By ChrisDFW on Monday, August 20, 2001 - 02:21 am:| By ChrisDFW on Monday, August 20, 2001 - 02:21 am: |
It's D-Day for Tom Hanks
Hollywood landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, for the world premiere of the most expensive cable TV mini-series ever made - Band of Brothers, produced by a couple called Spielberg and Hanks, with a bankroll of USD 120 million. Our screen columnist Tony Crawley previews the action.
This was the first time Hollywood has visited Normandy in such numbers since Darryl F Zanuck's The Longest Day (with longest all-star cast) was partially shot on Utah Beach, at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, in 1961.
The Normandy villages of Carentan, Sainte-Marie-du-Mont and Sainte-Mère-Église, contributed to the US Army's building and costs of two massive tents for 6 June's première, and the reception for Tom Hanks, author Stephen Ambrose and survivors of Easy Company, the WWII US paratroop regiment on which the 10-hour series' story is based.
The elaborate party was a side-show to the hundreds of veterans attending the 57th anniversary commemorations marking the allied landings during the early hours of June 6 1944, which led to the defeat of Germany less than a year later.
It was the most recent and most painfully realistic screen depiction of D-Day - Saving Private Ryan - which first brought Steven Spielberg and Hanks together professionally.
It was while making the film that the two multi-millionaire friends started musing on a WWII mini-series, (something along the lines of Hanks' highly successful space series, From The Earth To The Moon).
They chose Ambrose's book, Band of Brothers, about an heroic American outfit called Easy Company.
It's a name you immediately feel you've heard before. Easy Company sounds, almost derogatorily, like every squad ever created in every Hollywood GI Joe WWII movie, a name as seductive a cliché as the cool look of the Yank at War - the close-shaven helmet, the chin-strap hanging loose, as eternal an image as the endless supply of cigarettes, good boots, hefty armaments, ever present medics.
But this Easy is the real stuff of 1944-45. The designation is, simply, E for Easy company of the 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, US Army. Real guys, like "Popeye" Wynn, Lewis Nixon and their worshipped CO, Dick Winters.
As elite paras and riflemen, their mission was to land behind German lines on the night of June 5/6 , to clear a way for the US troops coming up from Utah, alongside the mayhem of the other Normandy beaches (Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword).
The Easy Company pilots were young (obviously), bewildered, rapidly lost, scared of the German flak - "you could walk on it"- and they greenlit the jump too low from planes that were flying too fast over the wrong zones. It was a night of hell.
Lieut. Harry Welsh saw one plane explode beneath him, as he floated down.
But Easy actually managed their orders in such magnificent fashion, silencing four 105mm cannons, that they were packed off (this time in trucks, not planes) to Holland. Next they held the perimeter at Bastogne, led the counter-offensive at the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes, fought in the Rhineland and captured Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden - all this while suffering enormous casualties.
They were making ready for the Far East, next stop, when Harry S. Truman pressed the A button and Easy company went home to become cops, journalists, PRs, CIA men and mostly, after living through such appalling destruction, they moved into construction.
Wednesday's beach-side première is the closest the small-screen adaptation, produced for the HBO cable network with around 25 million subscribers, has come to French soil: the entire ten hours of Band of Brothers was produced in the same former British Aerospace facility at the Hatfield Aerodrome in Britain used to film scenes in Saving Private Ryan.
The Hatfield village set is a 12 acre area used to represent eleven different Euro cities, towns and villages.
Well, Kubrick had already showed it was possible to make a film about Vietnam shot in London (Full Metal Jacket, 19 ) and nobody batted an eyelid!