which is deeply
influenced by the D-Day footage that was shot yet which still shocked everyone
out of complacency about what that invasion was, and what the cost of it had
been. But all of our understanding of it comes from those initial images.”
Over 4,000 Allied troops were
lost that first day. The dramatic footage (some of it deemed too intense for
the public) was another example of how the immediacy of cinema brought the war
to audiences. “Film from the invasion got sent out almost immediately,” says
Harris. “The first part, called Eve of Battle, went out first, and then
on June 15, 1944, came the first actual D-Day footage. It was a huge event:
It’s more likely the D-Day footage was advertised as the big coming attraction
outside American movie theaters than whatever that week’s feature was. There
was incredible anticipation for it.”
One of the more
dramatic stories in Five Came Back involves Wyler’s assignment after he filmed the
liberation of Rome. His documentary Thunderbolt was about small,
single-pilot fighter planes, and to get footage from the air for it, the recent
Oscar-winner went up in a B25 bomber, a much louder plane than the B17 he was
in for Memphis Belle. Wyler put himself at the bottom of the B25 without
ear protection. After returning to the ground, he was diagnosed as having lost
80 percent of his hearing.
“That’s a shocking piece of
information,” says Harris. “In some sense, Wyler thinks his career is over and
that his life is over. In a blink. This is incredibly moving to me, and really
deepens your understanding of Wyler as a filmmaker.”
Five Came Back describes Stevens filming
the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, and photographing, in a
unique fashion, Germany’s surrender of Paris. As he continued with the Allies
in what Kasdan calls a “cold, hard, brutal, violent slog to Germany,” Stevens
and the Allied forces came to the Nazi death camp at Dachau – and were shocked
to their core by what they found.
“What they thought might be
prison camps turned out to be extermination camps. Death factories,” says
Kasdan.
Says Harris, “By the time Stevens
got to Dachau, he had had more brutal on the ground war experience than any of
the others. To me, it’s impossible that any of the five directors going into
Dachau would not be profoundly shaken and moved by what they saw. But Stevens
got through those gates and kind of intuited that this was without precedent,
and an atrocity of a scale that he had not imagined. He instantly understood
that now, what he was there for was something very different – he’s not using
his camera for propaganda, or shooting for newsreels. He’s there to document
history in the deepest sense.”
Stevens used his footage from
Dachau to create two filmed documents that would be used as evidence in what
would become the War Criminals trial at Nuremberg in late 1945.
“It was the first Holocaust
footage the world had ever seen,” says Spielberg.
After Germany surrendered in May
1945, Capra was assigned to work on the much-delayed
Know Your Enemy:
Japan. Unlike similar films that had sought to explain the German army,
this “hate film” portrayed the Japanese people in offensive, terrible ways.
However, after the U.S. dropped Atomic bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the
Southwest Pacific Area, ordered Know Your Enemy: Japan to never be
shown.
“This is a story we tell in the
documentary that ends up being unresolved, because Hiroshima really ends the
discussion of it,” says Harris. “But the question is always, How do you treat
the ‘other’ that you see as an enemy? When you talk about propaganda and about
how the U.S. government and the War Department wanted one thing and filmmakers
wanted another, you automatically assume that the government must be on the
wrong side in any formula like that. But there were people in the war effort
who urged Hollywood to turn it down and not indulge in monstrous caricatures.
The reason was impure – Japanese-Americans were in internment camps, and the
government was worried that if there were too many of these ‘hate movies,’
small towns wouldn’t let them re-settle there. The impulse to portray the
Japanese that way was not imposed on Hollywood by the Army. It’s a hard thing
to watch now.”
Five Came Back concludes with a section
on what happened to the filmmakers after their service ended. Ford’s first
feature upon his return, They Were
Expendable, was a tale of sacrifice imbued
with his experiences that nonetheless felt dated in 1945. Huston made a
documentary for the War Department, Let There Be Light, that showed, in raw
and humanistic ways, soldiers suffering from what we now call Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder at a military hospital. Stevens would never go back to making
comedy, instead doing films like A Place
in the Sun and Shane that delved into fear, guilt, cruelty and bravery.
Then there are
the studies in contrast: Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Wyler’s The
Best Years of Our Lives. Both were released at the end of 1946 – but as
Harris points out, their similarities end there.
“I think Capra really did think
that the war was a horrible and cataclysmic interruption of a very stable
America, after which the country would return to being what it was,” says
Harris. That’s baked into the small-town ode he chose to do as the debut
feature for what would become his new but short-lived independent company,
Liberty Films – and it was a disastrous box-office failure.
“This is not a criticism of It’s a Wonderful Life, which is a movie
that has immense emotional resonance for many people,” says Harris. “Yet that
film lives much more beautifully out of its moment than in its moment, when it
was dismissed as a piece of nostalgia. Capra didn’t necessarily understand that
the war had taken America to a new place, rather than return it to an old
place. It wasn’t seen as forwarded-thinking at a moment when America was very,
very ready to move forward.”
That move
forward is the essence of The Best Years of Our Lives, which was
the year’s biggest hit and the eventual recipient of 9 Oscars, including Best
Picture and Best Director. It was a movie that was as of-the-moment as one
could possibly be.
“The Best Years of Our Lives is both the
last war movie and the first post-war movie,” says Harris. “It ushers in the
next 15 years of social realism in movies. Wyler’s quest for truth and accuracy
comes out of his war experience, and is poured into that film. It brings the
subject of disabled veterans straight into the theater and then right into
people’s homes and then around their dinner table. Wyler truly understands who
those three returning veterans in the film are, because he is all three of
them. It is incontestably his greatest movie, one of the great American movies,
and an amazing achievement.”
‘THEY WANTED TO BE WHERE THE ACTION IS’
The stories in Five
Came Back reverberate with meaning. We are still living through their coda.
Says Bouzereau, “These filmmakers, at that time, had a responsibility in that
what they were putting into the world would be taken as truth, and there were
no alternate thoughts on that. You can see a lot of echoes in what is happening
today. It became clear as we were doing this film that the past was re-emerging
in some ways, including the line we see that separates cinema that exists for
entertainment and cinema that carries a message. And politics is more than ever
a part of entertainment. I find it courageous of filmmakers then, as with
artists today, to speak up for those who don’t have a platform.”
The duty to get news to audiences was
paramount for the World War II filmmakers, Harris says. “It’s the hardest thing
to convey to young, contemporary audiences – even if you understand it
intellectually, you don’t understand viscerally that you had to wait a really,
really long time for news.”
“We’re in a context now where we
have five different ways of knowing what is making news this morning,” says
Harris. “But you’re truly in another universe when you’re talking about the
1940s. There were newspapers and radio, but visually, the movies were the only
way people could see the war.”
Capra, Ford, Huston, Stevens and
Wyler were more than up to the job, even if its magnitude was unexpected, even
by them. Throughout Five Came Back , “We see over and over again with these
filmmakers that something they get into isn’t at all what they expected it to
be,” says Harris. After their time in the service ended, he notes, “Their
identity as people who served in the war remained an integral part of who they
are, which is true of every man who served in World War II.”
“All five of them paid a very
personal price,” says Coppola.
Their part in the war was to
document, and bear witness to, the truth wherever possible.
“One thing that stunned me
cumulatively while working on both the book and the docuseries of Five Came Back was that these guys were
at Midway; they were at the liberation of France; they were at D-Day; at
Dachau; at the Battle of the Bulge; in the Aleutian Islands; at San Pietro,
Italy; in North Africa; and Ford also went to Burma and China. They were just
about everywhere. I couldn’t believe how many places I could get to in the story
of the war just by following these five guys. When I say they wanted to be
where the action was,” says Harris. “They really were.”
# # #
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
MARK
HARRIS - Writer
Mark Harris is a journalist and
film historian, and the author of the New York Times bestsellers
Pictures at a
Revolution (2008) and Five Came Back (2014), a finalist for the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize for History. He writes a column about the intersection of
culture and politics for New York magazine, is also a columnist for Film
Comment, and has written for many other publications, including The New York
Times, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, Grantland, Time, and the Washington Post. He
is currently working on a biography of Mike Nichols. He lives in New York City
and Provincetown, Mass., with his husband, Tony Kushner.
LAURENT
BOUZEREAU - Director
Named one of the top 50 leaders
in the field of New Media by The Hollywood Reporter, filmmaker/author Laurent
Bouzereau is one of the most sought-after talents in the industry.
Bouzereau wrote, directed and produced the
feature-length documentary on producer Richard D. Zanuck entitled Don’t
Say No Until I Finish Talking, executive produced by Steven Spielberg. He
directed the feature-length documentary Roman
Polanski: A Film Memoir , which was selected at
the 2012 Cannes Film Festival (Out Of Competition). He wrote, directed, and
produced the TCM series A Night at the Movies.
Born and raised in France,
Bouzereau moved to New York in the early 1980s and worked in several areas of
the independent film industry. During this time Bouzereau also wrote his first
book, The DePalma Cut, a study of the films of director Brian De Palma. Bouzereau
moved to Hollywood, California in 1990 and worked in feature film development
for Bette Midler at Disney Studios, while continuing his passion for writing
books on cinema. In 1994, Bouzereau wrote, directed and produced his first of
many documentaries for Steven Spielberg, hence joining the home entertainment
revolution.
Over the span of his long career,
Bouzereau has directed, written and produced hundreds of documentaries on the
“making of” the biggest films in the history of cinema, by some of the most
acclaimed directors of all-time, including: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas,
James Cameron, J.J. Abrams, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Martin Scorsese,
Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Robert Zemeckis, Warren Beatty, Roman
Polanski, Michael Crichton, Peter Bogdanovich and others.
Laurent Bouzereau is executive producing with Sherri
Crichton an adaptation of Michael Crichton and Richard Preston’s Micro at
Amblin Partners, as well as the series Dragon Teeth, based on the novel by
Michael Crichton at Amblin Television.
PRODUCTION
CREDITS:
A Netflix Original Documentary
Series
An
Amblin Television
Scott Rudin
IACF Production
In Association With
Passion Pictures
Rock Paper Scissors Entertainment
Executive Producers
Steven Spielberg
Justin Falvey
Darryl Frank
Executive Producers
Scott Rudin
Eli Bush
Jason Sack
Barry Diller
Executive Producers
Angus Wall
Linda Carlson
Jason Sterman
Executive Producers
Ben Cotner
Adam Del Deo
Lisa Nishimura
Directed by
Laurent Bouzereau
Written by
Mark Harris
Produced by
John Battsek
Laurent Bouzereau
Main and End Title Theme Music by Thomas Newman
Original Score by
Jeremy Turner
Edited by
Will Znidaric
Narrator
Meryl Streep
Based on a Book by
Mark Harris
FILMS
FEATURED IN FIVE CAME BACK:
FRANK
CAPRA:
Studio Films
It's a Wonderful Life
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
It Happened One Night
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
You Can’t Take It With You
The Strong Man
War Documentaries
Why We Fight: Prelude to War
Why We Fight: The Battle of
Russia
Tunisian Victory
"Private SNAFU" Shorts
Know Your Enemy: Japan
Why We Fight: The Nazis Strike
Why We Fight: Divide and Conquer
Why We Fight: The Battle of
Britain
Why We Fight: War Comes to
America
Your Job in Germany
WILLIAM
WYLER:
Studio Films
The Best Years of Our Lives
Mrs. Miniver
Dodsworth
Ben-Hur
Jezebel
Roman Holiday
The Letter
Wuthering Heights
A House Divided
The Big Country
War Documentaries
The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress
Thunderbolt!
JOHN
FORD:
Studio Films
They Were Expendable
The Grapes of Wrath
The Long Voyage Home
Four Sons
The Searchers
Stagecoach
How Green Was My Valley
The Quiet Man
War Documentaries
The Battle of Midway
December 7th
JOHN
HUSTON:
Studio Films
The Maltese Falcon
Across the Pacific
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Sergeant York (Written by Huston)
Juarez (Written by Huston)
The African Queen
The Red Badge of Courage
War Documentaries
Report From the Aleutians
The Battle of San Pietro
Let There Be Light
GEORGE
STEVENS:
Studio Films
The Diary of Anne Frank
Gunga Din
The More the Merrier
Woman of the Year
A Place In The Sun
Giant
Swing Time
Vivacious Lady
Alice Adams
Shane
War Documentaries
Nazi Concentration Camps
The Nazi Plan
OTHER:
Studio Films
Flying Tigers
Air Force
The Fighting Seabees
Hollywood Canteen
Apocalypse Now
Citizen Kane
The Mortal Storm
Behind the Rising Sun
Little Tokyo USA
War Documentaries
The Negro Soldier
Desert Victory
At the Front in North Africa
With the Marines at Tarawa
Triumph of the Will
THE
FOLLOWING DOCUMENTARIES WILL BE AVAILABLE ON NETFLIX IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE
LAUNCH OF FIVE CAME BACK :
How to Operate Behind Enemy Lines
(1943, John Ford)
The Battle of Midway (1942, John
Ford)
Let There Be Light (1946, John
Huston)
San Pietro (1945, John Huston)
Tunisian Victory (1944, John
Huston)
Report from the Aleutians (1943,
John Huston)
Know Your Enemy - Japan (1945,
Frank Capra)
The Negro Soldier (1944, Stuart
Heisler; produced by Frank Capra)
The Battle of Russia (1943, Frank
Capra)
Prelude to War (1942, Frank
Capra)
Nazi Concentration Camps (1945,
George Stevens)
Thunderbolt (1947, William Wyler)
The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress
(1944, William Wyler)
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