WELCOME to AIR AMERICA
By Ann Thompson
Your pilot today is Captain Mel Gibson, assisted by chief mate Robert Downey
Jr. We will be flying towards Vietnam on our journey and large quantities of
opium will be served during the flight. Please relax now in the capable hands
of your chief stewardess, Ann Thompson.
Back in 1969, the CIA was busying itself - among other things - with
financing something called Air America, a covert and officially non-existent
airline which, among other dodgy activities, ran drugs and arms in the
triangle formed by Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It was allegedly the biggest
airline in the world at the time, costing the American taxpayer millions of
dollars and, it must be assumed, being of somewhat dubious benefit to the
people of South East Asia.
"I knew the subject was perfect," said maverick director Richard Rush (The
Stuntman) in 1985 when he came across Christopher Robbins' 1979 book about the
exploits of the outfit, "for the first comedy about Vietnam." This somewhat
unusual conclusion has remained the kernel of the project through a variety of
bewildering directorial and casting changes over the years.
"We had a serious and strange subject," says the eventual director Roger
Spottiswoode when asked about the humour in the film. "We didn't make up most
of the events in the movie, from the planes crashing to the condoms and
psychologica! warfare tapes. And we didn't make up the pilot's attitude to all
the bullshit. Twenty years ago, for a higher motive, to get rid of communism
in Vietnam, certain deals were made, bargains were made with the devil and it
was decided that it was better to smuggle the local crop - opium and heroin -
than to get help to fight the war. Our film reflects that world. There's a
long tradition that the more serious the subject, the more funny the film can
be, from Catch-22 to Dr. Strangelove and M*A*S*H."
Richard Rush's initial ideas were bounced around Hollywood until independent
producer Carolco, which specialises, of course, in big-scale international
action adventures like Total Recall, picked up the project and Rush wrote a
screenplay. He'd planned the $15 million budget, had the locations sorted out,
and had Sean Connery lined up to play Gene Ryack, the veteran flyer who plays
mentor to rookie pilot Billy Covington, who, at different times, was to be
played by Bill Murray, Jim Belushi and Kevin Costner.
As time went on, however, Good Morning Vietnam became the first comedy about
Vietnam, Connery and Costner's prices escalated out of reach, and producer
Daniel Melnick's IndieProd company joined forces with Carolco. MeInick took a
shine to the project, but ditched Rush. He and director Bob Rafelson hired
yippie-poet-rock musician-novelist-turned screenwriter John Eskow to write the
new script. While Eskow twiddled his thumbs during the 1988 writer's strike in
Hollywood, though, Rafelson sloped off to direct Mountains Of The Moon. Enter
British emigré Roger Spottiswoode, who had learned much by editing three films
for action master Sam Peckinpah, and had directed Nick Nolte in Under Fire,
Robin Williams in The Best Of Times, and Tom Hanks and a drooling dog in the
phenomenal box office smash, Turner and Hooch.
It was only, however, when the Australian with the eyes came aboard for a
reported seven million dollars and a percentage of the gross that the project
really started to get under way. With Mel on the team, the filmmakers soon
realised that although their story still featured plenty of Air America's
covert illegal activity in Laos in 1969, the wild and crazy antics of the
pilots would dominate the action. With Gibson opting for the role of the older
vet, Spottiswoode cast 25-year-old Robert Downey Jr. as the relatively callow
Covington while Nancy Travis replaced the originally cast Ally Sheedy as the
refugee camp coordinator, Corinrie Landroaux.
By this time, Spottiswoode was thinking big. The 500-member crew shot in
northern Thailand, London and L.A., in 49 different locations, with three film
units (air-to-air, air-to-ground and ground-to-air) operating between eight
and 15 cameras at a time, while 26 helicopters and planes were rented from the
Thai military. The budget soared to $35 million. When shooting eventually
began, it turned out to have absolutely nothing in common with the act of
falling off a log. Two earthquakes, one typhoon and four serious in-flight
emergencies dogged the production, while even the stunt fliers baulked at some
of the tasks required of them with grizzled 60 year-old veterans being drafted
in for the more demanding turns.
"On some of those airstrips," recalls Spottiswoode, "you couldn't breathe
wrong. There was 15 feet between the wing tips and the jungle."
Other problems emerged, particularly when Pepsi-Cola were politely informed
that Air America showed opium refining at their abandoned factory in the
region. "They wanted me to make up a fictional softdrink," recalls Melnick.
"So we added a line about wondering if Pepsi knew what was going on." To cope
with the stresses of the muggy jungle shoot, Mel Gibson took to two-hour Thai
massages and drawing rude caricatures of the cast and crew. After shooting
four movies back-to-back (Hamlet was the last), and having had such a physical
time on Air America, he is obviously more than ready to relax on his
Australian ranch for a while.
"It's stress management," he says. "I'll go back and produce more kids." (He
and his wife Robyn already have six.) "I'd do more harm than good by staying.
Oversaturation. Hamlet took the stuffing out of me. I just about buggered my
adrenal glands on that one. Put it this way, after that anything else is going
to be a cake walk. It's like a runner who trains with weights on his feet.
When he takes them off he runs like a deer."
Unfortunately, the finished film has been anything but fleet of foot. American
critics generally ignored the political content and declared the film a stiff,
a consensus which led co-producer and scriptwriter John Eskow to assert that
there was a disinformation campaign designed to discredit the film. It's
certainly true that several editorial writers on the New York Times and Wall
Street Journal, as well as the author of the original source material,
Christopher Robbins, went out of their way to invalidate the film's true
premise. As it turns out, they needn't have gone to such bother. Afer six
months on release in the US, Air America is still a good five million dollars
shy of even covering that $35 million budget. ..