00:00:00:21 – 00:00:14:17
Dan LeFebvre
Before we talk about some of the details in the movie, let’s take a step back and look at the movie overall. So if you were to give Young Guns II a letter grade for its historical accuracy, what would it get?

00:00:14:20 – 00:00:39:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I think I’d probably go with C+. It’s not the most historically accurate movie ever made. It is probably more accurate than a lot of the other Billy the Kid movies, and I think they really, like, captured the essence of Billy the Kid is personality, just kind of the way he was. This is mischievousness, I guess. So for that alone, I’m going to give it a c-plus.

00:00:39:26 – 00:00:53:13
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Especially being a sequel as well. Sometimes that well, well throw because they’re kind of tied to the inaccuracies of the first movie and then yeah, tying ins. I’ve had that be an issue before too. So I see plus it’s not bad actually.

00:00:53:15 – 00:01:12:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And it’s one of the better sequels that have ever been made. You know, a lot of times the sequels are pretty lackluster. The young guns, too, definitely lived up to the, the legacy of Young Guns one. So and I grew up with these movies, man. I used to play Young Guns at recess in, elementary school. So I was all about young guns.

00:01:12:29 – 00:01:17:19
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah. Nice. I’m sure that helped influence what you’re doing now.

00:01:17:21 – 00:01:39:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s a few works of art, I guess that definitely. If it wasn’t for. If it wasn’t for the book Lonesome Dove, and if it wasn’t for Young Guns one and two, I probably would not be doing this podcast. It really instilled in me just a love of history in general. All was history. And with young guns.

00:01:39:09 – 00:01:52:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Billy the Kid, man, he he’s just the guy I keep going back to out of everybody I cover on my show. All the mountain men and gunfighters and outlaws. Billy the Kid is just the guy I keep coming back to.

00:01:52:23 – 00:02:07:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we go back to the movie at the very beginning, a Young Guns two were introduced to an older man going by the name of Brushy Bill Roberts, and he claims to be Billy the Kid. And he’s proving his claims by telling the story to a lawyer. And that story is basically the plot of the entire movie.

00:02:07:03 – 00:02:26:26
Dan LeFebvre
So we’ll be talking about that throughout just our discussion today. And then, of course, we’ll circle back to Brushy Bill himself when we see him at the end of the movie. But one of the most common things for movies to do is to just make up characters. So for those of us who have only seen the movie, is it true that there was someone named Brushy Bill who claimed to be Billy the Kid?

00:02:26:29 – 00:02:48:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes, that is absolutely true. Brushy Bill Roberts, his real name was Oliver Roberts, but he did come forward in the 1940s claiming to be Billy the Kid. And he wanted that pardon? Just like he says in the movie at the beginning. The main difference I would say the movie, it looks like they filmed it at White Sands, New Mexico.

00:02:48:14 – 00:02:58:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m not entirely sure about that, but that’s what it looks like to me. That’s not how the meeting went down. It actually occurred at Roche’s house in Hiko, Texas. Okay.

00:02:58:13 – 00:03:03:02
Dan LeFebvre
Other than that, yeah, it was kind of a weird location just in the middle of the desert. Yeah, the side of the road.

00:03:03:04 – 00:03:17:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I guess it they they were kind of going for the effect of, you know, he was still, a wanted outlaw, just a desperado living in the desert. But now, at that point in time, Brushy Bill Roberts was definitely living in just a normal Texas town.

00:03:17:18 – 00:03:35:29
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, interesting. Yeah. Well, we’ll circle back to him, but, if we go back to the 1800 storyline in the movie, we get introduced to some other characters as the members of Billy the Kid’s gang. So, I’ll list off the four who I consider the four main characters. Feel free to add more if you’d like, but there’s Doc Scurlock.

00:03:35:29 – 00:03:55:07
Dan LeFebvre
He’s played by Kiefer Sutherland, Arkansas, Dave Ruta by who’s played by Christian Slater, Chavez Chavez, played by Lou Diamond Phillips. And then someone that, is pretty popular. Pat Garrett, another one of those popular ones, he’s played by William Petersen. Were those characters based on real people who rode with Billy the Kid?

00:03:55:09 – 00:04:21:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes, with a couple of asterisks. So Pat Garrett never actually rode with Billy the Kid as far as outlaw activities or anything like that, that’s they they really kind of strayed from the truth in that aspect. In the movie, Pat Garrett and Billy were friends. Pat. Pat was a buffalo hunter in Texas. He moved to New Mexico. I’m not exactly sure of the exact year.

00:04:21:15 – 00:04:41:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And he settled down, at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and he just ran different businesses. He had, he was a bartender for a little while. He had, like, a butcher shop for a while, and he and Billy would hang out whenever they were together. They would gamble together. They would dance with the senior items, all that stuff.

00:04:41:19 – 00:05:09:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
We we can kind of circle back to how close their friendship was later on. But yeah, Pat Garrett absolutely was a real person. He he was involved in Billy the Kid’s life, but there’s really not much evidence that he participated in outlaw activities. Now, everybody stole horses back in those days. Everybody stole a few cows. Every now and then, even the most respectable of people, you know, had a few stolen, some stolen livestock in the past.

00:05:09:15 – 00:05:33:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There are allegations that Garrett was selling stolen livestock out of his butcher shop. He himself may have gone and rounded up a few had here and there. I wouldn’t doubt it. But as far as him going out and, you know, killing bounty hunters with Billy the Kid or, just basically doing any illegal activities with Billy other than maybe possibly buying and selling stolen livestock.

00:05:33:06 – 00:05:59:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There’s really no indication as far as, the others docs Gerlach and Jose Chavez each others, those are both real life people. They were more involved in Billy’s life. If anybody’s ever seen Young Guns part one, where they basically cover the Lincoln County War, that’s when Scurlock and Chavez were riding with Billy the Kid. They were. They were Lincoln County regulators.

00:06:00:01 – 00:06:24:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
After the Lincoln County War, they kind of drifted apart. Chavez stayed down in Lincoln County for a while. He would end up going to prison later on. Doc Scurlock, he would settle up at Fort Sumner. So he and Billy still remain close. But doc started distancing himself. By the time the events unfold that we see in Young Guns, too, Doc Scurlock was already living in Texas.

00:06:24:28 – 00:06:49:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You left the whole thing behind. He got buried, he settled down, became an honest man. Dave Rude, a bore also very real person. He was never known as Arkansas Dave, though historically, I’m not really sure where that nickname comes from. There are stories that I’ve been unable to corroborate that he may have stolen cattle in Arkansas years prior.

00:06:49:16 – 00:07:08:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I actually reached out to John Fusco. This was a few months ago. John John Fusco was the guy who wrote and directed Young Guns one and two. He’s done a lot of great movies, and I thought maybe he had a source on that that I wasn’t familiar with. So I reached out like, hey, man, where did you find this information about him being called Arkansas?

00:07:08:09 – 00:07:31:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Dave, is that something you just made up? According to him, he could be completely pulling my chain, but he says he just made it up. He said it sounded you had a better ring to it than dirty. Dirty Dave. Rude about what he was actually known as, believe it or not. So I guess Arkansas Dave sounds cooler than Dirty Dave, but, any even that dirt, even that Dirty Dave nickname I.

00:07:31:06 – 00:07:47:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I may be mistaken here, but I believe it only comes from one source. At one point, Dave was arrested and taken to Las Vegas, New Mexico. And, there was a journalist there. A local paper published an article saying that he was wearing the same clothes that he had been wearing the last time he was in Vegas.

00:07:48:00 – 00:08:06:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So I guess that’s where the dirty thing comes from, whether or not he was unhygienic, I honestly don’t have any idea. But, yeah, he was the real deal. He was really more of an accomplished outlaw than any of these guys. He was a few years older than Billy the Kid. He had, he had been, caught robbing a train in Kansas.

00:08:06:05 – 00:08:27:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He spent time, like I said, in Las Vegas, New Mexico, sort of as a crooked lawman. And he eventually, participated in the killing of a jailer. So by the time him and Billy link up, Dave was wanted for murder. But, yeah, all these guys were real. The other two members of the gang that are that you see in Young Guns, too.

00:08:27:00 – 00:08:45:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You got Tom Foley or. Oh, weird. Depending on which version of his last name you want to go with. He too was a real life person. He wasn’t a 14 year old kid like they show in the movie, but he was real. He was a member of Billy’s gang. The other guy you see, Henry French, he’s sort of a composite character.

00:08:45:14 – 00:08:54:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There was a real guy named, Henry Newton French that Billy rode with.

00:08:54:20 – 00:09:18:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They I guess they just kind of made, like, a composite character out of a few different people. But in all reality, in the events that we see in Young Guns to Billy, the kids main core group was Dave Root of Ball, Tom folly, and two other guys named Billy Wilson and Tom Pickett. Those seem to be his main outlaw buddies at that time.

00:09:18:28 – 00:09:45:21
Dan LeFebvre
Maybe it’s just me, but when you have a nickname like Arkansas Dave, I assume that either he’s from Arkansas or he made a name in Arkansas before joining Billy the Kid. And I guess throughout the movie, he’s also kind of trying to he, he’s trying to be the one that everybody knows who he is. So I’m was just assuming that he made a name for himself in Arkansas somewhere as a, as an outlaw beforehand or something.

00:09:45:24 – 00:10:06:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And, you know, Dave was Dave got around, man. Dave. Dave knew he rub shoulders with a lot of famous people from the Old West, like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday. He knew all those guys. So, I, how, you know, I’ve heard people say that Ruta Ball was the only man that Billy the Kid feared.

00:10:06:25 – 00:10:30:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I don’t know if that’s true, but like I said a minute ago, he was a few years older than Billy, so I’m not sure how much of it was just him. Just straight up taking orders from a 19 year old rather than them just working together, you know what I mean? But yeah, he’s a really interesting guy. If anybody’s interested in learning more about him, I, I do have a full episode just on Dave Root about.

00:10:30:26 – 00:10:47:03
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, awesome. Yeah, I’ll make sure to add a link to that in the show notes so people can check that out. If we go back to the movie, New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace convinces Billy the Kid to testify against the Murph and Dolly faction who murdered, Murphy Dolan, I should say faction who murdered John Tunstall in exchange for a pardon.

00:10:47:03 – 00:11:06:18
Dan LeFebvre
That was kind of the context of the first movie, but then. So Billy the Kid and this one, young guns to Billy the Kid agrees and allows Wallace to arrest him so Wallace can protect Billy from anyone who wants to kill him before he can testify. But then Billy’s double crossed when the prosecuting attorney sides with the Irish politicians running Lincoln County.

00:11:06:26 – 00:11:29:14
Dan LeFebvre
Instead of going along with the pardon, he intends on taking Billy to trial, where he will surely be hanged. And while the movie doesn’t really mention it here, the impression that I got was this is the pardon that the older Brushy Bill mentioned wanting at the beginning of the movie. Is there any truth to the movie’s storyline around the pardon for Billy the Kid being offered?

00:11:29:16 – 00:11:51:25
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes, that that’s also based on a true story. Billy was offered a pardon from Gov Jim. Governor Lew Wallace a little bit different. What they show in the movie, Billy actually reached out to him, as opposed to Wallace reaching out to Billy the Kid at that time, mostly due to the Lincoln County War, that area was in complete disarray.

00:11:51:25 – 00:12:17:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Like matter of fact, whenever Lew Wallace was, was made governor right around the same time, then president it was Rutherford because he, gosh, what do they call it when you you martial law. What did he something martial law. Anyway, he he, Gosh, I’m I’m blanking on the word. He imposed martial law on Lincoln County.

00:12:18:00 – 00:12:37:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I mean, there was a there was a lot of outlaw tivity going on at that time, a lot of lawlessness. But also at the same time, Governor Lew Wallace sort of issued a blanket amnesty for people on both sides, as long as they didn’t have any active indictments against them, which that didn’t apply to Billy. He was wanted for murder.

00:12:37:09 – 00:13:00:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So were several of his close friends. So I guess he wanted in on a little bit of that amnesty action. So that’s why he reached out to the governor. They did meet in Lincoln like they show in the movie. They met in secrecy. They sort of hammered out the details and yeah, Billy left that meeting convinced that he was going to receive a pardon, and he agreed to testify.

00:13:00:19 – 00:13:24:14
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I guess it’s that’s why they call it the Wild West, right? I mean, just, you know, everybody’s got some sort of crime that they’ve done, like you’re talking about before. So I don’t know what what what was just the general public opinion of these pardons being offered, like because Billy the Kid at that point was he, well, like a well known outlaw that then offering a pardon to him would have affected.

00:13:24:20 – 00:13:37:02
Dan LeFebvre
I’m trying to think of, you know, politicians today offering a pardon and the public reaction to who they offer the pardon to. Was that kind of a thing back then, too, or is is am I projecting today’s, politics back then?

00:13:37:05 – 00:14:03:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, I’m not sure how that applied to, at the at the time frame when Billy and Governor Wallace agreed on the pardon, I’m not really sure what the public sentiment was. Billy was nowhere near as famous in his lifetime as he is nowadays. I mean, a lot of these famous figures from the Old West, their fame comes from bestselling novels and movies that followed the books later on.

00:14:03:07 – 00:14:35:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He wasn’t a he was notorious. He was well known in, in that area of New Mexico, certainly. And as his fame grew, you know, he would be reported on papers as far away as New York City or even Paris, France, you know, but he wasn’t necessarily a household name, I can tell you that. Spoiler alert, when he when he was killed later on, there were so many grateful people that the guy that killed him ended up receiving several thousand dollars just in donations, just from people that were glad to be rid of Billy the Kid.

00:14:35:01 – 00:15:01:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So as far as the public sentiment, you know, I’m not entirely sure that the public was aware that he was being offered a pardon. That’s another thing. There’s there’s not really any anything written down in black and white saying Lew Wallace absolutely guaranteed ability to get a pardon. It was more of an agreement. You know, there’s some people that think maybe the Billy read more into Wallace’s words than he should have.

00:15:01:21 – 00:15:11:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Maybe he put a little bit too much faith into Wallace. But as far as I’m aware, this was not excuse me, this was not a known thing that was just reported on the newspapers.

00:15:11:21 – 00:15:14:06
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, okay. More of an under the table type.

00:15:14:09 – 00:15:26:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Right. And, you know, when they arrested Billy, they had to stage an arrest so that they he didn’t just, you know, walk in one day, they arrest me. They had to stage an arrest to make it look legit.

00:15:26:18 – 00:15:37:05
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. The movie kind of alludes to that. I don’t remember actually seeing it happen in the movie, but it alludes to, oh, we gotta stage this to put on the appearance that we’ve actually caught you. Yeah.

00:15:37:07 – 00:15:39:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Right. Right. Yep.

00:15:39:04 – 00:15:58:24
Dan LeFebvre
Well, after he realizes in the movie, after he realizes he’s not going to get the pardon, Billy slips out of his handcuffs. Thanks to, as the movie puts it, a historical and biological fact that he had small hands and big wrists. Then he proceeds to escape and comes back, pretending to be part of a lynch mob. He there they have faces covered.

00:15:58:26 – 00:16:15:04
Dan LeFebvre
Law enforcement just hands over Doc and Chavez, assuming that they’re going to get killed by this lynch mob. But then, of course, the real vigilantes show up and there’s a huge shootout before Billy and his gang can escape. Did this escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse really happening the way that we see in the movie?

00:16:15:07 – 00:16:37:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Absolutely not. You know, it was nothing like that. Billy was not in chains. He was not locked behind bars. He was basically under voluntary house arrest during that period. So there are kernels of truth in there. You know, they show everybody being thrown into like a pit in the ground. That was a real thing. There was a pit jail in Lincoln, New Mexico.

00:16:38:01 – 00:16:59:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I a matter of fact, Billy had been thrown in that pit, back at the very beginning of the Lincoln County War. So he had actually spent time in there. I may I may not be, I’m not exactly sure about this, but by the time he comes back to Lincoln, I think they may have had an actual jail at that point, but, no, there was no gunfight with a lynch mob.

00:16:59:21 – 00:17:23:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Nothing like that. Billy stuck around, and, you know, they gloss over a few things. Billy did testify in real life. He, he testified in quite a few trials against a lot of his old enemies. And, he spent. Man, I want to say 2 to 3 months there in Lincoln, basically under a voluntary house arrest. And once he figured out that pardon wasn’t coming, he just got on a horse and rode out.

00:17:23:12 – 00:17:27:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That was it. No gunfight, no dramatics, nothing like that.

00:17:27:11 – 00:17:33:21
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, okay. Well, that wouldn’t be as fun in the movie.

00:17:33:24 – 00:17:55:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, yeah, I know, I know, you know, one thing you touched on was the big wrist and tiny hands. I’ve never I’ve always struggled with this because I’ve never seen anybody with wrists bigger than their hands, you know what I mean? But it is an undeniable fact that Billy was able to slip out of his chains on multiple occasions.

00:17:55:11 – 00:18:06:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was able to slide out of them. So he may have had abnormally tiny hands. I really don’t know. But that is a true fact. In this instance, though, he was he was not shackled or in chains or anything like that.

00:18:07:00 – 00:18:28:10
Dan LeFebvre
I touched on it briefly too, but the movie does make a point to say that there’s one thing an outlaw feared in New Mexico Territory, and that’s lynch mob justice. And that to me, as I was watching the movie, it implied that they didn’t necessarily fear law enforcement, though. So is it true that outlaws in the Old West feared vigilantes wanting to lynch them rather than actual law enforcement?

00:18:28:13 – 00:18:53:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, they feared both. So vigilante justice was a very real problem in the Old West, particularly in places like around that area of Lincoln, New Mexico. And part of it came from the law enforcement officials themselves being just as corrupt as the outlaws. So a lot of times they would just arrest their enemies as opposed to the people that were really committing the crimes.

00:18:53:03 – 00:19:20:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So on one hand, you had sheriffs and town marshals that weren’t doing anything about the crime. So the only recourse for justice in a lot of situations were these lynch mobs. And at the same time, if you were arrested, you know, I’ve covered a lot of these guys, man. So many times, I can tell you there would be is the stone cold killer like John Wesley Hardin or King Fisher Clay Allison, and they would gun somebody down in cold blood.

00:19:21:00 – 00:19:43:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They would make it to trial and they would get off, and they would just get off with a plea of self-defense or something like that. Nine times out of ten, if you made it to trial without being lynched by vigilantes, you would just get off scot free. So that was another reason why the vigilantes were so prevalent. They knew, if you know, this guy actually goes before a judge, he’s just going to get a slap on the wrist.

00:19:43:04 – 00:20:05:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And most so if we want justice be served, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Unfortunately, that meant a lot of innocent people also got lynched. No due process, you know, no, jury of your peers or anything like that. So it was not a good situation. Billy would have definitely been afraid of mob justice. He knew all about mob justice.

00:20:05:22 – 00:20:26:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
In fact, I mentioned a moment ago they had a staged arrest. He was very particular in who he was going to allow to arrest him. And he was basically worried that if the wrong people arrested him, air quotes, then he would get shot in the back while once again attempting to escape. You know, and you know him and his buddies.

00:20:26:21 – 00:20:51:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They did the same thing during the Lincoln County War. They murdered a couple of guys who they claimed later on were attempting to escape. More than likely, it was just an execution. He knew the same thing happening to him would be a very real possibility, but if it was a legitimate if it was like a legitimate sheriff that arrested him, that was half ass honest, he would have been all right.

00:20:51:00 – 00:21:01:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He just didn’t want any of his enemies to. A lot of his enemies also wore badges because they would have killed him in a heartbeat. No doubt about it.

00:21:01:11 – 00:21:09:15
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, it sounds like the justice system wasn’t really great back then and then serving justice.

00:21:09:18 – 00:21:28:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You. Well, you know, I, I, I’ve thought about that before. I was you know, it almost seems like they aired on the side of justice, almost like, okay, we’re not going to convict this person unless we know without a shadow of a doubt that they’re they’re guilty, right. So a lot of times I think people think of Old West justice like it was very harsh.

00:21:28:13 – 00:21:38:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You get caught stealing a horse and you’re going to be executed. Nah, they would just send them to jail for a little bit or let them go. If a lynch mob didn’t get them, they were just fine.

00:21:38:29 – 00:21:56:21
Dan LeFebvre
So then is it maybe that they did? It just wasn’t proof. I mean, everybody didn’t have phones and be able to take pictures and video and stuff like that. So it’s pretty much it sounds like a lot of he said, she said type, evidence. And so if it’s really hard to prove, then they could get away with it.

00:21:56:23 – 00:22:15:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. I mean, if you if you get in a gunfight with somebody in a saloon and enough of your buddies are willing to say that the other person drew first, you’re fine, you’re going to get by with it. And that’s that’s what I’ve seen happen time and time again with a lot of these guys. They just had really good lawyers and, some pretty good friends to testify under oath.

00:22:15:04 – 00:22:32:24
Dan LeFebvre
If you go back to the movie after escaping, Billy and his gang plan to go to Old Mexico. But they need some money first. So they go to the richest man in New Mexico Territory, John Chisum. And the movie sets it up that John Chisholm was the financial partner for Tunstall and McSween, which makes him a friend of Billy the Kid.

00:22:32:26 – 00:22:52:02
Dan LeFebvre
But once Billy gets there, he demands $500 and Chisum refuses to pay. So instead Billy kills a couple of Chisholm’s men, and that basically turns Chisolm into an enemy. So then Chisum decides to use his money to finance the hunting of Billy the Kid. Was that really how Billy the Kid turned John Chisholm against him?

00:22:52:05 – 00:23:15:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes or no? He didn’t kill his men like they show in the movie. He did try to basically extort money from Chisholm. That much is true. Chisholm refused to pay, at which point Billy started stealing cattle from him. Now, was Billy already stealing cattle from him? Probably. Would he have stolen cattle even if Chisum had paid him the money?

00:23:15:20 – 00:23:36:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Probably. Billy. Billy was a thief, man. He stole horses and he stole cattle. That’s what he did. You know, Billy the Kid never robbed a train. He never held up a stagecoach. He never, robbed a bank. Nothing like that. He was just a cattle thief and a horse. The. A lot of people at that time were stealing Mr. Chisholm’s cattle.

00:23:36:20 – 00:23:54:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A lot of people, Billy got the brunt of the blame, though he was the more well known of the people that were out there robbing with both hands. And even there were even certain killings that he was not involved in, that he was blamed for. And then that kind of leads back into what we were talking about earlier.

00:23:54:17 – 00:24:17:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
As far as his notoriety goes, as his fame grew, he just got blamed for pretty much everything that occurred in New Mexico Territory at that time. But yeah, as soon as he started stealing cattle from Chisum, that’s when Chisum and there was actually another guy named. Well, we’ll get to him in a minute named Joseph Lila. And they were both a let me correct that.

00:24:17:22 – 00:24:39:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m not entirely sure I’m saying his last name correctly, Joseph Lee or Joseph Lee. But, they were both really fed up with Billy the Kid just stealing from everybody. And, but yeah, it was primarily the stealing of Chisholm’s livestock that turned him against Billy the Kid. Now, there is another story. It’s a little bit apocryphal.

00:24:39:26 – 00:25:03:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Supposedly, John Tunstall, not John Tunstall. John Chisum showed up at, Fort Sumner one day in the saloon there, in the cantina, and Billy held him pistol, gunpoint and basically demanded, I want $500 right now. Chisum said, hey, I don’t have my checkbook on me. I don’t have any money on me. Let me go back to my ranch and I’ll send you a check in the mail.

00:25:03:26 – 00:25:23:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Basically. Billy ended up. Let him go. Now, whether or not that actually happened, I don’t know. Doesn’t sound like something that Chisum would agree to. I think Chisum would have probably told him to go to hell, but the source on that is a guy named Paco. Ennio who? Who did know Billy the Kid. But, you know, sometimes Paco, like, stretched the truth.

00:25:23:17 – 00:25:30:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A little bit. But yeah, as far as the animosity between Billy and, Chisum, that was absolutely true.

00:25:30:21 – 00:25:49:03
Dan LeFebvre
Were they ever allies then? Because when they ride in the movie, when they ride up to Chisum, it gives the impression that, in the events of the first movie, the first young guns that Chisum was an ally of, of Tunstall and McSweeney. So perhaps he and Billy were friends at one point. That’s the impression I got from the movie.

00:25:49:03 – 00:26:07:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
At least they probably weren’t friends just because at that time frame, when the Lincoln County War was going on, Billy would have been 17 or 18. Chisum was, you know, a middle aged man by that point, he probably didn’t even know about Billy the Kid during the Lincoln County War, but he would have certainly known about him at this point.

00:26:07:21 – 00:26:30:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And, yeah, Chisum was somewhat aligned with, Billy’s former boss, Tunstall and Tunstall’s partner, Alexander McSween. Chisum really didn’t take part in that conflict, though. But he was he was sort of, you know, the the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Basically, Chisum was kind of opposed to the same people that Tunstall and McSween were opposed to.

00:26:30:28 – 00:26:45:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But as far as any as far as Billy’s claims that Chisum owed him money, I think he like I said, he was basically just trying to extort some money from him, which he would have stolen from him anyway. I’m 100% positive of that.

00:26:45:07 – 00:26:48:28
Dan LeFebvre
And, I mean, it sounds like. Yeah, stealing cattle was a thing.

00:26:49:00 – 00:27:08:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. Oh, yeah. And Chisum stole cattle. Everybody back in those days was a it was a livestock thief. Chisum used to, send his men over to the Mescalero Apache reservation and steal their livestock because he knew they couldn’t do anything about it. No, he’s not exactly, you know, the purest of souls either.

00:27:08:07 – 00:27:30:29
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Okay. I guess, do unto others as you would have done unto you. And he’s. He. It’s happening. It’s happening, is happening. Well, you might have already, answered this some, but if we go back to the movies, versions of events, at this point, John Chisum decides to hire a thief to catch a thief. So then throughout the movie, we get Pat Garrett going from being friend and riding with Billy the Kid to wanting to settle down.

00:27:31:01 – 00:27:52:23
Dan LeFebvre
And Chisum hears about this and offers Garrett the chance to settle down by making him Sheriff Pat Garrett, giving him $500 cash up front, the men and resources to hunt down Billy the Kid, and then a guarantee of $500 cash. Once Garrett kills Billy and if were to believe the movie’s version of events, Garrett accepts the job offer and the hunt for Billy the Kid begins.

00:27:52:25 – 00:28:03:10
Dan LeFebvre
Does the movie accurately portray this swing in Garrett’s character arc, going from being Billy’s friend to then being hired by Chisum as the sheriff to kill him?

00:28:03:12 – 00:28:23:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Well, you know, there’s, there’s a several different caveats there. You know, Chisum had no authority to make anybody a sheriff. So really, all all he did was convince Pat Garrett to run for sheriff. He still had to be elected and all that stuff. He still had to go out on the campaign trail. Excuse me. What happened?

00:28:23:20 – 00:28:49:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Garrett got married. I want to say it was in January of 1880. Not long thereafter, he moved, to Roswell, New Mexico, which at that point was part of Lincoln County. Back in those days, Lincoln County was massive. It was it was way bigger than it is nowadays. So Roswell, New Mexico was still Lincoln County, while he was there in Lincoln, he gets buddy buddy with John Chisum and the guy I mentioned earlier, Joseph Leia.

00:28:49:07 – 00:29:15:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And they basically convinced him to run for sheriff. I don’t know where they got the $500 up front and $500 after. I don’t believe that either one of those guys paid Garrett anything to run. You know, he Garrett wanted to become a respectable man. You know, that was, a big goal of his. You. He had spent a lot of time at Fort Sumner, sort of cavorting with people that maybe had a little bit of loose morals.

00:29:15:18 – 00:29:36:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was a married man. Now he was going to raise a family. He wanted to make a name for himself. And, yeah, they convinced him to run for sheriff. I don’t think they there was any money exchanged. Later on, Billy would have a $500 bounty placed on its head. Maybe that’s where they’re basing it from. But that bounty was never from Chisum or, Joseph.

00:29:36:27 – 00:29:41:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Leia. That was actually offered by, the Wallace, the governor.

00:29:41:08 – 00:29:59:22
Dan LeFebvre
In the movie. The impression I got was that Chisum convinced Garrett to to be sheriff, specifically to hunt for Billy the Kid. Was that basically the reason why he became sheriff then? To hunt for Billy? Or was it more that he became sheriff and then. Well, now there’s this this outlaw, and that’s that’s your job?

00:29:59:24 – 00:30:24:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
No. Yeah, that was his problem. You’re all right about that. That was his primary reason for running for sheriff. That’s why they wanted him to run for sheriff. And you know, part of it, like you say, it takes a thief to catch a thief. While there’s not necessarily in any indication that Garrett and Billy had rode the hoot off trail together, anything like that, he was still very familiar with Billy’s mannerisms, with Billy’s various hideouts, with his habits.

00:30:24:27 – 00:30:48:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So he was intimately aware of Billy the Kid. Now, as far as their friendship is concerned, this is something that historians still debate about all the time. There’s some people that try to downplay it and say they were. They were just acquaintances, you know, there’s other people that go with, basically the same route they went in the movie that they were just the best of friends, almost like brothers.

00:30:48:26 – 00:31:13:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If, Paulina Maxwell, she was, one of Billy the Kids gal pals. If what she said is any indication, they were extremely tight. They were very good friends. But that friendship doesn’t really seem to have extended outside of Fort Sumner now. Paul Lita would later, decades later, she would say that when they found out that Garrett was running for sheriff, it came as a big shock to them.

00:31:13:24 – 00:31:27:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Like they didn’t think he would turn on on his friends like that. And, that’s basically that basically severed their friendship from that point on. You know, if they came face to face, there was probably going to be some violence.

00:31:27:05 – 00:31:32:12
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. So it wasn’t like Garrett ran with Billy the Kid, though, like we see happening in the beginning of the movie.

00:31:32:14 – 00:31:57:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
If anybody can find any historical evidence showing this might. I’m all eyes and ears, but I have never been able to find any indication that they did outlaw activities together. Now, when Garrett won, the matter of fact, Billy actually campaigned against him during the during the election, he would travel out. Yeah, he would travel out to, like, the, local Hispanic communities and tell them, hey, don’t vote for this joker.

00:31:57:19 – 00:32:11:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Won enough. Garrett had the backing not just of Chisholm and Leah, but he had, his cronies up in Santa Fe, the Santa Fe ring. They were back in his play. Now, interestingly enough.

00:32:11:23 – 00:32:34:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, it was just like, nowadays you can win an election, but you’re still not going to take hold of that office until the following year, right? So if you’re elected in November, you’re not going to take office until January. February. It was the same thing with Pat Garrett. However, the guy who was the sheriff, the incumbent, the guy that he beat in the election, he was a he basically went ahead and deputized Garrett and in step back.

00:32:34:16 – 00:32:56:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So for all intents and purposes, Garrett was sheriff in just he was basically sheriff at that point as soon as he won the election, he may not have been sheriff in name, but he was a deputy with the power of the the Lincoln County sheriff. He also received a commission as a deputy US marshal is Fort Sumner where Billy the Kid like to spend time?

00:32:56:02 – 00:33:05:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That was not in Lincoln County. So even a sheriff, he would not have jurisdiction up there. But with that marshal’s badge, now you can go in anywhere.

00:33:05:07 – 00:33:17:20
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, ink. So maybe maybe that’s kind of in the movie because they hand him the badge right away. So maybe that was kind of a nod to that of, pretty much becoming a sheriff. Right away. It sounds like, even if it’s not official by title, but.

00:33:17:22 – 00:33:28:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And he did I mean, as soon as he as soon as he got that badge, he went on the hunt. That was that was his primary goal. Not necessarily to kill, but to arrest Billy the Kid.

00:33:28:04 – 00:33:43:15
Dan LeFebvre
In the movie, after he becomes sheriff, we see Pat Garrett hiring, journalists to tag along and record the hunt for Billy the Kid. So then he can turn it into a book. And then at the end of the movie, there’s some text on screen saying it. The book was called The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, and it was a failure according to the movie.

00:33:43:22 – 00:33:47:19
Dan LeFebvre
Did he really write that book and was it a failure or was it any good?

00:33:47:21 – 00:34:06:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, it was a failure at the time. But yeah, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid was published, I believe it was in 1882. So very, very soon after the events that are portrayed in the movie. And the guy that you see there, Ash Upson, he was hired by Pat Garrett basically to be a ghost writer.

00:34:06:14 – 00:34:23:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So as far as his, you know, I have a love hate relationship with that book. You can tell the parts that Ash Upson wrote, and you can tell the parts that Pat Garrett wrote. Ash ups him. He was he was a little full of it. He never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

00:34:23:28 – 00:34:47:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Right? Ash Upson even went so far, he didn’t know Billy the Kid’s actual birth date, so he just substituted it with his own birth date. Like stuff like that. You know, he would just make stuff up. You can kind of sorta tell where ash ups and stops writing and Pat Garrett takes over, because the parts were where Pat’s talking about, especially towards the end of the book.

00:34:47:05 – 00:35:05:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There’s a lot more accuracy there. So it’s one of those sources that you got to take with a grain of salt or a grain of salt. You definitely need to corroborate a lot of the stuff in the book with other sources, but it’s, to me, it’s a must read for anybody who’s a fan of Billy the Kid history.

00:35:05:12 – 00:35:23:11
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like there’s well, I guess like movies. They they they, you know, never get the truth, get in the way of a good story. It just sounds like that’s the case, too. There. Well, in the movie, while they’re on the run, Billy and his gang end up in the town of White Oaks at a brothel run by Jane Greathouse.

00:35:23:13 – 00:35:48:01
Dan LeFebvre
And she’s. She’s played by junior, right, in the movie. And she seems to be an old friend of Billy’s. And then that night, a mob of townspeople carrying torches started to burn the building down. If Billy the Gang don’t give themselves up, a local lawman guy named Deputy Carlyle goes inside, tries to talk to Billy, tries to get him to come out peacefully, but instead Billy tricks Carlyle into putting on Travis’s hat and coat and then pushes Carlyle out of the front door and the mob is waiting there.

00:35:48:01 – 00:36:06:07
Dan LeFebvre
They just open fire and kill him, thinking that it’s Chavez. But of course it’s not. And then when they realize their mistake, the town scatters. And that’s how Billy gets out of that one. Even though the older Brushy Bill says that he got pinned with Carlyle’s death, how much of that event really happened?

00:36:06:09 – 00:36:09:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Some of it.

00:36:09:22 – 00:36:12:10
Dan LeFebvre
Never left the truth anyway.

00:36:12:12 – 00:36:32:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Never let the truth. And, you know, I, I used to love that scene when I was a kid. I had the biggest crush on Jenny right at that time. But, yeah, she never existed in real life. Jane. Great. Else was actually. Jim. Great house. It was a man. They call him Whiskey Jim because he used to illegally sell alcohol to Native Americans.

00:36:32:27 – 00:36:52:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He ran a roadhouse. It wasn’t actually in White Oaks. It was about 40 miles to the north. And it was. It wasn’t necessarily a, House bill repute. It was basically a place where you could go and get a meal, a couple of drinks and a place to sleep for the night. Whether or not he had any soiled doves working for him, that I can’t say.

00:36:52:05 – 00:37:09:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m sure he did, but I honestly don’t know about that. But it was sort of a hangout for Billy and several of his buddies. There’s a lot of people that think that that’s where Billy first met Dave Root. The bar now on the on the day in question, it was Billy the Kid, Dave Root of Ball and Billy Wilson.

00:37:09:07 – 00:37:31:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So Chavez and Scurlock and the others that you see in the movie, they were not there for this. But yeah, they they were surrounded by a posse. Deputy Carlyle. He wasn’t like an he wasn’t like a full time deputy. He was a blacksmith, believe it or not. He was just deputized to be part of this posse. And, the reason he went inside is because he knew some of those guys.

00:37:31:19 – 00:37:56:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was on friendly terms with them, so they sort of swapped it out. So, Jim, great house. He goes outside and he’s basically the posse’s hostage while Deputy Carlyle is inside trying to talk everybody into surrendering. Well, Billy’s not going to surrender to a lynch mob, so he’s steadily pouring whiskey down. Deputy Carlisle’s mouth gets him stumbling drunk.

00:37:56:11 – 00:38:18:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The posse outside keeps tossing out ultimatums. They finally they say, we’re going to give you five minutes. If you don’t come out and surrender, we’re going to kill Jim Greathouse. There’s a shot, and he gets fired. Supposedly, Billy the Kid would later claim the shot was fired from the outside, at which point, drunken Carlyle freaks out, jumps through the window.

00:38:18:07 – 00:38:40:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Okay, so as he jumps in the window, he’s gunned down by his posse. That’s according to Billy the Kid. Later on, gave root a ball, allegedly told somebody that he, Billy Wilson and Billy the Kid, that all three of them shot Carlisle in the back when he jumped through the window. Where the truth lies, I don’t know.

00:38:40:09 – 00:38:59:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
However, just like they show in the movie, Billy the Kid would definitely get the blame for that particular killing. And, you know, that kind of, that kind of lost him a lot of goodwill to, a lot of people, because Deputy Carlisle was well-liked and well-respected. So a lot of people didn’t appreciate the way he was gunned down.

00:38:59:23 – 00:39:20:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Whether or not was the posse or not that did it. Billy still got a lot of the blame for it. And as they show in the movie, Carlisle or not Carlisle, Great Houses Roadhouse was burned to the ground the next day. That is something that did occur. I don’t know that he got on his horse naked and rode out of town, but like, the lady does in the movie.

00:39:20:14 – 00:39:23:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But they definitely did burn this place to the ground.

00:39:23:18 – 00:39:42:19
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I guess it just from, as you were explaining, the two different versions of what could have happened with Carlisle, I it sounds like maybe both could be true, like they could have shot him as he went in the back, shot him as he went out the window. And then also the posse opened fire on him. And I mean, who knows?

00:39:42:21 – 00:39:51:21
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, yeah, I guess that kind of goes back to I was talking about it could be like, you know, starts to get into he said she said in the evidence and what really happened. And, you know, I don’t know.

00:39:51:23 – 00:40:09:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, yeah. It’s one of those and, you know, come to think of it, you would think that if he was shot in the back as he was coming through the window, somebody would have made note of it, you know? But, I’m not aware if there’s any, contemporary reports that specify where his wounds were. I need to check into that.

00:40:09:21 – 00:40:12:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That’s a that’s a good idea.

00:40:12:02 – 00:40:29:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we head back to the movie’s timeline, Pat Garrett and his men finally catch up to Billy and his gang. And this leads to the big climactic shootout where doc Spurlock is hit badly. He sacrifices himself so everyone else can escape, but it doesn’t really work because Billy finds himself surrounded and captured, and then he’s sentenced to hang.

00:40:29:20 – 00:40:51:00
Dan LeFebvre
But before that gets carried out, Jane Greathouse comes back and she sneaks a gun into the outhouse so Billy can use it to make his escape. In the process, he kills some of the bad guy deputies that we’ve grown to dislike throughout the movie, and he rides off to join the rest of his gang. Once he’s there, we find out that Chavez was mortally wounded, and I know there’s a lot in there, but all of that happens in the movie.

00:40:51:00 – 00:41:04:01
Dan LeFebvre
It’s just like ten minutes of screen time. So it really seems like the movie is rushing through a lot of events to kind of wrap up a lot of these different storylines. Is there any truth to those things that we see happening in that fast paced sequence of events?

00:41:04:03 – 00:41:29:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A little bit of truth in there. So like you said, it’s, they, they gloss over a lot of stuff. So, okay, at this point in time, after the debacle at, White Oaks, Billy’s on the run. Pat Garrett, hunt him down. And, you know, it wasn’t just Pat Garrett that was after him. There was, contingent of cattlemen from the Texas Panhandle who were also on the hunt for Billy.

00:41:29:03 – 00:41:50:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
What Billy was doing at this period following the Lincoln County War. Basically, he was still in horses in New Mexico, trailing them all the way up to the Texas Panhandle, selling them to ranchers there. And then on his way back to New Mexico, he was still a bunch of cattle and sell them to people here in are there in New Mexico.

00:41:50:06 – 00:42:11:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Sorry about that. And my alarm going off. But, so you had Pat Garrett hunt him down. Believe it or not, there was actually a Secret Service agent who was in New Mexico at that time hunting Billy down together. He was connected to a counterfeiting ring, and, yeah, the cowboys from Texas. So. And even the military was on the hunt for Billy the Kid.

00:42:11:12 – 00:42:31:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So a lot of people were looking for him. His sort of a safe place was Fort Sumner, where you see Fort Sumner a lot throughout the movie. The the part where he’s hanging out with the guy he keeps calling Beaver. That was a real life guy named Beaver Smith. They had a cantina there at Fort Sumner, but, Billy felt safe there.

00:42:31:12 – 00:42:55:11
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It was a predominantly Hispanic area. He was very friendly with the Hispanics. He got along amazingly with them. He spoke their language fluently, was very assimilated into their culture. So he felt safe there. Well, as soon as Garrett gets the badge, he he ends up linking up with those cowboys from Texas. And they lie in wait at Fort Sumner and set up an ambush.

00:42:55:14 – 00:43:12:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So one day, Billy and the boys are riding up Billy the Kid just so happens to be riding sort of in the rear of the column. When they get right up to the to the gates, Garrett yells out from the halt, Billy’s friend. Tom, follow your goes for his pistol! They blasted out of the saddle. Kill him!

00:43:12:04 – 00:43:17:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Billy and the others are able to will their horses around and escape.

00:43:17:05 – 00:43:38:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Get bad. A couple of days later and the rest of the what’s called the the Stone house at a place called Stinking Springs wasn’t very far away from Fort Sumner at all. And, it was just an old, abandoned, just tiny one room building made of rocks. Basically. That’s kind of what you see in that scene where, they show Scurlock being gunned down.

00:43:38:21 – 00:44:01:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So basically three days later or may have been four days later, Garrett and the posse track them down to the stone house surrounded in the middle of the night. And the next morning, one of Billy’s good friends got him. Charlie Beaudry steps outside. He’s wearing, a big, sombrero of the kind that Billy the Kid also was partial to.

00:44:01:10 – 00:44:27:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He’s mistaken for Billy the Kid. Garrett gives a signal rifle sound and Beaudry shot the pieces. Charlie Beaudry was a Lincoln County regulator. He did help Billy still in live stock after Gotti wore, but at this point he too, he was kind of pulling a Doc Scurlock. He was distancing himself. He had gotten married. He was trying to settle down.

00:44:27:21 – 00:44:48:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That was the last person they wanted to kill. Garrett. And then it was a it was a complete accident. So in Young Guns two, when you see Doc Scurlock being gunned down, that never happened. Doc, was living in Texas at the time. That is actually, portrayal, pretty accurate portrayal of the death of the very real life Charlie Beaudry.

00:44:48:17 – 00:45:12:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There was a siege. Believe it or not, Garrett actually brought in a wagon. They started cooking breakfast outside to lure the boys out, and it worked. They ended up. They all surrendered. So it was. It was Billy the Kid, Ruta Ball, Tom Pickett and Billy Wilson. All of these guys ended up coming out. They surrendered. They were arrested and taken the Las Vegas in New Mexico and placed in jail.

00:45:12:20 – 00:45:30:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Billy was in jail for a while. He was actually tried and convicted for murder during this period. He’s then taken to Lincoln to await, execution. So that all the stuff that you’re saying they glossed over. Absolutely. You know, they you don’t we don’t get to see him. Well, you do see the trial. We do see that in the movie.

00:45:30:24 – 00:45:59:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I forgot about that. The judge says he’s going to hang by the neck until he’s dead. Dead, dead. And Billy tells him you can go to hell, hell, hell. But but yeah, it they did sort of gloss over a few things. It wasn’t Scurlock who was killed. It was actually a guy named Charlie Beaudry. Now, if anybody is not familiar with any of these people and, you’re a little morbidly curious, do a Google image search for Charlie Beaudry, and you’ll find the photo of him and his wife.

00:45:59:10 – 00:46:14:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It was actually taken off of his body. Still has the bloodstains on it. Really cryptic image. But, he was he was a real deal outlaw. Very tough guy. And unfortunately, he was trying to go straight at the time. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That deal.

00:46:14:21 – 00:46:32:01
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Yeah. I mean, I guess that kind of goes back to. Yeah, they don’t have I know they wanted posters, but they don’t have, you know, mug shots and photographs and things like that to know what somebody actually looks like. So they’re going it sounds like what you said they were going off Garrett’s recognition of him. Right? Garrett gave the give the shot.

00:46:32:05 – 00:46:41:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Or gave it? Yeah. That’s what it seems to be. It seems to be the case to me as well. I mean, Garrett Garrett just they it was a case of mistaken identity, you know?

00:46:41:07 – 00:47:04:12
Dan LeFebvre
Well, throughout the movie, I really felt like it could have benefited from some titles clarifying dates and locations and perhaps that that sequence, there’s perhaps the most obvious at the end, because the whole time they’re talking about going to old Mexico. And there’s one line of dialog after the shootout where Arkansas Dave asks, the a couple of guys nearby if he’s in old Mexico and they simply nod.

00:47:04:12 – 00:47:20:24
Dan LeFebvre
So he seems to think that he’s finally made it. And since the whole gang talked about going to old Mexico, the entire movie, that led me to believe, as I was watching it, that maybe finally they they made it to old Mexico after this big shootout. Can you clarify the actual locations where these events in the movie took place?

00:47:20:24 – 00:47:23:24
Dan LeFebvre
I’m assuming not in near Old Mexico?

00:47:23:26 – 00:47:41:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. You know, there is some indication that Billy was planning on going to Mexico and one of his buddies would would have write a book. Gosh, man, it was one of the Cocos. And he was either Frank or George Coe, who said that Billy was planning on going to Mexico and laying low. He just had to settle some business there.

00:47:41:21 – 00:48:04:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Fort Sumner I think. I do think that’s pretty plausible. He just dragged his feet too long about doing it and he got got. But Dave Root Ball would flee to old Mexico like they show in the movie. It wasn’t immediate like that. He would live for several more years. But yeah, he would eventually find his way to Mexico, to a place called Parral, Mexico.

00:48:04:25 – 00:48:32:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And he got crossways with the wrong guys. They shot him dead, and they cut his head off and placed it on a pike so that that part was real. I think, you see him kind of sharpening the machetes and get ready to take care of him. It just didn’t happen. As immediate as they show in the in this in the in the movie, most of the movie is going to take place either in Lincoln, New Mexico or Fort Sumner, New Mexico, maybe.

00:48:32:08 – 00:48:51:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, excuse me. The scene where they show Garrett meeting with, John Chisum and being offered the job of sheriff, maybe that’s supposed to represent the capital of Santa Fe or maybe Roswell. I’m not sure, but I know what you’re talking about. It does sort of seem like they’re just on the run towards New Mexico the entire time around.

00:48:51:15 – 00:49:00:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Answer I’m sorry, old Mexico, but no, in most of what you’re seeing, there is either taking place at Lincoln or Fort Sumner or the surrounding areas.

00:49:00:03 – 00:49:08:25
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense because, yeah, I got the impression that, yeah, they’re trying to trying to make it there, but they never really seem to make it there.

00:49:08:28 – 00:49:13:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The route about did, but, I’m sure at his final moments he wished he hadn’t.

00:49:13:12 – 00:49:30:29
Dan LeFebvre
At the very end of the movie, Pat Garrett is alone when he finds Billy the Kid, and he seems to regret being in the position of killing his old friend, according to the movie. Garrett says this hurts him to do it, but he’s in a place that he can’t get out of and Billy says he’s going to make it easy and then turns his back to Garrett.

00:49:31:01 – 00:49:52:18
Dan LeFebvre
There’s a gunshot, but the movie never really shows Billy getting hit. And then in the next scene, we see a casket being lowered into the ground with Garrett and Chisum, and they’re watching this going on. And then the movie cuts back to the elderly Brushy Bill telling his story to the lawyer from the beginning. So from the movie’s perspective, it seems to suggest that Pat Garrett helped Billy the Kid fake his death.

00:49:52:21 – 00:50:15:07
Dan LeFebvre
And then he lived out the rest of his days as Brushy Bill Roberts. There’s even some text at the end of the movie that says, Brushy Bill went before the New Mexico governor, Thomas Mabry, on November 29th, 1950, and despite identification by several surviving friends of the notorious outlaw Brushy Bill, was discredited. Finally, I’m going to quote this last bit of text from the movie.

00:50:15:07 – 00:50:34:02
Dan LeFebvre
So this is a quote from the movie. It says, quote, whether or not Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid remains a mystery. End quote. Can you help unravel the history that we know from the movies version of this guy named Brushy Bill Roberts, living in the 1950s, actually being Billy the Kid?

00:50:34:05 – 00:50:53:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. So I’m glad you included that quote, especially the the word mystery. There is a lot of mystery, you know, taking taking Brushy Bill out of the equation for now. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding Billy the Kid’s life. There’s a lot of stuff that we make assumptions about that we don’t know for certain. We don’t know when he was born.

00:50:53:24 – 00:51:17:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
We don’t know where he was born. We don’t know how old he was when he died. We don’t know his his father’s name, his mother’s maiden name. There’s so much we don’t know about Billy the Kid. His death is probably the least mysterious aspect of his entire life. So once again, there’s a lot of misconceptions surrounding his death.

00:51:17:18 – 00:51:37:25
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
To be frank, there’s a lot of false information that people put out there. I’m really not sure why, but, one of the things that people seem to, to think is true, that’s not true, is that Garrett killed Billy the Kid without anybody else seeing what was happening, and then buried his body before anybody could get a good look at it.

00:51:37:27 – 00:52:02:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That could not be farther from the truth. So Garrett had two deputies with him at the time, Kit McKinney and John Poe. They snuck into Fort Sumner under the cover of Dark. They and they eventually made their way to the home of P Maxwell. So Fort Sumner used to be a legitimate military installation. A guy named Lucian Maxwell bought the fort from the Army.

00:52:02:22 – 00:52:29:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I want to say, in the late 1860s. Could be wrong about that date. Lucian Maxwell ended up passing away. Everything went to his widow and his kids. His son was Pete Maxwell. So by the time these these events are unfolding, Pete Maxwell basically had to run to Fort Sumner. Lady I mentioned earlier, Paul Lita Maxwell, that was Pete’s sister, and also Billy, the kid’s alleged girlfriend.

00:52:29:08 – 00:52:44:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So if anybody knew where Billy the Kid was, it was going to be Pete Maxwell, right? Pat and his deputies make their way once again to the middle of the night. It’s dark. They kind of sneak their way inside the fort. They go because they want to talk to Maxwell. Basically, they ask him, hey, have you seen Billy?

00:52:44:29 – 00:53:06:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Do you know where Billy could be? They were not expecting to find Billy the Kid there. Matter of fact, both. You know, Garrett obviously would write his book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, John W Poe. Decades later, he would write his own book called, The Death of Billy the Kid. And they’re both very clear that they kind of felt like they were on a wild goose chase at this point.

00:53:06:26 – 00:53:31:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They knew Billy was in the area. They just didn’t think he would be, for lack of better words, I guess naive enough to actually be inside Fort Sumner itself when he was such a wanted man by this point. And they definitely didn’t think he’d be at Pete Maxwell’s place. Right. So Garrett goes inside to question Pete Maxwell. He leaves his two deputies outside on the porch.

00:53:31:19 – 00:53:47:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
This happened very quickly, like in less than a couple of minutes. Right at that moment, Billy the Kid comes strolling up. He’s he doesn’t have his boots on. He’s in his he’s in his stockings, as they call them. He’s got a pistol in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. He’s going to get a midnight snack.

00:53:47:15 – 00:54:03:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He’s. There was a slaughtered steer. He was going to cut a piece of meat off of it, take it back to a friend’s house. They were going to cook him a midnight snack and he was going to go to sleep. So he wasn’t expecting Garrett either. It was all it was. It was the perfect storm. He’s almost on the deputies.

00:54:03:22 – 00:54:24:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
When he notices them, he immediately raises his pistol and starts asking them in Spanish. Once again. You know, it was a predominantly Spanish area. He’s asking them, Kens, who is it? DNS kidnaps as he’s back in. As he’s doing that, he’s backing into Maxwell’s bedroom. The layout of Fort Sumter was a little strange. There’s a lot more involved here, Pete.

00:54:24:26 – 00:54:45:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Only he did not have an interior door going to his his room where he where he stayed. It was an exterior door. So Billy just backed into it. He. Pete, who are those guys outside? At the same moment, he sees a shadowy figure standing next to Pete Maxwell’s bed, lifts his pistol again, says kidnaps. And that’s when Garrett shoots him and kills him.

00:54:45:17 – 00:55:04:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So right off the bat, you’ve got an eyewitness and Pete Maxwell. The whole entire town converged on that building. As soon as soon as this happened, he, Maxwell, did not live alone. His mother, his siblings, other relatives all live in that house. They came to his room. They saw Billy the Kid lying there dead. Everybody else was looking in the window.

00:55:04:29 – 00:55:29:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They saw Billy the Kid’s body lying in their dead. Things were so tense that Garrett and his deputies had to follow it up inside of Maxwell’s room for the rest of the night. They were expecting the mob to attack them just to avenge Billy’s. That the attack never came. The next morning, a coroner’s jury was formed. Every single one of the people that were in the coroner’s jury where people who personally knew Billy the Kid, they saw the body.

00:55:29:27 – 00:55:54:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They interviewed Pete Maxwell, they talked to the deputies, they talked to Garrett. They issued a, coroner’s jury report. It was basically the same thing as a death certificate back in those days, describing the entire event and explicitly saying that, yes, Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett. Later on that morning, they released Billy’s body to the citizens of Fort Sumner.

00:55:54:27 – 00:56:17:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was a very popular figure there. A lot of people loved him. Not everybody loved him, but a lot of people did. They dressed and cleaned his body or they cleaned his body. They dressed it in new clothes. Other people dug the grave. They held a public wake, like there was a literal public wake. So many, many, many people saw Billy the Kid’s dead body.

00:56:17:21 – 00:56:44:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The funeral was attended by nearly everybody in town. According to Polly, the Maxwell. And that was it. And of course, Billy the Kid was never seen again after that happened. So there is a lot of evidence coming from multiple sources that Pat Garrett did indeed kill Billy the Kid. There was no photograph taken. A lot of people are under the false impression that every dead outlaw had their pictures taken back in those days.

00:56:44:14 – 00:57:01:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Once again, nothing could be further from the truth. I know what people are thinking of because there are a lot of. I hate to sound say it this way, but a lot of cool photos of dead outlaws from the old West. They would prop them up, take pictures of them, turn them into postcards. That is something that did happen on occasion.

00:57:01:27 – 00:57:24:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But I mean, we only have like maybe 15 to 20 of those type of photos. At the same time, there is probably a thousand outlaws at any given time roaming the West. There’s a lot of people like Dave Root Ball, for example. We don’t have any photos of him while he was alive. Right. And he was a much more accomplished outlaw than Billy the Kid ever was.

00:57:24:03 – 00:57:44:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There was a lot of people that we don’t have photographic evidence of their death. Right. But some people will point to that and say, that’s how we know that Pat Garrett did not kill Billy the Kid because we don’t have a photo. Well, number one, he didn’t have to provide photographic proof. He had all the proof he needed in the coroner’s jury report and all the eyewitnesses.

00:57:44:03 – 00:58:09:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And we know that because he was paid the reward eventually for killing Billy the Kid, and there was no photographer that lived in Fort Sumner. This is a very tiny community. I want to say it was less than 300 people. Yeah. No, no, photographer probably within about 2 or 3 days riding, Fort Sumner. Okay. So.

00:58:09:04 – 00:58:29:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, and one more thing historians have been able to identify. At least I always forget on the exact number it was. It’s over two dozen people by name who saw Billy the Kid’s dead body. A lot of these people live for a very, very long time. I’m talking up until the 1920s, 30s. Some of these people wrote books.

00:58:29:13 – 00:58:50:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Some of them had had their journals published. Many of them were interviewed by historians and journalists. And, you know, there may be certain details that people get wrong, just like any, you know, if if there’s a carjacking and a police officer shows up, somebody is going to say it happened at 115 in the afternoon, somebody else is going to say, no, no, it was after 2:00.

00:58:50:19 – 00:59:12:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Somebody is going to say the guy was wearing a green shirt. Somebody else is going to say, but they all agreed. That guy definitely stole that car, right? It was the same thing with Billy’s death. Not all the details lined up. Maybe not everybody agrees on the timing, but the one thing that they all maintained for literally the rest of their lives, even after Pat Garrett was long gone, was that Garrett absolutely killed Billy the Kid.

00:59:12:20 – 00:59:36:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So there’s a ton of evidence showing that it’s kind of all the all the mystery, the supposed mystery surrounding the kid’s death is pretty much much ado about nothing. By contrast, there is zero evidence that Brushy Bill Roberts was who he claimed he was. It’s a cool story, man. I, I when I was a kid, I believe that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid I want.

00:59:36:06 – 00:59:56:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And to this day, if there was a new discovery that definitively that definitively prove that brushy was Billy the Kid, I would be ecstatic. You know, I don’t look up to Billy the Kid as a hero. Like a lot of people, I’m pretty neutral on the people I cover on my show. They were just historical figures, you know?

00:59:56:04 – 01:00:13:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But he is a very sympathetic character, and he’s a very. He was a likable guy when he was alive. He was fun loving. He, if mean, you got in the time machine right now and were whisked back to Fort Sumner, we would be in no danger. Billy the Kid is not just going to shoot you like a dog in the street.

01:00:13:07 – 01:00:36:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He wasn’t a he wasn’t a psychopath. A lot of the people I cover on my show were definitely psychopaths. Billy was a young kid who got caught up with the wrong people. He probably had a little bit of, you know, he aversion to authority, but he wasn’t an evil person. And we don’t like the idea of him just being killed in the dark like that at the hands of Pat Garrett.

01:00:36:00 – 01:00:51:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Somebody that used to be his friend is not a it’s not a fairy tale ending. You know, we never get to see Billy the Kid grow up to be Billy the Man, essentially. You know, so I think a lot of people just don’t want it to be true. They don’t want Billy to have been killed the way he was.

01:00:52:01 – 01:01:16:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Somebody like Brushy Bill Roberts comes along. It’s a very compelling story. It’s surface level. So people just, you know, they buy hook, line and sinker and now brushy. Like I said, on the surface, it’s very compelling. The story goes that Brushy had all the same scars as Billy the Kid that he had. He he was fluent in Spanish, just like Billy the Kid.

01:01:16:23 – 01:01:34:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was ambidextrous, could shoot just as well with both hands that he had tiny hands and big wrist, just like Billy the Kid. He knew things about the Lincoln County War that nobody could have possibly known unless they were Billy the Kid, or very close to Billy the Kid. And yeah, I think he sort of touched on this earlier.

01:01:35:01 – 01:02:01:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There were people who knew Billy the Kid that vouched for Brushy Bill Roberts. Sounds very compelling. If any of that that I just said was true, I would be convinced. But if you dig just a little bit deeper, it all falls apart. So we can start with the multiple gunshot wounds. Brushy Bill. Well, let me just. Have you ever known a pathological liar?

01:02:01:15 – 01:02:02:01
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah.

01:02:02:03 – 01:02:28:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Unfortunately, a lot of times they don’t know when to stop, so they’ll they’ll they’ll take, a tiny lie and it’ll snowball until it’s just this fantastical, unbelievable fairytale story. Brushy Bill was the same. He, the the stories he told were. If you tried to print them as a fiction novel now, you’d be laughed out of the publishing house like, we’re not going to we’re not going to print this.

01:02:28:08 – 01:02:49:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
This is too silly. This would be a comedy story, you know? But. So, Bryce, he didn’t just say that he was shot a couple of times. He had been shot. I want to say 30, 34 times. He claimed he had 34 various bullet wounds and knife wounds over his body. Did he have the same scars as Billy the Kid?

01:02:49:06 – 01:03:12:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Well, how many times was Billy the Kid shot when he was still before Pat Garrett killed him? Possibly once. There’s some evidence. He took a bullet to the thigh when they ambushed and killed Sheriff Brady. Even that’s not, like, proven for a fact, because just a couple of days later, Billy was on his feet, participating in a completely different gun gunfight at Blazer’s Mill.

01:03:12:09 – 01:03:30:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So we think he was possibly wounded. It may have been a grazing wound, at one point in his life, but he certainly wasn’t riddled with scars like Brushy Bill. Roberts claimed that he was. So no, he didn’t have any of the same scars. The ability to kill because we don’t know what scars bleed to get. Have number two.

01:03:30:18 – 01:03:51:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There is no evidence that Brushy Bill Roberts had any scars. You know, there’s a lot of photos of Brushy Bill Roberts out there, but neither he or his lawyer ever thought to document any of these supposed scars. A lot of people are under the false impression that there is, autopsy report out there documenting the scars. There’s no autopsy report.

01:03:51:09 – 01:04:13:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He died of a heart attack. You know, when an old man dies of a heart attack, they don’t necessarily perform an autopsy. So the only evidence we have of brushy scars comes only from his attorney, William Morrison. I don’t think I’ve said it yet, but after Brushy passed away in 1950, a couple of years later, Morrison actually published a book sharing brushy story.

01:04:13:10 – 01:04:17:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It’s called, Alias Billy the Kid.

01:04:17:09 – 01:04:38:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
As far as the supposed inside information that Brushy Bill Roberts said that nobody could possibly know, there has been nothing that he said that wasn’t already common knowledge. So there was a guy named Walter Noble Burns in the, early 1920s. He kind of made the rounds there in New Mexico, and he interviewed a lot of people that knew Billy the Kid back in the day.

01:04:38:29 – 01:05:03:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He talked to Paulina Maxwell, Billy’s old girlfriend. Another dear friend of Billy’s was a lady named Del Vino Maxwell. He talked to her. You interviewed a lot of people, and he published a book called The Saga of Billy the Kid in 1925 or 26. This book is is one of the main pieces of works that kind of catapulted Billy into superstardom.

01:05:03:06 – 01:05:24:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The book was a huge bestseller. Everybody had it. I need to double check on this. I may be wrong here, but I believe it was one of the first book of the book of the month books or but late book of the Month Club books, right? It was sold. It was such a popular book that it was serialized, and they ran in newspapers all over the country.

01:05:24:14 – 01:05:52:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Brushy Bill Roberts definitely read the saga of Billy the Kid, because while it is a very cool book, not everything, it’s historically correct in it. Burns did make quite a few mistakes. Brushy Bill Roberts also happens to make the same exact mistakes, almost word for word, that Burns made. So basically all of his insider knowledge, he was just copying off of other people, and it was information that was that had been known for decades.

01:05:52:19 – 01:06:16:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The affidavits Brushy Bill Roberts and his attorney were able to obtain five signed and sworn affidavits from people that supposedly knew Billy the Kid and boots that Brushy and Billy were one of the same. Once again, you just got to dig a little bit deeper. Out of those five people, three of them never knew the historical Billy the Kid ever.

01:06:16:09 – 01:06:32:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
One of them wasn’t even born yet in 1881 when Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid. So if he wasn’t even alive at the time, how could he possibly know of Brushy Bill? Roberts and Billy the Kid were the same. The best they could do was there were these two old men they had that had, lived in Lincoln, New Mexico.

01:06:32:26 – 01:06:53:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They had allegedly known Billy the Kid when they were young children. I’m talking like 12 years old. They weren’t Billy the Kid’s friends. They weren’t his outlaw buddies. They weren’t Old West lawmen. Nothing like that. These were two old men who, 70 years after the fact, they may have possibly known Billy the Kid and even one of them when he first met up with Brushy.

01:06:53:13 – 01:07:13:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He goes, now you’re way too young to be Billy the Kid for whatever reason, he changed his mind a couple of days later, but that’s the best they could do. So whenever, Brushy Bill proponents will try to say that people who actually knew Billy the Kid vouched for him kind of nothing. None of Billy’s old associates ever vouched for him.

01:07:13:27 – 01:07:37:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
None of his Lincoln County regulators ever vouched for Brushy Bill Roberts. Once again, the best they could find were two old guys who possibly knew Billy the Kid when they were very, very young. So every other aspect of Brushy story falls under the same purview. I mentioned earlier that he was kind of he kind of went a little bit too far in his exaggerations.

01:07:37:15 – 01:08:00:11
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
In addition to being the most famous outlaw of all time, he also claimed to have been a Pinkerton detective. He said he was a deputy U.S. Marshal under Hanging Judge Parker. He lived with three different Native American tribes at three different times. He, he fought in Cuba as a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt. He fought as a mercenary in Mexico with Pancho Villa.

01:08:00:13 – 01:08:28:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
On another occasion, he survived a running gunfight with 2000 Mexican soldiers. He, chased after horse thieves in Oklahoma. He was a gunfighter in Idaho. He was a professional boxer. He was, rodeo champ toward all over the place. He worked for Buffalo Bill Cody on his ranch, breaking horses. He’s claimed to have had his own Wild West show that toured extensively across the United States, putting on, you know, those reenactments of Old West, events.

01:08:28:24 – 01:08:55:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He caught wild horses in South America. I could go on and on with all the. He was a lookout for the famous lady bandit Belle Starr. There’s a million stories that Brushy Bill Roberts told, and I cannot stress this enough. There’s no evidence for any of it. By contrast, the evidence we do have, which is legion, shows that Brushy Bill Roberts was a toddler when the real Billy the Kid was shot and killed.

01:08:55:25 – 01:09:31:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So Rush’s real name was Oliver Roberts. You can find him on every single census from 1880 all the way to his death in 1950. Every single census. We have marriage certificates, we have divorce decrees. There is a family Bible that shows that he was born in 1879. There’s, there’s even a World War One draft registration. We know what Brushy Bill Roberts did where he lived, what his occupation was, the names of his wives, the name of his parents.

01:09:31:07 – 01:09:52:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
We know dang near every detail of his life. And in no point was he allowed law at no point did you live in New Mexico. Like I said he was. He was one and a half, two years old when the real Billy the Kid was gunned down. The, Now, you may be wondering, why do people believe in Brushy Bill’s story if there’s that much evidence?

01:09:52:16 – 01:10:14:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The one tiny thread, the one tiny little string that holds his entire story together? He never gave a date on this, but he claimed that later in life, he, was in Oklahoma and he came across, a couple of law men who had just killed what they thought was a horse thief. Well, it wasn’t a horse thief.

01:10:14:05 – 01:10:48:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It was an undercover police officer who just so happened to be Brushy Bill Roberts cousin, Oliver Roberts. Okay. His much younger cousin, Brushy took his belongings back to Texas, to his family. Oliver’s mother mistook him for Oliver, and he just went with it. At that point on, he kind of slid into that new identity of Oliver Roberts, which is why Brushy Bill proponents will say, well, that’s why he he’s so much younger on all the census data and all the records, because he wasn’t really Oliver Roberts.

01:10:48:19 – 01:11:13:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He just kind of slid into his, identity after he died. Once again, there’s there’s no evidence of any of this occurring. I don’t know about you, but if if my brother died and my cousin returned his belongings, I wouldn’t let my grieving mother think that that was her. Her dead son. You know what I’m saying? Like, there’s just so many fantastical angles to his story.

01:11:13:03 – 01:11:33:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And when you add them all up, they’re just completely unbelievable. You can even just Google pictures of Brushy Bill Roberts. There’s a lot of pictures of him out there, and none of those pictures does he look anywhere near 90 years of age. In all reality, he was 7071 when he dropped out of that heart attack. But yeah, there’s there’s no evidence that he was Billy the Kid.

01:11:33:02 – 01:11:58:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Some people will try to tell you that there was a DNA test proving that they were, the same person. No, Billy has never been exhumed. There has never been a DNA test done on Billy the Kid. Never happened. So with. I can tell you, with, you know, there’s a lot of mysteries in the Old West. I can tell you with 110% certainty that Brushy Bill Roberts was definitely a frog, and he hung out with other frogs.

01:11:58:19 – 01:12:20:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There’s another guy that’s, there was also, an old West fraudster named J. Frank Dalton. He claimed to be Jesse James, and he and Brushy were best friends. They would hang out together. They would go to they, they, Billy, Brushy Bill Roberts, I think, attended, J. Frank Dalton’s 100th birthday. So they were thick as thieves and they were just telling lies.

01:12:20:29 – 01:12:22:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Man.

01:12:22:24 – 01:12:40:13
Dan LeFebvre
So in the movie, it suggests that the reason why Brushy Bill is coming forward is because he wants that pardon that we, we see happening, to Billy the Kid. And that seems to be the impression that I got was that’s why he came forward near the end of his life. He’s like, I finally want this. This pardon that I’ve been promised.

01:12:40:19 – 01:12:56:27
Dan LeFebvre
Was that really what he was going for? Or was the real Brushy Bill, just as you said, you know, just telling lies and couldn’t stop? And or was he trying to sell his own book or was he trying to make money off of it? Like, what was his motivation? I guess it would be my question.

01:12:57:00 – 01:13:24:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, I, I an acronym that I like it’s mice in Missy. So it’s a good way to kind of figure out someone’s motive money, ideology, coercion and ego. I don’t think Brushy Bill was doing this on ideological grounds. I don’t think somebody, somebody was coercing him or blackmailing him into telling these lies. I think it was a mixture of money and ego.

01:13:24:09 – 01:13:46:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Now, now, Brushy, had a very long history of telling tall tales, even even before he was claiming to be Billy the Kid. He used to tell people he was like a scout, an old army scout and a frontiersman. There’s even an old newspaper article. Gosh, man, I want to say from the 1920s. So we’re talking decades before he claimed to be Billy the Kid.

01:13:46:24 – 01:14:13:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
In this newspaper article, he’s making this wild claim that he saved a group of Texas Rangers from machine gun wielding gangsters. So he had a history of telling these type of stories. I do know that he was he was living in poverty in his later years. So I think money certainly played a role in it. Like I said, he was good friends with J.

01:14:13:17 – 01:14:34:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Frank Dalton, J. Frank Dalton was kind of being wined and dined by people. He was living rent free. He was taking trips to New York City. I think maybe Brushy wanted a little bit of that limelight. And he really did meet with the governor. That is, something that occurred. He basically got left out of there. I mean, he he forgot key details.

01:14:34:24 – 01:14:55:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He couldn’t answer very simple questions. And it was just a big joke. And about a month later is when he just fell dead of a massive heart attack. But, you know, I people people will ask me, well, why would he possibly lie about that? I don’t know, man. I don’t I don’t know why anybody would lie about that, but I have known people that told similar lies.

01:14:55:19 – 01:15:15:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’ve known old men who told similar lie. You know, there was, there was a movie, a few years ago, The Irishman with Robert De Niro, the Scorsese movie. And that was based on, a book called We Paint Houses. I believe this guy, you know, he claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa and claimed to have done all this stuff.

01:15:15:21 – 01:15:34:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A lot of the stuff that that guy claimed to have done, we know that he absolutely did not do well. Yet. He was a dying old man, and he still told these stories that were lies. Why? I don’t know, but I do know it’s it’s human nature. It is something that does happen.

01:15:34:02 – 01:16:01:14
Dan LeFebvre
Well, like you said, there are, you know, compulsive liars out there too, that once you get get started on that, I imagine the money part aside, the ego, like just feeling, people asking you these questions and people focusing on you, it’s, I mean, today, you know, it’s a dopamine hit, right? We know that. But that that’s one of those things, I would imagine that he might not have known even why he did it himself.

01:16:01:14 – 01:16:12:23
Dan LeFebvre
Just that I like being Billy the Kid right? I like when people think I’m Billy the Kid. So keep telling those stories to keep more people thinking that, yeah, that’s the only hack I could think of.

01:16:12:24 – 01:16:36:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, it’s the same way nowadays. People will lie about stolen valor. People that were never in the military will claim to be Navy Seals and stuff like that. It happens all the time. Why? You know, and especially in Bryce’s day, there wasn’t the internet, so we couldn’t just immediately fact check the guy, right. All of those records weren’t you couldn’t get on Ancestry.com in 1950 and look at all the census records.

01:16:36:28 – 01:16:40:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So there he he probably was able to convince quite a few people.

01:16:40:18 – 01:16:54:23
Dan LeFebvre
Especially if you’re something like you mentioned, you know, with, with the wounds, like, we don’t really know what Billy the Kid wounds were. So how like, how can you how can you how would you know? Maybe he has the same wounds, but we don’t know what Billy the Kid had. So how would you know?

01:16:54:26 – 01:17:18:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And you know, I was talking to, one of my buddies about this the other day. My father. Was it my father? Recently turned 80 years old. He was in the Vietnam War. He was, in a combat intensive unit during the Vietnam War. But he was never wounded. Thankfully, my dad came home and spent the rest of his life raising a family, but he lived kind of a rough life.

01:17:18:29 – 01:17:40:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
My dad grew up on a cotton farm. No electricity. I mean, he he grew up pretty rough. If if my dad wanted to start telling stories and say that he has all these war wounds, people would probably believe him because he looks like he has war wounds. He’s missing a a couple of fingers. He, he was in a hunting accident when he was younger and got got shot in the face with a shotgun.

01:17:40:24 – 01:17:59:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He could easily lie and say he got all these wounds in the Vietnam War, which he was in the war, but they were just. These are just injuries that he’s accumulated during that throughout the course of his life. I think Brushy Bill Roberts was a lot was much the same because Brushy Bill, he spent the vast majority of his life as a laborer.

01:17:59:24 – 01:18:17:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He did a lot of blue collar work, farming, you know, I think he was working on oil rigs later on in life. Like this guy, this guy would have definitely been he would have looked rough. He would have certainly have had scars and marks of his own that were most likely work related injuries that he could have. Hey, hey, look at this.

01:18:17:26 – 01:18:37:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
This is where I got shot back in 1885. Would really, you know, he he was he got kicked by a mule when he was 12. You know. So I don’t doubt that he did have, markings that may have appeared to be scars, the uninitiated. But as far as him ever getting any type of gunfights and stuff like that.

01:18:37:04 – 01:18:39:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Absolutely.

01:18:39:26 – 01:18:57:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you mentioned the name, Jesse James and a lot of people are familiar with Jesse James. Billy the Kid, you know, because there’s so many movies that have been made about them. But let’s say you’re given the budget to make a movie about someone from the Old West that hasn’t had a movie made about them yet. Who would you pick and why.

01:18:57:09 – 01:19:20:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Is it so hard to choose? Because there’s so many great stories that have gone completely untold. What’s fresh on my mind right now? Because I’m currently doing a series on it right now. But Chief Joseph and in this purse war. Wow. I mean, just you hear a lot of stories about people having their, you know, the indigenous peoples having their land stolen and being screwed over and stuff like that.

01:19:20:26 – 01:19:41:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m not sure if there’s as much of a clear, just open and shut case of them being screwed over. As much as the Nez Perce were in the events that led to the Nez Perce War, I mean, these were a very peaceful people. They weren’t raiding the American settlers or anything like that. It just basically came down to, hey, we want your land, so you have to leave now.

01:19:41:11 – 01:20:09:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And by the way, we’re going to kill some of your people until you leave, and they eventually push them to the limit. And the war broke out. But it’s a very fascinating story. And just the the way the Nez Perce, it was basically a 1400 mile running gunfight with the U.S. Army. There was maybe 250 Nez Perce warriors with hundreds of women and children, old and sick, against thousands of U.S. troops.

01:20:10:01 – 01:20:37:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And they still held them off. Time and time again were able to defeat them in battle time and time again. It truly is an amazing story, and it’s a heartbreaking story because it doesn’t end well for the Nez Perce people, but I would love to see something like that. Not necessarily a movie. I, I would love to see that made into like an HBO mini series or something, you know, something that could they could really, you know, put about 8 or 9 hours into telling the story.

01:20:37:02 – 01:20:59:23
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Dive a lot deeper into the story for that. Yeah. Wow. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about the true story behind them, guns, too. For anyone who wants to learn more about the history of the Old West, I highly recommend they check out your podcast called The Wild West Extravaganza. You obviously do a ton of research and do a great job bringing the stories of the Old West to life.

01:21:00:00 – 01:21:04:10
Dan LeFebvre
So thank you. Can you give my audience a peek into your podcast and where they can find it?

01:21:04:13 – 01:21:20:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, I have a YouTube channel, The Wild West Extravaganza. It’s also available wherever else you listen to podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, audible, or you can go to my website, Wild West extra.com. But yeah, I mean, everywhere where you listen to podcasts.

01:21:20:17 – 01:21:24:24
Dan LeFebvre
Fantastic. I will add all those links in the show notes for this episode too. Thanks again so much for your time, Josh.

01:21:24:27 – 01:21:26:11
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Thank you man. My pleasure.

00:00:00:25 – 00:00:17:26
Dan LeFebvre
Before we dig into some of the key plot points from 2009. Amelia, let’s take a step back and look at the movie from an overall perspective and how it captures Amelia Earhart story. If you were to give it a letter grade for its historical accuracy or what it get.

00:00:17:29 – 00:00:46:03
Chris Williamson
Start off with the hard questions. Dan. You know, that’s a tough one. Maybe a C+ or B-, if I’m feeling really generous. It really depends on the day. You know, the film covers the basics. It covers the Atlantic flight, covers her marriage to Putnam. The election, her disappearance. Wow. It was only cover the disappearance, but it kind of like, preludes it in kind of a precursor for the disappearance and kind of ends on that, which is kind of, you know, haunting, it kind of simplifies who Earhart was.

00:00:46:03 – 00:01:00:02
Chris Williamson
You know, her heart was a very complex person. She’s a very complex woman. She had a lot of different, you know, sides to her. And, some of the events are sort of, according to me, sort of a little bit overly tweaked and overly analyzed and maybe kind of a little bit of movie magic is kind of thrown in there.

00:01:00:02 – 00:01:18:27
Chris Williamson
And they’ve taken some liberties, which you can’t really, but it is a historical piece, but you can’t really, you know, there’s there’s there’s so much of a mystery to this. It’s hard to not take some kind of historical liberty a little bit here and there, especially when it comes to some of the characters that came in and out of her life, specifically toward the end, like Fred Noonan and stuff, which I’m sure we’ll get into, as we get further in the conversation.

00:01:18:27 – 00:01:21:27
Chris Williamson
But, yeah, you know, a c-plus maybe a B-minus.

00:01:21:29 – 00:01:38:29
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah, that’s I mean, like you said, I mean, again, it is movie and entertainment, but, you know, every movie makes different changes and the creative decisions that they do to, to tell a historical story. So I’m always curious just kind of get that overall general sense. Where is the ballpark here on this.

00:01:39:01 – 00:02:02:21
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah. They they did a they did a good job with it. You know overall I mean it wasn’t again historical accuracy is is picked apart I think in every film. I think it’s very rare that that film gets it like you know spot on or pretty close to spot on. This one, obviously, Amelia’s life was, one of our guest, Laurie, who just has a book out, currently said, you know, Amelia’s first few years of her career was like the first reality show.

00:02:02:21 – 00:02:21:12
Chris Williamson
She was like, cast, you know, cast in this and this part, which will, of course, get into probably the next few questions. But yeah, it’s it’s it, you know, when you have stuff like that, it takes a lot of creative liberty to sort of tell the story, especially when you have limited sources and limited time. And, and her movie studio that I’m sure wants to put certain things into the film and all that.

00:02:21:12 – 00:02:45:19
Dan LeFebvre
So you mentioned what my next question is going to be, because at the very beginning of the movie, we learned that a man named George Putnam, he published Charles Lindbergh book in 1927. And then George gets financing from a socialite named Amy Guess to find a woman to be the first to fly across the Atlantic. And there’s a contract here that we learn about in the movie to tell this woman’s story in The New York Times and also to write a book about it.

00:02:45:25 – 00:03:13:00
Dan LeFebvre
But all that money is going to go back to Mrs. Guest as the financier. And then George finds Amelia Earhart, and that’s how she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in 1928. Although the movie shows Amelia being a passenger, the pilot is a man named Bill Stultz and navigator is Slim Gordon, but according to yeah, according to George in the movie, the pilot signed a deal to say that Amelia is the commander, so it kind of makes it sound like she was the one in charge.

00:03:13:00 – 00:03:23:20
Dan LeFebvre
Although when we’re riding along in the movie, it also shows that Amelia is pretty much just along for the ride. How well does the movie do? You set up Amelia Earhart Trip across the Atlantic in 1928?

00:03:23:22 – 00:03:43:00
Chris Williamson
Yeah, it gets it gets a lot of the again, a lot of the basic foundational stuff. Right? I mean, Putnam was involved with with Lombard’s book prior, he had made a name for himself prior to Earhart walking into his office. Annie Guest is a really interesting woman. Amy. Guest. You think about the time, you know, this is 20, 27, 28.

00:03:43:02 – 00:04:07:26
Chris Williamson
This woman was a billionaire with a B. So at that time, you know, she was she really wanted to go on the flight herself. The whole vehicle was, was initially meant to be for her. Amy Phipps guest wanted to be the first woman across the Atlantic. And her family or kids specifically said, hell no, you’re not going to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic because so many people have already died, women included, trying to attempt this.

00:04:07:28 – 00:04:25:28
Chris Williamson
And so credit to Amy Gast, who didn’t poo poo the entire who saw the bigger picture. It didn’t poo poo the fly just because she wasn’t going to be the star of the show. She, you know, asked George Putnam and and to come up with, you know, the right American pilot or the right woman, you know, to to do this.

00:04:25:28 – 00:04:45:03
Chris Williamson
And and Earhart at the time was in 28. You have to understand, she wasn’t, you know, her flights and she was flying for the fun of it, but she was flying a lot of that time to promote, you know, the the Dennison house and the social work that she was doing in Boston. And she wasn’t really about the she wasn’t looking for her next big step.

00:04:45:05 – 00:05:02:10
Chris Williamson
But when it came, it was kind of out of left field. And, you know, there’s a lot of a lot of infamous, interactions between, you know, her first interaction with George Putnam wasn’t very positive. She thought he was a pompous. You know, I can’t know if I can cuss on the show, but she thought he was a pompous asshole, you know?

00:05:02:10 – 00:05:30:01
Chris Williamson
And she really didn’t. You know, she really didn’t feel like he was, you know, a very, very, a very good guy, calling her the commander. Yeah, it definitely was a PR move. They wanted. They wanted Earhart, though, to feel like she had some power in the flight. And she did exercise that power. You know, there she had a lifelong issue with alcoholism and drinking, and she despised really people that did and, you know, went all the way back to her father when she was a little girl.

00:05:30:03 – 00:05:48:16
Chris Williamson
It will appear again with Fred Noonan as we get further into this conversation. And it appeared here in the, in the 28, the friendship flight. And, you know, they were drunk, these guys were drunk. And she was just, you know, she was beside herself and she really took it seriously because to her, this wasn’t just another flight to her, this was her chance at making history.

00:05:48:23 – 00:06:04:13
Chris Williamson
And these guys were kind of sort of, you know, not taking it as seriously as she would have liked it. But yeah, that’s that’s all fairly accurate. I mean, Putnam, you know, he comes her husband later, he plays a big role in her public image. Obviously. We talk about that a lot today. But calling her the commander wasn’t.

00:06:04:15 – 00:06:11:19
Chris Williamson
It wasn’t about deception, necessarily, but it it definitely was a PR move to help sort of launcher into the stratosphere, which, you know, he was right.

00:06:11:21 – 00:06:42:17
Dan LeFebvre
I think we do see a little clip of that in the movie. There’s a scene I remember even before they took off, one of the guys was drinking and and Mayo comes in and basically tells him off. You know, she clearly doesn’t like that he’s drinking and he’s, you know, and when I was watching that, I guess I if I think she remember she mentioned something about her father, but the impression that I got was, also like, you’re going to be flying this plane and my life is on the line here, and, you know, do your job, and they.

00:06:42:18 – 00:06:59:24
Chris Williamson
Say, I don’t want to die. Yeah, I don’t want to be another statistic. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she was very serious about it. She had dreamed about this moment, but she had kind of put it away, you know, and then it kind of came roaring back into her life and, in a very earth shattering way, and, you know, in the form of the 28 flight.

00:06:59:24 – 00:07:04:21
Chris Williamson
So, yeah, it changed everything for her. And she took it very seriously. She was not happy with them drinking on that flight.

00:07:04:24 – 00:07:20:19
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned earlier, kind of being cast in and in the movie, George basically tells Amelia that he picked her to be the pilot, not because of her skills, because, as the movie puts it, pretty girls command more attention. So is it true that Amelia was recruited for basically her looks over experience like the movie suggests?

00:07:20:21 – 00:07:36:02
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I think so. I mean, at first she definitely was, you know, they wanted an American girl. Like I said earlier in the chat, I mean, it was a reality casting it was an early phase of reality casting. That’s really what it was. They were looking for somebody that would fit the bill. That would look the part.

00:07:36:08 – 00:07:55:27
Chris Williamson
You know, the whole Lady Lindy thing was a real thing. He wanted to he wanted to basically copy Charles Lindbergh. And just make a female version of Charles Lindbergh. And, you know, he was definitely successful at that. The man, you know, was brilliant when it came to PR and kind of, you know, what he was doing.

00:07:55:27 – 00:08:12:15
Chris Williamson
He knew exactly where he wanted to go with Amelia. And I think, you know, she sort of had that tunnel vision that a lot of people maybe didn’t around him, other than maybe Amelia herself. Once they got together, that was like a whole nother, whole nother thing. He kind of supercharged her career, so. But, yeah, I would say it’s it’s it’s largely right.

00:08:12:15 – 00:08:27:09
Chris Williamson
I mean, looks played a role in it. She looked like, you know, she was a pretty woman. You know, she, had all these jobs. She had all this top, these ties into the backbone of America. Like, it just made a lot of sense and a lot of different ways. But I’d be lying if I said looks wasn’t a big part of it.

00:08:27:09 – 00:08:28:15
Chris Williamson
Of course. Yeah, yeah.

00:08:28:17 – 00:08:49:27
Dan LeFebvre
Well, that leads right into my next question. Because in the movie, after after the successful trip across the Atlantic, when Amelia returns to the U.S., she instantly becomes a celebrity and in addition to the book deal, now we start to find out that George seems to have turned the trip into other moneymaking opportunities. You mentioned the Lucky Strike Cigarets that he kind of snuck in there, and not to get too far ahead of where we are in the movie’s timeline.

00:08:49:27 – 00:09:18:09
Dan LeFebvre
But about halfway through the movie, we also see Amelia doing things like commercials for her own brand of luggage and clothing. And we see then George talking about how he convinced Purdue University to pay 80,000 for the electric plane that Amelia flew around the world. That, of course, we’ll talk about later in our discussion. But the impression that I got then was, as I was watching the movie here was basically Amy guess financed the first flight, but then after that it was kind of George Putnam, who basically secured sponsors to finance both himself and Amelia’s career.

00:09:18:11 – 00:09:21:27
Dan LeFebvre
Is that really how Amelia Earhart earned money for her flying career?

00:09:21:29 – 00:09:39:00
Chris Williamson
Yeah, it’s pretty spot on. Earhart don’t, you know, worked a lot of jobs, worked a lot of jobs before she became famous. And that didn’t change when she became famous. Just the job type changed. That’s all it was. You know, he was obviously, you know, the the best of the best of publicity. He wasted no time.

00:09:39:00 – 00:09:56:04
Chris Williamson
He got into, like, as you mentioned, speaking gigs, endorsement deals, magazine features, the Lucky Strike ad that you mentioned. She wasn’t happy with that. She kind of later regretted that, you know, tying her her face and her her likeness, her name to cigarets. But, you know, that was all sort of part of, like, this, this large branding effort.

00:09:56:04 – 00:10:16:15
Chris Williamson
I mean, they wanted to explode her into the stratosphere. They wanted to make her paste her face everywhere. It’s really not unlike what they do with, you know, celebrities today when you see certain names and they’re just they’re everywhere. All of a sudden they’re advertising for everybody. You know, it’s a I compare kind of very different, but I compare it to when Patrick Mahomes were, you know, around Kansas City here when he became really big.

00:10:16:23 – 00:10:35:24
Chris Williamson
I mean, he was he’s advertising everything out here in Kansas City. It’s everything banks and Whataburger and like just all kinds of things, you know, you name it. So it’s not like it’s not very different. I think, George, I’m just kind of was, was doing it in the 20s, you know, and doing it in the 30s, up until Amelia disappeared.

00:10:35:26 – 00:10:55:08
Chris Williamson
But she wasn’t just along for the ride. I mean, I think she, you know, she we’ve talked about this a lot on the show. She helped shape her own image. She was a very, strong woman. She had a lot of goals. You know, she had no problem, you know, doing what she needed to do to to achieve those goals.

00:10:55:10 – 00:11:12:25
Chris Williamson
You know, she had her own luggage set, her own clothing line. She was a editor for cosmopolitan. I mean, this woman was everywhere. And, you know, the Purdue connection to to just kind of wrap it up. It’s legit. She was brought in by the then president, Purdue. I’m forgetting Eliot. I forgot his name for a second.

00:11:12:27 – 00:11:33:00
Chris Williamson
He saw her. She had already been speaking on the lecture circuit, and he saw her, and he was like, Holy shit. This woman is, like, amazing. You know, this woman is amazing. She’s she’s garnering, you know, all of this following and all these people are just mesmerized by her, I think to to Eliot’s credit, he saw that and brought her into to Purdue, and helped her fund her.

00:11:33:00 – 00:12:00:16
Chris Williamson
You know, her electric. They even called it the the flying laboratory. She was given a special designation, a career counselor for women, if I’m not mistaken, or something along the lines of that. This is a woman who was in classrooms in Purdue in the 20s, 100 years ahead of her time talking about things like Stem, you know, science, technology, you know, engineering mathematics, trying to get a lot of women and men really, for that matter.

00:12:00:18 – 00:12:18:12
Chris Williamson
But women specifically to say, look, you don’t have to get a general degree and go back into the home, and, well, now you got to go get married. No, you can fly. You can do, you know, you can get in mathematics, you can be an engineer, you can be a mechanic, things like that. So a lot of that is very, the groundwork that the movie lays is, is very good, is very solid.

00:12:18:12 – 00:12:21:13
Chris Williamson
And, it hits a lot of the big strides. You know.

00:12:21:16 – 00:12:41:03
Dan LeFebvre
I can understand in the movie, you know, just not getting into that side of it, you know, there would be a lot of time to, to get into her, promoting that kind of stuff. But it’s fascinating that she. You’re talking about you on reality show ahead of the time, but it sounds like she was really ahead of her time, too, like in and what she was promoting there with, women in Stem and stuff like that.

00:12:41:03 – 00:12:44:20
Dan LeFebvre
I can imagine that was very popular back in the 1920s.

00:12:44:22 – 00:13:06:29
Chris Williamson
Yeah. And it was very important to her, very important to her. She was a champion of of women. She was a champion of aviation. You know, she wanted to be on the front line. She saw no problem with, really the fame that she, you know, she was a sort of a double a walking, double edged sword. I mean, she loved to, she loved her privacy.

00:13:07:01 – 00:13:19:07
Chris Williamson
I think there was a man that she dated to go to take it back a little bit, and I know we’re jumping around, but to take it backwards a little bit before she met George, there was a man and I. I’m remiss if I didn’t say this, that she, that she met, that she was engaged to. His name was Sam Chapman.

00:13:19:09 – 00:13:41:06
Chris Williamson
And Sam Chapman was, in my opinion, was really the love of her life. And he was, you know, if you look him up, he was fiercely private. He protected that privacy. There were, moments in the middle of Earhart’s career, early in her career, where they were still together. This is before she, you know, got engaged and started having an affair with George and Mary.

00:13:41:06 – 00:14:05:09
Chris Williamson
George, where they would spend time together, they would drive up the coast after she got back from a flight. And it spent 3 or 4 hours together before she had to be rushed back to her, her schedule, you know, the rest of her stuff. But she was very much in love with Sam, to the point that if she had trusted him, specifically with, you know, what to do with everything after she died, if she didn’t make it across, you know, the transatlantic flight or her solo.

00:14:05:09 – 00:14:24:22
Chris Williamson
I mean, she was really. She really loved him, really trusted him. So Sam was, I think, the love of her life. But George Putnam was just a natural fit. And it, you know, it just kind of worked out for for Amelia, when it comes to the publicity side of things that she happened to be with, you know, have somebody in her pocket that was, probably the best she could have at the time.

00:14:24:25 – 00:14:45:13
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I wonder if some of that leads into my next question. Because if you go back to the movie, we see George and Amelia, it’s it their relationship transitioned from a strictly professional one to a romantic one as well. And he’s the one that seems to be more entirely smitten with her and wants to get married. And even though she does seem to eventually love him, she doesn’t want to commit to a marriage.

00:14:45:13 – 00:14:59:07
Dan LeFebvre
And maybe some of what you were just talking about kind of alluded to that. But then skipping ahead in the timeline of the movie a little bit later on, George eventually does convince her to marry him. Do you think the movie does a good job telling the true story of George and Amelia’s relationship?

00:14:59:10 – 00:15:26:11
Chris Williamson
It gets the broad strokes right. You know, it’s such a deep relationship. There’s a book, I will promote it. It’s not mine. It’s you’ve probably heard of it. It’s called The Aviator and the showman. It’s by Lori King Shapiro. It just dropped. We just had Lori was the most current episode of our show, and, you know, that relationship, if you really want to know the the the gritty, nitty gritty details, you know, read that book because it there’s so much more to that relationship.

00:15:26:13 – 00:15:46:24
Chris Williamson
And Lori did a fantastic job of uncovering some new information that hadn’t been previously known, historically, but it does get the the broad strokes, for the most part, fairly accurate. He was very persistent. He pushed. I mean, I can appreciate that. I, as soon as I saw my wife, I, I told my friend like, that’s my wife, she doesn’t know yet, but I’m going to marry her.

00:15:46:24 – 00:16:23:10
Chris Williamson
And it took me a little while, but I was very persistent. So I can I can admire that persistence, in Mr. Putnam. But she was obviously much more hesitant. She, you know, she valued her independence, really, above anything else, her flying, her public life, all her private relationships and things of that nature. And, and, you know, she wrote a really famous letter to George, and I’m paraphrasing, but she talks about her reluctance to marry him, and, you know, that marrying him sort of shatters any chances, in work and her work, which really meant, more than anything, getting women in aviation out there.

00:16:23:10 – 00:16:41:21
Chris Williamson
And really, the mission, the cause was the most important thing to her more than anything else. And, you know, she tells him famously in that letter, you got to let me go in a year. If if we don’t find happiness, you know, even though it’s an attractive cage, I can’t stay in a cage. And you got to promise you’ll let me go in a year.

00:16:41:23 – 00:17:06:16
Chris Williamson
I won’t hold you to any medieval, you know, marital obligations. And you don’t hold me to any marital obligations, either. And she was again, what, 100 year? I mean, people, I mean, this is way off topic, but if you look at like the the status of like marriage, now, you know, just how much open marriage is there, how much that, you know, this is in the Jazz age, a hundred years ago almost.

00:17:06:18 – 00:17:34:18
Chris Williamson
And, you know, open marriage. It’s weird how it comes around in circles like that was a very common thing at that time, and it just wasn’t really talked about. But the people that were really well known that were sort of in those circles, like Amelia Earhart and George Putnam, I once those things started to get out, I mean, people were like, well, of course, you know, it was because it was the Jazz Age and it was everybody was having affairs and everybody was sleeping around and everybody was, you know, had the sort of loose lips kind of look at marriage and long term relationships.

00:17:34:18 – 00:17:42:02
Chris Williamson
So, you know, people could argue that she was way ahead of her time or people could say that, well, just everybody was doing that at the time. That was just kind of the way the world is.

00:17:42:02 – 00:18:01:12
Dan LeFebvre
Since we are on the topic of Amelia’s personal relationships, another one that we see in the movie is Jean Vidal, who also works with Amelia for a little bit while, and we don’t really see them sleeping together in the movie, although there is a scene where we see Jean and Amelia kissing in an elevator. So the impression that I got was that Amelia probably had an affair with Jean while she was married to George.

00:18:01:15 – 00:18:05:28
Dan LeFebvre
Was there a romantic relationship between May and Jean?

00:18:06:00 – 00:18:24:17
Chris Williamson
Maybe. You know, we don’t have we don’t have any there. So I will tell you this. There’s no definitive proof. So the film does take liberty there with the elevator kiss I, which I’d forgotten about. I just remember that, as you told me, was like, oh, yeah, she did. Yeah, she did sneak a kiss in the elevator. There’s no definitive proof that they ever had a relationship.

00:18:24:17 – 00:18:52:15
Chris Williamson
They were friends. They were close as a you know, she was with a lot of people. He was Jean was obviously, he was the, the father of of, Gore Vidal, the who was a writer. And Gore is, really the one that sort of, kept this rumor alive, for lack of a better phrase. But, you know, Gore was a fantasy writer, and he was a kid, you know, when he would have seen Amelia with with Jean.

00:18:52:22 – 00:19:08:24
Chris Williamson
And, you know, doesn’t mean that if we’re, you know, six, seven years old, we don’t remember things that we see, you know, definitively. But, you know, you sort of take that into consideration that in combination with there never being a physical or any any kind of proof or any letters between the two of them, then that would, that would say, you know, hey, we were romantic together or anything like that.

00:19:08:27 – 00:19:23:09
Chris Williamson
There’s just no, there’s to use a term from the disappearance. There’s no smoking gun for that. So, you know, it’s it’s rumor and innuendo to to which there is an awful lot, when it comes to Amelia Earhart, both pre death and certainly post death.

00:19:23:15 – 00:19:44:28
Dan LeFebvre
So it sounds like maybe the movie and a movie do this a lot. You know, you have this one little, little fact you’re talking about, open relationships being a bigger thing. And then this other element of it and they’re like, okay, we’re just going to connect these dots and just kind of fill in some of those gaps, even if there’s not, a dot in the middle of of proof that we know, but it’s a movie and we have that creative license to do that.

00:19:44:28 – 00:19:46:07
Dan LeFebvre
It sounds like that’s kind of what they’re doing there.

00:19:46:14 – 00:19:51:08
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s that’s kind of what Hollywood does with a lot of. So yeah. Yeah.

00:19:51:08 – 00:20:18:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, speaking of Amelia Earhart, supporting other women, one of the other women aviators in the movie that we see is Eleanor Smith. And the movie shows Amelia being very supportive of Miss Smith and really, any other women fighters that she comes across. But when Amelia isn’t around, George tries to convince Eleanor to purposely let Amelia win a derby flight from Santa Monica to Cleveland to as the movie puts it, benefits women fliers everywhere.

00:20:18:26 – 00:20:41:26
Dan LeFebvre
And of course, the sponsorships that the movie shows, I’m sure would also benefit him financially too. But then we see Amelia coming in third behind Louise Hayden and Gladys O’Donnell. Anyway, so the movie is really unclear if George’s influence had any effect on that outcome. Does the movie accurately portray the different perspectives that Amelia Earhart and George Putnam had on other women fighters, like Eleanor Smith?

00:20:41:29 – 00:21:16:18
Chris Williamson
Yeah, it does. So I will tell you, it’s it does portrayed accurately. Amelia, you’re right 100%. Amelia was very friendly with all of her compatriots, the people that, you know, fellow 90 nines people that she was flying with, people in the air, dirty races, other female aviators. She was very sweet. And I think if you look at any of the, documentation that’s out there, you’re going to be hard pressed to find, an instance where Amelia ever, like, cussed another female aviator out or any or anything like that, or, you know, she showed more than minor frustrations, you know, of of things.

00:21:16:21 – 00:21:37:04
Chris Williamson
But it wasn’t with anybody in particular. Eleanor Smith was an absolute animal when it came to fly. She was one of the best fliers ever. She was a fantastic aviator, and she was technically a much more skilled pilot. Admitted by Amelia herself. Amelia has said several times on record that, you know, she’s not the most talented pilot.

00:21:37:04 – 00:22:03:13
Chris Williamson
If you talk to, a lot of aviation history historians, they’ll tell you about people like Pancho Barnes. They’ll tell you about Florence Clayton Smith. I’ll tell you about Ruth Elder Ruth Nichols, Eleanor Smith. I mean, there’s dozens and dozens and dozens of women, that were incredible fliers. George, while that particular event, with the the, the Air Derby race with Eleanor Smith, that particular event was fictionalized.

00:22:03:13 – 00:22:22:25
Chris Williamson
It was more of a representation of kind of what he would do. So, you know, yes, he did, try to influence negatively and pressure a lot of the other women and try to tell them things, like, you know, they wouldn’t have a career if, you know, they didn’t allow Earhart to do dot, dot, dot or whatever.

00:22:22:27 – 00:22:40:17
Chris Williamson
Now, Earhart and, and, and Putnam were sort of at odds with that. But Earhart obviously didn’t know a lot of a lot of that stuff. I think that, you know, or that were instances where Earhart found out that George Putnam was pressuring people and she would go talk to George and tell them, like, look, this is important. You know, you can’t be talking to women like this.

00:22:40:17 – 00:22:59:21
Chris Williamson
You can’t be, you know, talking to my compatriots like this. So, yeah, I mean, that particular moment. No. But did that stuff happen all the time? Absolutely. I mean, George was fiercely competitive and wanted Earhart to be the woman, the face of aviation. And, you know, to his credit, we’re still sitting here talking about her.

00:22:59:21 – 00:23:01:27
Chris Williamson
And so he must have done something right.

00:23:02:00 – 00:23:15:25
Dan LeFebvre
I guess sometimes. Yeah. When you’re, in PR like that, you got to kind of do what you got to do, and he’s doing his job. But then Amelia being, you know, married to her job, it sounds like, you’re going to but has an end be at odds. Sometimes it seems.

00:23:15:27 – 00:23:32:11
Chris Williamson
Yeah, sometimes I mean, it it’s it’s, you know, he was he was brutal, but I don’t I don’t think George had a problem being the bad guy. You know, when it came to that, if it if it resolve the mission and if it got them to where they needed to be, I, I really don’t I don’t think he had a problem with that.

00:23:32:11 – 00:23:36:05
Chris Williamson
He just wasn’t the kind of guy that had a problem with that. You know, it was just business. It was a personal.

00:23:36:11 – 00:24:02:06
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we go back to the movie after being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger, the movie then shows Amelia wanting to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. And that happens in 1932. We see her leaving new Jersey with the plan to arrive in Paris, and then there’s some issues with the storm and icing along the way, and the movie shows her landing successfully in Gallagher’s pasture, which just seems to be a random farm in Ireland, as she’s greeted by Shepherd and his sheep.

00:24:02:09 – 00:24:19:00
Dan LeFebvre
But still, it’s a successful flight across the Atlantic and makes history for the first nonstop solo flight for a woman. And the only. This movie mentions the second person, following Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight. How well does the movie do? Showing Amelia Earhart historic flight across the Atlantic in 1932?

00:24:19:03 – 00:24:44:28
Chris Williamson
Yeah. It’s pretty it’s pretty accurate. For the most part. As far as everything you laid out, where she landed, where she started from, you know, the inclement weather, to say the least. I mean, she was in an open weather cockpit, so. I mean, that Vega. So, I mean, you weren’t in an Electra like she was, you know, in 37 where she had some cover, so she was just getting dumped on with everything that, you know, the good Lord was throwing at her, while she was going across the Atlantic.

00:24:45:00 – 00:25:06:02
Chris Williamson
And, you know, so this is this is the the this is the flight that if the French friendship flight made her world a world star, this shot her into the stratosphere. It earned her the Distinguished Flying Cross. You know, she was obviously, as you mentioned, the the, you know, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic right after, Lindbergh.

00:25:06:04 – 00:25:33:19
Chris Williamson
But the the the historical accuracy of of sort of like what she dealt with and kind of, you know, how she, handled the flight and the things that she sort of encountered was, was largely accurate. And, yeah, she did. The weather was so bad, it did blow her way off course. And she did end up in an Ireland in a cow pasture and, and, you know, it’s, you know, it’s one of those really famous stories that sort of makes her, America’s sweetheart, you know, keeps, gives, gives her that status of America’s sweetheart.

00:25:33:19 – 00:25:49:05
Chris Williamson
You know, she arrives, you know, in Ireland and, and the guys, like, you know, when you come far and she’s like, come from America. You know, she she knew she was she knew what she was doing. She knew she had made it. I can’t imagine whether you land in the right spot or not just to touch ground.

00:25:49:05 – 00:26:04:22
Chris Williamson
After what she went through, I got to imagine you. She made it technically, even though she didn’t end up on the same spot that she planned out to be. She did, you know, make it across the Atlantic. And I can’t imagine the weight off her shoulders and really the vindication, right, that she probably must have felt, internally at that time.

00:26:04:22 – 00:26:20:27
Chris Williamson
You know, maybe we’ll never know because she never really talked about herself in a, in a really, like, a pompous way or anything. If she talked any kind of business at all, it was just about women in general, women in aviation. And women can do the things that men could do, and all that jazz. But yeah, I mean, it largely gets it, right.

00:26:20:27 – 00:26:27:09
Chris Williamson
I mean, for the most part, again, broad, broad strokes, but pretty accurate for what she had to endure.

00:26:27:11 – 00:26:48:19
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I could imagine what that would be like, especially because that first flight she was mostly a, I mean, a passenger you mentioned, you know, she did have some some control there too, but not she wasn’t the pilot, which is what she wanted to do. And then I can imagine with, people like Eleanor Smith who was actually a great pilot, and I, I could imagine internally, you’re starting to feel like, can I actually do this?

00:26:48:22 – 00:26:57:23
Dan LeFebvre
Like, is this something I could actually do, starting to have some of those doubts. So just imagine. Yeah, that has to be a huge weight off. Like, yeah, I, I can do this.

00:26:57:26 – 00:27:22:18
Chris Williamson
You can do it. And in that Vega which is a gorgeous planet. And the Smithsonian, I’ve stood underneath it. It’s such a beautiful plane. And, you know, a very strong plane for its time. But by today’s standards, it’s, you know, very basic, very unforgiving, very loud. Imagine navigating a flight like that with, you know, no GPS, no modern instruments, you know, near freezing temperatures, rain dumped on your face and then doing it alone.

00:27:22:18 – 00:27:38:18
Chris Williamson
Right? I mean, doing it alone. You have nobody you can really talk to. You have no one to lean on. It’s just you and that ocean. And, it must have been horrifying. But she was, you know, she she loved it. It’s all she ever wanted to do from the first moment she saw it. And it clicked for her.

00:27:38:18 – 00:27:55:27
Chris Williamson
It was what she wanted. And I think, she just didn’t see, you know, she saw the fear. But I don’t know. I can’t really explain her fearlessness. It was kind of different, which makes her very final moments historically recorded, that much more haunting, which we’ll get to toward the end. Yeah.

00:27:55:29 – 00:28:16:25
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. I love that you mentioned, you know, as you were saying, I was like, I gotta I gotta use GPS to get to the grocery store, right? I mean, these days we just rely on it, right? It’s just so right. You just comin. You just doesn’t matter. You just get used to that and just follow that line. Or, you know, when you’re falling asleep while you’re driving, I’m gonna roll the window down a little bit and be a little cool, but that’s a whole other level of just an open cockpit and and altitude and.

00:28:16:25 – 00:28:17:21
Dan LeFebvre
Oof! Yeah.

00:28:17:23 – 00:28:27:22
Chris Williamson
How loud? Yeah. And how loud. It must have been the whole time. And you’re, you know. Yeah. All that, just all that together would have been very difficult to overcome at that time.

00:28:27:25 – 00:28:47:04
Dan LeFebvre
Well, in the movie there are a few achievements that are really just mentioned only briefly. There’s a headline that says Amelia took an auto gyro of 19,000ft to set a new altitude record. There’s another one that mentions her being the first to achieve a solo flight from Hawaii to California. These are all just kind of headlines that we see passed by very quickly in the movie.

00:28:47:04 – 00:28:54:13
Dan LeFebvre
But can you fill in some more historical details around some of the aviation records that Emily Earhart set in the movie, that it doesn’t really show us?

00:28:54:16 – 00:29:15:20
Chris Williamson
Yeah. The Autobots, I mean, I can flesh it out a little bit. The auto gyro is one of my favorite stories. It was sort of like this. It was sort of like a helicopter. It was like a like a prototype helicopter kind of aircraft. She took it up. 19th hour. Not quite nice about it was a little over 18,000ft, but pretty close to 19,000ft, you know, promptly crashed it.

00:29:15:22 – 00:29:34:26
Chris Williamson
You know, came down after the crash was fine. It was like. Yeah. You know, your auto gyro needs some improvements. But she said. But she set a record in it. So, you know, she did that, obviously. Big one. First woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 32. We talked about that. You know, it was the Distinguished Flying Cross was a big deal across of the night of the Legion of Honor.

00:29:35:02 – 00:29:56:15
Chris Williamson
From France. I want to say, and, you know, she received a lot of awards for that, a lot of accolades. You know, first person, as you mentioned, a fly from Hawaii to California, a much, much funner flight than going across, the Atlantic. But, you know, it’s still very dangerous, 24,500 miles of ocean, I’m not mistaken.

00:29:56:18 – 00:30:11:23
Chris Williamson
And, you know, not even Lindbergh had done it, you know? So, like, she was, she was now. So she had done what Lindbergh had done. And she’s like, all right, now I’m going to take this five steps forward now, and I’m just going to make the history books, not forget about Charles Lindbergh, but I’m going to dwarf Charles Lindbergh.

00:30:11:25 – 00:30:28:18
Chris Williamson
You know, she really I felt that she really wanted to do that because she wanted to do it for women. She, you know, I mean, it was the. I think that was the first. It was the first flight from the from the mainland US to Hawaii, if I’m not mistaken. I could be wrong, man or woman, but I think it was the first flight.

00:30:28:21 – 00:30:46:17
Chris Williamson
She flew across the, in 32. She also flew across the US, the United States, the continental United States, a Los Angeles to New Jersey, which is soon, which is interesting when you look at the the, disappearance stuff and some of the theories, and, speed records, you know, lots of speed records and other distance records.

00:30:46:24 – 00:31:10:10
Chris Williamson
She won some races, you know, she really boned up her navigation skills over time. And the for in those couple of years, you know, from 28 to like 32, 33, 34, 35, really try to get better. She flew from Mexico City to New Jersey, I believe, as well, and Los Angeles to Mexico City, like, so a bunch of, like a little, little flights, not little flights, but a bunch of smaller flights.

00:31:10:13 – 00:31:38:08
Chris Williamson
But she was just racking up records and racking up altitude records and speed records and all these things all along the way, and just becoming a better, you know, pilot. And then she sort of shifted into becoming sort of, this bigger than, bigger than just a pilot face, for women in aviation, for women in general, not just in aviation, but, aviation was sort of the, a launching pad for, for women to do things in general that she felt, they should be already doing.

00:31:38:10 – 00:31:59:17
Dan LeFebvre
I’m curious how much of that was pressure from George as PR because you think, you know, with PR, it’s s easier to to sell our new record a new something. And you know how much of that was her wanting to push, beyond Lindbergh and and promote women in aviation? How much of that was George B like, oh, we gotta top what we did last time.

00:31:59:17 – 00:32:01:18
Dan LeFebvre
Make a new record, do this?

00:32:01:21 – 00:32:25:22
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Both. Both. Sure. She she had her own reasons, certainly, for doing it. You know, don’t get me wrong, she, she loved, the fame, but I think she loved the fame for different reasons. I really think she saw the fame as a catalyst to get what she ultimately wanted, which was a women into the forefront of, you know, what would become modern day aviation at the time.

00:32:25:24 – 00:32:49:23
Chris Williamson
So, you know, George certainly pushed for more records, more flights, you know, it bumped up her lecture costs. It bumped up her, you know, more books. It bumped up, you know, more appearances. She was everywhere christening the cars. I mean, doing all kinds. I mean, the blimps, you know, she’d come out, she’d make an appearance somewhere, like a planned appearance.

00:32:49:25 – 00:33:07:24
Chris Williamson
And, you know, there would be 10,000 people there to see her. I mean, you know, insane for this is, you know, in the 20s and the 30s. So this is, you know, you think, you think this would be someone that was modern, but this was like a Taylor Swift before Taylor Swift. This was like, you know, think pick any real famous female celebrity now, and you think I’m a celebrity.

00:33:07:24 – 00:33:24:04
Chris Williamson
Really? And it’s really she is that before them, which is really kind of interesting. She kind of set the groundwork for it. And then, you know, I think that kind of rolls into her role with Purdue kind of to kind of take it back to Purdue. I mean, that was when she really started speaking a lot more in the lecture circuit.

00:33:24:04 – 00:33:46:29
Chris Williamson
That’s when Edward Kelly comes along, sees her speaking, brings her into Purdue. You know, she’s, the first woman to receive a National Aeronautic Association license. You know, she’s one of the now, not the but one of the very first female instructors in aviation at her role at Purdue. Like, really amplifies that. And not to mention, she’s the president and the co-founder of the 99, which was is still going right now.

00:33:47:03 – 00:34:08:07
Chris Williamson
So, I mean, it’s, you know, not bad for someone whose career. But when you think about this, when she met George Putnam was 1928. She was gone in 37. So not even ten years later, she was gone. And, what’s really interesting about Earhart and what they try to maybe I’ll touch more on this at the end is, you know, we never really got to see her age.

00:34:08:10 – 00:34:29:27
Chris Williamson
We never got to see her become like this old, feeble woman. We didn’t see her die. And, you know, as an old lady in a bed, we just kind of saw her fly off into the sunset, and we don’t have a period on the end of that sentence, which is what makes films like 2009. Amelia was, you know, the one we’re talking about today and and flight for freedom and all those other films that that have been made over the years that have tie to Earhart in one shape, one way or another.

00:34:30:00 – 00:34:40:01
Chris Williamson
You know, it makes them very significant. And, you know, Amelia is one of those films I think that probably did it, probably did it best, you know, so far out of all the films. But, you know, there’s always room for improvement. Of course.

00:34:40:03 – 00:34:58:28
Dan LeFebvre
What were her lectures like? Was she teaching more like, teaching how to be a pilot? Because also we learned earlier, like her experience as a pilot was she admitted, was not as great as some others. Or was she more just kind of recounting her adventures? Well, I call them adventures, but, you know, terrifying adventures in some of them.

00:34:58:28 – 00:35:04:04
Dan LeFebvre
But, you know, these flights was was it more just kind of here’s what I’ve done or is it more teaching?

00:35:04:06 – 00:35:21:22
Chris Williamson
I think it was a little bit of both. She talked on the lecture circuit for sure. For sure. She was talking about her, her adventurous, great work. I mean, that’s exactly what she would probably have used. And, you know, but when it came to being in the classroom, I mean, this is a woman who, you know, gritty was in the classroom, spent time, you know, she ate at Purdue.

00:35:21:23 – 00:35:49:04
Chris Williamson
She lived, you know, she stayed at Purdue. I mean, she was there. She was all in, and in the classrooms. I think it was more of a, you know, talking to women, motivating women, being in the classroom, being one on one, with female students, male students, they also had built she had also gotten Purdue to build a, a mechanics lab, an aviation mechanics lab that was going to be there, that was going to be, was going to sort of take the spotlight when she returned from the world flight.

00:35:49:09 – 00:36:19:18
Chris Williamson
And it was just, a lab that, you know, anybody, male or female, could go in there and tinker with engines and could, you know, look at the ins and outs of the mechanics of how airplanes worked. And not just airplanes, but just, you know, other things. They called her the Electra, the flying laboratory, because she was going to take, you know, air samples, water samples, land samples from all around the world and bring those back to Purdue, so they can sort of study maybe parts of the world that hadn’t really been heavily traveled yet, or at least by modern people.

00:36:19:21 – 00:36:36:09
Chris Williamson
And, you know, that, again, ties into some of the theory and some of the some of the disappearance ideas and stuff. But, you know, she was definitely she was lecturing, broad spectrum, broad strokes, talking about her adventures. And then in the classroom, it allowed her to get into the more nitty gritty and get, you know, one on one with people.

00:36:36:09 – 00:36:40:04
Chris Williamson
And she did both very well to a very, very high degree.

00:36:40:06 – 00:36:47:06
Dan LeFebvre
That ties right into what you’re talking about, you know, her wanting to push women in Stem, I mean, lead by example, right? It seems like that’s exactly what she was doing.

00:36:47:09 – 00:37:06:16
Chris Williamson
Absolutely. She was the definition of like, you know, the say like a real leader is, is going to be there with you. They’re not going to be shouting instructions. They’re going to be doing it. And she she was doing it. I mean, she wasn’t you know, this is a woman who had God, I couldn’t even tell you how many different jobs that she had to, to, to support her flying.

00:37:06:18 – 00:37:25:28
Chris Williamson
Now again, there has been some new information that’s come out, that would, maybe make you look at things a little bit differently. But, you know, I would say that wasn’t in the movie, for instance, it’s part of Laurie’s book. I it’s it’s kind of a big spoiler, but the book’s out now, so people can kind of can read it for themselves.

00:37:26:01 – 00:37:48:10
Chris Williamson
But Laurie’s one of Laurie’s big revelations in the book is that Amelia Earhart had, And this is her word, not mine. Had a sugar daddy. I had a much wealthier, older guy who actually bought her cars and bought her, you know, some of her plane. Not not her Electra, of course, but early in her career. And, so, you know, the whole idea of her having all these jobs and everything, that certainly did happen.

00:37:48:10 – 00:38:12:13
Chris Williamson
But, you know, she was a woman, and she knew how to use her, you know, her feminine wiles to use a term I hate. A but I just don’t have anything else to say, to kind of come up with. That’s better. I would say that she knew how to how to sort of flip that switch. I compare her a lot, to a Marilyn Monroe type figure where if you look at Marilyn’s history, Marilyn, and in the films and books and all that stuff, Marilyn could turn it on like a switch.

00:38:12:16 – 00:38:32:13
Chris Williamson
You know, she was very, very kind of a quiet, private person. But when she was in front of the media, it’s like, you know, okay, got to turn it on, got to go to work. And that’s kind of what what Earhart did. But she had, you know, she used everything in her power that she had to be able to acquire again, mission first, more than anything else, she had a she had a dream and she wanted to achieve it.

00:38:32:13 – 00:38:34:25
Chris Williamson
And damn, whatever she had to do to do it.

00:38:34:25 – 00:38:52:28
Dan LeFebvre
Well, we’ve talked a lot about the events, but something we haven’t really talked about much, a little bit here, but obviously everybody. Well, spoiler alert, we know what’s going to happen. But throughout the movie interspersed, we see Amelia’s flight around the world with Fred Noonan, and it’s not really till the end of the movie that it starts to focus on that flight.

00:38:52:28 – 00:39:13:07
Dan LeFebvre
So there’s a lot we can talk about with that. But according to the way it’s set up in the movie, it starts in Miami, June 1st, 1937, and that’s when Amelia meets Fred for what looks like in the movie. The first time. The movie suggests that he was hired for the flight because he’s the best celestial navigator of that time, and for Amelia’s flight around the world to be successful.

00:39:13:09 – 00:39:30:07
Dan LeFebvre
There’s one part that she’ll really need his help with, and that’s finding this tiny island called Howland Island, which is positioned roughly halfway between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii. The problem, according to the movie, is that Howland Island is less than two miles long, no, no taller than 18ft, making it next to impossible to see in the expanse of the ocean.

00:39:30:14 – 00:39:48:03
Dan LeFebvre
But that’s why it’s important to find, because, according to the movie, again, refueling mid-air is something beyond Amelia’s skill level. So they’d have to land to refuel and then finish the journey. Does the movie correctly set up the reasons why Fred Noonan joined Amelia Earhart as her navigator for the flight around the world?

00:39:48:05 – 00:40:06:26
Chris Williamson
Yeah, it doesn’t go into a lot. It touches on certain aspects of of Noonan’s character and who he was. You know, you put it perfectly. I couldn’t put it better myself. I say this all the time in media. If you were going to do a flight of that magnitude, that would be the guy that you would want to have on board the flight with you.

00:40:07:00 – 00:40:29:21
Chris Williamson
No question. If you look at his history, he was a big, big reason why Panam was was able to map so much of the Pacific that they were able to map, in the Atlantic as well. He was, a skilled, skilled celestial navigator, and he was the best in the world. And she believed in him. And, you know, it was it was important for Noonan.

00:40:29:21 – 00:40:52:14
Chris Williamson
He. This is a guy who was newly remarried at the time of of the flight, and he had dreams of his own. I think he he wanted to ultimately wanted to set up a navigation school post-World flight. I think he again, not only Amelia, but Fred and of course, and George Putnam, they were all looking at this flight as a way to basically set their life, for the back half of their careers.

00:40:52:16 – 00:41:16:21
Chris Williamson
And so, you know, it largely gets, you know, Noonan accurate. He did have a drinking problem. We talk about this all the time on the show. We’ve debated it heavily, unvarnished. A lot of experts now will tell you that a drunk Noonan is was probably better than 90% of sober navigators at the time. And, that Noonan was sort of a functional alcoholic.

00:41:16:21 – 00:41:39:04
Chris Williamson
So he could drink. You can get kind of plastered the night before, and he could show up for work and do his job, you know, to a very high ability, the next day. Now, Erhard didn’t like that. He drank. Clearly, it takes us back to the friendship flight. Takes us back to her. You know, her days with her father when you know they want to play cowboys and Indians and, you know, he would stumble in the house drunk, obviously, and they wouldn’t be able to, you know, play with them.

00:41:39:04 – 00:41:59:15
Chris Williamson
And he had to go pass out and, you know, so she really I mean, the alcoholism ran really deep, with her when it came to, you know, men and alcoholism. So, you know, Noonan, was a very excellent navigator, but he, you know, he had some demons. He had some issues. He respected Earhart. Earhart respected him.

00:41:59:18 – 00:42:17:13
Chris Williamson
I think they respect each other’s professional abilities. And, there’s even a quote somewhere in Oakland. I think early, or maybe even it was in Miami. And maybe I had him thinking about it where she was asked, about Fred Noonan, about navigation or about being lost, you know, making sure that Howland was something that they could hit.

00:42:17:15 – 00:42:37:27
Chris Williamson
Excuse me, could hit. And her response, I’m paraphrasing, was, I brought the best navigator in the world to make sure that that doesn’t happen, that, you know, we hit Howland, that we make it, we we finish our flight and we come home. She believed in him. Very much so. Yeah. How he met her, how he convinced her, you know, sort of the way they they talked and had their conversations.

00:42:38:00 – 00:42:47:20
Chris Williamson
He he was her best bet, and she knew it, and, she took a gamble, and it turns out it didn’t work out, you know? So, but, yeah, she believed it 100%.

00:42:47:27 – 00:43:02:28
Dan LeFebvre
So. Well, you touched on something briefly that we see in the movie, because the last stop in the movie that we see before Howland Island is in Papua New Guinea. And while they’re there, Fred and Amelia grab drinks a little bar to rest for the evening before taking off the next day. And then, of course, watching the movie.

00:43:03:01 – 00:43:24:24
Dan LeFebvre
We know what’s going to happen. It’s like watching the Titanic. You kind of know how you know what is going to happen at the end. But as I was watching this scene, I couldn’t help but pick up and at least two red flags that seem to suggest that there’s a problem. And one is that the movie implied Fred had a drinking problem, although he did flat out tell Amelia at one point in the movie that, his drinking has never affected his work.

00:43:24:24 – 00:43:44:04
Dan LeFebvre
Which kind of goes back to what you were talking about being a functional, alcoholic. But then secondly, after Amelia and Fred take off from Papua New Guinea, the guy at the airfield, a guy named Mr. Balfour, radios George Putnam to say that the headwinds were stronger than a million. Fred thought. So their plane had to use about 9% more fuel than they calculated.

00:43:44:06 – 00:44:00:22
Dan LeFebvre
And then on top of that, Mr. Balfour tries to hail them on the radio to let them know about this, but he’s not successful in doing that. So that tells me that perhaps a million Fred would be surprised by running out of fuel faster than they expected. Is there any truth to these potential problems as they left Papua New Guinea?

00:44:00:25 – 00:44:20:09
Chris Williamson
Oh yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot, the, the, Tom Detweiler, who was on our show, who was the operations manager for Titanic. And his resume is insane. He told me something that’s always stuck with me. And I say it every time I get the chance to say. And a lot of these accidents. It’s not. It’s never just one thing.

00:44:20:09 – 00:44:46:25
Chris Williamson
It’s the sum of a lot of little things that lead up to the end result. What we have. Right. One of those, surely. We’ll talk about a few of them. One was. Wait, they were really, really concerned about the aircraft. Amelia, was it has been quoted in papers leading up to that takeoff in particular. They have the take off in life or Howland she kept saying she was flying it weighted capacity, which is an interesting way to say it.

00:44:46:27 – 00:45:13:00
Chris Williamson
And they were throwing out everything you can imagine, including the raft, including some things that you would. That kind of boggles the mind. She left her pistol there. There’s a lot of things. They were counting the ounces, essentially, because they knew that, Lockheed’s specs, were meant that the the plane couldn’t weigh, more than a certain amount on a paved runway with a certain length to take off.

00:45:13:00 – 00:45:27:25
Chris Williamson
And they were they weren’t on a page from the way they were on a grass runway. As a matter of fact, there is footage of that last takeoff. You can see it on YouTube of them, actually. People at least shooting them, taking off, getting up onto the aircraft and taking off. By the way, Fred Noonan does not look drunk.

00:45:27:25 – 00:45:46:15
Chris Williamson
Not in the slightest. When they do that, and I will say, and I did mean to say this, I apologize. This is my fault. The the you did ask earlier, the movie does indicate that they met on, in Miami. They had flown previously together, so they that that is inaccurate. Technically, they had met each other and they he would he had been involved earlier in the flight.

00:45:46:15 – 00:46:04:22
Chris Williamson
They had the whole ground loop incident had a reverse course. That’s kind of a whole nother thing. But again, some of a lot of little things. Right. So, the headwinds certainly, the fuel certainly. That’s a big, big, big point of contention when it comes to theory. How much fuel did they actually leave late with?

00:46:04:24 – 00:46:27:04
Chris Williamson
Everything you’re talking about when it comes to Harry Balfour is 100% accurate. He tried to get in touch with them. He tried to, couldn’t receive the the, the Earhart. Noonan couldn’t receive his transmissions. They finally did receive his transmissions. And, they seemed to sort of, you know, make the adjustments and necessary adjustments needed to, to combat headwinds and things of that nature.

00:46:27:04 – 00:46:43:03
Chris Williamson
But, you know, we don’t know what was going on in the aircraft, essentially. That’s kind of the that’s kind of the rough part. And yeah, you’re right. If they had not anticipated those headwinds, now, a lot of people would say that the headwinds were, well, well known, in that in that part of the world at that time.

00:46:43:06 – 00:47:15:02
Chris Williamson
And there’s about half the people that would say that they weren’t discovered. Those headwinds that had been shipped wasn’t discovered until like five years after they were in the area. So headwinds would have been a big, factor in the end result and so would have obviously fuel and the lack of fuel. Which brings us to sort of, you know, the end of the of the film when there, you know, she’s saying all these really well known, historically famous lines, like we must, you know, we must be on you, but I cannot see you were on one five, seven, three, three, seven flying north and south, you know, all that stuff.

00:47:15:02 – 00:47:24:21
Chris Williamson
And her last word that she ever spoke on record was the word wait, which is an interesting, interesting word to choose as your last word.

00:47:24:23 – 00:47:44:02
Dan LeFebvre
Obviously the weight has would factor into the fuel, but would it also factor into speaking of of Howland? Just being a smaller island, being able to take off when you, as you were saying, that was part of the concern of weight, not as much getting there, but being able to take off from the island again.

00:47:44:04 – 00:47:58:19
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I think so. Taking off, in both cases from not only from Lee, but, you know, trying to anticipate Howland. Howland would have given him a little bit more run, a little bit more room to to run, to kind of get up off the ground and take off. And as you said, it was 18ft off the ground.

00:47:58:19 – 00:48:17:13
Chris Williamson
You know, lay was certainly not if you look at, them taking off and lay a lot of the, the bystanders, the witnesses said that it looked like they just the flame just went right off the cliff. And luckily she was able to like, you know, pull that stick and there was able to bear I mean, they barely they were in circles over the water until they were able to get enough, you know, between them on the water to get up off of it.

00:48:17:13 – 00:48:46:25
Chris Williamson
They almost died right there. You know, so Howland would have been a different situation because it’s obviously not the same, topography. And it’s not the same, you know, high three thing. But they had they also had the Itasca there, you know, off the coast of Howland, that’s also portrayed in the film. The Itasca was there and that they were there to do their job, which was to bring them in, help assist, bring them in, help them with R&R, get them, you know, rested up, refueled, and get them off to Hawaii to finish the last leg of the flight.

00:48:46:27 – 00:49:12:26
Chris Williamson
And, even with the Itasca there, you know, and the Itasca pulling the signals that they were pulling and all that stuff like they talked about at the end of the film, or that they show you at the end of the film. It’s it’s one of history’s greatest mysteries when it comes to why they couldn’t communicate with each other and why they couldn’t see each other, and why when Leo Ballard stepped outside the radio room expecting to see her coming right over on top of the Itasca, he didn’t see them anywhere.

00:49:12:26 – 00:49:23:10
Chris Williamson
And that was kind of mind boggling to the radio room operators, you know, as especially when they were pulling consistent signal strength and, like they were at the end of the film.

00:49:23:12 – 00:49:43:24
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. I want to ask you about some of the details that we see in the movie, because we do see the Itasca, US Coast Guard cutter, anchored at Howland. And then they can hear Amelia’s transmissions, but she can’t seem to hear the replies. The attempts for Morse code don’t work either. According to George Putnam in the movie, they didn’t even take the receiver in a way, perhaps because of the weight thing.

00:49:43:24 – 00:50:09:15
Dan LeFebvre
So, it’s mostly a one way conversation. But then, to make matters worse, in the movie, someone accidentally left the direction finder on the Itasca on overnight. So the battery is dead. That means they can’t pinpoint her plane’s location. And then after a few communications from Amelia to Itasca, there’s a there is a brief moment where Amelia does seem to hear something back from Itasca, along with Itasca, is blowing smoke in an attempt to send a visual signal for their location.

00:50:09:18 – 00:50:27:10
Dan LeFebvre
And then the final radio transmission to Itasca in the movie says they’re on position line 157337 and they’re running north South. Itasca hears this and immediately radios back. If she can receive their transmissions and the radio is silent, is that really how Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared?

00:50:27:12 – 00:50:49:01
Chris Williamson
That’s right. Yeah. The some of a lot of little things. Right. I mean, it really it really ended up being, just a very unfortunate set of events. You know, Leo Belle Arts was, flabbergasted by it. And he was, you know, he kept that with him his whole life. He was the last real eyewitness. You know, he was talking.

00:50:49:01 – 00:51:05:06
Chris Williamson
He wasn’t making, as you mentioned, two way radio communication with them, but he was speaking to them and he could hear her speaking. So they, you know, they just couldn’t hear each other. You’re right. And, you know, again, to take it all the way back to the ground loop, you know, it wasn’t always just Earhart and Noonan.

00:51:05:08 – 00:51:21:19
Chris Williamson
It was actually going to be a larger crew. And one of the people on the crew was a man by the name of Harry Manning, who there was also remember that Earhart had slept with and had an affair with earlier in her career. But he was an expert at Morse code, and he could have given them a lot more options.

00:51:21:23 – 00:51:40:09
Chris Williamson
You know, he could have Noonan could have done the navigations while he took the radios. You know, that’s kind of what they did on the flight over from Oakland to Hawaii, which was the first leg of the original flight. This is prior to March 20th of 37, when she ground loops of the aircraft in Hawaii, and they have to change directions and rebuild the aircraft and all that jazz.

00:51:40:11 – 00:52:03:21
Chris Williamson
But she, you know, if they had had Manning on board, we might not be sitting here having this conversation right now. It might be a very different historical you know, piece right now. Right now, though, we have really no oil slick, no wreckage, no, no evidence of of anything other than the had the original Itasca call logs.

00:52:03:23 – 00:52:28:25
Chris Williamson
My co-host for vanished, Jen Taylor. You know, I love she says this, and I love it. If this is a modern day domestic violence murder case, the Itasca call logs are the final text messages between the couple. Like, that’s that’s basically kind of what we’ve got. And then we’ve got, about 88 years, almost 90 years, some couple of years now, of theory, of theory, all over the world.

00:52:28:27 – 00:52:54:03
Chris Williamson
That puts them in all kinds of different, you know, situations all over the world. And so, you know, the film kind of. So the film is largely based off of, a book or the work of a gentleman by the name of Elgin Long, who was a, a pioneering aviator and, one of the really if there was going to be a mount Rushmore of of Earhart researchers, he would be one of the four for sure.

00:52:54:05 – 00:53:23:01
Chris Williamson
And it was based a lot on his work. And in the his theory was that they did just run out of gas. And they did they did just fall short of Howland. And they are somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, 16 or 18,000ft down. And, that it will be it will be recovered one day, whether it’s by one of these people that are out here searching for it specifically, or whether it’s by some, like fiber optic cable company that’s going to map the underwater ocean and just kind of stumble across the aircraft one day, you know, but it was largely based on Elgin’s, Elgin’s, research.

00:53:23:01 – 00:53:44:19
Chris Williamson
And they posit that she ran out of gas. A lot of people agree with that. And, a lot of what we have in that, some of a lot of little things kind of adds up to them running out of gas and just ending up on the water. The question is, you’re looking for, an aircraft that’s got a 55.5ft wingspan, 39.5ft long in an area that’s roughly the size of Texas at about $2 million a day.

00:53:44:21 – 00:53:53:20
Chris Williamson
So it’s it’s very, very difficult to to search an area of that big, and, you know, that’s kind of where we are now, you know, 88 years later.

00:53:53:22 – 00:54:09:07
Dan LeFebvre
Which is even more I mean, in the movie, they’re talking about how hard it would be to find Howland, and that’s an island that’s, you know, miles long. I mean, just a couple of miles. But, that’s more than an airplane in the same expanse. Right? So that was the whole difficulty. Yeah, I can imagine.

00:54:09:07 – 00:54:31:15
Chris Williamson
Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of people, a lot of the theories, you know, whether that you believe in Japanese capture or crash and sink, you know, they believe the plane’s a buka, or do you believe the plane’s never going to be found? It’s under a runway in Taipan. Or, you know, whatever you subscribe to. You know, everybody kind of kind of tends to agree on on on that point, you know, they, they, they, they just ran it a lot of, a lot of bad stuff that day.

00:54:31:15 – 00:54:49:13
Chris Williamson
And, you know, we just don’t have an ending to it. So that’s kind of that’s kind of what leaves us, to this point leads us to this point rather 88 years later. And then all the the fallout around her disappearance and their disappearance, I should say, you know, in 1937, July of 1937. So just a few weeks ago, we just had the anniversary now.

00:54:49:13 – 00:55:11:06
Dan LeFebvre
So what the movie does end with the disappearance. But as you as you mentioned before, I mean, the 2009 version might be the best one, but let’s say you’re that’s still like 16 years ago as of this recording. So let’s say you’re in charge of directing the next biopic about Earhart’s life. What’s something you want to make sure got included that we don’t get to see in the 2009 movie?

00:55:11:08 – 00:55:51:27
Chris Williamson
You know, there is a so there’s a presentation, I just attended. It’s and it’s I’m biased because it’s by a really good friend. Her name is Doctor Margie Arnold, and, she does a presentation, and, we just attended at the Earhart Birthplace Museum, during the Earhart Festival. And it her presentation concentrates on the four years leading up to the moment that she is selected for transatlantic, and that she, in Margie, gives incredible detail about not only her relationship with Sam Chapman, who I kind of teased about earlier in the conversation, but everything that Amelia was setting herself up to be and do and maybe an alternate career as a social worker,

00:55:52:04 – 00:56:14:26
Chris Williamson
Margie states. And I tend to believe her that she would if she really had a chance at being like the next Jane Addams. Like she really could have been. I, you know, I think that, Earhart was a woman that, you know, she was pre-med at one point at Columbia. You know, she was a nurse’s aide and World War one, she was a photographer, a truck driver, also, obviously an aviator.

00:56:14:26 – 00:56:37:27
Chris Williamson
I mean, she did, you know, all kinds of stuff. And, you know, that’s just the kind of woman that we’re dealing with, you know, here at the center of of all this. But I would probably concentrate, I would build that that film, and concentrated on those four years I would cast as Sam Chapman, would do all of that stuff, and I would look into the nitty gritty details of the moment before, and I would end the film.

00:56:37:29 – 00:57:00:23
Chris Williamson
On her walking into Platinum’s office and being selected for the transatlantic flight, because everybody kind of knows from 28 on to 37, you know, it’s there’s always more room to cover, but that that nine year period is like really covered, aggressively. This four years, not so much. So I think that would be really fun. How Laurie’s book did a great, great job of diving into some of that as well.

00:57:00:23 – 00:57:05:06
Chris Williamson
But I think a real hard concentration on that would be would make a really fun film.

00:57:05:09 – 00:57:17:18
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I have a couple of follow ups on that one. From everything you’ve learned about Millie Earhart, how well do you think Hilary Swank did bringing her movie to life and for your biopic, who would you cast in that role?

00:57:17:21 – 00:57:36:07
Chris Williamson
I would cast a young Amelia. Her name is Sophia Lillis. I don’t know how old she is now. She is 23 now. And I, I found her, I saw her first in the it films, the remake, the when they did the, you know, back in 20. Oh, I don’t know when I was 2017 or something like that.

00:57:36:09 – 00:57:51:29
Chris Williamson
And she was excellent on those films. And I thought, man, that’s an Earhart. Like, if you wanted to take a young Earhart like a younger version of her and make, you know, kind of build to that 28 flight or, you know, take her through her, her young or her late teenage years and maybe her early 20s. That would be a really she would be perfect for it.

00:57:52:01 – 00:58:09:10
Chris Williamson
As far as Hillary, you know, I think she did it. I think she did a fantastic job. I also thought Diane Keaton did a really good job in her film. I mean, I think everybody sort of brings something to Earhart specifically. She’s got a lot of little nuances and things. I think Earhart got a lot of the ticks down, I think.

00:58:09:10 – 00:58:25:04
Chris Williamson
I’m sorry. Hilary Swank got a lot of the ticks down. For Earhart. I think she got a lot of her. Her cadences down, her nuances. Just, you know, some of her facial expressions were pretty on point, like a few, because there’s a lot of video and a lot of pictures of Earhart out there. So it’s it’s not somebody that we don’t have anything.

00:58:25:04 – 00:58:39:14
Chris Williamson
She’s not a ghost. She was at the time she disappeared. The most photographed person on the face of the earth. So, yeah, I think Hilary Swank did a good job. I mean, she’s a two time Oscar winner. I mean, I, I when I saw that she was being, you know, she was going to do the role, I thought it was a good fit.

00:58:39:16 – 00:58:52:08
Chris Williamson
I’ve seen. And the Earhart Birthplace Museum has a bunch of her outfits, as a matter of fact, the the one on the poster with the A.E., the jumpsuit that she has, which she never really had, but it was a it was a jumpsuit that they put her in for the movie and just for the promo and stuff.

00:58:52:08 – 00:59:05:28
Chris Williamson
That’s in the Birthplace Museum. The one that Hilary Swank wore in the film and stuff. And so that’s kind of cool. We got to, you know, shoot a bunch of our documentary stuff on that backdrop of her, her suits and her stuff that she wore in the film. So, but I liked it. I thought, I thought they did a good job.

00:59:05:28 – 00:59:12:28
Chris Williamson
I thought Richard Geer was great as platinum. Richard Gears got that really great. He can he can be charming, but he could also be, you know, a jerk.

00:59:13:00 – 00:59:18:28
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Sounds like George Putnam being interviewed. You got. You decide. Yeah.

00:59:19:00 – 00:59:41:27
Chris Williamson
Yeah. There’s a there’s a there’s a double. There’s two sides to that for sure. But, you know, I thought she did a great job. Hilary Swank is a fantastic actress. I mean, her catalog is really great. And, you know, it’s a hard role to play. She’s a very, Earhart’s a very complex person. And, I so if I was directing, I would love to bring somebody in, like, Sophia Lillis and just have her just go to town on it and just do a young version of it.

00:59:41:27 – 00:59:59:07
Chris Williamson
You know, when she was when she was a social worker, when she was doing all that stuff. And because I think she forms a lot of those relationships that that end up being, valuable to her, you know, seven to 8 or 9 years later. Right? Right up until the point she disappears. That are really formed and built foundationally in those four years leading up to the transatlantic flight.

00:59:59:07 – 01:00:00:25
Chris Williamson
So I would focus on that.

01:00:00:27 – 01:00:19:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, the 2009 Amelia movie ends with the disappearance, but I know there have been numerous times where people have claimed to have found Amelia Earhart plane, so correct me if I’m wrong. As far as I know, it hasn’t been found yet, but I know you’ve been doing years of research for the Chasing Earhart project, so I have a two part question for you as we wrap up our discussion today.

01:00:19:06 – 01:00:28:13
Dan LeFebvre
First, can you share an overview of the current status of finding Amelia Earhart plane? And can you tell my audience more about the chasing Earhart Project and where they can learn more about your work?

01:00:28:15 – 01:00:47:12
Chris Williamson
Oh, yes, I’d love to. So just a very, very quick, quick, the short, short version, there are several active investigations, all over the world, right now going on. I just got off the phone yesterday with, with our group, that’s going to be looking at this aircraft out in Boca, to try to rule it, rule it out and get it out of the way, or maybe, maybe roll it in.

01:00:47:12 – 01:01:18:23
Chris Williamson
We’ll see. There are deep ocean searches going on. There was a there’s a search going on, with, the Archeology channel and Doctor Rick Pettigrew. That has made a lot of headlines lately because Purdue got involved in that expedition, and they’re going out to Nick Morocco. I want to say in November, they’re going to go out there and they’re going to look at something called the Soraya object, which is an object that was found by brothers Mike and Robert Ashmore several years ago via some satellite imagery in a lagoon on the island of Nikumaroro.

01:01:18:26 – 01:01:35:17
Chris Williamson
Now, the folks at Tiger, a lot of the folks on what put words in their mouth. But I’m just basing this off sort of like media and things I’ve seen and watched and people I’ve talked to. Of course, there is a kind of a divide within, you know, the international Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery there. It’s part of Tiger.

01:01:35:17 – 01:01:53:23
Chris Williamson
Ric Gillespie and his and those those folks believe that, you know, hey, we’ve kind of we’ve kind of gone over this already. It’s not there. But Doctor Pettigrew and his team believe it’s it’s certainly warrants being looked at, and, Purdue’s in tow. That’s a big feather in their cap. And, they’re going out in November, so they’re going out in November.

01:01:53:29 – 01:02:11:24
Chris Williamson
We’re trying to go out sometime around that time as well for Buka. So hopefully we have some good final finality and clarification on two major theories at the end of this year. You never know though, with their heart stuff because it’s, it’s it’s all about money. It’s all about funding. It’s all about what Earhart was doing back in the day with her new funding and trying to get dollars raised.

01:02:11:27 – 01:02:33:12
Chris Williamson
So excuse me. So, there’s three different acting investigations going on right now. And there’s also, a lot of work going on for Japanese capture behind the scenes. It’s a little bit more of a slow burn, but that is is something that’s going to be, you know, uncovered in archives and things like that. It’s not going to be you’re not going to go out on some island and find an aircraft or anything.

01:02:33:14 – 01:02:49:18
Chris Williamson
If you believe in Japanese capture, you likely believe that the aircraft was destroyed and is buried under a runway in Sai Pan and is on a billion pieces that will never be found. So if that’s the case, then, you know, you’re you’re never going to find it. You’re just going to find some kind of, anecdotal or, documentation, you know, evidence.

01:02:49:18 – 01:03:08:23
Chris Williamson
So that’s being worked on. And then, you know, there’s always a few other things that are going on when it comes to Earhart. I’ve got projects coming out. Regarding some really exciting things I can’t talk about publicly yet. Really, I wish I could, but like, in a couple months, they’ll be released. But I would say just watch the Chasing Earhart podcast space and you’ll you’ll have all you need there.

01:03:08:25 – 01:03:29:11
Chris Williamson
As far as the show, just to wrap it up here, we’ve been going for, gosh, 140, 50 episodes ish right now. And, Lori, Gwen Shapiro’s our most recent episode just came out a couple of weeks ago. You can you can catch that on any pod catcher, any anywhere you listen to your podcast or, you know, we’re everywhere, pretty much.

01:03:29:13 – 01:03:48:00
Chris Williamson
And, the podcast aims to just sort of give a platform to everybody. That’s in the Earhart case, whether they’re on the disappearance side or the legacy side, whether they’re an author or a scientist or a historian or whatever it is, I, I don’t care. I want to hear from all of them. And, we’ve talked to pretty much everybody who’s anybody.

01:03:48:00 – 01:04:05:25
Chris Williamson
There’s a few notables that we haven’t talked to for specific reasons. But we will keep going. It’s it’s, you know, something? I rebranded this thing like 30 episodes or 40 episodes ago, and I was only trying to do 3 or 4 episodes, you know, back. And we just kept people kept coming forward and new stuff kept breaking, as it tends to do in this case.

01:04:05:25 – 01:04:23:25
Chris Williamson
And, I think that’s what we’ll have until the cases ultimately resolved, satisfactorily. That’s the big key question. Is it going to be satisfactory to everybody who has an idea about what may have happened to Earhart or Noonan on July 2nd? So that’s what the podcast is all about. I’ve also got a book out called Rabbit Hole The Vanishing of Amelia Earhart.

01:04:23:25 – 01:04:47:04
Chris Williamson
Fred Noonan, which was basically season one of our podcast, vanished. It’s unlike any book you’ve ever read on the case. I can guarantee you that it’s the format’s different. We’ve got over 60 collaborators all over the Earhart case in that book and in that podcast. It’s the largest collective, effort ever. On the disappearance of Earhart and Noonan, and that’s in bookstores right now, and it’s on Amazon and then Barnes and Noble and all that stuff.

01:04:47:04 – 01:04:52:02
Chris Williamson
So you can pick that up or listen to the podcast, or you can go check out Chasing Earhart.

01:04:52:05 – 01:04:58:13
Dan LeFebvre
Fantastic. I’ll make sure to add all those links in the show notes for this for anybody who’s watching. Thanks again so much for your time, Chris.

01:04:58:15 – 01:05:00:04
Chris Williamson
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Dan. Appreciate it.

 

00:03:19:13 – 00:03:34:00
Dan LeFebvre
As longtime listeners of Based on a True Story know, I always like to start with an overall letter grade for a movie’s historical accuracy. So today we’re talking about 2025 Trail of Vengeance. What grade does it get?

00:03:34:02 – 00:04:00:25
Rob Hilliard
Well, it’s a little bit of a tough question to answer, mainly because it’s a fictional story. So, and they’re, you know, obviously we’re going to get into this there, there is at least one, true to life character in the story. And it certainly references real events like the Civil War and, and some specific things within the, specific actions within the Civil War that we’ll get to.

00:04:01:22 – 00:04:45:05
Rob Hilliard
But it is it really makes no pretense of being a true story. So it’s a little less like, things that you’ve covered in the past, like tombstone or, even like a series like Billy the Kid, which are based on true events, real people. And it’s kind of reshaping those. This is more like along the lines of, like a Dances With Wolves or, like there’s a movie called Shadow Riders with, Tom Selleck and, Sam Elliott and they those are both Westerns that are set shortly after the Civil War.

00:04:45:05 – 00:05:16:09
Rob Hilliard
And they reference back to the Civil War. But there, like I said, they don’t really make any pretense of being based on on, true story or all real characters. So that’s a prolonged way of saying I would probably give it a B, in because it wasn’t, there weren’t any, like, glaring anachronisms. There was nobody wearing, you know, re boxes or walking around or anything.

00:05:17:15 – 00:05:34:08
Rob Hilliard
And I didn’t go to the like the extensive trouble of looking at, well, I, I did actually a little bit, but looking at some of the armaments that were carrying and making sure that they dated to the right period and stuff, most of the things were were accurate. I did get a little bit of a chuckle.

00:05:34:08 – 00:05:55:29
Rob Hilliard
There’s a crowd scene where they show people kind of walking down the street in the town, and there’s kind of dozens of people, and the first thing that struck me was, they look awfully clean for being, you know, in kind of a, 1870 ish, type of time period. But, but yeah, that’s, you know, that’s minor stuff.

00:05:55:29 – 00:06:16:19
Rob Hilliard
So I would say it’s a B I think largely they, they capture the time period accurately. And, you know, like I said, they, they weren’t they weren’t attempting to portray it as, as an actual true story with, with one glaring exception that I, I know you’re going to hit right now.

00:06:16:22 – 00:06:43:05
Dan LeFebvre
You know what I mean? It is good. It’s good to know that, too, because I think a lot of times it just being set in a historical time period, it can just lend itself to, oh, this must be based on a true story. So it’s also good to know that. But the part that you probably are talking about is what I’m going to follow up with, because one of the key things to me when I watch Trail of Vengeance is it’s probably the first feature film that I’m aware of, at least that features John Scoble as one of the main characters.

00:06:43:12 – 00:06:54:16
Dan LeFebvre
And I know you’ve done a ton of research into the real John Scoble for your book. So what letter grade would you give the movie for just how it brings John Scoble to life on screen?

00:06:54:18 – 00:07:13:21
Rob Hilliard
Good question. And yeah, I guess it’s probably worth noting for everybody. We wouldn’t. Well, I shouldn’t say we wouldn’t be having the show, but you wouldn’t be having me on as a guest right now if it weren’t for the fact that I had written a book about, John’s Google. So, I really I won’t, I won’t, give you a long preamble on this one.

00:07:13:21 – 00:07:33:10
Rob Hilliard
I thought they did a really good job. As you might expect, I was a little nervous going into it. And I was like, hey, Amanda, they’re going to, you know, how are they going to handle this? Are they going to mess it up or whatever? But, I actually the, the letter grade I wrote that was an A-minus.

00:07:33:12 – 00:08:07:24
Rob Hilliard
And, I guess, I mean, I can just go ahead and give you the details on the only reason it’s an A minus. But really the way there’s one particular scene, where Scoble is talking to, Catherine, which is the Rumer Willis, character, and, the, he, he’s talking about his background and kind of giving, some of the story of how he was a spy during the Civil War and, that he had been, recruited to be a spy.

00:08:07:24 – 00:08:51:28
Rob Hilliard
And we’ll touch on that a bit later. But what he says there or the description that he goes through there, is really straight out of what we know about John Scoble. And so, kind of getting into that, what we know about John Scoble is entirely, there have been variations on it, but everything derives back to a book that was written by Allan Pinkerton called The Spy of the rebellion in 1883, and that, at the outset or very near the outset of the Civil War, the neither at the outbreak of the Civil War, neither the North nor the South had their own spy agency or what was then called Secret service.

00:08:52:09 – 00:09:21:27
Rob Hilliard
We use that terminology different today. When they said Secret Service, they would mean something more like our FBI or CIA. And that’s a term that goes back to England. And you know, long before that. So, but neither neither side had that at the outbreak of the war because the US was very much an isolated, isolationist country at the time, they didn’t really feel like they had the need to have one, until April of 1861.

00:09:21:27 – 00:09:46:19
Rob Hilliard
And all of a sudden they were they were in a war. And both sides immediately realized they needed that. So, the federal the Union side, they made the decision to, just much like we would today when you don’t have when you have a need that you need to fill and you don’t have a way of immediately sort of staffing up to do it at the government level, you just bring in the contractor.

00:09:46:22 – 00:10:22:10
Rob Hilliard
And so what they did was they hired a Pinkerton agency, or specifically hired Allan Pinkerton, who’s based in Chicago, and he basically picked up his whole Pinkerton Detective Agency lock, stock and barrel and brought them to Washington, D.C., and the people who the day before basically had been, detectives and investigating crimes and things like that. Now all of a sudden, they were spies and they were spies for, for the Union Army, for the Federals against the Confederacy.

00:10:22:13 – 00:10:46:26
Rob Hilliard
And so Pinkerton, 20 years later, like I said in 1883, wrote this book called The Spy The Rebellion. He’s you’ve heard me say this before, when you interviewed me in the past, Pinkerton was a brilliant, groundbreaking detective. Kind of a middling spy. He did some things that were pretty innovative, which we’ll talk a little bit about as we go through here.

00:10:47:18 – 00:11:19:03
Rob Hilliard
But he tended to over inflate, exaggerate troop numbers, and, basically not he would just sort of deliver everything in a, in a, in a batch. He wouldn’t make a concise report that he could hand to, general McClellan, who was ahead of the Army of the Potomac at the time, or to President Lincoln and and have, like, a concise intelligence report, he would just kind of almost, almost literally hand him a batch of papers and say, well, here’s what we found.

00:11:19:03 – 00:11:47:07
Rob Hilliard
And it was like, you know, one report from this person which conflicts with another report from this person, and they kind of left them on their own to sort that out. So not a great spy, spy chief, I should say. And, so. And he was a miserable writer, a terrible, a terrible author. And, so the reason I mentioned that part is when you’re reading The Spy of the rebellion, it desperately needs an editor.

00:11:48:02 – 00:12:16:10
Rob Hilliard
And it’s very confusing because you’ll say one thing in one place and then another thing in another, and you’re left scratching your head saying, well, I thought this person was doing this, but you saying on the same day they’re also doing this, you know, miles away. So the reason I launch into all that, backstory is and this finally gets back to why I’m saying it was an A minus, because the story is actually a little bit different.

00:12:16:10 – 00:12:54:03
Rob Hilliard
The way they reported it for 150 plus years, people accepted the way Pinkerton presented the story about John Scoble and about his spies being in Richmond in, this would have been spring of 1862, and there were, in Pinkerton’s book, there were four names that he that he talked about, in that contacts mainly. There’s a couple of others, but one was Timothy Webster, who was kind of the primary spy in the field, on behalf of, Pinkerton and his operatives.

00:12:55:11 – 00:13:32:15
Rob Hilliard
And in other words, John Scoble. Course. And then then he talks about how he hated Wharton and a Carey Creek lot. And so really, only difference of three letters between, you know, between the two names and it was, again, very confusing. He talks about them both being in Richmond in different contexts. And, so for the longest time, a century and a half, people were under the impression that that was one in the same person.

00:13:32:15 – 00:14:05:25
Rob Hilliard
And the Pinkerton was just such a lousy writer that he was really talking about one person, but he was using two different names, and it was understandable. When I first started researching this, I thought the exact same thing. I’m like, how can this person be here where he’s actually saying she’s here? And it doesn’t make sense. And but the key part and this is, this is how it’s stated in Trail of Vengeance, is that if you accept that they’re the same person, then he talks about, then I gotta make sure I get this right, because I can always get it backwards.

00:14:05:25 – 00:14:34:10
Rob Hilliard
I always carry who was with John Scoble and Hattie was with Tim Webster. So if you accept that they’re the same person, like I said, that was kind of the generally accepted, historiography, I suppose, to be the right term for, for a long time. Then that meant the school was with Tim Webster. So the and then when Tim Webster.

00:14:34:12 – 00:15:00:12
Rob Hilliard
But spoiler spoiler for my book and for the movie. But he was captured by the Confederates and, Hattie Laughton was also captured. Then, by extension, you have to accept that. Well, if they captured the two of them, they must have captured Scoble as well. And that’s how, I will not get the pronunciation of his name correct.

00:15:00:12 – 00:15:37:09
Rob Hilliard
But I believe with Bengay, I can ogbe. But I think that’s close. A friend of mine is Nigerian and I can argue he is also Nigerian, so I actually checked with him to try and get some more close on the pronunciation. But, that’s the actor who plays John Scoble. And when he’s explaining this in the scene where he’s talking to, Katherine or Rumer Willis, he says that he was captured with them with Webster Lawton, and then he was released because the Confederates didn’t believe, basically, that a black man would be intelligent enough to be a spot.

00:15:37:12 – 00:15:59:19
Rob Hilliard
And and like I said, that was accepted as fact for for a very long time, but specifically until 2018. And in 2018, there was a book came out with the, one of the great book titles of all time. It was called Pinkertons, Prostitutes and Spies. But we’re not going to get into the prostitutes part, but I had to look that up on their own.

00:15:59:19 – 00:16:26:23
Rob Hilliard
But, and it was, written by God and John Stuart, a historian, and John Stuart, who had really just gone deeper and dug deeper in the research than anybody had previously. And he was able to determine that they were, in fact, two separate women who both were spies for the Pinkerton Agency. Now, neither of those was their real name, which is what made it confusing.

00:16:26:25 – 00:16:54:10
Rob Hilliard
And, so the those were both names of Pinkerton and fabricated, like I said, that the how close they are made it appear as if he had just sort of screwed up and had a, as you know, one person called two different names, but at the end of the day, and this was, the conclusion of Stuart’s research was that they were, in fact, two separate women.

00:16:54:11 – 00:17:25:29
Rob Hilliard
He was able to identify who they were. And, that Hattie Lawton is actually he he poses I can’t recall now if, if this was actually verified 100%. But he poses that Hattie Lawton was actually Kate Warne, who was the famous female actor, important agency. And of course, you and I talked about her before. We talked about victims because she was kind of a lead character in that, and, but Carey.

00:17:25:29 – 00:17:58:14
Rob Hilliard
So that was Hattie Carey. Was a a woman named Kitty Brackett who was separately a female spy for the Pinkerton Agency. She was the one that worked with Scoble on a sort of separate but parallel mission in Richmond, while Webster and Warne, M.I.T., you know, whatever name you want to use, was, they were on, like I said, a separate but parallel mission, same time frame, different actors in Richmond.

00:17:58:16 – 00:18:35:24
Rob Hilliard
So with all that very confusing, I’m sure your listeners are probably scratching their heads. Now. What the heck is even talking about? And you need a, you know, scorecard to follow the players here, but, the in Trail of Vengeance, the story that’s presented is the original sort of accepted canon, which was that Goble was, captured as part of the, Webster Hattie, as part of them being caught, and then released and then he was released.

00:18:36:18 – 00:19:01:02
Rob Hilliard
It actually makes a whole lot more sense. If you look at it, the two separate people, the story, you know, kind of make sense. Better. And, and so and as you know, that’s the approach that I took in in my book. And I was very fortunate, actually, that that book came out, five years before mine, because to be honest with you, at the time, I was already working on it, and I was still scratching my head trying to figure out how am I gonna write this?

00:19:01:02 – 00:19:26:04
Rob Hilliard
Because it makes no sense. These two people are, or one person is doing two different things at the same time. So, shout out to John Stewart wherever you are. I’ve never spoken to him, but thanks a million for, you know, sorting that out. And, but that’s like I said, that’s the only reason I gave it a minus is because they didn’t incorporate that relatively new scholarship that, you know, that had been done.

00:19:27:06 – 00:19:57:15
Rob Hilliard
So one other thing to mention. I’m going to further muddy the waters here, but just in the interest of full disclosure, for your listeners, they there is, an ongoing, frankly, discussion or controversy around whether John Scoble is in fact, a real person. And so, again, the the source information that we have on Scoble is, Pinkerton’s book.

00:19:58:20 – 00:20:34:27
Rob Hilliard
As I’ve already said, it wasn’t very trustworthy when it came to his, sharing of information or reliable. Maybe trustworthy might not be the right word, but reliable. And he like to change people’s names. So wanted just to kind of set that context a little bit. The reason he did that was, spying maybe even today, but certainly in the 1800s was not considered to be a, respected profession.

00:20:35:12 – 00:20:58:17
Rob Hilliard
People really disliked spies and after the Civil War, of course, when he wrote his book in the 1880s, it was we were into the actually really almost out of the reconstruction period. There was still a lot of division in between the North and the South in the country, politically and much of other things. I say a bunch of other things, as I said, are not important.

00:20:58:17 – 00:21:27:21
Rob Hilliard
Certainly Jim Crow period in the South is extraordinarily important. I don’t want to dismiss that. But, it’s separate from what I’m trying to get to with, with Pinkerton’s handling of this. So because of those sensitivities, and because spies were not low respected, they he changed the names of every person who worked for him in the book whose name hadn’t become publicly known during the Civil War.

00:21:27:24 – 00:21:55:17
Rob Hilliard
So Webster, for example, became, he was captured. His name was in all the newspapers. So everybody knew who he was. So he used Pinkerton uses the name Tim Webster in The Spy for the rebellion. A couple other, people who worked for him, during that period. Price Lewis is one. I can’t think of any other names off the top of my head, but anyway, they their names also became known during the war.

00:21:55:17 – 00:22:31:18
Rob Hilliard
So he uses their names in the book, but, Hattie Laughton and Terry Lot and their names did not become. It was never known who they were at the time of the war, or even after. And so he chose to use, pseudonyms for them. And he very likely did the same for John Scoble. So the controversy around whether Scoble was actually a real person or not is based on the fact that there’s really no record of him prior to the Civil War or after the Civil War.

00:22:31:23 – 00:22:54:11
Rob Hilliard
There’s just the little basically one year period within the war that, Pinkerton writes about in his book, The Problem. And that’s, you know, that’s valid, right? If you can’t find any verification or second source. I mean, that’s ironically, that’s how intelligence works when you gather one sort year by gather one piece of information, you try to confirm that with a second piece of information that aligns.

00:22:54:11 – 00:23:25:20
Rob Hilliard
Right. And here we are six years later trying to do that about a spot. And but the problem is, John Scoble very likely wasn’t his real name. Almost certainly Pinkerton changed some facts about him. Facts. I guess I’ll, er, quote that, but. So, changed some of the story to, help protect Scoles identity.

00:23:25:23 – 00:23:49:27
Rob Hilliard
And in doing so, you totally lose the thread. Now, I said earlier that, Mr. Stewart had gone back and done research and was able to ferret out just who Carrie Lawton and Hattie Lawton were. There’s a critically important distinction there. And that is this was the 1800s, and they were white. Scoble was blond. He was born a slave.

00:23:50:00 – 00:24:09:12
Rob Hilliard
So there had been no record of his birth, no record of where he lived? No, he wouldn’t appear in any census records. Certainly until after the Civil War. And but the problem is, after the Civil War, we wouldn’t know what name to look for, to see whether he was there or not. Because, again, John Scoble probably not his real name.

00:24:09:15 – 00:24:17:24
Rob Hilliard
So as I like to say, you have a guy who was born a slave, became a spy, and is only biographer, probably changed his name.

00:24:17:26 – 00:24:20:24
Dan LeFebvre
So really hard to find that second source. Then.

00:24:20:27 – 00:25:06:18
Rob Hilliard
Exactly. So to get that tie and get that verification, it’s almost impossible. That’s not to say that I’m going to, you know, take a stand and say no, he is absolutely real person. Unquestionably. You know, that’s those people who don’t believe he was real or wrong. Because I don’t know that verification either. But, it is the the preponderance of historians and very well respected historians not only over 150 years, but even much more recently, there were several who, there was, a guy named Ken Nagler who worked for the CIA, who researched into Scoble.

00:25:06:29 – 00:25:26:26
Rob Hilliard
He believes in to be a real person. There was another, man who worked for the NSA. We’re getting into all the spy agencies in here. And his name was Donald Markel, who became an expert on espionage in the Civil War after you retired from the NSA. And he very much believed that Jobs Global was a real person.

00:25:27:20 – 00:25:55:19
Rob Hilliard
So, like I said, these are not people who, from a hundred plus years ago, these are much more current, people who’ve done this research in the past, I don’t know, decade or 15 years. And, so the preponderance of, proof or the preponderance of professional historians believe or accept that Scoble was a real person.

00:25:55:22 – 00:26:06:02
Rob Hilliard
But, there is there is a, reasonable doubt there, or, I don’t know, whatever you want to use. And like I said, for the benefit of your listeners, I wanted to make sure that we that we touched on that as well.

00:26:06:02 – 00:26:27:14
Dan LeFebvre
So it’s fascinating. It’s fascinating to me that they were able to separate the two women, hundreds of years later. Two I mean, that sort of thing. I mean, because you are talking about spies and they’re purpose is to not be known. All right. So, so, so, so you have all these different things working against you and still being able to do that.

00:26:27:14 – 00:26:50:03
Dan LeFebvre
So it would make sense. It just makes logical sense to me that, you know, if Alan Pinkerton is writing something that Scoble would have to be based on somebody, we might not know what his real name was, but the point of just making somebody up, like, if we know that these two women were actually two separate women, he didn’t make them up.

00:26:50:05 – 00:27:13:03
Rob Hilliard
Right. That’s that’s true. And there’s there’s a really, important point to be made. I’m really glad you said that. There’s an important point to be made there. One is, you said, you know, is he a real person? There is a school of thought that may be Scoble, the character in, Pinkerton’s book was an amalgam.

00:27:13:03 – 00:27:33:17
Rob Hilliard
Maybe it was because we certainly know that he used people who were, or employed, I should say, use employed, which is important because they were getting paid. But people who had previously been slaves, that he absolutely used them to gather intelligence and that he interviewed them when they were escaping, or had escaped across, Confederate lines into Union lines.

00:27:33:19 – 00:27:59:12
Rob Hilliard
So we know all that that’s documented outside of, a Pinkerton’s book. But the, there is a thought that he might be, like I said, maybe, maybe a combination of a couple characters together, as opposed to just one person. Again, we’ll never know. The other thing, part of the reason we’ll never know is because, as I said, the packages were based in Chicago.

00:27:59:12 – 00:28:25:13
Rob Hilliard
That was their main office. And, the great Chicago Fire of 1871 burned up all their records. So, there’s a there’s a gap there as well. So you have the time gap and then you have the, you know, physically losing all the files. Gap. And, there was another point that I want to come back to there, and I, I veered off and lost myself.

00:28:26:13 – 00:28:56:20
Rob Hilliard
But the, Oh, you you said when you were talking about. Well, he wrote about two real women, and they were able to verify that if you kind of look at the if you start to question, did Pinkerton fabricate Scoble, you know, out of whole cloth and was he not just a real person at all? The immediate question that comes to my mind is, why would he do that?

00:28:56:22 – 00:29:51:10
Rob Hilliard
Right? And now in first Pinkerton, he was a staunch abolitionist. Well, prior to the Civil War. And so he certainly believed in emancipation, for, for blacks. But he when if you put yourself in his position now spin back to 1883, I’m sure we can all easily do that. To write and write about and essentially glorify, a black character in that time period, which, as I kind of alluded to earlier, you’re talking, you know, Jim Crow era in the South, reconstruction has essentially fallen apart, very deep and, and painful racial divisions, within the country.

00:29:52:28 – 00:30:28:14
Rob Hilliard
So what would be the upside for him? Like, he wasn’t doing it to sell more books, right? If anything, it was probably going to have the opposite effect. It was probably going to cause he would sell less books if he by appearing, sympathetic to, to blacks in that time period. And so, like, just to make himself look like a cool guy or I like, there’s really no, like I said, if anything, I would have created most likely a negative or more of a negative reaction, more of a negative backlash than than any sort of positive one.

00:30:28:14 – 00:31:01:06
Rob Hilliard
So it’s hard to see what his motivation might have been in creating, a fictional Scoble character and addressing him as or, you know, advertising him as, a real person. That’s the that’s the part of the aside from what I mentioned about the historians and all those things, in their investigations. But, that’s the part that just doesn’t really ring true in the John school was not a real person argument.

00:31:01:06 – 00:31:05:22
Rob Hilliard
Like what’s what would be the benefit of Pinkerton making him up?

00:31:05:24 – 00:31:21:05
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. No, that’s a great point. And it’s speaking of the talk of changing names and things like that, that Pinkerton in his book, if we go back to the movie, there is text at the beginning of the movie that is alludes to something along those lines. It’s kind of one of the key plot points throughout the entire movie.

00:31:21:11 – 00:31:49:00
Dan LeFebvre
I’m going to go ahead and read some of that opening text. It says based on historical figures and events during the American Civil War, the Pinkerton Agency, under the commission of Abraham Lincoln, created a secret spy group known as the woods to infiltrate the Confederate army. They named the woods because their code names uniformly ended with wood. And then throughout the movie, we learn about these spies that had code names like Kirkwood and Westwood and things like that.

00:31:49:03 – 00:31:52:28
Dan LeFebvre
Was there really a spy group known as The Woods?

00:31:53:01 – 00:32:14:12
Rob Hilliard
So when I first watched the movie, which was before, you and I talked about this and, I hadn’t seen these questions and that came up on the screen, as you said, like right at the gates before the start of the movie, actually, and I’ve done I don’t certainly don’t know everything there is to know about spies in the Civil War or out of the Civil War.

00:32:14:14 – 00:32:39:20
Rob Hilliard
But I’ve done extensive, extensive research on the Pinkerton spies during the Civil War. And as soon as I popped up, I was watching with my wife, my son, and I turned to them. And of course, they’re looking at me like, is that true? And we and I’m like, no, absolutely not true. And and I’m like, it’s, you know, totally made up and so cut like, you know, first 10s.

00:32:39:20 – 00:33:32:22
Rob Hilliard
Right. I’m already off on the, a train wreck, you know, but I was wrong. Well, I was kind of wrong. What I said was correct, that they didn’t use the the wood suffix effectively, as code names during the Civil War. That part is correct. They didn’t do that. But, it apparently started very shortly, like within a year or two after the Civil War that Alan Pinkerton started using that code system, not only for his operating lives, but also for, informants who were, I’ll kind of say the good guys, people who were, who were providing that information that they were able to use to capture criminals.

00:33:33:08 – 00:33:59:23
Rob Hilliard
And interestingly, well, there’s a couple interesting points about one is he had a similar system that he used for criminals or people they were investigating, except they use the suffix stone. So it would be like, you know, Featherstone or capstone or whatever. He would assign these names to people they were investigating. So the woods were the good guys?

00:34:00:10 – 00:34:19:09
Rob Hilliard
Technically the spies, as the text of the movie said. And then they didn’t mention the stone part, but the stone would be, the bad guys. And these were just to be clear. It’s not like they took, like it wasn’t Lafayette Stone or Wolf Wood. They didn’t take those names. And added something on to it.

00:34:19:11 – 00:34:45:14
Rob Hilliard
They would make, he would make up, you know, like a four letter, thing, like I said, like Atwood or, whatever. And then that would become that would become their name. But, and they would use that in a, telegraph code, which of course, was communication, not over time or letters. And Pinkerton was a big believer in substitution codes, which he did use during the Civil War.

00:34:45:17 – 00:35:10:09
Rob Hilliard
And he had a very extensive about 170 words, if I remember right, substitution code, where it would be like, I don’t know, remember him off top of his operatives had to memorize all of them. Fortunately, I didn’t. I would have been a terrible operator because I know these, but I don’t remember them. But he would say, like lamp Boyle and that might mean cavalry.

00:35:10:12 – 00:35:38:03
Rob Hilliard
And, coal would, would instead mean, soldier or something like that. So he would use that substitution code. So this was, this would and Stone system was really just an extension of that for people’s names or and then they kept in their files extensive, extensive notes on who, what, what the real person’s name was. So it would be Dan LaFave.

00:35:38:03 – 00:36:03:19
Rob Hilliard
You know, I’ll give you a good guy named. Yeah. Them would, or call wood or whatever. And so and then it would be, you know, Rob Hilliard, capstone and I would be somebody they would be investigating. So they actually had these cards, that, that had those all listed out and they maintained them at the agency.

00:36:03:27 – 00:36:34:02
Rob Hilliard
So another thing thing about this that started, like I said, after the Civil War, so let’s say 1860, 66, 67, somewhere in that ballpark. They used that system, the Pinkerton Agency, which still exists today, by the way. They used that system until 1965, 1965, so almost 100 years or basically a hundred years. And the only reason they stopped it.

00:36:34:03 – 00:36:57:06
Rob Hilliard
So the Pinkerton Agency was being run by Pinkerton descendants up until that time. And as long as they were pictured in descendant as the president of the company, they continued to use that wood and stone system for their agents and, and, and informants and, I can’t remember his name. I want to say it was like Robert Pinkerton the third.

00:36:57:06 – 00:37:23:13
Rob Hilliard
Maybe, he was Allan Pinkerton’s great, great 2 or 3 great mature, grandson. And, when he finally retired or handed over the reins of the, of the company, that’s when in 1965, that’s when they stopped using that system. So, so, yeah, it’s, like I said when I first saw it, I’m like, no, they didn’t do that during a Civil War.

00:37:23:15 – 00:37:34:12
Rob Hilliard
Technically, they didn’t do it during a Civil war. The movie plays a little bit fast and loose with the timing, but they’re rolling off by a couple of years. And the basis of the idea is, very much factual.

00:37:34:15 – 00:37:52:10
Dan LeFebvre
You might have already answered my next question about that, though, because if we don’t really know if John Scoble was real, but not to get too far, the the storyline in the movie, we do find out that, John Goebbels codename towards the end of the movie, we find out I think his codename was like James Howard. So it didn’t even go with wood there.

00:37:52:15 – 00:37:57:00
Dan LeFebvre
But do we know if John Scoble ever used a codename James Howard like we see in the movie?

00:37:57:22 – 00:38:09:17
Rob Hilliard
He he did not know or not. We don’t. Not in any time, as documented. Let’s put it that way. Okay? It’s not again, we don’t know his real name, so he might use some other name. Right?

00:38:09:19 – 00:38:11:14
Dan LeFebvre
John Scoble might have been the codename.

00:38:11:16 – 00:38:38:27
Rob Hilliard
Right. Exactly. Yeah, it could be exactly the opposite. So, yeah, if we go back into that vortex again. But, I did do a little digging, though, and there this is very tangential, but there was actually James Howard, who, was connected to the Pinkertons during the Civil War. He was a, Somebody who was working in.

00:38:38:27 – 00:39:01:24
Rob Hilliard
And I didn’t write this down. I should have, I can’t remember if he was a telegraph operator, or he was maybe an employee of the Telegraph. Company, living in Washington, DC at the outbreak of the war. But he was a Confederate sympathizer. Now, that is not at all unusual. There were hundreds of people who fit that description, and many of them became spies during the war.

00:39:02:05 – 00:39:34:06
Rob Hilliard
Howard did, in fact, become a spy. It was passing information that he learned in Washington, DC and sending it south to the Confederacy when he was identified by Pinkerton, Allan Pinkerton, and, ultimately, I think he was arrested. And, I think they actually just sent him south. I don’t think you jail, but, but anyway, that’s, you know, an interesting tie in.

00:39:34:06 – 00:39:55:26
Rob Hilliard
It’s weird because it’s kind of the opposite of of John Scoble. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. I mean, James Howard isn’t that unusual of a name that it might might land that I’m not? But, But you. No, that was not. There was. No, I guess I should be a little bit more specific. There was never a codename.

00:39:55:28 – 00:40:04:08
Rob Hilliard
Pinkerton never identified a code name that Scoble used during his time. As a as an undercover operative.

00:40:04:10 – 00:40:12:17
Dan LeFebvre
And, I mean, especially if we don’t even really know John Scoble. Then how would we start to know someone? Those other details. We don’t know the base thing.

00:40:12:19 – 00:40:18:16
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, if you’re already given a fictitious name, but why bother trying to get to some other fictitious name? So.

00:40:18:18 – 00:40:39:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I have to ask then, because, you know, a lot of movies do make up characters, and maybe you already answered this in the beginning when you were talking about how it was a more of a fictional story in the movie, but the main storyline in the movie revolves around Catherine Atherton and then the main bad guy is a guy named Colonel William Davis, and the only other person in the movie that I would call a main character.

00:40:39:07 – 00:40:53:20
Dan LeFebvre
Feel free to add more if you want, but it would be, Colonel Davis’s henchman, one of the guys named Frank Cooper, and I’m really kind of calling him a main character because he’s the one kind of going around trying to find the woods. And, he’s also recognized by John Scoble because of a huge scar on his face.

00:40:53:22 – 00:40:58:07
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know if any of those people were based on real people from history?

00:40:58:09 – 00:41:29:07
Rob Hilliard
Most likely not. Catherine Allerton is a fictional character. William Davis. Colonel William Davis, who was the Jesse he character? Was, he is a fictional character. I did do some digging just to after I missed on the wood thing. Then I’m like, man, I better all the way back there. But, there were actually a couple of Colonel William Davises in the Civil War on both sides.

00:41:29:10 – 00:41:49:17
Rob Hilliard
Interestingly, some for the Union and for the, Confederacy. But none of them. None of them fit the fit. The description of this character, they were like the war was in Massachusetts or from Massachusetts or whatever. And then, the other one never served in the West. He served in Georgia, if I remember, in the Confederacy.

00:41:49:17 – 00:41:52:00
Dan LeFebvre
So, again, just a popular name. It sounds.

00:41:52:03 – 00:42:17:17
Rob Hilliard
And, that’s a good segue, because Frank Cooper, speaking of popular names, I actually got on the, National Park Service website, and they have a say if anybody out there wants to find out about their ancestors in the Civil War or whatever, you go to the National Park Service, they have a, a subsection of their site where you can search Civil War records.

00:42:18:15 – 00:42:53:03
Rob Hilliard
And really useful, really helpful. So I search Frank Cooper, which proved to be kind of a mistake because there were 45,130 Frank Cooper’s or it was 1000 results. So that was kind of a fail. And then, I tried to narrow down a little bit, on the assumption that he was from Missouri, and we’ll get to the, the Kansas, Missouri, piece of story here in a bit, but I still got when I hit the Missouri, there were 2207 results for that super not section.

00:42:53:03 – 00:43:03:05
Rob Hilliard
So, yeah, again, I think Frank Cooper was just probably, you know, they threw a dart at a, at a name board and that’s the one they came up with.

00:43:03:05 – 00:43:10:02
Dan LeFebvre
So, I mean, that’s, it sounds like one of the bigger targets on the board for a random name. I mean, it’s a it’s a real name that a lot of people had.

00:43:10:02 – 00:43:31:09
Rob Hilliard
So probably absolutely correct. And there’s and there’s, you know, hundreds of variations. There’s, you know, Francis Cooper and then there’s just Frank Cooper and then was Frank Lynn Cooper. And of course, all of them turn up results. So, yeah, I think he was, he was I could tell he was just a fictional character.

00:43:31:11 – 00:43:52:06
Dan LeFebvre
Well, one of the core plot points in the movie revolves around Katherine’s husband, Caleb. It seems to know John Scoble when they were both spies for the Pinkertons. And speaking of the names, Caleb went by William Kirkwood when he was a spy. And so the very beginning of the movie, Caleb is killed, and then Katherine reaches out to Scoble to try to help track down her husband’s killers.

00:43:52:06 – 00:44:09:17
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s kind of the whole trail of vengeance from the title of the movie. How realistic is that concept of John Scoble being called to help the family of a former Pinkerton associate? They don’t seem to be in the Pinkertons now or in the timeline of the movie. But, you know, as a former associate.

00:44:09:19 – 00:44:43:18
Rob Hilliard
There’s no record that I found of anything like that happening. But I will say that it’s plausible. And the reason I say that is, Allan Pinkerton himself. And the agency, even after he was gone, after he passed away, were very big on loyalty. Amongst their agents and, and between them and, I’m sorry, amongst their agents and between Pinkerton and and the operatives.

00:44:44:17 – 00:45:12:22
Rob Hilliard
And just to give a couple of example, like there are a couple photos of that people can find online of, Pinkerton operatives during the Civil War, actually at the time of Civil War. And, there’s there’s actually one that I use in presentations where I’m talking about whether John Scoble was a real person or not, because they have all these people sat around a table, and there’s one black man seated in the center of the table where they’re all eating dinner together.

00:45:13:24 – 00:45:42:18
Rob Hilliard
And, and he’s kind of staring in the camera. I’m like, well, if he wasn’t a real person, then who was this guy? Right. But my point there is, they clearly all kind of hung out together and there’s a couple other pictures, like people maybe seeing pictures of certain units from the Civil War where everybody’s lined up in front of a tent and they’re all, you know, got their kind of, get the beards, go and, and and, nobody’s ever smiling because it.

00:45:42:19 – 00:46:04:15
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Because it took so long to take a picture, but yeah, they’re all standing, puffed up. And so there’s a couple of pictures like that just of the Pinkertons. And so and then the other thing, the other really good example, this is, I mentioned Kate Warner earlier when she passed away, which was just a few years after the Civil War.

00:46:05:02 – 00:46:32:25
Rob Hilliard
Allan Pinkerton actually footing the bill for her funeral and her burial plot and paid for her headstone. And that’s people can still go see that today. It’s, sort of a morbid, I guess, tourist attraction or tourist site in Chicago or outside Chicago. So there was, like I said, they they really kind of bred this loyalty, between agents.

00:46:32:25 – 00:46:53:05
Rob Hilliard
And I mean, if you think about it. Right. Those are especially if you’re undercover, those are the only people you can depend on. They’re the only people who know your real story and who are going to have your back, and try and protect you when, when you know what hits the fan. And, so, I mean, it’s understandable, right?

00:46:53:05 – 00:47:00:04
Rob Hilliard
It would be not much different, I’m sure, from like, like I said earlier from the FBI or CIA today.

00:47:00:07 – 00:47:16:23
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, we see him with military, too. I mean, you see, I mean, I’ve seen in a lot of movies like, you know, you’re fighting alongside somebody right next to you and they’re the ones that have your back. So even after towards the end of the movie, the war is over, you know, and but they’re still they still have this camaraderie.

00:47:16:23 – 00:47:26:06
Dan LeFebvre
So it does make sense that, you know, during a War two, in the Civil War, these spies would have that sort of bond as well. That makes sense.

00:47:26:09 – 00:47:36:23
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Yeah. So like I said, very much plausible. But there’s no, I wasn’t able to find any record of that having happened with other any other agents.

00:47:36:26 – 00:47:56:05
Dan LeFebvre
What is speaking of the Civil War, the movie wasn’t really clear about exactly what year it said. It just kind of suggests that it’s happening after the Civil War and after John squabbles time in the Pinkertons. So when Catherine goes to meet John Scoble for the first time in the movie, he’s staying in a place called Cades Cove, Tennessee.

00:47:56:07 – 00:48:07:27
Dan LeFebvre
And it it seems that he’s been there for a while since Catherine was able to track him down there after her husband is killed. Do we know if the real John Scoble lived in Cades Cove after his time in the Pinkertons?

00:48:08:00 – 00:48:34:02
Rob Hilliard
Unfortunately, and I, you know, I kind of already said this, but we we virtually know nothing of Scoble. Prior a little bit prior to the war. No real details, but we kind of where he came from and. And that he was a slave after the war. We know nothing. And that’s, Again, Pinkerton wrote the book later, and he was focused on.

00:48:34:02 – 00:48:53:18
Rob Hilliard
I mean, the title of his book was The Spy of the rebellion. So obviously that’s what he was talking about was the Civil War. He doesn’t mention anything about any of his operatives after the war, even though we have documentation that several of them did continue to work as Pinkerton agents after the war. But in the in the book, you know, he doesn’t get into that.

00:48:54:18 – 00:49:19:09
Rob Hilliard
So we don’t know that there is very much a real place called Cades Cove in Tennessee. Anybody who’s been to Great Smoky Mountain National Park probably knows about that, because it’s one of the major tourist attractions in the park. Gorgeous area. Can, you know, down the valley with the mountains behind it, but, yeah, we don’t know.

00:49:19:12 – 00:49:32:10
Rob Hilliard
You know, we don’t know Scoble live there. It’s against plausible that he might have, but, he might have because he lived in Butte, Montana. I mean, we really don’t know.

00:49:32:13 – 00:49:55:03
Dan LeFebvre
Fair point, fair point. During one of the conversations in the movie between John Scoble and Kathryn, we find there’s there’s a few clues that the dialog just kind of puts in there about John’s childhood. He mentions his dad’s name was John Armstrong. We don’t hear his mom’s name, but he talks about how she read to him from an Ethiopian Bible that they hid on their mattress while they were enslaved.

00:49:55:06 – 00:50:04:17
Dan LeFebvre
And then she died when he was just 12 years old. How well does the movie do, telling the bits and pieces that we know about John’s cobbles? Parents?

00:50:04:19 – 00:50:39:18
Rob Hilliard
Well, again, this was this was to me an interesting question, but for different reasons. So we don’t know anything about his parents. We know that, he was a slave in Mississippi prior to the war. The plantation that he lived on was owned by a guy named Scoble. And much like, you know, many slaves at the time, even after they got out of slavery, they adopted the surname of of the person around the the plantation and kept them, in slavery.

00:50:41:09 – 00:51:10:18
Rob Hilliard
And so that’s the that’s how Pinkerton presents it in the book that that he lived on the plantation of a guy who’s last Abel Scoble. The we like I said, we don’t know anything about his parents. What was it funny to me? Interesting to me is. And this is total coincidence. And maybe I should have started with at the very beginning, of our talk here that I don’t have any association with the movie.

00:51:11:19 – 00:51:39:01
Rob Hilliard
Other than the fact that we, you know, we have a character in common between the two things, but, like, I don’t know that anybody I don’t know the writers or director or any of those people. And and as far as I know, they don’t know anything about me either. So, the reason I say that now is, and the reason I find it interesting is totally coincidentally, we both chose to present very similar backgrounds for Scoble.

00:51:39:27 – 00:52:01:21
Rob Hilliard
So in my book, I talked about his parents, and I had, his mom passed away in childbirth. When when John was born. And then that his father lived, I think until I forget, I said he was, I got to check my notes. I you would think I would know this.

00:52:02:07 – 00:52:05:13
Dan LeFebvre
So I wrote it down. So you have to remember exactly like.

00:52:05:25 – 00:52:24:18
Rob Hilliard
I wrote it twice. I wrote it in the book, and then I saw it in my notes. But. So in my in my story, when John’s father passed away, when, John was six years old. So, as you just said, they had a somewhat similar story where his mother dies when he was young, and she’s not named in quotes in that way.

00:52:24:18 – 00:52:49:14
Rob Hilliard
She’s named in my book either. And, and then you know that his father kind of lives a little while longer, but, but the reality is, you know, we don’t know any of that stuff. I think it’s probably not a total coincidence that we both chose that little piece of the storyline, about his mother passing away.

00:52:49:14 – 00:53:26:22
Rob Hilliard
Because, as you might expect, the lifespan, people who were in slavery at that time was extraordinarily short, and for a whole variety of reasons. But, medical care wasn’t really a thing, for them. And, so if he got sick, if you were having a baby, if you were, if any little thing happened to you, not to mention the fact, you know, very poor nutrition, extraordinarily hard work and working conditions, you know, like, go on a run, but I’m sure you get the point.

00:53:27:09 – 00:53:46:06
Rob Hilliard
So it would it would not be at all unusual, for someone’s parents to to have died young and, so, like I said, probably not a total coincidence, but I just thought it was kind of odd. Kind of funny that, we ended up on a somewhat similar path, you know, totally unrelated to each other.

00:53:46:08 – 00:54:01:25
Dan LeFebvre
So you mentioned, Scoble being on a plantation whose name was Scoble. Have you ever done research to see if you could find, like, where that was and then kind of go from that direction to see if we can learn more about John Scoble or.

00:54:02:04 – 00:54:26:14
Rob Hilliard
Yes. The short answer is yes. And I wasn’t, wasn’t able to come up with anything from the name. And, there’s even I’m now I’m trying to remember this is, this is the, the tenuous line that a somebody who writes historical fiction falls into is when I think about these things, I can’t remember what’s actually true.

00:54:26:15 – 00:54:29:04
Rob Hilliard
When I moved up.

00:54:29:06 – 00:54:31:28
Dan LeFebvre
So it’s plausible. It must be true.

00:54:32:01 – 00:54:57:12
Rob Hilliard
Right. Exactly. And so I’d have to go back and look at the spy of the rebellion. Pinkerton’s book again. But I think there was a mention. I’m almost positive. No, I don’t think about it, that there’s a mention of a specific county in Mississippi. Although I don’t remember the name of it. Now. And and like I said, I went back and looked at, this is what I was researching the book.

00:54:57:12 – 00:55:22:19
Rob Hilliard
So this is, you know, pushing ten years ago now, but I looked at, troop regiment names, officer names from, you know, from the troops who were raised in those areas. Looked a little bit land ownership records in those areas. Didn’t see anything that, you know, that had the name Scoble in it. Which probably, again, just lends itself to the fact that he that Pinkerton fabricated that name.

00:55:22:19 – 00:55:34:07
Rob Hilliard
And, it might have been Cooper. For all we know, Frank Cooper was frank there with thousands of them. So, yeah, no. No way to tell.

00:55:34:09 – 00:55:58:00
Dan LeFebvre
Well, since we’re on the topic of of John was family, there are also some conversations in the movie where he talks about his wife and kids. He says he married a woman named Fanny Woodrow in 1859. They had a daughter named says Mary Armstrong. And then when she passed away, Fanny left with their son, John Armstrong Jr. And so that’s why, during the timeline of the movie, John Scoble is single.

00:55:58:02 – 00:56:02:01
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know anything about that? If that’s accurate?

00:56:02:03 – 00:56:33:25
Rob Hilliard
Not no, we don’t. So there’s, John John’s Goebbels wife, and I’m calling her that because she doesn’t. She’s not named. She gets, a whopping two sentences in Pinkerton’s book, The Spy of the rebellion. One saying that she existed and the other saying that she, took work in Richmond, Virginia. And that’s it. That’s all.

00:56:33:26 – 00:57:00:27
Rob Hilliard
That’s all we know about her. So. And and she is, again, we’re talking about a book was written in 83. Wouldn’t be very unusual for anybody, of any color or anything else, of a woman to be described as so-and-so’s wife, right? As opposed to using her her proper name. And that was, unfortunately for researchers of the 21st century, that was the approach that picker didn’t, chose.

00:57:00:27 – 00:57:13:27
Rob Hilliard
So, we don’t even we’ll know her first name, let alone her last name. You know, no indication of whether they had kids or not. So, that’s, you know.

00:57:14:00 – 00:57:36:27
Dan LeFebvre
One of those things we don’t know, which probably means I thought it was interesting that in the movie, they they called her Woodrow, which, you know, we’ve been talking about how there all these woods in it. So I was like, well, maybe she’s a spy, too. But of course, we don’t even really know much about her. Then we’re probably not going to know if she also was recruited by Pinkertons, although I would say this is just my assumption.

00:57:36:29 – 00:57:55:13
Dan LeFebvre
If Allan Pinkerton went to the length of at least mentioning that she existed, if she actually worked for him as a spy, I would assume there would be more information in there. But I might be. I mean, that’s just my assumption. Like maybe he would have said a little bit more about her.

00:57:55:15 – 00:58:21:13
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Well, if if I would say, I think you’re you’re on the right track there. If she was spying for him during the Civil War, but that might not be true if she were working as a, Pinkerton detective after the Civil War. Right. And because, like I said, he basically drew a line and, and didn’t really talk about any of the operatives after the war.

00:58:22:18 – 00:58:33:11
Rob Hilliard
So and I’m not saying that to be coy. I’m just I’m just saying, you know, you’re right that if she was if she was actively spying on the Civil War, she would have certainly got a mentioned.

00:58:33:13 – 00:58:43:18
Dan LeFebvre
But it was after the Civil War that they started using the word codename. Right. So those two things then wouldn’t really my, my assumption would have been way out there.

00:58:43:20 – 00:58:49:03
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, I maybe, but you know, maybe the screenwriters were they might have been setting themselves up for a sequel there.

00:58:49:03 – 00:59:06:19
Dan LeFebvre
I don’t oh, there we go. We’re to see. Wait, you already talked about this a little bit. And there is a point in the movie where Catherine asks, well, how he met the Pinkertons, and he tells her that Mr. Pinkerton debriefed runaways and free slaves, and then recruited some of them to return back to the South as spies.

00:59:06:21 – 00:59:12:14
Dan LeFebvre
And I’m assuming then that’s how Scoble, the real John Scoble, was recruited into the Pinkertons.

00:59:12:17 – 00:59:36:19
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, that’s exactly right. In fact, I was, this was the scene that I was referencing earlier where he talks about how he’s recruiting. It is spot on. And then the only little wobble that you know, was in there, from my standpoint was when he talks about being in Richmond and when he says that he was, you know, he was captured with all of Webster and, and Lorton.

00:59:37:22 – 01:00:06:17
Rob Hilliard
So and again, that’s a completely forgivable one because that was, you know, kind of the accepted, backstory for Scoble. But, the just to get a little bit into the, the Pinkerton side of it here, he was, as I said before, he was a very staunch abolitionist, and felt very strongly about emancipation with that.

01:00:06:19 – 01:00:36:03
Rob Hilliard
He was one of, if not the first, people in the intelligence community. And that not includes, like Army intelligence or whoever else, to recognize that these slaves who were escaping and coming into Union line, there were largely slaves, not exclusively. There were some people who were free, people who were also coming across, but, they they were what became known as Contrabands.

01:00:36:06 – 01:01:05:22
Rob Hilliard
And that was the term that was used for slaves who came out of the South and into the North. They were legally considered to be contraband of war, meaning that, and it’s kind of a I always thought kind of a pretty sweet, twist of, legal interpretation where the, the Southerners, the Confederates felt that the slaves were property, right?

01:01:05:22 – 01:01:29:23
Rob Hilliard
They weren’t people. They were property. And so very early in the war, a couple of slaves came across, got onto the Union lines and, and the, after the skirmish that had happened, the Confederate, officer reached out to the Union officer and said, hey, I want my slaves back. And that Union officer happened to be Benjamin Butler, who was another staunch abolitionist of Massachusetts.

01:01:29:25 – 01:01:54:16
Rob Hilliard
But he was also a lawyer. And, and Butler said, well, not so fast if you’re saying that they’re not people, that they’re property and they were captured, effectively captured during a battle, then it would be no different than a cannon or a horse or a rifle. And I’m not giving you your cannon or your horses or your rifles back.

01:01:54:16 – 01:02:28:20
Rob Hilliard
So I’m not giving you your swing back either. And that’s where the in his sort of legal decision, as it were, on that, or his legal rationale, he actually used the terminology contraband of war. And then, within a month or so, President Lincoln recognized, of course, the strategic military value that beyond the human value of it and every, you know, basically every slave that came across, I mean, this is the basis of Emancipation Proclamation as well.

01:02:28:20 – 01:02:57:08
Rob Hilliard
But every slave who was not no longer working on a plantation or working wherever in the South was either that much less production for the South, or it meant that one more soldier or potential soldier for the Confederate army had to stay home and work, right. So he did way weaken the Confederate Army. And, so Lincoln adopted, that policy, across, you know, across the whole country.

01:02:57:10 – 01:03:39:29
Rob Hilliard
And so the slaves were coming across, therefore became those contrabands. And that became kind of a common, language even among the slaves themselves. And so Pinkerton was interviewing these people as they came over because, along with two federate deserters, Union P.O.W., who would either escaped or been released, because all of them had been just, you know, a lot of cases the day before or very shortly before on the other side of the skirmish line, and they would often know, what units were there, how many people were there, how much artillery was there?

01:03:39:29 – 01:04:00:15
Rob Hilliard
Was there a cavalry unit versus an infantry leader or whatever it might’ve been? So he was very deliberate about interviewing those people as they came across and gathering that intelligence to the best that he could, and then trying to to match it up with those we talked about earlier, try to match it up to confirm it, you know, with other sources.

01:04:01:00 – 01:04:23:07
Rob Hilliard
That was, as I said already, that was kind of where Picatinny fell apart in the in doing you did not do a very good job of that part. But but Scoble specifically, you know, he was part of that and he was interviewed as a contraband coming across. And, he made such an impression on Pinkerton.

01:04:24:18 – 01:04:39:12
Rob Hilliard
Mainly because he could read and write, which, of course, most slaves couldn’t, because it was illegal to teach. So to do so in most of the South, and I don’t remember. Do you remember if they mentioned that in the movie, the. Did Skomal say something about the.

01:04:39:15 – 01:04:46:23
Dan LeFebvre
I seem to recall something about that, but I don’t know if I’m, just making that up now off the top of my head. But.

01:04:46:25 – 01:04:51:13
Rob Hilliard
You’re starting to see more into my my into that I did I invent that or was that I.

01:04:51:16 – 01:05:09:25
Dan LeFebvre
I seem to recall something about that that was kind of one of the differentiating facts, but also the other part of that, too. And for, for people listening this if you, go listen to my chat with Rob where we talk about the Pinkertons, we also talk about John Scoble there, too. So that might also be where I’m pulling this from.

01:05:09:27 – 01:05:31:07
Rob Hilliard
That’s where, like I said, you’re following in my travels. Is that really real or did I just do that or did I write that? So, but anyway, yeah, it’s, that was a differentiator is that he could read and write. I just couldn’t remember if it’s I feel like the maybe he said that quickly in the movie, but yeah, I’d like to like you.

01:05:31:07 – 01:06:05:16
Rob Hilliard
I’m not actually positive. So, but he did make such a really strong impression on Pinkerton. And I mentioned, the CIA officer earlier who had done some research into this, and I talked to him, interviewed him when I was preparing my book. And he he used a phrase that I really liked. He said, if if he if Pinkerton had been talking to Scoble today, and debriefing him as a, as a contraband, what would have impressed Pinkerton would have been his street smarts.

01:06:05:19 – 01:06:37:18
Rob Hilliard
And they didn’t use the phrase street smarts as a modern phrase. Not, you know, not one would have been used in the 1800s, but, it it conveys the idea. Right? He was he was very sharp. He understood he pick things up quickly, understood what was going on. Yeah. He could read and write, but he was also somebody who Pinkerton immediately saw could, to use Pinkerton terminology, assume a role, in and be able to go undercover and, and gather intelligence and import it back.

01:06:37:23 – 01:06:45:12
Rob Hilliard
So it takes a special person to do that. And Pinkerton recognized right away, let’s go boys, was somebody who could do it successfully.

01:06:45:15 – 01:07:11:11
Dan LeFebvre
It takes a special kind of person to be willing to do that, especially, you know, if it’s covert. I can’t imagine being in the position of, you know, being finally getting to freedom. And then there’s this job that will take you back. And I’m correct me if I’m wrong. I would assume that he did have a choice in that matter, and he chose then to go back and actually work instead of just running away.

01:07:11:13 – 01:07:54:07
Rob Hilliard
Well. Pinkerton is not explicit on that point. Okay, so, excuse me. My word. Careful here. For a couple reasons. One of them, you know, I’m tiptoeing around spoilers for my book, but, but the, Pinkerton was notoriously as a person. All about the job. And so I mentioned earlier, and he was very loyal to his operatives, which is true, but I don’t think anybody would have described him as like, a kindly boss.

01:07:54:16 – 01:07:54:25
Rob Hilliard
That’s.

01:07:54:28 – 01:07:56:26
Dan LeFebvre
The results, it sounds like.

01:07:56:29 – 01:08:30:28
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And like I said, it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t. He wasn’t loyal and that he didn’t care for his people. But, as you said, he was all about results. So I think he recognized, that opportunity was Scoble and and that he was somebody who would be uniquely positioned. And I probably should also touch on the fact that, that idea of using people who were uniquely positioned was not foreign to Pinkerton because he was the first to employ female detectives in the US, maybe in the world.

01:08:31:00 – 01:08:31:18
Dan LeFebvre
That weren’t.

01:08:31:24 – 01:08:33:08
Rob Hilliard
Him. Oh, sorry.

01:08:33:08 – 01:08:37:14
Dan LeFebvre
Go ahead. No, I was going to say like, hey, Warren, that we’ve mentioned that earlier. Yeah.

01:08:37:16 – 01:08:59:03
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. And so she was the first female detective that he hired and the first female detective anybody hired. But then after that, he actually built, I think he called the Women’s Bureau or Women Detective Bureau or something like that. Recognizing that they could you know, do things and get access to information and go places that men couldn’t, particularly in the 19th century.

01:08:59:21 – 01:09:24:09
Rob Hilliard
So the idea then of using a black man’s ability to do those things, is maybe just a little bit of a tangent off of, the idea of using a woman as a detective or a spy at that time. So, it wouldn’t have been. I guess what I’m trying to get at is it would have been a totally foreign concept for him to do that.

01:09:24:25 – 01:09:33:00
Rob Hilliard
Now, to your point about,

01:09:33:02 – 01:09:55:19
Rob Hilliard
Motivation. I always feel like. And this is really why I’m, I’m kind of choosing my words carefully. In my book, as you know, from reading it, I embedded a little bit more motivation into the reason for doing this. And, I’ll kind of, if you’ll indulge me, I’ll kind of do a little another little quick tangent here.

01:09:55:19 – 01:10:32:03
Rob Hilliard
But in the in the spy in the intelligence community, they talk about the reasons that people become spies and they use the acronym Mice, Mickey. And the reasons are money. Ideology, C coercion and E ego. Okay. Ego, the classic example that would be, from stripping a gear. The famous traitor during the Revolutionary War.

01:10:32:05 – 01:10:33:25
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, Benedict Arnold.

01:10:33:28 – 01:11:07:15
Rob Hilliard
The. Thank you for all my my work. I can think of his wife’s name in this movie. Her. Yeah, but Arnold passed over for promotion. You know, got pissed off at his superiors, and really, it was ego. So the classic example there, he he became, you know, traitor, spy for for the other side, ideology is, like, James Howard, I mentioned earlier, he was a Confederates sympathizer who happened to be living in the North in the capital, Washington, DC.

01:11:07:17 – 01:11:43:09
Rob Hilliard
But his ideology lay with the other side. So he spied and passed information to to the other side of the Confederacy. In that case, money. That’s pretty straightforward, right? Your pile of cash. If it’s big enough, you turn target tables. Coercion, though, can take many forms. And I chose to present score wars story with, a form of coercion, as, you know, his motivation.

01:11:43:25 – 01:12:07:16
Rob Hilliard
No, I think it would be in real life. Certainly a combination of ideology. Right. He he he was a good man. He certainly would have wanted to he wanted to be free himself so that he could have done to help free other black people. You know, there had to be some part of his motivation, be that, you know, how much percent ideology, how much percent coercion.

01:12:07:16 – 01:12:09:12
Rob Hilliard
Remember, we don’t even know the guy’s name.

01:12:09:12 – 01:12:12:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, right. That’s going to say so.

01:12:12:07 – 01:12:43:24
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, but I always feel a little bit guilty, in my mind, because he might have been, he might have been that guy who was just like, you know what? I’m doing this because it’s the right thing. And doing it for, you know, to use that, that might terminology, doing it for ideology exclusively. I chose for reasons that have nothing to do with him or his personality or anything else, and everything to do with writing and kind of building a fictional story.

01:12:43:26 – 01:13:08:19
Rob Hilliard
I chose to blend in a little bit of, coercion, storyline in there. Because, frankly, because it made him a more interesting character. If you’re, you know, if you’re the the person who’s just always does things because it’s the right thing to do, if you’re always the upright, you know, person, like, you always know you’re gonna do the right thing, for the right reasons.

01:13:10:07 – 01:13:44:04
Rob Hilliard
You strangely, ironically, I guess, become a less interesting character, from a storytelling standpoint. So, so anyway, again, very long winded answer to, to your question there, but, it still doesn’t matter how you slice that. What he did was unquestionably extraordinarily courageous, extraordinarily heroic. There wasn’t you know, to your original point there, there was nothing forcing him to do it.

01:13:44:21 – 01:14:07:23
Rob Hilliard
So he did have some, you know, some freewill choice there. And, and he chose to do, frankly, probably the most frightening thing possible, which is not only risking his life, but his freedom and and probable torture and like every bad thing you can possibly think of, he risked all those things to become a spy.

01:14:07:23 – 01:14:30:23
Dan LeFebvre
So which tells you you kind of some a bit about who he who he was as a person to that he would even do that. But, before I go to the next question, I will say that that was a good job working around your, little plot line there. But, if somebody’s watching this, go pick up Rob’s book to find out that little nugget and that little plot line there.

01:14:31:00 – 01:14:57:21
Dan LeFebvre
But if we go back to this movie, one of the core plot points in the movie revolves around this, this massacre. And I mentioned, Colonel William Davis before, and we never see the massacre in the movie because it’s before the timeline. But the biggest clue that I saw in the movie is, I think it’s about an hour or so into the movie, and there’s a singular mention to something called the Quantrill Massacre, where men, women and children were killed in Lawrence, Kansas, and then the woods knew about it, according to the movie.

01:14:57:27 – 01:15:16:21
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s why in the movie’s timeline, Colonel Davis is now running for a seat in the Senate, and he kind of wants to hide that he was involved in this massacre. And so that seems to be his motivation for hiring hitmen to track down the woods and kill them. Is there any truth to the movie’s telling of this massacre?

01:15:16:24 – 01:15:40:29
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, the the massacre itself was absolutely true. And, it was, I mean, it was national news. It was extremely well known. I wasn’t like you. I think I wasn’t totally clear because it was so. Well known why he was trying to like, I’m not. Either I missed it or maybe it just wasn’t totally well explained.

01:15:40:29 – 01:15:52:14
Rob Hilliard
But why? Colonel Davis was worried about being associated with the massacre. Unless it was. The implication, I think, was that he had somehow ordered it or planned it.

01:15:52:16 – 01:16:01:29
Dan LeFebvre
That was the impression I got was he was basically responsible for it, and now he’s trying to get a seat in the Senate and he’s not going to get votes. If that was the impression I got from the when the movie explained. Yeah.

01:16:02:02 – 01:16:25:04
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. So anyway, I’m, I like to swing back around to that at the end, but just to give me the facts and figures here on, the, this is one of those, some of your listeners may know a lot of Civil War battles had two names, and that was because the newspapers in the South, used, I’m trying remember, the right way.

01:16:25:08 – 01:16:45:10
Rob Hilliard
They use stream names. And then the northern newspapers tended to use, like the closest, the closest town to it or mine on the backwards. But anyway, so you’ll see, like Manassas and Bull Run, it’s the same battle to the. This one, has two different names, but it depended on which side of the line you were sitting on.

01:16:45:10 – 01:17:16:27
Rob Hilliard
So if you were, southern sympathizer or specifically in Missouri, it was called quantiles raid. If you were a northern sympathizer, or in Kansas, it was called the Lawrence massacre. So take your pick. But it was very real event. It happened on August 21st, 1863. And the specifics of it are that a group of raiders, or again, prioritized.

01:17:16:29 – 01:17:43:12
Rob Hilliard
You’re on they were also known as bushwhackers, which is a term that we talked about in the, talked about the Pinkertons, or or guerrillas. So Cantrell’s raiders were about 400 men rode into Kansas and basically just started shooting people and then, and let the town on fire. So they killed somewhere between 160 and 190 people.

01:17:43:23 – 01:18:07:10
Rob Hilliard
All of those were civilians. They were not this was not soldiers versus soldiers, which is what made it, so terrible, what made national news. Some of those were, free blacks who lived in, in Lawrence at the time. And part of what precipitated this, I mean, this is like a you could put somebody probably does teach a whole college course on this.

01:18:07:10 – 01:18:34:18
Rob Hilliard
So I’m not going to give it justice even close. But, Kansas was a free state. Missouri was a slave state. That was the, Missouri compromise that you may or may not have learned about in history class where you’re in high school. And but Lawrence, specifically within Kansas, was known for a long time as kind of a bastion of, anti-slavery, kind of a stronghold of anti-slavery.

01:18:34:21 – 01:18:59:03
Rob Hilliard
And so there were a lot of free box there. So when controls man rode in, they were specifically, looking for black people, mostly black men, but black people who they were, shooting. And then, then they’d beyond that, though, of course, they killed many whites as well. I don’t I wasn’t able to find a breakdown of how many of you trace.

01:18:59:03 – 01:19:27:03
Rob Hilliard
It doesn’t matter. They killed almost 200 people. And burned most of the town to the ground. So, so what precipitated that? Again, this has been going back and forth for a couple of years, even prior to the war. And and then during the war, the Kansas regiments that were known as the Jayhawks, which had a college for both the and so, college sports fans will recognize that name for University of Kansas today.

01:19:27:22 – 01:19:53:11
Rob Hilliard
They conducted race in the Missouri prior to this, 1863 raid. And, so and that was really back and forth. I mean, the Missouri, the Bushwhackers were coming across and killing people, killing soldiers. A lot of this was, as I said, guerrilla warfare kind of back and forth, not, not organized set piece battles like we picture in the East.

01:19:54:07 – 01:20:21:02
Rob Hilliard
And that actually gave, rise to the term bleeding Kansas and, that was used widely in newspapers at the time. But it gives you an indication of just how bad it really was. One other thing to note. There is about a week before the Lawrence raid, there was, a Union prison in Kansas City where they were holding, Confederate, mostly women.

01:20:21:04 – 01:20:49:28
Rob Hilliard
And, they were, as you might expect, many of them were relatives of the bushwhackers. And tragically, the building collapsed, that it really knew what caused that. It wasn’t it wasn’t deliberate, but it collapsed and it killed five women. And among these, one was the sister of a guy known as bloody Bill Henderson, who was the most famous or infamous of Charles Raiders.

01:20:50:01 – 01:21:19:12
Rob Hilliard
And, and then another woman who was a cousin of Cole Younger. He later rode with, and Rob banks with just jacked. So that all and actually, speaking of Jesse James, he certainly had associations with, Raiders and probably was one of them may not have been present at the Lawrence massacre. But he definitely was part of that guerrilla.

01:21:19:22 – 01:21:24:13
Rob Hilliard
It was brother, brother Frank. Both were part of those guerrilla, outfits.

01:21:24:16 – 01:21:29:21
Dan LeFebvre
And that must have been then how they got connected to be the James Younger gang.

01:21:29:23 – 01:22:00:27
Rob Hilliard
Exactly. That’s exactly right. And, so the reason I mentioned the the prison collapse is that might have been part of the motivation for the attack on Lawrence because, you know, kind of a revenge factor. But there were at this point, by 1863, several years worth of, extremely bloody incidents that also prevented it. So, but because that was just the week before, it may have been, you know, it might have been the immediate, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

01:22:00:27 – 01:22:24:08
Dan LeFebvre
It’s also well, at the end of the movie, there’s there’s a final showdown for Katherine’s Trail of vengeance. Throughout the movie, she kills Zeke, who is one of the other, hitmen for Colonel Davis. Accidentally shoots Scoble from the long distance. Shot through the window seem to be aimed at Frank, but. And then she does get closer and actually shoots Frank in the head to kill him.

01:22:24:14 – 01:22:48:23
Dan LeFebvre
She also shoots Colonel Davis point blank range in a showdown with him. And then the movie ends by implying that she thought John Scoble was killed by her accidental shot. But then the movie fast forwards. Many years later, and the very end of the movie we see John Scoble is alive as he’s watching Katherine and her now son Caleb Junior from afar.

01:22:48:26 – 01:22:52:24
Dan LeFebvre
How historically accurate is the way the movie ends?

01:22:52:26 – 01:23:10:15
Rob Hilliard
Well, it’s, I’m not going to pick it apart because it’s a fictional story in an official, so, it’s not. Yeah. And other than Scoble and all the characters he mentioned there were made up for the purposes of the film, so I can’t say, you know, entirely accurate.

01:23:10:15 – 01:23:11:21
Dan LeFebvre
Just not historically.

01:23:11:24 – 01:23:39:17
Rob Hilliard
Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They can basically, it’s their story. They can end in any way they want. Yeah, yeah. The, the, the one thing, that, as I said, we were watching this, my wife and son and I were watching, and, when Catherine picks up the Henry rifle and she’s kind of aiming in the window, and, as you said, it was kind of a long distance shot, and I might have even said it out loud.

01:23:39:17 – 01:23:59:03
Rob Hilliard
I certainly thought it. I’m like, she’s going to shoot Scoble if she takes that shot. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. So, of course I was very offended at that, since he’s he’s my guy. I didn’t wanna see him shot. But, but, yeah, at the end, you know, they did show, as any good, heroic character.

01:23:59:03 – 01:24:22:08
Rob Hilliard
Does he? He survived it. He pulled through. So, but, yeah, I’ve touched on this previously, but we don’t know anything about, what happened was go after the war. We don’t, you know, we don’t know how long you live where he lived. Anything like, we don’t know if he got shot in the chest and bounced back from it.

01:24:22:09 – 01:24:36:10
Rob Hilliard
And it came back to check on her or not. So, yeah, like I said, it’s it’s a, you know, a fictional story and a fictional ending. So there, it was up to the writers to decide how they wanted to make that one play out.

01:24:36:12 – 01:24:57:01
Dan LeFebvre
I felt like maybe, maybe, maybe they will do a sequel to this, but I felt like when they were talking about his wife, I almost assumed at the end. But when I was watching The end there, I was like, oh, he’s going to reunite with his wife somewhere or something like that, and it’s going to be, you know, him kind of having a happily ever after, I guess.

01:24:57:01 – 01:25:05:13
Dan LeFebvre
I didn’t really expect him to come back and find Catherine randomly after that. But I guess that’s, you know.

01:25:05:15 – 01:25:08:14
Rob Hilliard
Like I said, they can make any ending they, they want. That’s their movie.

01:25:08:14 – 01:25:32:12
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s true. Well, as we wrap up our discussion today, I would like to shift from the movie storyline to another storyline. We talked about a little bit featuring John Scoble. I’m talking course about your historical novel called In Freedom Shadow. There’s a link in the show notes, and as a quick tangent of my own, I know there are people in my audience who work in the feature film industry, so if that’s you, I will highly recommend reaching out to Rob to turn in Freedom Shadow into a movie.

01:25:32:12 – 01:25:37:14
Dan LeFebvre
That would be a fantastic movie. But, before I let you go, Rob, can you give us an overview of your book?

01:25:37:16 – 01:26:03:28
Rob Hilliard
Sure. It’s, I feel like I’ve already kind of done that a little bit, and I don’t want to I don’t want to bore anybody by repeating it, but, it does. It takes the the bit, the we know, the true story about John Scoble from Pinkerton’s book and, lays that on the broader context of what was going on in the Civil War, in the Civil War at that time.

01:26:04:25 – 01:26:25:07
Rob Hilliard
I love bashing Pinkerton as a as a writer. I’ll know one more time here before we wrap up, but what, another criticism that I’m the only one who has this that people have. And reading him is everything seem to happen in isolation. So it was like, well, you know, they were doing this in Richmond during this time period.

01:26:25:07 – 01:27:02:01
Rob Hilliard
And it’s like, well, the Richmond was virtually under attack in the spring of 18. So, by, by the Northern Army during the Peninsula Campaign. And he I don’t think the words Peninsula campaign actually appear in his book. And so anyway, point of all that is, I tried to take that the true story as kind of the backbone of the book and, and then build it into something that looks at the larger context of what was going on and, and puts a little more meat on the bones to tell Scoble story.

01:27:03:00 – 01:27:28:07
Rob Hilliard
And really fleshed out, and, you know, are already talked about this a little bit, but try to get into what were his motivations, why might he have done some of these things? A couple of these people who get just a word or two mention, in Pinkerton’s, story or, the whole Carrie lot, Patty lot and thing.

01:27:28:07 – 01:27:56:24
Rob Hilliard
Like, who was Carrie Latin and what did she do? Why did she do it? And how did she interact with Scoble? There’s very little of that. Almost none in Pinkerton’s book. So try to build, a larger, fuller story. Fictional course, because we don’t know, what what actually happened between those lines. But, I try to fill in some of the, some of the space in between with, with that story.

01:27:56:26 – 01:28:00:13
Dan LeFebvre
And make sure to add a link to that in the show notes. Thanks again so much for your time, Rob.

01:28:00:29 – 01:28:15:06
Rob Hilliard
I appreciate you having me back on. I wasn’t expecting it would be this soon, but we didn’t know that, Trail of Vengeance was coming out and that it was going to feature, John Scoble, that he was going to pop up in, in pop culture so soon. So, yeah, thanks very much.

01:28:15:09 – 01:28:32:04
Dan LeFebvre
Actually, one I do have one, since you mentioned that, since you were just on we talked about the Pinkertons and now a Trail of Vengeance. Would you say that? Which one would you say does a better job of portraying John Scoble and the Pinkertons? He’s not even named Scoble. He’s John Bell. And we’ve talked about both a little bit.

01:28:32:04 – 01:28:35:24
Dan LeFebvre
Do you think Trail of Vengeance did a better job bringing John’s Gospel to life?

01:28:36:03 – 01:28:56:22
Rob Hilliard
I think they did. I mean, in fairness to the writers of the Pinkertons and I know, I, I know I lit into them pretty good when we, when we did this earlier episodes, for their complete disregard for facts. But they, you know, as you said, they didn’t name their character John Scoble. They called him John Bell.

01:28:57:10 – 01:29:40:10
Rob Hilliard
And I think in retrospect, part of the reason for that might have been that because, well, if we’re not tied to this character, no, we that to be tied to his real life storyline, either we can kind of go off whatever direction we want, which they assuredly did. Let it but as I said earlier in this interview, you know, kudos to, to Trail Vengeance for and the writers and the director for, really toeing the line on the, on the Scoble story and, and sticking to, like I said before, almost verbatim, you know, what we know about about Scoble from, from Pinkerton’s work.

01:29:40:13 – 01:29:52:18
Dan LeFebvre
It’s it’s just fascinating that we we don’t know much. So there’s going to be you’re you’re almost going to have to have a story like this that’s made up because we don’t know much. But it is great to hear that what we do know. They did a good job.

01:29:52:20 – 01:30:09:07
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, yeah. And as I said, the I can’t criticize him because I did the exact same thing. Right? I took what was known and filled in the gaps in between. They took a different approach by taking that character and fast forwarding him a few years past the end of Civil War and then creating a story around him there.

01:30:09:07 – 01:30:23:12
Rob Hilliard
But still, you know, having some touch points back to those known, to the known facts. So, you know, two different approaches. But like you said, when they’re so little known, if you’re going to tell a story and have them in there, you got to have something to tell.

01:30:23:14 – 01:30:25:28
Dan LeFebvre
Thanks again so much for your time round.

01:30:26:01 – 01:30:33:23
Rob Hilliard
Appreciate you having me on, Dan. Thanks very much as always.

00:02:01:28 – 00:02:25:24
Dan LeFebvre
The movie starts off in Hong Kong in 1949. Since we know from history that Bruce Lee was born on November 27th, 1940, we can assume he’s 8 or 9, depending on when in 1949. This is happening in the movie. But almost right away we see the young Bruce Lee start training one on one with the IT man. Can you give us some background on Bruce Lee as a child?

00:02:26:00 – 00:02:30:07
Dan LeFebvre
And when he started training with Japan, like we see in the movie?

00:02:30:09 – 00:02:49:09
Matthew Polly
Sure. But first I just want to correct one thing that really annoys me about the first part of this movie and annoyed the Lee family, which is that, he wasn’t an only child living along with his father. He had a mother. He had three older siblings and a younger brother. So they were a, a big family.

00:02:49:12 – 00:03:09:03
Matthew Polly
And so this movie depicts him as almost being, you know, an orphan child with just a father around. So that’s the first thing that they, for some odd reason, decided to do. The second thing was, yeah, it. Man, he didn’t begin formal study of martial arts under it, man, as his master until he was 16 years old.

00:03:09:06 – 00:03:41:15
Matthew Polly
So they pushed this up very early. That’s fine that they did that. As far as Hollywood biopics go. This isn’t the worst, poetic license that they took. But no, he, the reason he started studying, kung fu was actually because he was in a gang, like, kind of a middle class gang. We weren’t, like, selling drugs or anything, but, he loved getting into fights, and so they would go around and start trouble on the streets of Hong Kong, which back in the 1950s was a much rougher place than it is today.

00:03:41:18 – 00:03:59:15
Matthew Polly
And he met this older boy by the name of William Chung, who was a better fighter than he was. And Bruce was so competitive, he hated the idea anyone was better, so he wanted to see why. And the reason was because William Chung was studying Wing Chun under it. Man. And so Bruce Lee said, hey, can I learn with you?

00:03:59:17 – 00:04:16:01
Matthew Polly
And he went, man. And Wong Shu Long, who was your senior student? And he said, I want to study with you. How long before I can beat up William Chung? So his his purpose in studying Wing Chun was not to like, protect himself from bullies. It was to become a better street fighter.

00:04:16:01 – 00:04:25:04
Dan LeFebvre
So it had nothing to do with in the movie. It’s like his father is the one that leads him there and kind of hold his hand. Yes, to the to the training. So not that at all.

00:04:25:06 – 00:04:52:02
Matthew Polly
Not that at all, in fact. So what is interesting is when Bruce was 7 or 8, his father tried to teach him tai chi because Bruce was a hyperactive kid. I joked that if he’d been born later, they’d have put him on Ritalin. So, Bruce didn’t like tai chi because it was for old people. And in fact, when he went to study Wing Chun, he didn’t tell his father because his father was so upset with him already for getting into all these fights.

00:04:52:05 – 00:05:00:04
Matthew Polly
And so he kept it a secret. And when his father found out, he was studying Wing Chun, he was furious. So it’s the complete opposite of how they told it in the story.

00:05:00:07 – 00:05:20:17
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned, getting into a fight. And that leads into the next question, because according to the movie, this is, I think 1961, there’s a fight and a scene at the text on the screen tells us it’s at the Lantern Festival, and there’s some soldiers there. One of them happens to be the nephew of the assistant police inspector of Kowloon.

00:05:20:20 – 00:05:41:24
Dan LeFebvre
And Bruce gets into this fight with them. He ends up sending this sailor to the hospital with a punctured lung after getting into a fight. And this is when Bruce’s dad. And it’s. It’s interesting that you mention that there’s no other family around because, yeah, again, you don’t see anybody else. It’s just him and his dad. They’re talking, and he tells Bruce that he has to leave Hong Kong.

00:05:41:27 – 00:06:03:29
Dan LeFebvre
And this is when, in the movie, we see he takes Bruce to this, like, secret room or secret area. And, here’s a birth certificate. Your name is Bruce Lee, and you have to go to America now. And he mentions, I should say, he mentions that he was on tour there with the, Cannes Opera Company in 1940.

00:06:04:01 – 00:06:09:02
Dan LeFebvre
So is that why Bruce Lee left Hong Kong to go to America again?

00:06:09:02 – 00:06:27:03
Matthew Polly
What they do a lot in this movie is they take some elements that are true, and then they stretch it to the point of breaking, and then they kind of put it back together. So Bruce’s father did tours, with the Cantonese opera troupe in America in 1940, and Bruce was born there. So he was an American citizen.

00:06:27:06 – 00:06:47:06
Matthew Polly
He knew that before. Before the great reveal. But they, you know, they didn’t make a big deal. It didn’t matter to him. He didn’t think about it very much. What had happened was that Bruce Lee, after he started studying Wing Chun, wanted to go learn how to be better at it. And so he would go on the streets of Hong Kong and bump into people.

00:06:47:08 – 00:07:08:20
Matthew Polly
And if they got angry, then he’d start a fight with them. And so he was basically this punk who was like starting fights with people. This show, how good he was. And also to practice and get better. And one day he bumped into this Chinese teenage kid, and the kid fought back and he beat him up. And the kid’s father was an important person.

00:07:08:20 – 00:07:20:00
Matthew Polly
And that kid’s father went to the police. He didn’t fight in the British soldiers. He had a lantern festival and beat up five of them doing acrobatics. Which, by the way, he didn’t know how to do Acrobat.

00:07:20:00 – 00:07:22:23
Dan LeFebvre
Ripping his shirt off in the process. He forgot that.

00:07:22:25 – 00:07:45:03
Matthew Polly
Yeah, you ripped up her off, and then the, like, several backflips. So that was like Jackie Chan. Bruce Lee was a Wing Chun guy, and they didn’t do flips. But anyway, so he didn’t fight white guys. It was some Chinese kid from an important family. So the police had heard about Bruce. He had been in so many street fights that his name was on a list.

00:07:45:06 – 00:08:03:24
Matthew Polly
And so finally, the police went around to his parents and to his mother, actually, and said, if you don’t straighten him out, we’re going to have to arrest him. And that’s when they had the conversation, which you see in the movie. But it was the mother and father saying, look, things are going well. Bruce was failing out of high school.

00:08:03:27 – 00:08:14:14
Matthew Polly
It didn’t look like he had any job prospects. So they said, why don’t you go to American, straighten yourself out. And so that aspect is true. But, through the distortion of, Hollywood magic.

00:08:14:16 – 00:08:23:02
Dan LeFebvre
Why go to America then? Because in the movie, it’s like, oh, you love American cars, you love American things. So obviously America is is where you’re going to go.

00:08:23:04 – 00:08:45:15
Matthew Polly
It was America because he had an American passport. And so that was somewhere he could go. But also there was another reason, which was at that time, every American male of 18 years of age had to sign up for the draft. It was a law. And so if Bruce Lee didn’t sign up for the draft, his American citizenship could be revoked.

00:08:45:18 – 00:09:06:23
Matthew Polly
And so they also wanted to make sure that he secured this, because for people living in Hong Kong, which at that time was very third world, an American birth certificate, a citizenship had great value. And so if he secured that, then the family could theoretically move to America with him. And so this was something they didn’t want to lose.

00:09:06:26 – 00:09:11:01
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah. The movie doesn’t mention any of that side of it. No.

00:09:11:03 – 00:09:12:12
Matthew Polly
No.

00:09:12:14 – 00:09:33:19
Dan LeFebvre
Well, once Bruce arrives in America in the movie, he’s in San Francisco, and we see him as a dishwasher in a restaurant called gussy Yang’s here almost right away. He attracts the attention of a waitress named April, which then leads to a fight. Another fight where he’s outnumbered, with the cooks. They’re led by someone named Mr. Ho.

00:09:33:21 – 00:09:55:02
Dan LeFebvre
Of course, vers is a much better fighter than the cooks, so he defeats them pretty easily. But Miss Yang gets upset, fires Bruce, but then gives him two weeks pay, two weeks severance on top of that, and then hands him some extra money as a loan. She suggests that either he can just go blow his money and then wind up.

00:09:55:02 – 00:10:11:27
Dan LeFebvre
There is a dishwasher. I think she says something to the effect of I can always use a good dishwasher, or he should go get an education. Now, if were to believe the movie, Bruce seems to go to America and then get in trouble right away. Is any of that true?

00:10:12:01 – 00:10:31:11
Matthew Polly
One thing I do like about that scene is the, owner of the restaurant. And it’s true, he did work as a dishwasher in a restaurant called Ruby Chiles, and the owner was a woman by the name of Ruby Chao. And on screen, she’s played by Nancy Kwan, who is a famous Hong Kong actress who was also a personal friend of Bruce Lee.

00:10:31:14 – 00:10:58:17
Matthew Polly
So it was it’s nice to see a personal friend of Bruce Lee play a character in the movie. That’s the best part of that scene, actually, Bruce came to America. And Ruby Chao, husband was friends with Bruce’s father. That’s how he got a job in the restaurant. They put him up there. But Bruce, actually, because his father and the owner’s husband were friends, thought he would just go nuts live there.

00:10:58:18 – 00:11:18:15
Matthew Polly
He didn’t realize he was going to have to do scut work. And so he was refused this. But he had to do the worst jobs and the restaurant dishwashing, cleaning up. And that they treated him like a servant because he actually came from a well-to-do family in Hong Kong, and he never had to do. He had servants in Hong Kong, so he never had to do any of this kind of work.

00:11:18:18 – 00:11:41:00
Matthew Polly
And so he would complain loudly that he was being treated like an indentured servant. And all the other cooks were annoyed by this because they didn’t come from this kind of rich background, and they thought he was a snotty little brat. And so there were a couple times where he said something and apparently once one of the cooks picked up a knife and threatened him, and Bruce said, come on, come get me.

00:11:41:03 – 00:11:52:19
Matthew Polly
And then it ended there. So they took that moment, which is true. Which is? Bruce shot his mouth off, and somebody challenged him with a butcher’s knife, and then they turned it into a whole fight scene.

00:11:52:25 – 00:11:57:20
Dan LeFebvre
Going out and in the alley behind the restaurant. And this whole whole fight scene there.

00:11:57:22 – 00:12:16:06
Matthew Polly
Exactly. And that’s actually one of the things Bruce Lee’s life has been turned into many different sort of projects, and they inevitably try to turn his life into a kung fu movie. And that’s one of the problems, is like, he want to turn it into a genre kung fu movie. So you take things that are kind of true, and then you turn it into these big fight scenes.

00:12:16:10 – 00:12:23:11
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, you have to find somewhere in there to to throw in those fight scenes to keep the action in the movie, because people are expecting it at that point.

00:12:23:13 – 00:12:29:26
Matthew Polly
So they have such generic constriction that they’re they’re forced into, and so they try to bend the biography to the genre.

00:12:29:29 – 00:12:55:08
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, I see, I see well, in the movie, we never to my recollection, I don’t remember seeing or hearing any dialog necessarily about where Bruce goes to get an education. After this, we see him on some sort of a college campus, and then there’s another another fight here. And it happens with somebody named Joe Henderson. Bruce is working out in the gym one day and Joe comes in.

00:12:55:15 – 00:13:14:14
Dan LeFebvre
He spurts some racist remarks and picks a fight with Bruce. Bruce again pretty easily defeats Joe and the three other guys that he’s with. He’s always outnumbered in these fights. And then after the fight, a couple of the guys come up to him and ask, can you, can you teach me how to fight? I want to learn. Learn what you did.

00:13:14:16 – 00:13:44:07
Dan LeFebvre
A little bit later, we see, Linda Emery. She enters the movie as the only woman in Bruce’s class. That’s kind of how the movie sets up that he goes from, not basically. He was a dishwasher, and then he goes to get an education, and then he starts teaching. And then, of course, meeting Linda. So how accurate was that where he went from not teaching to teaching his his martial arts to then meeting Linda?

00:13:44:07 – 00:13:47:28
Dan LeFebvre
Was she one of the first students that he had in the US?

00:13:48:00 – 00:14:12:08
Matthew Polly
No. So, they again, they play with the time frame. So what happened was when he first got to America, he was already intent on going to college. They signed him up for a essentially a remedial or vocational high school to get his high school diploma because he hadn’t graduated from high school, Hong Kong. So he went to this high school for older students, vocational education.

00:14:12:10 – 00:14:32:24
Matthew Polly
And in, in his class was, a man, African-American by the name of Jesse Glover. Who later shows up in the movie is it’s kind of best buddy. He actually is the first student of Bruce Lee, and he had wanted to learn kung fu, but other Chinese teachers wouldn’t teach him. And he heard that Bruce Lee knew it.

00:14:32:26 – 00:14:57:13
Matthew Polly
And so he befriended Bruce Lee. And Bruce Lee actually didn’t really want to teach him that much, but because no one else, he didn’t have anything else to do but washing dishes. Jesse Glover became his first student, and Jesse loved him. He thought he was great. So Jesse told his, roommate, who became Bruce Lee’s second student. And then they told a couple other friends, and they became Bruce Lee’s third and fourth student.

00:14:57:16 – 00:15:14:08
Matthew Polly
And then Bruce started doing things like going and giving demonstrations at high schools to gain more students. And at these demonstrations, he would invite a tough guy in the crowd up on stage and say, hey, try to hit me. And they would try to hit him and he would block all their punches and tie them up in knots.

00:15:14:11 – 00:15:40:07
Matthew Polly
And then those people would become his students. So they took that and turned that into a fight scene on the college campus. But before he got to college and he went to the University of Washington, he had already had about 10 or 15, students who were also best friends, and they trained in parks, etc.. And then he opened a school in his first year when he was at the University of Washington, and he had a school running.

00:15:40:09 – 00:15:49:07
Matthew Polly
And one of Lynda’s friends, female friends was one of his students, and she told him about Bruce Lee, and that’s how she became one of its students.

00:15:49:14 – 00:15:54:26
Dan LeFebvre
But she did eventually become one of his students there, but introduced through one of her friends. That was. That’s right.

00:15:54:26 – 00:16:06:06
Matthew Polly
Okay, so that’s absolutely true. And they and they did. She was one of his students. And he started to take a shine to her. And she was sort of gaga for him from the very beginning. And that’s how they ended up dating.

00:16:06:09 – 00:16:27:09
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Okay. So then that leads into the next part, because in the movie we see when once they start dating, the movie very heavily implies that it was Linda’s idea for Bruce to actually start his own school, not just students, but have his own school. We see like a a rundown building that, Bruce is going to fix up.

00:16:27:09 – 00:16:41:08
Dan LeFebvre
And in the in the movie you see on the the glass pane of the door, it says it’s the Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute. Was it Linda’s idea for Bruce to start a school? I’m assuming not in San Francisco, but perhaps in Washington.

00:16:41:11 – 00:17:15:15
Matthew Polly
No, it wasn’t her idea. So, and one thing you have to know is that, how this movie came about, which is, Linda Lee ran the Bruce Lee estate and Universal Pictures bought all the rights to Bruce Lee from her as part of an overall deal. So the movie rights, the TV rights, the game video game rights, the image rights, and also the her book in order to turn it into this movie, because they were going to make Bruce Lee part of, you know, like Spider-Man, one of their franchises.

00:17:15:17 – 00:17:43:20
Matthew Polly
And so because it’s based on her book, this is really her story of who Bruce Lee was, and it’s from their perspective, which is why this is kind of a romance, because this is Linda’s version of Bruce Lee, how she met him, how it did. And of course, with Hollywood magic, they make her sort of a, you know, a kind of feminist in the 1990s model as opposed to what she was, which was like kind of an Eisenhower girl who was very strong but quiet.

00:17:43:23 – 00:18:02:24
Matthew Polly
And so, you know, Lauren Holly, who’s beautiful place her is this kind of spunky thing. But actually, Linda was much quieter as a person. Bruce Lee already had opened a school. She went to the school that he had opened, and he already had the idea of making it like McDonald’s, like a franchise across the country.

00:18:02:26 – 00:18:09:02
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah, because that’s something that she mentions to the McDonald’s key there of franchising it.

00:18:09:04 – 00:18:13:07
Matthew Polly
So they gave that to her to make her sort of a stronger female lead.

00:18:13:07 – 00:18:40:24
Dan LeFebvre
Basically. Okay, okay. Well, once he starts the school, this kind leads back to something that you had talked about earlier. Bruce, he gets in trouble for teaching what they call Galo or Westerners. The. We never really find out who they are, really. But the other Chinese martial arts teachers around just. He goes into some room and they’re playing poker or something around, you know, around the table.

00:18:40:24 – 00:19:01:03
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah, they’re playing around the table and, yeah, you can’t you can’t teach non-Chinese ways. Yeah. I think the movie just calls them the elders, you know, and they’re going to enforce this rule. And the way they’re going to enforce it is by pitting Bruce Lee against who we presume is their fighting champion, Johnny Sun.

00:19:01:06 – 00:19:24:03
Dan LeFebvre
And in this fight, Bruce beats Johnny. But then at the very last moment, just as Bruce is walking away, Johnny has kind of a cheap shot. He kicks Bruce in the back, breaking his back and sending Bruce to the hospital. That’s how the movie sets this up. Did this fight with Johnny Sun actually happened because Bruce Lee wanted to teach anyone who wanted to learn?

00:19:24:06 – 00:19:40:12
Matthew Polly
Yeah. So again, this is one of those this is one of the great myths of Bruce Lee, that this is why this happened. It’s it is one of it. The fight did happen. It is one of the most famous, kung fu fights ever. The real story is that Bruce Lee was, opening a school in Oakland.

00:19:40:12 – 00:20:03:14
Matthew Polly
He had one in Seattle. And this was going to be a second part of his franchise, part of his great empire. McDonald’s kung fu empire that he was going to build. And he was having trouble getting students to Oakland because all the country students were in San Francisco, because that had the largest Chinatown. Now, there were people who knew that he was teaching white people, and there were people who didn’t think it was a good idea.

00:20:03:17 – 00:20:34:11
Matthew Polly
Chinese people at that time, for example, Ruby Chao told him not to do it, but they there was no elders there that Chinatown didn’t have a system of elders who enforce their laws. They were just people who like, you know, between each other. We’re saying that’s really stupid, that you shouldn’t teach Grillo. What actually happened was he was giving a performance in San Francisco at a Chinese theater with a large crowd, and he was demonstrating his version of kung fu wing Chung, his style.

00:20:34:14 – 00:20:57:17
Matthew Polly
And while giving the demonstration, he said, my style is better than everybody else’s style. And he also said, you’ve got a lot of old masters. These old tigers have no teeth, basically, that their styles are useless and mine’s the best. So you should come study with me now. Every martial artist thinks his style is the best, but you’re not supposed to say it out loud because it gets people pissed off.

00:20:57:19 – 00:21:17:24
Matthew Polly
And that’s what happened. They got pissed off. And so there were a couple of young 20 something kids who were mad that Bruce Lee had said this. And so they started talking amongst themselves, and they got this waiter who also studied kung fu and wanted to open his own school by the name of Wong Jack man to challenge formerly challenged Bruce Lee.

00:21:17:26 – 00:21:34:07
Matthew Polly
And so they went over and they challenged him and Bruce Lee said, yeah, I’ll fight him, but you have to fight me at my school. Another thing, the movie gets wrong. And so they went over to his school. And by the way, when they went over to a school, his wife was there, his friend was there.

00:21:34:07 – 00:21:55:11
Matthew Polly
He didn’t sneak off and had this fight. And he won the fight fairly quickly. It was within three minutes, at the end of the fight, though, he beats up that he beat up Wong deck man. Wong Jack man didn’t break his back, but that’s a total fallacy. What happened was later many like 4 or 5 years later, Bruce Lee was doing an exercise.

00:21:55:11 – 00:22:16:15
Matthew Polly
He hadn’t warmed up for it, where he’s picking dead weight off the ground. And, he strained his back. So he did have a back injury. They just collapsed the time frame, and then they had Wong Jack man sneakily break his back at the end of a fight that he lost. And so they’re combining several elements in order to sort of make the story more exciting.

00:22:16:16 – 00:22:25:16
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Okay. So that’s a common technique that a lot of movies do to compress a timeline of an entire lifetime into just, you know, an hour, hour and a half or so.

00:22:25:22 – 00:22:34:24
Matthew Polly
I should say, though, that, when Wong Jack Mann saw the movie, he was so furious that he sued Linda Lee and Universal Studios for $2 million.

00:22:34:24 – 00:22:35:20
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, wow.

00:22:35:22 – 00:22:58:26
Matthew Polly
So that went to court. And the court ruled that he was somewhat of a public figure, so they threw it out. But he became a very respected, martial arts instructor in San Francisco. And for his whole career, he became the guy who broke Bruce Lee’s back in a fight. And so but his his students hate this movie, and they hate like Bruce Lee.

00:22:59:03 – 00:23:05:09
Matthew Polly
So this has become a lot like within this little world. This is like a really contentious issue. What actually happened at that fight?

00:23:05:12 – 00:23:28:12
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. So as far as the movie is concerned and I it sounds like he did have some sort of a back strain, not necessarily a broken back, but there’s a montage in the movie where Bruce is in rehabilitation and as he’s in rehabilitation, he can barely move. And he takes this idea of a new form of martial arts to Linda.

00:23:28:17 – 00:23:54:18
Dan LeFebvre
And this is where we get, you know, Linda’s taking notes, sketches. We see her typing it out on a typewriter. I pause the movie to see the title of it, just called The Book. And we know from history that, of course, Bruce Lee really did write a book called Tao Ju Ji Kondo. But the publication date on that I looked was in 1975, after Bruce Lee’s death.

00:23:54:20 – 00:24:13:03
Dan LeFebvre
And we see a scene in the movie where Linda is so excited she comes and you can see the book is, you know, oh, your books, your books here. So how accurate is the movie in depicting this montage of how Bruce Lee came up with Jeet Kune Do by dictating it to Linda while he was in rehabilitation?

00:24:13:06 – 00:24:34:29
Matthew Polly
Yeah. So again, time frame and compression, they tried to get all of this into a very tight space. Bruce Lee came up with the idea of G condo in 1967, 1968, and his injury wasn’t until 1969. So he had already had the idea himself, and he’d been working on it for actually the Wong Jack man fight when that ended.

00:24:35:02 – 00:24:56:26
Matthew Polly
That’s true. He was upset by how it did, and that led to his break with Wang Chong and his desire to form a new style. So for maybe 3 or 4 years, he’d already been taking notes about GI Kondo, and he had the name for it, and he had already started teaching it before he had his injury. That, said, Linda Lee was extraordinarily helpful to his career.

00:24:56:26 – 00:25:17:22
Matthew Polly
She supported him all the way. She was one of his students. He was a pretty good martial artist. So they’re giving her a little more credit or specific credit than she deserves for this. But she was very much part of his life. And I think what’s interesting, people should know, the Daljit Kondo’s the bestselling martial arts book of all time.

00:25:17:24 – 00:25:39:15
Matthew Polly
I’ve written three. It’s none of them have sold anywhere near what that has so all respect. But, basically what happened is they went through and they found a box full of notebooks, and they just took those notebooks and splice them together. And that’s the book after he died. So he never finished the book? He didn’t write it.

00:25:39:15 – 00:25:54:20
Matthew Polly
It’s not. If you look at it, it’s not actually a book. It’s just a series of notes and sayings that he scribbled through, like, you know, eight notebooks as you do when you’re prepping to try to write something. But he never got around to the actual writing of it. He just got to the research phase.

00:25:54:25 – 00:26:21:14
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, okay. Yeah. Again, that’s a very different picture than him dictating it all and and having it all typed out and and published and received back in his lifetime. Okay. Okay. So I’m assuming based on what you had had said before because after this we see Bruce Lee go proving his new fighting style. And he does this going to you know, pretty much it.

00:26:21:17 – 00:26:39:07
Dan LeFebvre
Remember if it was a high school auditorium or where it was. But he goes to this auditorium, he’s like pretty much pick out the I’ll fight anybody in this room, prove that my style is better. And you mentioned something earlier similar to that. Of course, the movie uses this as an example of bringing Johnny Son back and he defeats him in under 60s.

00:26:39:07 – 00:26:44:12
Dan LeFebvre
I’m assuming that particular instance didn’t happen.

00:26:44:14 – 00:27:10:23
Matthew Polly
Now. So he, from the moment he opened his first school, he would go give demonstrations. And what I think is interesting about that is that’s how he created the Bruce Lee character that we see on screen is he did it in essentially like a stand up comic working his material. He would go on stage and give demonstrations of what his style was, and he would tell jokes and he would be funny, but he also be serious and invite somebody up.

00:27:10:25 – 00:27:34:18
Matthew Polly
And he got to see from the crowds what worked and what didn’t. And he invented himself as Bruce Lee, the kung fu master, on the sort of small stages of Seattle, Oakland and L.A. And so when you understand who Bruce Lee was, you understand somebody who had honed this persona, which was part him, of course, like any standup, but was also, were reaction to the crowd.

00:27:34:18 – 00:27:57:18
Matthew Polly
He knew what worked because he tested it. So he did go around and give these demonstrations. But he never he was always in control. And it was always like, throw a punch, I’ll block it. And never turned into a full fight. He did have a few fights with people who didn’t like him. There was a Japanese master, mat master, a Japanese karate student.

00:27:57:22 – 00:28:26:01
Matthew Polly
He fought and beaten like 20s. So Bruce Lee was a real fighter, and he could fight, but he never fought the Jackson Wong Jack man guy ever again. The guy who didn’t actually break his back. So, what? And and that scene leads up to him, his discovery in Hollywood. Right. What actually happened was he gave a performance in, Long Beach outside of LA, and there was a hairdresser there.

00:28:26:03 – 00:28:48:11
Matthew Polly
Who was a famous Hollywood hairdresser. And he saw the performance and was impressed by Bruce Lee. And then by the name of Jay Sebring. And Jay Sebring had a TV executive who was one of his clients talking about a new TV series he wanted to do with a Chinese actor who could do action. And so Jay Sebring put the TV producer together with Bruce Lee.

00:28:48:13 – 00:28:55:27
Matthew Polly
So one of his demonstrations did lead to his Hollywood career. But it wasn’t, 62nd fight to the death with someone.

00:28:56:00 – 00:29:17:08
Dan LeFebvre
I think it was, Bill Krieger was. Yes. Happened to be watching. One of the performances is, oh, hey, can you do this stuff in front of the camera? I’ve got a show called The Green Hornet. Let’s let’s do this. That’s pretty much how the movie shows his transition from martial arts to acting. Did he? When when he made that transition to acting, what happened to his schools?

00:29:17:08 – 00:29:26:29
Dan LeFebvre
Did he did he kind of put that part of his chapter of his life behind him and kind of shift over to acting? The movie kind of seems to imply that he did.

00:29:27:01 – 00:30:02:22
Matthew Polly
So he actually, after he got offered the role of Kato in The Green Hornet, he opened the school in Los Angeles. He did close his Oakland school because it didn’t have enough students. And then he had a friend running his Seattle school. So for the early parts of his Hollywood career, he basically still had two schools going, and, he did he did spend a fair amount of time initially, which is a lot, Los Angeles school because L.A. based school and taught some of the students there and that was he sort of had a bifurcated life.

00:30:02:22 – 00:30:10:21
Matthew Polly
He had his Hollywood life, and he still kept up his students. But eventually, by the time he becomes world famous, he closed all of the schools down.

00:30:10:25 – 00:30:33:17
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, okay. Yeah, that’s a lot of different irons in the fire to to keep going, especially spread across the different locations. Now, there’s one scene I want to ask you about because there’s Bruce Lee. He started his acting career, and we see a scene where he’s walking with Bill Krieger, and the two of them are coming up with an idea for a new show.

00:30:33:22 – 00:30:59:15
Dan LeFebvre
They’re talking back and forth, and as they’re doing that from the dialog, we start to get this idea that starts to take shape. It’ll it’ll be a Western starring a Chinese immigrant. He’s searching for his brother. Except he doesn’t use a gun. He uses kung fu, and they’re both just excited about this show. And then later, we see Bruce and Linda sitting at home watching a new TV show called Kung Fu starring David Carradine.

00:30:59:18 – 00:31:21:00
Dan LeFebvre
And you can you can just see that Bruce feels betrayed, like they they cast David Carradine and instead of him. So that’s how the movie sets up this idea that Bruce Lee and Bill Krieger came up with this idea for the show, and then it very heavily implies that David Carradine was cast over Bruce Lee for the lead role.

00:31:21:02 – 00:31:22:05
Dan LeFebvre
That happened.

00:31:22:07 – 00:31:46:00
Matthew Polly
So no, again, this is again, as this is one of the most annoying myths that continue to this day based on this movie. So the TV series Kung Fu was written by, two Jewish Brooklyn from Brooklyn, comedy writers from Brooklyn by the name of, Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander. They came up with the original idea. They sold it to, Warner Brothers.

00:31:46:02 – 00:32:07:00
Matthew Polly
And the producer was, Fred Weintraub, who is the Bill Krieger character. So he had this idea. He went to Bruce Lee and said, I have this idea. I hear you know, you, Ben Kato, what do you think about playing the lead? And then the idea is a movie died, and later got revived as a TV series.

00:32:07:00 – 00:32:35:02
Matthew Polly
It was originally supposed to be a feature movie. And so it got revived as a TV series. But by this time it was 1971, and Bruce Lee had already gone back to Hong Kong and made the big boss. And so after he finished The Big Boss, he flew to Hollywood and auditioned for the role. And the TV producer in charge decided probably didn’t want a casting agent guy anyway, but he felt that Bruce Lee’s accent was too thick.

00:32:35:04 – 00:33:00:09
Matthew Polly
And so the role went to David Carradine. So this wasn’t his idea? He didn’t write the script. He auditioned for the role and didn’t get it. There may have been some racism why he didn’t get it, but he didn’t leave Hollywood because of it. He’d already left Hollywood and gone to Hong Kong. So all of this is mixed up, and it’s becomes this huge myth which everyone tells, which is Hollywood was so racist.

00:33:00:11 – 00:33:13:03
Matthew Polly
Bruce Lee had to leave because they gave Kung fu to David Carradine and go to Hong Kong, and that it just doesn’t fit the chronology. Hollywood was racist. He did face racism, but this wasn’t the example that drove him to Hong Kong.

00:33:13:10 – 00:33:16:16
Dan LeFebvre
What what was his reason for going to Hong Kong then?

00:33:16:18 – 00:33:38:13
Matthew Polly
So, he was really frustrated with, the fact that he couldn’t get roles and the roles he was offered were really stereotypical, terrible roles, which you can imagine at that time. And so, he got offered, a two movie deal by a man named Raymond Chow, who had started Golden Harvest Studios, which was this upstart studio.

00:33:38:15 – 00:34:03:27
Matthew Polly
And initially Bruce blew him off because he still thought his Hollywood career was going to come to fruition. And then after a couple of years of it not going well, he changed his mind and signed the deal. But as soon as he signed the deal, he got this role in Long Street, which did really well. And so he felt like Hollywood was going to work out for him, but he needed the money.

00:34:03:29 – 00:34:28:01
Matthew Polly
He had bought a house in Brentwood that was too expensive for him. And he’d also bought a Porsche because his student, Steve McQueen, had a Porsche. And he wanted to be cool like the other cool kids. And so, he basically was out of money. And so he went, he signed, he agreed to go to Hong Kong, and he planned on going for like 2 or 3 months and filming these two movies, getting a cash infusion.

00:34:28:08 – 00:34:44:07
Matthew Polly
And then he was going to go back to Hollywood and continue his TV career, which right before he left, looked like it was very promising. So, it’s and that’s like a confusing storyline, and that’s why they simplify it and make it just a simple racism story.

00:34:44:09 – 00:35:03:19
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I think there’s little hints as you’re talking there. There’s a little hints of those types of things. There was, I think one scene where we see Linda looking at some pass do notices and some, you know, Bill like the giving the impression that they need the money. And there’s a scene, I think, where where Bruce has a I don’t know if it was a Porsche.

00:35:03:19 – 00:35:09:23
Dan LeFebvre
I didn’t look, I don’t remember specifically, but it was a pretty nice car that he was he was driving around in.

00:35:09:26 – 00:35:13:12
Matthew Polly
And she’s gets that seat. When he pulls up in it, she gives him a look like, what are you doing.

00:35:13:16 – 00:35:36:27
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Right. Yeah yeah. Which leads into another aspect of it because the implication I got from from that side was they may have had financial troubles, but maybe Bruce didn’t really know about that. It I guess the impression I got was that Linda. Linda knew about it. She kept track of the finances, but Bruce went off and bought this expensive car.

00:35:36:27 – 00:35:42:12
Dan LeFebvre
And when they when they need the money, was that kind of that dynamic between the two of them?

00:35:42:15 – 00:36:01:25
Matthew Polly
No. He knew about all the financial difficulties. There’s letters where he sends home. He sends letters. He had to borrow money from friends. And so he was like, writing letters, saying, I’ll get you your money. Now, or I’m really sorry I’m late with the money. So, No, but one thing that did happen was when, it.

00:36:01:25 – 00:36:22:04
Matthew Polly
Right at this period when he had, the house that was too expensive. And the Porsche, that’s when he injured his back. And he could and he couldn’t work for six months, and he was making his money teaching martial arts to Hollywood stars like Steve McQueen, who were paying him the equivalent of $1,000 an hour. And he could no longer teach them.

00:36:22:06 – 00:36:43:27
Matthew Polly
And that’s when their financial difficulty got much worse. And so Linda had to take a job, which she had never done before because it was very 1950s. She looked after the kids. He brought in the money. And so she did have to support the family during his period of convalescence. So I don’t want in any way underplay her importance to Bruce Lee’s success.

00:36:43:29 – 00:36:49:23
Matthew Polly
It’s just they they polish it up and turn it kind of 1990s version.

00:36:49:25 – 00:37:11:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, that touches on something else I want to ask you about. And that is the overall way that Bruce is portrayed in the movie as a family man. And in the movie, we see Bruce Lee. It seems like he, you know, he loves Linda and his two kids. He’s a workaholic. But it looks like throughout the movie, he’s really just trying his best to provide for his family.

00:37:11:22 – 00:37:25:14
Dan LeFebvre
Toward the end of the movie, he says something along the lines of, I just want to spend more time with my kids and stop breaking my wife’s heart because, you know, I’m I’m working all the time. What was the Lee family dynamic like?

00:37:25:16 – 00:37:53:23
Matthew Polly
So. And certain ways. That’s very true. Which is he did love his wife. They were great friends. He adored his children. And he was a workaholic. But he was also a Hollywood actor. And the era of free love and, his friends are like Steve McQueen. And so, he had a little things on the side here and there, that no one ever reported before.

00:37:53:23 – 00:38:14:08
Matthew Polly
I wrote my biography about him. And, for him, he didn’t I it was just that, you know, he was a Hollywood actor in the late 60s. They all cheated. And he did as well. That didn’t mean he didn’t love his wife. It just he was doing what they all did. But the movie comes out and makes him the perfect family man.

00:38:14:11 – 00:38:46:04
Matthew Polly
And maybe that’s what a 1969 perfect family man look like. But that’s not what we think a perfect one does. And so they whitewashed his history in order to to make him, you know, it was Linda’s book that they turned it into. They didn’t want to get into it. And, you know, what’s interesting is in the original screenplay, they had a scene where he’s in Thailand filming the movie, and there’s an actress who’s hitting on him, and he’s awful tempted, but at the very end he says, no, I can’t because I love my wife too much.

00:38:46:06 – 00:39:02:28
Matthew Polly
And they ended up feeling that was too racy and they cut even that suggestion that they’re a hint that he might have been tempted away from, you know, heart and home. And the truth was, he he had multiple affairs over, over the years. Once he became a Hollywood actor.

00:39:03:00 – 00:39:07:12
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah. That’s a that’s a little bit of a different dynamic than we see in the movie then.

00:39:07:15 – 00:39:26:00
Matthew Polly
Yeah. Very much. It was he was much more like Mad Men, you know? Okay. Like when you think about Mad Men, you think about these guys who loved their wives, came home and whatever. But when they were off at work, they did. They had sex with the secretary or whatever, and it just didn’t interfere. And that’s that double standard was what he grew up with.

00:39:26:03 – 00:39:32:23
Matthew Polly
And so it’s just a different dynamic than those of us who grew up kind of post 80s, where that’s just not acceptable.

00:39:32:25 – 00:39:54:20
Dan LeFebvre
That’s a that’s a good way to phrase that in another, another TV show example. Yeah. Another theme throughout the movie that I wanted to ask you about was this concept we see of the demon. It starts at the very beginning, right at the very beginning of the movie, with Bruce as a child, all the way to what I thought was a very specific date.

00:39:54:22 – 00:40:24:12
Dan LeFebvre
The 32nd day of shooting Enter the Dragon near the end of the film, and then, it’s during that last vision that Bruce sees his own grave. And on the grave is the date July 28th, 1973, engraved on it. Can you give a little more insight into the historical accuracy of this idea of the demon that Bruce Lee how if he’s hallucinating or how he’s seeing these visions in the movie?

00:40:24:14 – 00:40:30:16
Dan LeFebvre
But then how well did the movie do depicting the end of Bruce Lee’s life?

00:40:30:18 – 00:40:52:23
Matthew Polly
So they took again, they took some element of truth, and then they, they, they ran with it, which is, before Bruce was born, the first male child, that his parents had did die, I think, before was one year old. And in Chinese culture, that’s considered a bad omen. And so it’s a kind of superstition.

00:40:52:25 – 00:41:11:13
Matthew Polly
Any child, any male child born after that is supposed to be given a female nickname, and dressed up in female clothes. And so they didn’t do that with Bruce Lee. In fact, they even pierced his ear and gave him an earring when he was a little baby. And so this is a, Chinese custom from that period of time.

00:41:11:15 – 00:41:32:24
Matthew Polly
But that’s it. Like, that’s that’s the end of the demons. He never he never came up again. Bruce Lee never had visions of a demon. His father never warned him that the demon was going to get him. So you’d have to run off to America. And, Bruce probably had some bad dreams every once in a while, but it wasn’t of a demon.

00:41:32:27 – 00:41:57:08
Matthew Polly
And that was the one you interviewed. The director’s been interviewed, and he said I wanted to, you know, use that artistic license to speak about his inner struggle. But they also had another problem, which is, how to deal with Bruce Lee’s death. And Bruce Lee died in another woman’s bedroom. That’s that’s how we know that he wasn’t a purely faithful husband.

00:41:57:10 – 00:42:25:16
Matthew Polly
And when that scandal, when that came out, it was a huge scandal and ongoing press, and it was very tough on Linda. And so one of the things that she wanted to make sure in the years since is that no one really dug into this situation involving Bruce Lee’s death. And so any Bruce Lee estate product, any anything that comes that’s associated with the Bruce Lee estate pretty much avoids the the gritty details of his death.

00:42:25:18 – 00:42:40:23
Matthew Polly
And so using the demon was another way for them to kind of skedaddle by what actually happened, which was he was spending the afternoon with his mistress. And for some reasons that are still under debate, he ended up dying in her bedroom.

00:42:40:26 – 00:42:47:29
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, well, I could I could see that then, because that would go against the family man that they set up throughout the entire movie.

00:42:48:01 – 00:43:10:28
Matthew Polly
Yeah, it it would just I mean, this is really the version they’re doing. It’s Bruce Lee, the Family man, but also the romance. And I think they do a wonderful job of getting that part of it. But he was a more complicated person, with more flaws. And they just decided to, you know, scrub those away. And the death obviously would make that much more complicated, a storyline.

00:43:10:29 – 00:43:31:18
Matthew Polly
So him dying in that sort of almost mythical way is a way for them to escape that. But, you know, one of the things that was spooky about the movie is that, they had asked Brandon Lee if he wanted to play his father, Brandon being Bruce’s son. And he said no. He took the part in The Crow.

00:43:31:21 – 00:43:50:12
Matthew Polly
And that last scene, Bruce is fighting the demon, and then the demon goes after his son. And Bruce has to kill the demon in order to protect his son. And within a year, Brandon had died. Actually, six months, I think, had died on the set of The Crow Under, like, really weird circumstances.

00:43:50:12 – 00:43:57:11
Dan LeFebvre
That was like a blink or something like that, wasn’t it? That that I don’t remember the specifics of. But I remember when that happened. Yeah.

00:43:57:13 – 00:44:19:20
Matthew Polly
Yeah, yeah. Very creepy. And so this movie came out and it’s got this whole demon thing about a family curse, and then Brandon dies. And so in the public’s mind, there is this idea that somehow Bruce’s family has actually been cursed. I’ve actually had producers in Hollywood call me and say, we’re doing the curse. The Lee family.

00:44:19:21 – 00:44:38:13
Matthew Polly
Will you participate in that? And I’m like, no. Oh. However, because it there’s no curse on his family, but they’ve had two really tragic deaths, the father and the son. And part of the reason people believe this is because, unfortunately, they use this demon sort of, mythos in the movie itself.

00:44:38:16 – 00:44:50:23
Dan LeFebvre
Well, we’ve talked about some of the, the big myths that come out of the movie. Are there any other major myths about Bruce Lee that people believe because of Dragon, the Bruce Lee story?

00:44:50:25 – 00:45:10:25
Matthew Polly
I think we had the main ones. I was rewatching it this afternoon, and, he never drove a motorcycle. That’s not a big myth. But it is funny, because all of his friends said he was a terrible driver, like he was. He was like, he drove too fast. He scared the heck out of them.

00:45:10:27 – 00:45:36:12
Matthew Polly
So they, the idea of him on a motorcycle, is kind of foolish. I think the biggest myth that the movie sets up, which is because they start with him training with it, man, they make it seem as if he was a martial artist who accidentally became an actor. You know, so his whole everything up to this moment where he’s fighting Jackson, he’s just this martial artist.

00:45:36:14 – 00:45:59:27
Matthew Polly
And then accidentally, Hollywood discovers him. Actually, Bruce Lee’s father was a famous, opera singer, which they mentioned in the movie. But Bruce Lee was also a child actor and appeared in 20 Cantonese movies before the age of 18. And he was kind of like the Macaulay Culkin of Hong Kong. And so when Hollywood called, he was ready.

00:46:00:00 – 00:46:21:02
Matthew Polly
Like he already knew how to act. And that’s why he succeeded, because he was a great martial artist who also had a strong background in acting. And most martial artists who get cast like Chuck Norris don’t know how to act. Bruce Lee is the only one who could do both, and that’s why he succeeded as a star, because he was an actor.

00:46:21:04 – 00:46:44:19
Matthew Polly
And then he became a martial artist, and then he combined the two. And this movie sets up the idea of Bruce Lee, the pure martial arts genius, perfect father. And he’s actually like an actor who became a martial artist who was not perfect. But combine those two skills. And I think if they had just had one scene where they showed him as a child actor, it would have filled out his story much more.

00:46:44:21 – 00:47:06:18
Dan LeFebvre
I’m wondering, just as you’re saying, that it it lends back to watch something that you mentioned earlier where he kind of thrown into, well, this has to be a kung fu movie because it’s about Bruce Lee. And so if he was an actor, would he know how to fight the four cooks in the alleyway? And, you know, the sailors and, you know, all these scenes that we have to set up for him?

00:47:06:20 – 00:47:23:06
Dan LeFebvre
Well, he has to be a martial artist then at that point, because he already know how to fight. And so I’m wondering if that’s kind of how they why they why they did that in order to, tell the story, but mix up quite a few things along the way to do that.

00:47:23:08 – 00:47:45:18
Matthew Polly
Yeah. You know, that’s part of the issue. And to be fair, I, I’ve seen much worse biopics than this one. Like, as biopics go, it’s a perfectly decent version. It’s a huge inaccuracies, but that’s sort of part of the part and parcel. Part of the reason, though, is I think this it’s based on Linda Lee’s book.

00:47:45:20 – 00:48:03:12
Matthew Polly
And for her, she fell in love with Bruce Lee when he was a martial artist, and she fell in love with her martial arts teacher. And I think for her, that’s the most important aspect of him. And I don’t believe she was ever particularly happy with him when he went back to being an actor.

00:48:03:14 – 00:48:08:06
Dan LeFebvre
Do you think some of the affairs had something to do with that? I mean, that’s part of that lifestyle or.

00:48:08:08 – 00:48:26:04
Matthew Polly
I think the lifestyle. Yeah. And so after he died, very interestingly, she never she pulled away from it. She kept her kids away from it. She didn’t want her son to be an actor. She was a quiet person who never cotton to that world. And I think this was Bruce Lee’s dream to be a great star.

00:48:26:12 – 00:48:46:14
Matthew Polly
Her dream was to marry a guy who had the McDonald’s chain of kung fu studios. And so I think those two aspects of Bruce Lee, what’s interesting is when you hear her versions of the story, she recognizes he was both, but she emphasizes the part that she loved that she fell in love with. And this movie does as well.

00:48:46:16 – 00:48:54:25
Matthew Polly
And that’s created this image of Bruce Lee is this kung fu master and that sort of accidental actor, when it’s actually the opposite.

00:48:54:27 – 00:49:06:10
Dan LeFebvre
Now, if you kind of put yourself in the director’s chair for a moment, if there was one thing you wish that was in the movie and they didn’t put it in there, what would that be?

00:49:06:12 – 00:49:40:01
Matthew Polly
It would help if they just showed. I think Jason Scott Lee did a good job of catching Bruce’s emotional range, like his charm and his anger. But they should have showed his flaws, and they should have had one scene where he was not the perfect husband. They still had one affair, because I think that would have shown a more complex adult version of him and allowed us to appreciate, you know, the fact that he was a flawed human being who was also able to achieve greatness and that would have made it less a child story and more an adult story.

00:49:40:04 – 00:50:08:19
Matthew Polly
And every time someone, you know, there’s recently been a documentary that came out, ESPN is doing and again, they skipped the death. And they, they skip the affairs and they focus on Bruce Lee’s accomplishments only, and they turn him into a saint and almost a demigod. And I and I really think it’s important for us to appreciate him as a human being because as a flawed human being, his successes are more impressive.

00:50:08:21 – 00:50:27:13
Matthew Polly
But if you treat him as a demigod, then, you know, of course he can beat 50 people from the get go. He never lost a fight. He was perfect. And this, this. I don’t know why we feel the need to treat Bruce Lee as perfect. We have movies about other iconic figures where, you know, Martin Luther King had affairs like it’s not.

00:50:27:18 – 00:50:41:10
Matthew Polly
These aren’t things that we can’t deal with as a culture. So that’s the thing that annoys me about these films in general, which is this, this desire to make Bruce Lee a saint. He wasn’t a saint. He was a great man, but he wasn’t a saint.

00:50:41:12 – 00:50:59:16
Dan LeFebvre
Was a human. I think you put you you said it really well, like, I mean, we’re all human. We all make mistakes. And they’re going to, I mean, perhaps be different mistakes and the ones that he made. But, I think that would make for a lot more, a lot more character depth there and a lot more relatability to it.

00:50:59:19 – 00:51:10:00
Dan LeFebvre
I can’t go out and do what Bruce Lee did by any means, any way you look at it. But, you know, I guess more human relatable ends up being a much more relatable character on screen.

00:51:10:02 – 00:51:26:28
Matthew Polly
I think so, and so I’m hopeful that someday they will do a more human version of Bruce Lee on screen. And this was I feel like this was the kind of the kids starter version of the Bruce Lee story, where they mix a bunch of stuff up and unfortunately, no one else is correct in it.

00:51:27:00 – 00:51:46:01
Matthew Polly
And so when I wrote the biography, I felt in many ways I felt like this movie was the thing I was writing against because there were so many things that were wrong that I didn’t know when I started, because the movie’s been reinforced by magazine articles, etc. and so while it’s a perfectly fine movie, it’s, it’s it is pretty terrible history.

00:51:46:08 – 00:52:07:08
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you mentioned your biography, and hopefully at the end of the day, everybody listening to this realizes that it is a movie. It’s going to be a movie. It’s not going to be historically accurate. So with that in mind, anyone listening to this that wants to learn the true story, can you share some information about your book and where they can get a copy?

00:52:07:10 – 00:52:29:08
Matthew Polly
So the title of the book is Bruce Lee A life, by Matthew Polley. It’s available everywhere, so you can get it on Amazon. It’s in most bookstores. Still paperback versions come out. It’s being adapted into a documentary. It may be a movie someday. We’re working on that. So who knows, maybe we will get the story straight and, in Hollywood.

00:52:29:11 – 00:52:34:15
Matthew Polly
But until that day, the books, books there, and it’s, available everywhere.

00:52:34:17 – 00:52:37:00
Dan LeFebvre
Thank you again so much for your time, Matthew.

00:52:37:03 – 00:52:43:28
Matthew Polly
I really appreciate it.

00:03:39:07 – 00:03:49:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you for coming on to talk about Titanic, Mark. And before we get started as a screenwriter, can you share how you got interested in the Titanic?

00:03:49:23 – 00:04:15:29
Mark B. Perry
Yes. I am a self-professed ship geek. I am, it’s one of my most passionate hobbies. I’m not an expert, but I know, a little bit about a lot of things as a result of, a lot of research that I’ve done over the years. I love 20th century ocean liners. I love ocean travel. I love the Normandie, the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, the New Amsterdam of 1938.

00:04:16:01 – 00:04:41:08
Mark B. Perry
To the QM, to the contemporary ocean liner. I’m a big collector of memorabilia, furniture, artwork, China, silverware, that sort of thing. And I’m also on. I’m a founding board member of the SS United States Conservancy, which is a nonprofit that is working to preserve the legacy of my favorite ship, which is the 1950s era ocean liner, the SS United States.

00:04:41:11 – 00:05:04:24
Mark B. Perry
So as I say, I am a ship geek as a hobby, but I am a screenwriter, professional Lee. And to that end, in 1988, I got, before I got my first professional break on the Wonder Years in 1989, I wrote a screenplay with a writing partner, a wonderful writer named Dudley Sanders, and we wrote it.

00:05:04:24 – 00:05:25:29
Mark B. Perry
We sent it to the agent that was representing me at the time. She called on a Sunday and left a message on my answering machine. This was 1988, and she said she had just finished reading it. She was so excited that Monday morning they were going to send this script. Every studio and every producer in town, there was going to be a bidding war.

00:05:26:02 – 00:05:47:28
Mark B. Perry
This was going to be a huge success. Congratulations, kiddo. Monday came. They did. They sent the script everywhere. All over town. Everybody passed and everybody said the same thing. A version of the same thing. This is a great script, but it would be the most expensive movie ever made. And nobody cares about the Titanic.

00:05:48:00 – 00:05:50:00
Dan LeFebvre
Oh.

00:05:50:03 – 00:06:12:25
Mark B. Perry
So. Yeah. True story, true story. So that came about because when I was a kid, I saw a movie called The Last Voyage with Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone. It was from the early 60s, and in it they actually partially sank an old ocean liner, the Ille de France, which was one of the most famous liners of its era.

00:06:12:27 – 00:06:44:11
Mark B. Perry
And when I saw that as a kid, I was fascinated by the ship. And so I really got interested in the ships. And then, of course, I read Walter Lord’s book, A Night to Remember all about the Titanic disaster. And it wasn’t until the mid 80s when the National Geographic documentary came out about Bob Ballard finding the wreck and the story of the Titanic, that I got re-energized about the story, and I reread A Night to Remember, and there was one passage in there.

00:06:44:13 – 00:07:06:07
Mark B. Perry
It was, I think, about two sentences, and it was. A surviving crew member recounted the story of just after the ship struck the berg, that a passenger came up to him out of nowhere, holding ice in his hands, where he had scooped it up and shaved into the deck, threw it at the officer’s feet, and said as if it had been an ongoing debate.

00:07:06:08 – 00:07:43:17
Mark B. Perry
Will you believe me now? And that’s all Lord wrote was that little exchange. And I thought, that’s really interesting. So the script that we wrote was not a Jack and Rose story. It was, it was a time travel action adventure film set aboard the Titanic. But because we didn’t want to come across as, you know, exploiting a real life tragedy where real people died, we decided that we were going to work really hard to make sure that our version of events was is accurate, as it could possibly be, out of respect for the people who died and the events of that night.

00:07:43:19 – 00:08:03:02
Mark B. Perry
So we scripted the ship breaking in half, which had never been confirmed before or portrayed in any of the films, because it wasn’t really known until Ballard find that found the wreck in two pieces, and you may see the Ravel model behind me. I built that while we were writing the script, and I’m not a model maker.

00:08:03:02 – 00:08:09:29
Mark B. Perry
That funnels are the wrong part, but the the point was we wanted a three dimensional reference as we were plotting out.

00:08:10:01 – 00:08:10:19
Dan LeFebvre
The.

00:08:10:19 – 00:08:37:28
Mark B. Perry
The, the action of our script while the ship was sinking and again, trying to stick as close as we could to the established history. And since we did that, you know, research back then, there was no internet. So we had, you know, we went to the bookstores, we bought everything we could get our hands on. And, so that’s why I, my, my interest has endured in the story of the Titanic.

00:08:38:01 – 00:08:58:04
Mark B. Perry
But when it comes to my love of ships, I’m actually more drawn to the ones that were, that that did what they were designed to do and not the ones that failed. But, so anyway, that’s that’s how I came to know I can hold my own in a cocktail party. If the subject of the Titanic comes out.

00:08:58:06 – 00:09:19:14
Dan LeFebvre
Well, the movie that we are talking about today is 1953. So even before, the timeline of when you were writing your version of the story as well, and here on the podcast, it being based on a true story. Most of the movies that we talk about start with some sort of variation of based on true Story, but the movie that we’re talking about today goes a little bit further than that.

00:09:19:14 – 00:09:43:19
Dan LeFebvre
I think I’m going to quote with the opening text is from the movie. It says all navigational details of this film. Conversations, incidents and general data are taken verbatim from the published reports of inquiries held in 1912 by the Congress of the United States and the British Board of Trade, and while it does only mention the navigation details, it also kind of generically says the general data is.

00:09:43:19 – 00:10:01:02
Dan LeFebvre
So the impression that I get, as I read that when I started watching this movie was that this is trying to be more than based on true story. It’s trying to be as accurate as possible. So as we start our discussion today about 1953, is Titanic. If you were to give it a letter grade for its historical accuracy, what would again.

00:10:01:05 – 00:10:23:21
Mark B. Perry
First of all, I want to preface everything by quoting Walter Lord, who I think is the definitive. He said in his first book, A Night to Remember. It is a rash man indeed who would set himself as final arbiter on all that happened, the incredible night the Titanic went down. So, to be clear, I’m not a rash man, but, historical accuracy of Titanic 53.

00:10:23:23 – 00:10:54:08
Mark B. Perry
This movie was made before, Walter Lord’s book came out. This book was 53. His book came out in 55. And in Lord’s book is considered by many to be the Titanic Bible. And because he was able to interview dozens and dozens of people who survived the sinking who were still alive in the 1950s, though even he admits that it can’t be 100% accurate because of human memory.

00:10:54:15 – 00:11:17:28
Mark B. Perry
Memory eyewitnesses are notoriously fallible, and stories would change. People swore they saw Captain Smith saving a baby, you know, in the water, before he went down. Others swore they saw him on the on the bridge. So this is what I think about this film. I think that they really tried, I think with what they knew at the time, they really tried.

00:11:17:28 – 00:11:41:11
Mark B. Perry
And it wasn’t until five years later when when A Night to Remember the movie came out that was based on, Walter Lord’s book. That was that was much more of a documentary like dramatization of the sinking. But, in this one there, as for Titanic 53, I love this movie because it is. It’s a soap opera.

00:11:41:11 – 00:12:13:16
Mark B. Perry
First it and and it’s a good soap opera. The script won an Academy Award, and, it’s also a soap opera, a disaster movie hybrid. And I think more than based on a true story, we could say it’s inspired by a true event. The focus of this movie is the Sturges family. Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb as Richard and Julia Sturges and it’s it’s how the disaster plays a role in their relationships and not the other way around.

00:12:13:16 – 00:12:39:16
Mark B. Perry
And on that level, I think the movie works really well. So the navigational details may indeed be correct and taken verbatim from the reports that were available. But remember that those hearings were held very quickly after, the the survivors arrived in New York and they didn’t ask all of the questions of the people who were available, and not everybody was testifying.

00:12:39:18 – 00:13:03:00
Mark B. Perry
So they didn’t know as much. In 1953 or 52, when the writers were working on the script. And they didn’t have a lot of photographs of interiors of the ship and things to go. And they did not have the absolute wealth of information that we have now. So in fairness to the film makers, I think that they were making do with what they had in terms of reference.

00:13:03:00 – 00:13:24:21
Mark B. Perry
So as for the general data, that may refer to the timeline of things like, you know, which boat left when, how many people. But this film is not really beholden to historical accuracy, despite its lofty claims at the top. And I think it’s trying to set the stage to say we want to be respectful to the true story.

00:13:24:23 – 00:13:51:07
Mark B. Perry
But and, you know, not unlike what Dudley and I were doing, I do think that they were trying to be respectful and, they just didn’t didn’t have the material research available. There’s also there’s a famous story about the night they were filming in the in the tank on the backlot when they were lowering the lifeboats. And Barbara Stanwyck was in one of the lifeboats, and she started sobbing uncontrollably, not as the character, but as the actress herself.

00:13:51:09 – 00:14:19:01
Mark B. Perry
And it was because she was suddenly overcome with the reality of what they were reenacting in this movie. And from what I’ve heard, that sentiment also, pervaded some of the crew as well. But in the end, they had to answer to Darryl Zanuck, you know, and the accountants at 20th Century Fox. So, you know, they couldn’t throw as much money, certainly as Cameron did to to make his film.

00:14:19:04 – 00:14:51:15
Mark B. Perry
But I think they get a fair amount. Right. The film is often disparaged in Titanic circles, but they don’t always take it in context of the fact they didn’t know as much as we we do now. And I think little things like there’s a there’s a brief moment once, Clifton Webb as, Richard Sturges gets aboard the ship and he’s this pompous, snob, wealthy guy, but he pauses to recognize a stewardess and he calls her by name, and he mentions the ship that he recognizes her from, and that was apparently a very real thing among the wealthy people of the time.

00:14:51:18 – 00:15:23:10
Mark B. Perry
That they they would make a point of knowing the people who waited on them on these ships. But in this movie, there’s no mention of Thomas Andrews being aboard. And of course, he was aboard. He was the ship’s designer. And he played an incredibly important role in, the events of that night. Also, there’s a version of that with Bruce Ismay in this, who was the White Star Line representative, who by all accounts, was pressuring Captain Smith to, you know, go faster, go faster, break the speed record.

00:15:23:12 – 00:15:49:15
Mark B. Perry
He died in the 1930s, so I’m not sure why they felt that they had to fictionalize him. There’s a there’s someone named, Mr. Sanderson who’s a fictional character who’s representing the White Star line at the beginning of the movie, but he disembarks in Cherbourg. Does not even take the maiden voyage. And I think that must have been the 20th Century Fox lawyers being worried about the estates coming after them because Ismay died in the 30s.

00:15:49:17 – 00:16:13:09
Mark B. Perry
Also, the maiden voyage was not sold out as it is depicted in this film, and it’s used as a device for, Clifton Webb to, you know, sort of buy a ticket from a third class passenger. He could have just bought a first class ticket. And, but in the movie, they’re going for drama. And so, you know, he the ship is sold out, but he’s got to get on that ship.

00:16:13:12 – 00:16:37:27
Mark B. Perry
And, you know, he buys a ticket from Mr. Oscar Doom, who’s who’s with his family. And that way, you know, like I said, there’s plenty of room in first class, but the film certainly goes for the more dramatic setup. And that gives the his character a chance to prove that he isn’t entirely a heartless snob when he makes an effort after this ship hits the bird to return to third class, find Mrs. Goodman or children and get them into a lifeboat.

00:16:37:29 – 00:17:01:06
Mark B. Perry
Marnie the character who’s played by Thelma Ritter, is clearly Molly Brown, but again, the lawyers at 20th must have been nervous. Even though Molly Brown died in the 30s and The Unsinkable Molly Brown was still a good seven years away, it wasn’t until the 60s that the play and then the movie was made. So one bit of trivia that I want to share, and I am I’m going to answer your question, by the way.

00:17:01:06 – 00:17:30:04
Mark B. Perry
I’m going to give you my, my rating. But one bit of trivia that I find fascinating is, is is more of a, it’s more of a continuity error, an error than, an historical inaccuracy. And that is the they depict the ship striking the iceberg on its starboard or right side, which is accurate. But then they cut to an underwater shot and they show the hull of the ship being ripped open by the iceberg, and it’s on the port or left side of the ship.

00:17:30:09 – 00:17:52:06
Mark B. Perry
Then they cut to the inside cargo hold where some men are fleeing as the terror is is in real time, going down the side and the water spilling in. And again, based on the the way the ship was moving, that’s also on the on the port or left side of the ship. Then it cuts back to the ship and the ship is again, you know, with the iceberg to starboard.

00:17:52:08 – 00:18:12:02
Mark B. Perry
And all they had to do was flip the negative on those two shots and my theory on that is, I think that the director, John Lesko, realized that by flipping the shots and keeping it accurate, suddenly the ship would be moving right to left when it hit the bird. But it would then be moving right, left to right when it hit the hull.

00:18:12:02 – 00:18:34:20
Mark B. Perry
I know this is a little confusing, but I think he left it that way because that way all of the action is consistent from right to left, both above water and underwater. And only a nerd like me would probably notice something like and then go into a dissertation about it. But anyway, the film depicts an alarm going off, when they’re loading the lifeboats.

00:18:34:20 – 00:18:59:15
Mark B. Perry
That did not happen. They did fire signal, flares. But there was no white siren wailing throughout the loading. The interiors of the ship, they’re more evocative. They’re certainly not reproductions. And again, there were only a handful of photographs available at the time. But I think on the scale of lavishness of of what they’re depicting, I think, you know, they got they get the general ambiance and the orchestra music in this.

00:18:59:15 – 00:19:23:26
Mark B. Perry
The ship’s orchestra is much more 1920s than it is 19 tens. And the dancing that people are doing is, is more 1920s. The Titanic Orchestra was all piano and string instruments. So in terms of historical accuracy, to answer your question, and for the very long winded answer, I give it whatever the razor thin line is between a B and a C minus.

00:19:23:29 – 00:19:48:29
Dan LeFebvre
I really like that you went that you were talking about the historical context of it, because that’s something that, you know, I hear a lot of, a lot of different stories that in history, it’s hard for us now to kind of put yourself, especially going back into ancient times or things like that. But even with this one in particular, too, because we you mentioning James Cameron’s movie 1997 is kind of that’s what everybody thinks of with Titanic.

00:19:49:01 – 00:20:18:01
Dan LeFebvre
And so even, you know, watching this, it’s really hard not to compare this to that movie and, and just assume that, okay, James Cameron’s movie showed it this way. So let’s compare it to that, even though, as you point out, like they didn’t even know a lot of that stuff. And that leads right into my next question, because in Cameron’s 97 movie, we see these lavish sets and obviously a lot more money put into that than the 1953 Titanic movie.

00:20:18:03 – 00:20:26:29
Dan LeFebvre
Do you think the 53 movie did a good job transporting us back to being aboard the Titanic? From a visual perspective.

00:20:27:01 – 00:20:51:26
Mark B. Perry
Does the film visually transport us back to the ship? Does it do a good job? And I’m going to give them props, and that’s an intended pun for the 28ft model. And the exterior shots on deck, all of which were sets, and they’re pretty convincing for the time, especially when you consider this was before CGI. It was before AI and before whatever other eyes are coming down the pike toward us.

00:20:51:28 – 00:21:19:09
Mark B. Perry
But I think it was much easier for audiences in 1953 to suspend disbelief because they hadn’t yet been made completely immune by seeing, anything imaginable rendered on film in a reasonable facsimile of reality, like people flying in anything you might see in a marvel movie. As I said earlier, the interiors of the of the the ship are evocative, and they didn’t have the visual resources for the designs.

00:21:19:11 – 00:21:43:28
Mark B. Perry
We have a context now from all the material at the endless documentaries, the, you know, everything. We have so much visual reference that they just didn’t have in 53. So I cut him some slack in this regard. The sets, I think they captured the lavishness and the scale and the ambiance of, of what a what a liner of that class would have been like back in the day.

00:21:44:01 – 00:22:06:21
Mark B. Perry
But they’re not exact replicas. And the iconic staircase is actually laid out more or less like the actual staircase aboard the ship. The one in, in Titanic 53. But again, the version to beat on that count is Cameron, who was obsessive about getting every rivet on the models of the hull in exactly the right place.

00:22:06:23 – 00:22:27:17
Mark B. Perry
And he had endless amounts of research, including having seen the wreck with his own eyes, diving down to the wreck of, the Titanic. So I, I think for the time period again, all in context, I think they did a pretty good job of putting us aboard a ship in 1912.

00:22:27:19 – 00:22:51:03
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. Again, it goes I mean, with Cameron’s not only having that extensive research, but also had a little bit of a bigger budget and better technology to work with. So, you know, being able to, to do that, and again, with the 53 movie is black and white too. So, you know, you’re capturing some of those lavish things.

00:22:51:05 – 00:22:55:06
Dan LeFebvre
It’s a little he’s going to suspend belief a little bit more.

00:22:55:08 – 00:23:15:17
Mark B. Perry
They were there was talk about making the film in color in 1953, but then they realized that the models would probably not look as realistic in color, which I think is a good point. And again, you know, for the special effects that were available at the time period, I think they do a serviceable job. I mean, it’s always funny when you cut to the ship sinking in there, clearly.

00:23:15:17 – 00:23:29:19
Mark B. Perry
No people on the deck, but, you know, they they had little motorized lifeboats with the oars moving in in one of the shots. And so, you know, they really tried, they really did try with what they had available at the time.

00:23:29:21 – 00:23:40:24
Dan LeFebvre
I think you mentioned his name. And early in the movie we meet Captain Edward Smith, and this movie seems to make a point of mentioning a flag that Captain Smith had when he was an apprentice on another ship called the Star of Madagascar.

00:23:40:25 – 00:23:42:22
Mark B. Perry
Star of Madagascar.

00:23:42:25 – 00:24:01:23
Dan LeFebvre
When I saw that, it made me curious about why the movie would mention that. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but the impression that I’ve always had is that even back in 1912, the maiden voyage of Titanic was a big deal. And the movie seems to allude to this. So as you talk about, you know, talks about the it was sold out since March, although you already mentioned that that’s not necessarily true.

00:24:01:25 – 00:24:25:12
Dan LeFebvre
But then the only experience that it mentions for Captain Smith is him being this apprentice. So that left me with the impression after watching the movie, that maybe Titanic’s maiden voyage was also Captain Smith’s first time being a ship’s captain, but then that just kind of seems to be a juxtaposition of this big deal. How experienced was Captain Smith prior to taking command of Titanic?

00:24:25:15 – 00:24:50:17
Mark B. Perry
Well, first, I can see how you would take that away from this particular film and the way Smith is depicted. But Smith was actually one of the most experienced captains of, vessels, on the North Atlantic. The star of Madagascar, as far as I can tell, existed only in the same universe where the Titanic’s maiden voyage was sold out.

00:24:50:20 – 00:24:52:18
Dan LeFebvre
So,

00:24:52:21 – 00:25:16:08
Mark B. Perry
I can find no reference to the Star of Madagascar. And I’ve always personally. I mean, I’ve seen this movie a hundred times, and I’ve always found that an odd bit of like, what were the writers trying to convey with. It’s delivered to him on the bridge and he says, run it up the main mast. And, you know, then there’s that moment at the end after the ship is sinking and he’s going down with the ship, and that’s what he looks up and sees.

00:25:16:08 – 00:25:45:09
Mark B. Perry
And I’m like, maybe they were trying to give us some sort of sentimental backstory to humanize him in some way. I mean, we’ll never know because the writers are all dead, and I don’t I don’t know, but it’s an odd beat, but it’s weirdly effective. But I and at the same time, I don’t know what it’s accomplishing. So and if it cast dispersion on Captain Smith’s experience, that’s an unfortunate, upshot of what I think they were trying to do.

00:25:45:11 – 00:26:23:13
Mark B. Perry
But Smith was very experienced. He had over 40 years at sea, as a as a commodore or captain for the White Star Line. And he was their go to whenever they would introduce new ships. And in fact, he had commanded the, he had commanded 17 White Star Line ships in his 40 years, including the maiden voyage of the Titanic’s bigger, older sister, the Olympic, about a year before the Titanic, maiden voyage, wealthy people at the time also very often chose their ship based on the captain, not on the vessel.

00:26:23:15 – 00:26:52:15
Mark B. Perry
And, Captain Smith had his own, groupies who followed him around from ship to ship, which I found to be a very interesting little factoid. But in truth, in some ways, Captain Smith’s abundant experience, I think, may have actually worked against him. On the night of April 14th. And to clarify, I want to read you a famous quote of his.

00:26:52:17 – 00:27:20:19
Mark B. Perry
He once said, I will say that I cannot imagine any condition which could cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that, and I wonder if that played a part in his apparent nonchalance about the ship’s speed, the ice warnings, if he felt that the ship was indeed impervious.

00:27:20:21 – 00:27:45:03
Mark B. Perry
But we don’t know. It’s all speculation at this point, but I do find that interesting that he did apparently say that, and that’s what he believed. And what’s even more poignant, I think, about the Titanic, is that opposed to it being the first time he commanded a ship, it was to be his last. He was going to retire after the maiden voyage once he got back to England.

00:27:45:06 – 00:27:54:01
Mark B. Perry
And to me, that’s a very tragic, bittersweet note to this man who had this long and storied career.

00:27:54:03 – 00:28:18:00
Dan LeFebvre
I wonder if maybe this is just my speculation, as you mentioned, that if this was going to be his last, if the writers of Titanic 53 knew that and then they because the the flag that you know from the Star of Madagascar, it mentions him being an apprentice. So maybe it’s kind of trying to do a bookend like this was, you know, the flag of his first command, his first ship.

00:28:18:08 – 00:28:28:21
Dan LeFebvre
And then this is going to be his last, you know, if he was going to retire after that, that that was maybe I’m just thinking out loud as, you know, as you mentioned, that that’s very interesting.

00:28:28:28 – 00:28:35:09
Mark B. Perry
That may have that I that had not occurred to me, but I think that’s a very, that’s a that’s a solid theory.

00:28:35:12 – 00:28:47:08
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you mentioned their names earlier and you know, the this May storyline throughout the movie follows, Richard Sturgis, his wife Julia, and their two kids, Annette Norman. Do we know if they’re based on real people on Titanic?

00:28:47:11 – 00:29:13:00
Mark B. Perry
Not that I know of, but they are certainly amalgams of, real people, real wealthy people of the time. And certainly real people who were aboard the ship. So I would say kind of yes and no. Now, in the film, Barbara Stanwyck is basically she’s kidnaped her children and she’s tried she wants to save them from, you know, the a life of insufferable snobbery growing up with Clifton Webb.

00:29:13:02 – 00:29:46:10
Mark B. Perry
And there was on the actual Titanic, there was a man aboard who had kidnaped his children in a custody dispute and was taking them to the United States, and the children survived, but the father perished in the the sinking. So it’s possible that, Charles Brackett and Richard Breen and Walter Rice had read about that particular passenger, and that may have been the the inspiration for the inciting incident of Julia kidnaping or taking the kids away from him.

00:29:46:13 – 00:29:49:28
Mark B. Perry
But again, of course, we’ll never know.

00:29:50:01 – 00:30:08:29
Dan LeFebvre
That leads into another tie. And speaking of, Annette, the the daughter in the 53 movie, that’s another tie into the James Cameron 97 one, which is that, you know, a young love story and that one, it’s Annette. And then a young guy named Gifford Rogers from the Purdue tennis team on his way home after playing Oxford during Easter.

00:30:09:01 – 00:30:25:25
Dan LeFebvre
And it’s not exact copy of, you know, the 97 movie with Jack and Rose. But then we it’s it’s hard watching the 53 movie now not to compare it to the 97 movie me like, oh on Titanic, there’s both these love stories. Do we know of any romances like that actually happening on Titanic?

00:30:25:27 – 00:30:54:10
Mark B. Perry
Well, first of all, let me just say this. If you look at Old Hollywood films, so many of them take place at least partly on, some glamorous ocean liner. Doris Day’s first movie wrote, romance on the high seas. Gentlemen prefer blonds. The Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell film, and The Lady Eve, which is one of my favorites, which is a Preston Sturges movie which coincidentally also stars Barbara Stanwyck.

00:30:54:12 – 00:31:17:25
Mark B. Perry
And in it she’s a con artist and she’s seducing Henry Fonda. And there’s a scene where they’re out on deck at night. It’s very romantic, and she says something like, A moonlit deck is a woman’s business office. And so there was a great romance associated with the old steamships and ocean voyages and the idea of shipboard romances has become a trope and a cliche.

00:31:17:28 – 00:31:36:14
Mark B. Perry
Did they happen on the Titanic? I think it’s very likely that they did, because people are people, and when you’re on a ship, there’s a there is a romantic aspect to it. I mean, I’ve crossed the Atlantic on the QE2 and the Queen Mary two and the old France as the Norway, and there is a romance to it.

00:31:36:14 – 00:32:05:22
Mark B. Perry
It’s, it’s it’s a very unique experience. There was a woman aboard the Titanic and her name was, Helen Candy. Candy. And she was traveling alone. And she had she had written a book, about how women can make a living. So I think she was a pioneer of women’s rights and, you know, good for her. She was traveling alone, and she caught the fancy and the attention of a handful of male passengers.

00:32:05:24 – 00:32:30:00
Mark B. Perry
And as Walter Lord describes it, they formed this little coterie of suitors with with miss Candy. And so who knows? You know, if I had to guess, I’d say yes. They’re probably more than one shipboard romance, but the chances are that many of them likely had very unhappy endings. Given what happened to the ship related to this in Cameron’s film.

00:32:30:02 – 00:32:38:17
Mark B. Perry
Leonardo DiCaprio. Jack, he dies because there isn’t room for him on that ginormous piece of wood.

00:32:38:20 – 00:32:42:04
Dan LeFebvre
I think we all saw the MythBusters on that. Yeah.

00:32:42:06 – 00:33:11:29
Mark B. Perry
That saves Kate Winslet. Yeah, there’s a debate about that. But that serves that story really well because that there’s a tragedy at the heart of the tragedy and a personal tragedy at the heart of the tragedy. And I find it interesting that, in 1953, which was closer in time to 1912, that the writers went out of their way to have Gifford, Robert Wagner be a hero.

00:33:12:01 – 00:33:36:16
Mark B. Perry
He’s the one who shimmies down when the lifeboat gets tangled. He’s the one who shimmies down, gets it free, gets it moving again, and then it’s when he’s trying to climb back up to rejoin the men that he loses. His grip, falls into the water. He’s pulled into a lifeboat, he’s unconscious, and that’s how he survives. And that way he’s not depicted as being dishonorable for not staying with the other man aboard the ship.

00:33:36:16 – 00:33:56:02
Mark B. Perry
And it. I think it’s an effective moment, but I also really thought that’s what they’re doing is they’re trying to justify him being able to survive. The Jack and Rose scenario, sadly, is probably closer to real life because so many of the third third class passengers perished.

00:33:56:04 – 00:34:16:19
Dan LeFebvre
That leads right into my next question that I have for you, because, we talked briefly about Richard Sturgis, and in the 53 movie, he buys a third class ticket to get in, and in the 97 movie, Jack wins a third class ticket. And it’s interesting because we don’t really see in both those movies, we see the first class and the third class.

00:34:16:19 – 00:34:34:19
Dan LeFebvre
They don’t really talk too much about a second class, but then both movies seem to imply that you can’t move around very much. In the 53 movie, after Richard gets his ticket, he deliberately moves a sign that says first class passengers, only to go from first. I’m sorry, from third class to first class and the top portion of the ship to where his family is.

00:34:34:22 – 00:34:40:18
Dan LeFebvre
Can you unravel some of the different classes that were aboard Titanic and how their experiences differed?

00:34:40:20 – 00:35:06:18
Mark B. Perry
Yes. This was something we researched quite a bit because in our script, the female sort of love interest, it wasn’t really a love story, but, she was a, an Irish immigrant, single mom who was traveling in steerage or third class, and our protagonist, our time traveling hero. He ends up, finding himself first in first class, but he spends the movie divided between the two.

00:35:06:20 – 00:35:41:21
Mark B. Perry
And we didn’t really get into second class, although Titanic 53. There is a brief sequence where Barbara Stanwyck escorts the defrocked drunken priest, played by Richard based Hart, another fictional character, by the way, down to his state room. And that’s the only time I think we see a second class state room. Then in the there was a 1970s made for TV movie called S.O.S. Titanic with Cloris Leachman and David Warner, and David Warner played a real life character, Lawrence Beasley, who was a survivor of the Titanic who was traveling in second class.

00:35:41:21 – 00:36:15:09
Mark B. Perry
So that film did a little more in second class than other films have historically done. And coincidentally, David Warner, who played Lawrence Beesley, is also in Cameron’s movie, playing Lovejoy, who is, the henchman of, Billy Zane’s character. And so he’s an actor who has the dubious distinction of being on the Titanic twice. But in a historic in a contemporary context, the first class aboard the Titanic was probably more like Claridges Hotel in London, which is considered to be one of the finest, most luxurious in the world.

00:36:15:11 – 00:36:51:08
Mark B. Perry
Or maybe a Four Seasons or a Ritz Carlton. Whatever the passengers wanted was available. They were pampered, like, the patrons on the show, HBO show White Lotus, with one exception that really surprised me. Everyone always talks about how this ship was the pinnacle of luxury, and it may have been for 1912, but it’s only some of the first class suites had private bathroom facilities, and most of the first class had shared bath facilities with other first class passengers.

00:36:51:08 – 00:37:16:01
Mark B. Perry
And to take an actual bath, you had to make a reservation with your cabin steward or stewardess, which I thought that was interesting. I would have assumed that in first class they’re paying that much money. They would have their own bathrooms. But no, second class is more like a marriott or Holiday Inn. It’s still nice, but it’s not quite as opulent as or as luxurious as first.

00:37:16:04 – 00:37:44:05
Mark B. Perry
My late friend, who was a historian and a writer. Her name was Sylvia Stoddard, and she was a Titanic fanatic. And she said that from her research second class aboard the White Star Line’s Titanic was more like first class aboard other liners from other shipping lines of the day. So I that says that says a lot about what first class must have been like.

00:37:44:07 – 00:38:10:07
Mark B. Perry
But the second class cabins had bunk beds, not regular beds, and they too had shared bathroom facilities. All of the second class had shared bathroom facilities. Third class, we’re talking super eight, Best Western, motel six. They were also equipped there. They were equipped with bunk beds. Some of them, I think, had up to 12 or 14.

00:38:10:07 – 00:38:35:10
Mark B. Perry
And so you, you would buy actually space in a bunk. If you were traveling either with you or just your family, and you may have to share quarters. And all of the bathrooms, of course, were shared in third class. And according to two sources, there were only two bathtubs available for third class, one for men, one for women, which I found to be pretty interesting.

00:38:35:12 – 00:39:06:03
Mark B. Perry
That said, people back in the day said that the third class on the Titanic was the best third class accommodations on any vessel at the time. So from what I’ve read about the separations between the classes, it wasn’t as regimented as it’s usually depicted. Yes, there were some physical barriers. There were gates and there were, but there were also chains and signs like we see in Titanic 53, when Clifton Webb lets himself into first class.

00:39:06:05 – 00:39:24:22
Mark B. Perry
It’s hard to imagine, but I think back then they still paid attention to, the honor system. And I hate this expression, but I think people sort of knew their place. And so, you know, they they didn’t break the rules. Yes. As they said, there were gates and there were barriers, and some of them were in fact locked in sort of thing.

00:39:24:22 – 00:39:39:13
Mark B. Perry
But it was not impossible, according to our research. For someone to move from one class to another if they were determined enough and in some cases sneaky enough or rich and entitled.

00:39:39:16 – 00:40:09:19
Dan LeFebvre
Which then makes sense in the 53 movie, how it would be so easy for him to go from third class to first class and just fit in exactly. Well, if we go back to the 53 movie, there are a few different scenes where we see mentions of an iceberg report. The one it focuses on most is a telegraph sent to Captain Smith from the commander of SS Baltic, about an iceberg at latitude 41 degrees 51 North, longitude 49 degrees 52 West.

00:40:09:21 – 00:40:36:21
Dan LeFebvre
And despite this, Captain Smith orders Titanic to go 21 knots. And doing the math on that. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s like 24mph. 39km/h. Going that fast seems to be something that one of the crew in the movie, Mr. Lightoller, is concerned with. So he asked Captain Smith about it, and Smith reassures Lightoller that they’ll be able to see any icebergs in the daylight, and so he’ll personally be on the bridge in the morning to watch out for those.

00:40:36:24 – 00:40:58:17
Dan LeFebvre
And just to help with some of the numbers, I looked up, Titanic’s top speed, and it’s about 23. Not so 26 miles an hour, 43km an hour. So our service speed was 21 knots that we see in the movie. And then, of course, looking at this with the historical context, it’s easy to see why, you know, with what happened, why the speed with the iceberg would have been such a big deal.

00:40:58:19 – 00:41:13:09
Dan LeFebvre
But then the movie seems to suggest that maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal. So with that in mind for how the movie portrays things, how well do you think the movie does explaining the iceberg reports, and then Captain Smith’s orders to maintain titanic speed.

00:41:13:12 – 00:41:41:15
Mark B. Perry
Is a good question. According to Walter Lord, again, the Titanic received at least seven ice warnings from ships like the Baltic, the, the Corona, the America, the Masada. And there may have been more, but the radio operators were very busy sending personal messages for the passengers who were basically playing with this brand new toy, the high tech of its day, the wireless telegraph.

00:41:41:21 – 00:42:13:05
Mark B. Perry
And they were sending personal messages about, oh, we expect to arrive in New York at such and such a time. Please have such and such available. And the it was a source of revenue for the White Star Line. And so the operators were sending outgoing messages, which meant that not some incoming messages. And in fact, in some cases the the, the operators aboard the Titanic told the people sending them messages to shut up and get off the line because they were sending messages through the Cape Race relay to the, the, the United States.

00:42:13:07 – 00:42:35:10
Mark B. Perry
So some of them probably didn’t even get through. And but that said, I’m not sure I, I think in the movie, if I’m recalling right, it’s the Baltic message that the captain flips over and writes the coordinates of the ship. I don’t think that’s true. I think he did receive the Baltic message in real life. Would it have made any difference?

00:42:35:10 – 00:43:13:06
Mark B. Perry
I don’t know, because Captain Smith believed his that ship’s shipbuilding had gone past the, you know, kinds of accidents they had. But this was a night of what ifs. This was a night of if this hadn’t happened, if this hadn’t happened, if this had happened. You know, I heard a theory recently that said that the iceberg, which I had never heard this before and I haven’t researched it, so I may be talking out of turn, but they said that the, the, the iceberg that they hit was actually had broken off and flipped over and was a dark blue on the bottom, and which there was no moon that night, and it made it almost

00:43:13:06 – 00:43:48:21
Mark B. Perry
impossible to see until they were right up on it. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t know. But Smith, by all accounts, was pretty nonchalant about the ice warnings. And again, I think it’s because of his overconfidence in shipbuilding. And being unable to envision any circumstance where a ship like this would actually flounder. So, again, not being the final arbiter of these things, my guess is the movie does a pretty good job in his attitude, if not the actual, facts as they played out aboard the aboard the ship.

00:43:48:23 – 00:43:58:08
Mark B. Perry
And, pretty much what he did, I think is, was supported by, contemporaneous accounts in those hearings and from survivors who were there.

00:43:58:10 – 00:44:23:22
Dan LeFebvre
I had never heard that theory about it, flipping over. But that brings up a good point of something kind of touching on what you were talking about before of, you know, if we don’t even it especially don’t, you know, during the 53 movie, they didn’t even have pictures or that much information there and then even even now, like how how old would you possibly be able to know about a specific iceberg in 1912, whether or not it had slipped over?

00:44:23:29 – 00:44:39:10
Dan LeFebvre
It’s not like there were footage or I mean, it’s that that kind of thing. I know there’s a lot of scientific stuff that people can do. It just blows my mind. But how we can jump to those sort of conclusions that we might know that, oh, there’s one particular iceberg might have flipped over. And that’s why they couldn’t see at that time.

00:44:39:10 – 00:44:48:02
Dan LeFebvre
And it’s like, okay, maybe. But also sometimes I think we just have to be okay never knowing what actually happened.

00:44:48:04 – 00:45:10:25
Mark B. Perry
Well, I think that’s true. And like I said, I preface that that’s I heard that recently and I have not substantiated it, but I thought it was interesting, but it still seems like that didn’t need to be part of the equation. I think if it had just been an iceberg, as it’s portrayed in the Cameron film and the the 53 film, and in a night to remember that just a big white iceberg, coming up out of nowhere.

00:45:10:25 – 00:45:32:14
Mark B. Perry
I mean, there was no moon that night, and it was it was difficult to discern those shapes at at the speed that they were moving and to maneuver properly in time. And, you know, again, you go back to eyewitness accounts. That’s all they had. And in 1953 that they only had what was on the record from people who were there.

00:45:32:16 – 00:46:01:19
Mark B. Perry
And those people weren’t carrying HD and 4K cameras in their pockets. The ship was not being charted by satellites. They weren’t in constant two way communication with other ships. It was a very different time. And so, you know, there’s so much speculations. There’s all the, you know, there’s the crazy conspiracy theory that that ship to to the Olympic and the Titanic were switched for some reason that I don’t think I’ve ever clearly understood.

00:46:01:22 – 00:46:10:03
Mark B. Perry
But, you know, it’s it’s fascinating to me that over 100 years after this happened, we’re still talking about it.

00:46:10:06 – 00:46:34:18
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, human memory is not great. But also to add to that, to everybody who survived had still gone through this extremely traumatic event. And so that’s going to affect memory as well. And just all these different. Yeah. We’re just never going to know all, all the facts.

00:46:34:20 – 00:46:53:27
Mark B. Perry
You know did clearly people can misremember. People can also make things up whether they mean to or not. I mean they might change their story because they didn’t run back to get the little boy who had fallen in the water and they just left them, you know, who knows? You know, we’re fallible.

00:46:54:00 – 00:47:11:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, very, very true. Well, if we go back to the movie, we do see we see a little bit, but there’s not a lot of dates and locations displayed out. Right? Like, you know, a lot of movies have had the text on screen, but we get some clues here and there, kind of what the path that the Titanic is taking.

00:47:11:03 – 00:47:27:03
Dan LeFebvre
At the beginning of the movie, for example, there are some signs that were in French. That’s when Richard Sturgis boards the ship, getting his his ticket. And after they start making their way to the open ocean, Richard is having dinner with his family, asks his daughter Annette what day it is, and she says it’s April 13th.

00:47:27:05 – 00:47:46:07
Dan LeFebvre
And then later in the movie, one of the sailors on the ship looks at the clock, making the movie make some notice that the clock is at 11:36 p.m. on April 14th, and that’s just before they see the iceberg in front of them. So based on these little clues that we have, do you think the movie does a pretty good job portraying the dates and places for Titanic’s timeline?

00:47:46:09 – 00:48:15:20
Mark B. Perry
I think they do an excellent job. In this case, the movie seems to be pretty accurate in the timeline. Maybe that’s what they meant by quote unquote general data in the, and, in the opening statement, the Titanic set sail on a Wednesday, which was April 10th, 1912, from Southampton, England. And there she was docked and the passengers boarded by gangway in the traditional fashion that we usually see in the movies.

00:48:15:22 – 00:48:37:00
Mark B. Perry
Interesting factoid. The the loading was done opposite of modern day air travel, and that they put the third class passengers aboard first before the first class and second class passengers boarded. I don’t know why, but apparently that was protocol of the day. Once she was fully loaded, she set sail. She arrived a few hours later in the French port of Cherbourg that you mentioned.

00:48:37:00 – 00:49:02:14
Mark B. Perry
And that’s where Titanic 53 picks her up, basically. Then they take on more passengers who come aboard by tender or those the smallish ferry boats that bring them out to the ship, because the harbor at Cherbourg did not have docking facilities that could accommodate a ship the size of the Titanic. So, incidentally, one of those tenders, the nomadic, survives to this day.

00:49:02:14 – 00:49:36:20
Mark B. Perry
It’s been restored. It’s on. You can visit it in Belfast, Ireland. And it was also designed by Thomas Andrews, who designed the much bigger sister ship, the Titanic. Only the nomadic is still afloat after all these years, unlike, the Titanic. There were while they were in Cherbourg. This is also where, this is where we see Julia and her children boarding, along with, Maud Young and other characters coming out on that tender.

00:49:36:22 – 00:50:10:07
Mark B. Perry
And that’s also where we see, Richard Sturgis, getting aboard by buying his ticket from the U.S. cruise and then sneaking up, and, let’s see. So then there were, passengers who disembarked in Cherbourg. There were about two dozen who left the ship because they had only booked passage to cross the channel. And I imagine they spent the rest of their lives with some pretty interesting cocktail party stories, about having, you know, just narrowly missed doom.

00:50:10:09 – 00:50:33:07
Mark B. Perry
And then from Cherbourg, the ship went to Queenstown, Ireland, which is they’ve changed the name and I’m blanking on what it’s called now, but, that isn’t even shown in Titanic 53. But it did stop in Ireland on Thursday the 11th midday, and then early afternoon it set sail for New York. And of course, infamy.

00:50:33:09 – 00:51:02:00
Mark B. Perry
April 13th would have been the Saturday. And that’s when when Annette says that the next day is when they’re in church on Sunday and they’re singing the hymn. And then by Monday morning, of course, the ship would be lost. And, you know, the story of the investigations and everything would begin. So in terms of accuracy, I think they got this, you know, with excluding things for time’s sake, I think more than anything else.

00:51:02:03 – 00:51:11:20
Mark B. Perry
I think they they did an excellent job. In fact, I’m going to upgrade my rating to a solid B at this point. Okay. Nice. That sizable.

00:51:11:22 – 00:51:30:13
Dan LeFebvre
Oh yes, of course, of course. Well we are at the point then if we go back to the movie, we’re at the point in the timeline where Titanic strikes the iceberg. It’s mere moments after it’s sited. According to the way the movie’s timeline is. And but Captain Smith is not on the bridge when the first actions are taken to avoid the iceberg.

00:51:30:13 – 00:51:46:26
Dan LeFebvre
But we can hear orders like Carter starboard and and full speed astern. Keep the helm hard over, and then movie cuts to the underwater shot that you’re talking about, where you see the, you know, the iceberg actually slicing the hull. And then at this point it cuts to, Captain Smith and he can feel the impact from where he’s on the ship.

00:51:46:26 – 00:52:12:15
Dan LeFebvre
And he rushes to the bridge, and he’s been informed that they picked up a spur. There’s no damage above the waterline, but the for pike is floated to the all top deck. There’s additional damage. After the the bulkhead be. And they’re taking water. And number one, two and three holds number five and six boiler rooms. And in the movie, Captain Smith seems surprised that there’s damage that far aft and asks if they can shore up.

00:52:12:18 – 00:52:29:26
Dan LeFebvre
No, is the reply, and they’ve been cut open like a tin can. And that’s basically a summary of the movie’s version of events. And there’s a lot of nautical terminology in there that, I would hope that you can help, kind of help explain what some of that is, but is that basically what happened?

00:52:29:29 – 00:52:33:00
Mark B. Perry
Well, no.

00:52:33:02 – 00:52:37:02
Dan LeFebvre
I’m sorry. Does that does that bring the grade back down to the B much? Yeah.

00:52:37:05 – 00:52:58:15
Mark B. Perry
No, no, I’m sticking with the B at this point. I, you know, I got a soft spot in my heart for this movie. So is that really what happened again? It’s a rash man indeed. Who knows. But from what we do know, the commands on the bridge. Hard to starboard. Full speed astern. All of that was pretty much exactly right.

00:52:58:15 – 00:53:22:04
Mark B. Perry
And it’s depicted as it’s depicted in the film. And I believe it’s the same thing in Cameron’s film. And that came from testimony at the hearings, because there were officers who survived, who were there, who knew what was going on. Captain Smith in Titanic 53 is sort of having a waxing, sentimental, poetic moment watching the kids sing their school anthem.

00:53:22:04 – 00:53:42:16
Mark B. Perry
And I think they’re in the I don’t know if they’re in the ballroom at the restaurant or where they are. But anyway, he was actually in his cabin, which was next to the wheelhouse on the bridge, and he did feel the impact. But it is very unlikely that the crew had that much information at their disposal, the way it’s portrayed in the film.

00:53:42:18 – 00:54:06:00
Mark B. Perry
In reality, Smith ordered inspections. He’s the one who ordered them to go down and do the inspections. And he also summoned Thomas Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer, who again, isn’t in this movie conveniently, and I think the writers were taking license to just condense all the shoe leather so that they don’t have to play out every step because they want to get back to.

00:54:06:01 – 00:54:27:15
Mark B. Perry
They just want to set up the stakes that the ship is going to sink. What’s going to happen to the Sturges family? And it it seems unlikely that Smith, given his history, and again, that quote, it seems unlikely that he believed the ship was doomed from the get go and he sent an officer below to inspect the damage.

00:54:27:15 – 00:54:54:04
Mark B. Perry
And he then subsequently learned that the forward compartments were flooding. The mail room was flooding, taking on water fast, and he ordered the ship’s carpenter to go down and shore up the damage as best they could. And when, Smith was told that the ship foundering was a mathematical certainty by Thomas Andrews as the ship’s designer, he would know.

00:54:54:07 – 00:55:23:09
Mark B. Perry
That’s when Smith really knew that this was inevitable. So there were several steps in his process. I think some of it may have been denial, but some of it was also doing what he possibly could to try to buy as much time as he could. And, I just think the film for dramatic purposes condensed all of that because, again, that despite their claim at the beginning, that wasn’t really the focus of this particular film.

00:55:23:12 – 00:55:50:22
Dan LeFebvre
That makes perfect sense and that then these ships and my next question, because according to the movie, after hearing about this, this damage, it’s almost immediate. The Captain Smith just knows that the ship is going to go down. The very one of the very first things we see in the movie is he he orders the Ford pump start, and then he rushes to the wireless telegraph room, where he orders a Cicd to all vessels and then you know, the movie through dialog, very helpfully explains one of the officers or the telegraph operators.

00:55:50:22 – 00:56:14:23
Dan LeFebvre
Like that means a full distress. Yeah, yeah, we’re going down. Basically what Captain Smith says. So do we know I’m assuming then knew that we don’t know if Captain Smith immediately knew that they were going to sink. But then if that’s the case, would it be a fair assessment that that order that the movie points out, that he says, you know, starting the Ford pumps, that that’s basically just trying to delay the inevitable to try and buy time for the lifeboats.

00:56:14:25 – 00:56:36:03
Mark B. Perry
I think it was trying to buy time for the lifeboats. I, based on what I’ve read, what I know about it, you know, which again, it’s all speculation, but, I think, yes, they did have pumps and they could buy some time by pumping out the water, but at some point, you know, they get overwhelmed and the ship goes down.

00:56:36:05 – 00:57:00:10
Mark B. Perry
But I do think he was trying. He was he had so few options. And as soon as Andrews told him, it’s a mathematical certainty, which that’s apparently a direct quote from what he said. But he didn’t survive, of course, so who knows? But, I think once those words were said, then Captain Smith knew he had to do whatever he could possibly do to buy as much time as he could as the ship was going down.

00:57:00:10 – 00:57:06:24
Mark B. Perry
And he also simultaneously said, muster, the passengers, put them off boats, women and children.

00:57:06:27 – 00:57:30:24
Dan LeFebvre
I can only those are the kind of things I can’t wrap my head around. What that receiving that news must be, especially with that quote that you mentioned from Captain Smith. You know, just the assumption that this could never happen. And we all think of, you know, the Titanic is unsinkable and that whole aspect. And then to hear that it’s a mathematical, mathematical certainty that just has to be absolutely devastating.

00:57:30:24 – 00:57:39:11
Dan LeFebvre
I don’t I mean, I don’t know how you what sort of reaction to have to that. I mean, unfortunately we’ll never know. But that’s just it’s chilling.

00:57:39:11 – 00:58:04:08
Mark B. Perry
And I think, the actor who plays Captain Smith in Titanic 53, I think he plays that moment pretty well of the realization. And, you know, oh my God, what do we do? And the captain still today, the captain is responsible for the ship. They they are they are the last word. They are the they are the for good or bad, they’re they get the credit.

00:58:04:09 – 00:58:06:12
Mark B. Perry
They they get the blame.

00:58:06:15 – 00:58:08:18
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. The buck stops here as they say.

00:58:08:24 – 00:58:10:00
Mark B. Perry
Exactly.

00:58:10:02 – 00:58:27:09
Dan LeFebvre
Well, speaking of the the lifeboats at this time in the movie is when we find out that they don’t have enough light plus for everybody, Captain Smith’s orders the women and children in lifeboats because there aren’t enough for the men. Can you share some more historical context about the lifeboats situation on Titanic?

00:58:27:11 – 00:58:40:16
Mark B. Perry
Well, I’m going to say something controversial, which is the Titanic actually had more than a sufficient number of lifeboats. Okay, to meet the outdated regulations of the time.

00:58:40:18 – 00:58:42:00
Dan LeFebvre
Okay.

00:58:42:02 – 00:59:10:25
Mark B. Perry
Ships had grown in size so fast and mankind so arrogant, apparently, that they didn’t want to clutter the recreational space on the boat deck with, quote unquote, non-essential equipment that would block the view for the first class passengers out for a stroll on the boat deck. So there were, 16 boats, 16 wooden boats, and that’s eight on each side of the ship for forward and for aft.

00:59:10:27 – 00:59:32:13
Mark B. Perry
And there between the forward and aft boats, there was about 200ft of open deck, as you see in the film, where the passengers could enjoy the view as the ship was sinking. I don’t mean to make light, but it just so absurd to me that they didn’t take safety so as seriously as we do now.

00:59:32:13 – 00:59:35:04
Mark B. Perry
And one of the reasons we do now is because it happened.

00:59:35:06 – 00:59:40:02
Dan LeFebvre
They’re called lifeboats. I mean, that’s that’s pretty essential. Their life. It’s in the name of lifeboat, like.

00:59:40:06 – 01:00:10:07
Mark B. Perry
Yeah, all of those boats, those 16 boats, the the two in the front were smaller. There were slightly smaller, but they were still the wooden lifeboats. Those satisfied by the regulations of the day. But the Titanic was equipped with four additional collapsible lifeboats which were stowed up on one of the I don’t know what you call that. It’s one of the platforms on the boat deck, and they were lashed there and they had some trouble getting them down, but those exceeded the requirements.

01:00:10:07 – 01:00:35:23
Mark B. Perry
And that’s why I say that the Titanic actually had more than sufficient lifeboats to meet the regulations at the time, because they did have these other, these other collapsible boats that could once the other boats had been lowered from the davits, these collapsible boats could be fit into those davits and lowered away. The some of the passengers were made were aware of the disparity between the number of boats and the number of people aboard.

01:00:35:25 – 01:01:02:15
Mark B. Perry
Others were not. And it is true, according to testimony, that some of the first class gentlemen were let in on this dire news and so they could act accordingly. And as for the haphazard use of the boats, you know, going away with a handful of people, there had been no boat drill, for the ship. It wasn’t done, it wasn’t required.

01:01:02:17 – 01:01:31:11
Mark B. Perry
And even as the passengers were told to muster at their muster stations, which is where they’re supposed to gather to get on their lifeboat, the crew was still telling them that the ship was unsinkable. So imagine yourself. It’s freezing cold out. It’s like 28 degrees freezing cold. You’re standing on a solid ship. There’s there’s lights, there’s heat, there’s jaunty music playing from somewhere aft from the ship’s orchestra.

01:01:31:14 – 01:02:00:01
Mark B. Perry
And then there’s a little wooden boat hanging 70ft above the frigid water. And so a lot of people would not get in those boats. And so some of them went away with a handful of people. So, if I may, I’ll go into some, I’ll go into the weeds with the lifeboats. But, all told, there were, as I said, there were 14 largest boats could accommodate 65 passengers each.

01:02:00:03 – 01:02:16:15
Mark B. Perry
The two smaller cutters at the bow, they were called cutters. They were the wooden boats. They had a capacity of 40 people. And the four collapsible boats could handle 47 people each. And that’s a total capacity of 1180 souls. If all of them had been fully loaded.

01:02:16:17 – 01:02:21:02
Dan LeFebvre
And the movie said, I think there are 2200 overall on the Titanic, just a kind of.

01:02:21:04 – 01:02:53:03
Mark B. Perry
There are around 21, 20, 200. The the the number is still not has never really been certified because there were discrepancies in the passenger list and so forth. But there were, let’s say, 21, 20, 200 aboard the maiden voyage. So even fully loaded, the boats would still have been insufficient for some 900 people who died. And but had they been fully loaded, they would have been able to save close to 500 additional lives than what they were able to save.

01:02:53:05 – 01:02:57:03
Mark B. Perry
But hey, even God himself couldn’t think this ship, right?

01:02:57:06 – 01:03:19:07
Dan LeFebvre
What you mentioned there about how the, the crew was saying that, the ship is unsinkable. That reminds me of something that I saw in the movie where, you know, as as people are being told to line up for the lifeboats. This is movie’s version of events. Everyone’s, you know, donning the life jackets, and the crew is sending up distress flares, but then they’re still selling, telling the passenger there’s no cause for alarm.

01:03:19:12 – 01:03:47:02
Dan LeFebvre
Even as in the movie, we can hear alarms blaring across the ship, which seems pretty like a pretty stark contrast to that. And then there’s, it seems pretty obvious that they’re trying to keep everybody calm, but it doesn’t really take very long in the movie for people to start to realize what’s going on. That movie really focuses on Richard Sturgis in his family, and he tells a man they’re probably going to row out a few hundred yards where they repair the damage.

01:03:47:04 – 01:04:03:16
Dan LeFebvre
His wife, Julia, then thanks him for lying to them, and they try to seem to make up their differences in the final moments that they have. And there are a lot of tears in the movie, with only one exception of a man pretending to be a woman to get on the lifeboats. Most of the men seem to be resigned to their fate.

01:04:03:18 – 01:04:12:13
Dan LeFebvre
Do you think the movie did a pretty accurate job of portraying this tension? And then the realization among the passengers as they boarded the lifeboats?

01:04:12:16 – 01:04:33:05
Mark B. Perry
Again, I think it did capture the drama of the moment. I’m not sure if that captured the accuracy. You know, the the who was where and which person was in which boat. But there are cases that Walter Lord writes about of men reassuring their wives, as Richard does in the movie. And, you know, it’s just a precaution.

01:04:33:05 – 01:04:54:14
Mark B. Perry
And so forth. And while knowing that they themselves were doomed, as Richard Sturgis does in the film and, you know, but that gives him for the soap that and the drama that gives him that great moment with Norman when Norman sadly, tragically gets to, quote unquote, be a man, which is his whole thing in the movie. He wants to wear long pants.

01:04:54:14 – 01:05:18:07
Mark B. Perry
He’s grown up. And so he’s going to become a man, which means he’s going to perish with the other man, the other gentleman aboard the ship. And in terms of the drama and the tears and the fear and the terror, as the reality of it begins to dawn on these people, the goodbyes, the stoicism of the the men and the other people who stayed behind.

01:05:18:07 – 01:05:32:27
Mark B. Perry
I think the film captures the drama of that really well and is and is pretty powerful. But again, if you want to get into the weeds on the actual timeline, you got to look to Mr. Cameron’s opus.

01:05:33:00 – 01:05:57:20
Dan LeFebvre
That yeah, that’s fair. And it does still go back to especially especially in a moment like that, because that’s the moment when there is the most panic. Relying on the witness reports is going to be the most, for lack of a better way to say it, the most inaccurate. I mean, that’s when their most panic is. So that’s when the misremembering, you know, trying to piece together things after the fact.

01:05:57:20 – 01:06:03:24
Dan LeFebvre
I imagine that would be the most difficult element to remember, as things are flashing by so quickly.

01:06:03:27 – 01:06:14:29
Mark B. Perry
Rational thought goes out the window. It’s all about do I jump, do I stay? I mean, I cannot imagine the terror of that situation.

01:06:15:01 – 01:06:33:13
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we go back to the movie as as the lifeboats lowered and they row away, we the band plays nearer. My God, to the everyone left on board sings along, and the movie cuts to some shots of people in the lifeboats. They can hear the songs being sung as Titanic starts to pitch forward. All of a sudden things accelerate very quickly.

01:06:33:13 – 01:06:53:03
Dan LeFebvre
In the movie, there seems to be some sort of an explosion. The movie doesn’t really mention what’s happening here, but there’s some dialog earlier talked about, the ship being finished once the water hits the boilers. So that’s what I was assuming. The movie’s trying to portray as water hits the boilers is explosion of steam, perhaps, but in the movie we see the ball fully engulfed in the water.

01:06:53:03 – 01:07:10:03
Dan LeFebvre
The water just kind of starts bubbling at the surface. And then there’s this rumbling that knocks everybody off their feet, stops them from singing Near my God to thee. And then within a few seconds, she slips beneath the waters entirely. Do you think the movie did a pretty good job recounting what we know of Titanic’s final moments.

01:07:10:06 – 01:07:41:13
Mark B. Perry
For the time? Once again, I’m going to put everything in this film in context of what they knew at the time. So I think they tried to do a, I, they tried to do a good job, a respectful job of depicting the final moments based on what they knew and with the technology they had available at the time, which was basically models, miniatures and, you know, air canisters so they could blow, you know, the water could bubble as the ship goes down and that sort of thing.

01:07:41:15 – 01:08:01:19
Mark B. Perry
There’s always been lively debate about the whole nearer, my God to thee thing, or whether it was nearer, my God to thee or a popular tune of the time called Autumn, which was a waltz. But the nearer, my God, to thee thing is such a. I don’t know if romantic is the right word to use, but it’s so evocative.

01:08:01:19 – 01:08:22:16
Mark B. Perry
I think it’s kind of become Titanic gospel, if you will. But Walter Lord writes about it in his sequel to A Night to Remember that came out in the 80s, called The Night Lives On. And, in this film, they start playing in Titanic 53. The captain asks them to start playing, and it’s much later in the process.

01:08:22:16 – 01:08:45:10
Mark B. Perry
And in truth, the captain didn’t ask them a while. Wallace Hartley, the band leader. He was the one who instigated it, which is portrayed pretty accurately in the Cameron film. And they were playing light music of the day. They were playing ragtime. They were playing, you know, waltzes. They’re playing popular songs because the whole idea was to take people, take people’s minds off of, you know, what was going on.

01:08:45:10 – 01:09:13:22
Mark B. Perry
And keep everybody calm. Interestingly enough, Nearer My God to Thee was the original title of Titanic 53, until somebody wisely suggested that they change it. But witnesses at the time, again, with the testimony that they had, they basically said they saw the bow going under, and then that accelerated as the water rose, the decks began to slope precariously, making it impossible for people to stand.

01:09:13:22 – 01:09:37:02
Mark B. Perry
And we see all of this in the film. The musicians eventually fell, you know, and the music stopped. The lights went out. Then there was a steady roar. And in the the real witness accounts, there was a steady roar, which was apparently the sound of all the heavy machinery, the dishes, the glassware, the furniture, the pianos, everything breaking loose and hurtling toward the submerged bow.

01:09:37:05 – 01:10:05:04
Mark B. Perry
We only see some of this and 53 it is shown in horrifying, vivid detail in Cameron’s film, the dishes and everything else. As the stern rose in the air and the real, incident, the, the forward funnel detached, fell into the water. It’s depicted in Cameron’s film. They do not show that happening here. It may have been beyond their capable to make that, look realistic.

01:10:05:06 – 01:10:27:06
Mark B. Perry
Then in real life, the ship did go perpendicular, for up to two minutes, according to witnesses. And the noises stopped. And the stern then settled back slightly, then slowly began to slip. It’s picking up speed as it went. Now in Titanic 53, we don’t see it do this, but we see it stay at the angle and.

01:10:27:06 – 01:10:28:28
Dan LeFebvre
Then.

01:10:29:01 – 01:11:03:20
Mark B. Perry
Hang there for a moment and then begin to sink and pick up speed. And that settling back might well have been as the witnesses who saw it. That may well have been the ship actually breaking in two at the time. But we didn’t know that for sure until the wreck was found by Ballard in the 80s. And I find it interesting that of all the people who testified were interviewed, only three swore they saw the ship break in half and all the others said that that did not happen.

01:11:03:22 – 01:11:29:05
Mark B. Perry
And so that goes back to speaking to the reliability of eyewitness testimony. So I think it puts a big caveat on all of this. As for the explosion that’s portrayed in 1953, they were basing that on testimony of one seaman who said that he survived, and he said that he heard an explosion before the ship went down.

01:11:29:07 – 01:11:52:03
Mark B. Perry
But when Ballard found the wreck, there was no evidence of a boiler explosion. There was no evidence of an explosion. There was evidence of the ship having been strained to the point of breaking in half. And but it is possible that the bulkhead, when they were going down the bulkheads finally giving way with all of that pressure, could have made explosive sounds.

01:11:52:06 – 01:12:19:06
Mark B. Perry
And who knows what a huge ship actually sounds like when it literally breaks into. So I think they opted to rely on that one person’s testimony because it makes for drama. It it accelerates the sinking. In the movie it says this happened and that’s why this happened. And that’s how Richard Sturgis dies with his son without ever having shared his true parentage.

01:12:19:06 – 01:12:21:18
Mark B. Perry
Because, again, it’s a soap opera.

01:12:21:20 – 01:12:41:26
Dan LeFebvre
I you make a great point two, of how would we know what that would, what it actually would have sounded like. That goes back to, you know, relying on on witness reports. But even they wouldn’t they you hear this big noise, you wouldn’t be able to identify exactly what that is because there’s all these there’s a lot of noises, I’m sure, that were happening.

01:12:42:03 – 01:12:46:12
Dan LeFebvre
And being able to identify what they were not easy to do.

01:12:46:19 – 01:13:10:12
Mark B. Perry
Yeah, I, I and I give Cameron big props for and his crew and the sound mixers because if you have to imagine that and try to create that, I think they did an exceptional job because that’s a horrifying moment in the Cameron film, which I recently rewatched. And as a research before you, we have our talk today.

01:13:10:15 – 01:13:34:16
Dan LeFebvre
Well, we started our discussion today with the text at the beginning of the movie, so it seems fitting to end in a similar fashion because the movie ends with voiceover. It gives us a few details about the tragedy, and I’m going to quote the voiceover from the end of the movie. Thus, on April 15th, 1912, at oh two 20 hours, as the passengers and crew sang a Welsh hymn, RMS Titanic passed from the British registry.

01:13:34:18 – 01:13:57:28
Dan LeFebvre
712 people in 19 lifeboats survived. I found it interesting that the movie mentioned the number of survivors in lifeboats, but didn’t mention how many souls were lost. So I have a two part question. As we start to wrap up our discussion today. First is the part the movie included in the final voice over accurate. And secondly, can you fill in some of the historical details that the movie doesn’t mention?

01:13:58:00 – 01:14:24:29
Mark B. Perry
By all accounts, there were 712 survivors, and most estimates put the loss of souls at around 1500, which is an interesting omission in this film, because to me. That’s the more horrifying statistic, actually. But again, this number isn’t really known because we don’t actually know how many people were aboard the ship because they weren’t all scanned by computers.

01:14:25:01 – 01:14:44:26
Mark B. Perry
You know, they didn’t have wristbands like they do today. And there were discrepancies in the passenger list. There were people who were on the printed passenger list who did not make the voyage. And same for the crew. So I want to go back to the singing of the hymn, the because you mentioned the Welsh hymn and the movie says Welsh hymn.

01:14:44:26 – 01:15:19:14
Mark B. Perry
Well, as many, many people insist that, you know, the band didn’t play the hymn, because their goal was to calm the passengers and not, you know, serenade the arrival of death or whatever. But if they had actually played or sung nearer, my God, to thee. As Walter Lord points out, the British version has a completely different melody than the American version, and not everybody would have known the song by the same melody, so it would have been a cacophony as opposed to the way it’s depicted in Titanic.

01:15:19:14 – 01:15:43:11
Mark B. Perry
53 years ago, I bought an excellent CD called Titanic. Music is heard on The Fateful Voyage, and it’s by, Ian Whitcomb and his orchestra, and they do authentic recreations of the music from the ship, and they do a performance of this waltz called Autumn. And for me, I like to think that that’s the last tune that the band played.

01:15:43:14 – 01:16:14:09
Mark B. Perry
People may have said prayers, they may have sung hymns. But that’s what I prefer to think, because it’s a very haunting, beautiful melody. Another interesting thing is that two of those four collapsible boats that could have carried however many people I said earlier, they apparently floated away with nobody in them. And, so of the total of 18 boats, the 16 wooden, the two collapsible, that’s all that survived.

01:16:14:12 – 01:16:33:28
Mark B. Perry
But if those other boats floated off and there was a sea full of people flailing, it’s hard to understand why they wouldn’t have done. One of the collapsible, as we’ve seen, was upside down, and the they managed to get aboard it and keep it afloat all night until they were rescued. So it’s hard to imagine why that happened.

01:16:33:28 – 01:17:06:12
Mark B. Perry
And I wonder, actually, if those boats were still lashed to the ship and went down with it. And that’s why there’s no account of those two. Two missing, collapsible boats. And then finally, the Titanic was never advertised as being unsinkable, but was generally referred to that way. And that was repeated enough that people believed that even apparently Captain Smith.

01:17:06:15 – 01:17:40:20
Mark B. Perry
But when you look at the persist, a fascination with this ship, all the TV shows, the documentaries, the coverage of that tragic submersible implosion that happened two years ago, going down to the dive, the wreck, the movies, the operas, the musicals, the books, nonfiction and fiction and on and on. As I said earlier, this was a hundred years ago, but it’s still this tragic confluence of events that happened that night and resulted in everything that it did.

01:17:40:23 – 01:17:58:21
Mark B. Perry
It it still resonates. It’s still it’s still relatable for people and it still fascinates. So it’s and and in that way, as Walter Lord points out, the Titanic herself may not have been unsinkable, but the legacy of the Titanic is certainly unsinkable.

01:17:58:24 – 01:18:17:27
Dan LeFebvre
But you mentioned at the very beginning that you had written your own version before Cameron’s version came out. If, let’s say that you were in charge of a new adaptation of Titanic story, is there anything you would change or anything based on the new information that’s come out since you wrote that originally?

01:18:18:00 – 01:18:22:10
Mark B. Perry
I probably wouldn’t do it.

01:18:22:13 – 01:18:28:25
Dan LeFebvre
Because it would be compared to Cameron’s. And that I mean, that’s that’s because that just seems to be the one that everybody’s like, this is what happened.

01:18:29:02 – 01:19:00:11
Mark B. Perry
Of course. I mean, Cameron, whatever we think of all the Jack and Rose stuff in the film, it made it a blockbuster hit. It’s a movie that I don’t know that I’ve ever met anybody who hasn’t seen it, which is rare. And I think he has set the standard for generations to come. And it’s also known as the studio execs prophetically said to us, this will be the most expensive movie ever made, which at the time it was.

01:19:00:11 – 01:19:30:24
Mark B. Perry
And so they were right. Even ten years before. But, you know, especially a movie where everybody already knows the ending. That said, I do think that the script that Dudley and I wrote at and again, trying to be respectful but still tell an action adventure, time travel movie, I think that it removes one of those obstacles, because in our script, you don’t know what’s going to happen to the ship, because the hero has the moral dilemma of, do I try to save these people?

01:19:30:27 – 01:19:58:06
Mark B. Perry
Or do I let it? Do I let history take its course? And the ship founder and all of the positive, developments that came from the tragedy, like lifeboats for all, and, you know, 24 hour, wireless communications and people receiving wireless as well as sending them on the ships and the safety of life at sea regulations that are constantly being updated.

01:19:58:08 – 01:20:11:19
Mark B. Perry
So a lot of positive things resulted from this horrible tragedy. But, you know, in our movie, you don’t you don’t know what’s going to happen. So, you know, if somebody from Netflix is a fan of your show, maybe they’ll give me a call. I don’t know.

01:20:11:21 – 01:20:33:26
Dan LeFebvre
When you’re talking about the time travel. When I was, have you ever seen, Final Countdown? I think it’s called where they go back in time to, and they have that same sort of discretion, like, do we stop the attack on Pearl Harbor? Do we, do we stop this from happening? I mean, that was the first thing that came to mind when you talk about not even really knowing, are they going to let history play out?

01:20:33:26 – 01:20:41:16
Dan LeFebvre
Is this going to be that same sort of dilemma in the movie that takes an event that we all know what happened, but is it really going to happen this way in this movie?

01:20:41:19 – 01:20:45:01
Mark B. Perry
Right. Well, we wrote our script first.

01:20:45:03 – 01:20:46:00
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, yeah, I.

01:20:46:03 – 01:20:49:27
Mark B. Perry
We didn’t need it made.

01:20:49:29 – 01:20:51:16
Mark B. Perry
But we wrote.

01:20:51:18 – 01:21:08:09
Dan LeFebvre
Fair. Well, I’d love to switch away from the 53 Titanic movie to another story of yours, the your debut novel called and introducing Dexter Gaines. And I’ve got a link to that in some notes for everyone to pick up their own copy. And while they do that, can you share a sneak peek of your book?

01:21:08:12 – 01:21:34:23
Mark B. Perry
Yeah, thanks. I appreciate you asking. In addition to my love for ships, I love old movies. I love old Hollywood, and I. I love historical fiction. And, as a side note, I also love time travel stories, obviously. But, and when I, when I decided to try my hand at fiction, I wanted to myself, time travel back to the twilight of Hollywood’s golden age.

01:21:34:23 – 01:22:00:19
Mark B. Perry
And I’m. This is not a time travel novel. I’m just saying, me as a writer, I wanted to experience it, to put my head in the heads of those characters and that time period. And I wanted specifically to set it in the early 1950s, when TV was a threat to the movie business and when the studio system was beginning to change and be phased out.

01:22:00:21 – 01:22:27:28
Mark B. Perry
And I wanted to tell an unconventional story that starts with one of the most well-known tropes, which is a young person coming to Hollywood to become a star. And, in my case, he’s a young man from Texas with matinee idol good looks and the unfortunate name of Dan Root, and he’s escaping a, troubled past. He arrives in town, he falls in with one of the most powerful couples in Hollywood.

01:22:28:00 – 01:22:52:01
Mark B. Perry
And it’s a hotshot producer at 20th Century Fox who produced Titanic 53. His name is Milford Langdon and his wife, Lillian Sinclair, who’s a glamorous movie star, who’s kind of on the cusp between fame and fade out, as happens to women in this cruel industry. And together, Millie and Lily, they mentor, Dan and transform him into a promising young actor.

01:22:52:01 – 01:23:20:24
Mark B. Perry
And they rechristened him Dexter Gaines. That’s going to be his big movie name. And it becomes an unconventional love story about heartbreak and redemption and sexual awakening. And it’s told as a kind of emotional mystery that set in, two time periods. It’s set in 1994, when he when Dan returns to Hollywood to confront his demons, and the early 1950s, when he, first gets his, first bitter taste of stardom.

01:23:20:26 – 01:23:47:01
Mark B. Perry
And we know from the very beginning of the book these are there are no spoilers here. We know from the very beginning of the book that his time in Hollywood ended up being a spectacular failure that ended in violence and attempted murder. But the story is about this man finding self absolution in the in the ultimate truth that he uncovers from the literal and figurative, ruins of his past.

01:23:47:01 – 01:24:21:15
Mark B. Perry
And I’m happy to say it’s been on one of Amazon’s, bestseller lists since it came out May 6th. And and I, I and the, the critical acclaim, the reviews I’ve gotten so far have been overwhelmingly positive. And I chose the early 50s for a couple of reasons. I wanted a real scene and a real movie that my character, my fictional character Dexter, could have been in when the film was shot and then could have been cut out of before it was released.

01:24:21:18 – 01:24:48:04
Mark B. Perry
And I was watching Titanic 53 for the 800th time, and the scene presented itself to me and I thought, oh, and then I worked backwards from that. And that’s how I, I originally I was going to start the book in 1950, but I shifted it to 1952. So that it could accommodate the maiden voyage of the United States, which is also featured in the book, and some behind the scenes stuff and the making of Titanic.

01:24:48:04 – 01:24:57:06
Mark B. Perry
So if you want to know more about that, I would encourage you to pick up a copy or listen to the wonderful audiobook that was performed by Daniel Henning.

01:24:57:09 – 01:25:01:08
Dan LeFebvre
Fantastic. I’ll make sure to add link that in the show notes. Thanks again so much for your time, Mark.

01:25:01:10 – 01:25:06:19
Mark B. Perry
Thank you. I as you can tell, I’m always happy to shoot the ship as we say.

01:25:07:20 – 01:25:13:04
Mark B. Perry
And this was really fun. Thanks for having me, Dan.

00:02:13:01 – 00:02:40:00
Dan LeFebvre
Let’s start this off on D-Day, June 6th, 1944. In the movie, we find out from some text on the screen that we’re at Dog Green Sector Omaha Beach. And this is where we join Tom Hanks, his character, Captain John Miller, and the other soldiers as they’re heading toward the beaches and landing vehicles. This is an interesting look at what it might have been like for soldiers as they were nearing the shores.

00:02:40:02 – 00:03:11:26
Dan LeFebvre
They can’t see over the sides of the vehicles. All they can hear are the guns and explosions getting closer. There are splashes from the explosions that rain water down on top of them. Then, as it’s time to go, we see the front ramp lowered and the front soldiers are almost immediately mowed down by machine gun fire. Miller starts yelling for his men to jump over the sides, which causes even more problems because as they do, their way down by their packs, some of the men manage to get out of their gear underwater and make it back to the surface.

00:03:11:29 – 00:03:23:12
Dan LeFebvre
Others don’t. Can you give us a little more insight into the location that we get in the movie of Don Green Sector, Omaha Beach, and these moments up until landing on the beach?

00:03:23:19 – 00:04:07:29
Marty Morgan
Yeah, what they’re depicting is the moment of the greatest intensity during the battle for Omaha Beach. I would just mention that Omaha Beach was really six separate battles, each battle functioning separate and almost entirely autonomous, and disconnected from one another for the first half of the day on D-Day. And what the screenplay writer in the movie did was, he chose the battle that provided the greatest amount of drama because the U.S. Army Fifth Corps landings in the dark green sector of Omaha Beach, and those are landings primarily carried out by two battalions of the 29th Infantry Division and

00:04:08:02 – 00:04:42:28
Marty Morgan
Then, with a few Rangers thrown in. That is where the entire assault goes entirely wrong. In fact, the the the historical quote that I think most effectively communicates how bad it was there is what happens to a company of the 164th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Division, a company landed with 164 officers and men, and within five minutes of combat in front of the German Resistance Master Bunker complex at Dog Sector, they had suffered 91 killed and 65 wounded.

00:04:43:00 – 00:05:08:25
Marty Morgan
So that literally in the span of five minutes, an entire infantry company was reduced to complete ineffectiveness. And that’s a significant detail because the Yoma, the first wave at Omaha Beach, consisted of nine infantry companies spread out over the entire length of the beach and Omaha Beach is five miles wide. Out of the nine infantry companies that conducted that preliminary assault.

00:05:08:28 – 00:05:14:24
Marty Morgan
One of them is destroyed entirely in front of the defenses at Dark Green Sector.

00:05:14:26 – 00:05:25:08
Dan LeFebvre
I know you mentioned the number of, division, but just getting a sense of how many people are storming the beaches this five mile stretch of beach, how many people were there overall that were involved in the invasion there?

00:05:25:10 – 00:05:39:11
Marty Morgan
Or if you consider just the first wave? And of course, there were far more than just one way during the day on June 6th. But if you consider just the first wave nine infantry companies just as approaching 1800 to 2000 men.

00:05:39:13 – 00:05:40:00
Dan LeFebvre
Wow.

00:05:40:02 – 00:06:18:03
Marty Morgan
They’re going up against Germans and basically 13 resistance nest or bunker complexes. And the total number of Germans that were immediately in those fighting positions ready to resist the landings at right after dawn on D-Day. So the number of Germans is about 600. So our assault force, even with just the first wave, possesses numerical superiority. But the German defending force was behind concrete and then also, in positions that were built into terrain so that they had elevation over the battlefield.

00:06:18:05 – 00:06:40:14
Marty Morgan
The bluff at Omaha Beach is about 100ft tall. German positions were, at the water level, and they were on top of the bluffs. And the the effect of the elevation, the use of terrain, and the use of concrete fighting positions function as a force multiplier. That made it possible for those German defenders to inflict heavy casualties for a brief period of time.

00:06:40:14 – 00:07:05:03
Marty Morgan
A point I love to make when discussing the movie Saving Private Ryan is that you can go just a few hundred meters to the east, down the length of Omaha Beach, where you’re encountering US troops that are landing first waves, and they’re receiving a little bit of harassing fire at long ranges to where the fire is not entirely effective.

00:07:05:05 – 00:07:33:06
Marty Morgan
And in other words, you could you had Americans that landed that were just a few hundred meters to the east of dark Green Sector, and almost everyone gets out of the landing craft, gets, through the beach obstacles and makes it to the stand called the shingle with light casualties, that stands in strong contrast to what happens at Green Sector, which is, of course, what’s depicted in the opening scene of the movie, where you have effectively cataclysmic casualties.

00:07:33:08 – 00:07:55:09
Dan LeFebvre
The impression I got was that was essentially what was going on everywhere, because of course, that’s the only thing that we see is this just mass rain of of fire. As these people are getting out of the, the landing vehicles. And so I just assumed that that was happening everywhere on the beach. But it sounds like very, very different experiences.

00:07:55:11 – 00:08:26:21
Marty Morgan
That’s absolutely correct, because the movie will teach you the impression that it was a five mile wide slaughterhouse, and it simply was not that. It just wasn’t that at all. I make the larger macro argument that the depiction of the moment of the greatest chaos and casualties, it sort of fits something that’s been going on in the overall narrative of the war movie as a genre and cinema for at least 50 years now.

00:08:26:23 – 00:09:00:27
Marty Morgan
And I argue that the era of Vietnam introduced certain levels of disenchantment and cynicism to the way that Americans comprehend the experience of war, and that the Vietnam era changed the way that we understand war, and that we always think of it as being led by fools. Thing bureaucratically led to the point of producing a massive ineffectiveness. And we at a point I like to make do is that it takes up to the victimization of the lowest ranking people.

00:09:00:29 – 00:09:27:27
Marty Morgan
And so, in other words, since the era of Vietnam, we like to imagine sat, catch corrupted high ranking officers that are far removed from the experience of fighting on the front, who are planning of, planning the battles in which the best and brightest of American youth are slaughtered needlessly on the battlefield and Private Ryan, I find, is a movie that, at its core is very patriotic.

00:09:27:29 – 00:09:52:06
Marty Morgan
Which is why it came as such a surprise to me when the movie came out and I caught it for the first time in the theaters, it really felt like a change of gears, because it’s a movie that, in the end, is very patriotic, very, very romanticized. But at the same time, I find that it selects from some of what tropes that really characterize the era of the Vietnam War movie.

00:09:52:08 – 00:10:17:20
Dan LeFebvre
After the soldiers land on the beach again, going back to the movie, we get a look at how they advance inland. First, there’s some metal obstacles that the Germans set up to prevent vehicles from landing on the beach, but they use that as cover. Much cover, but it’s better than nothing. And one of the lines of dialog, as they’re getting shot at, they’re kind of struck me as interesting.

00:10:17:27 – 00:10:36:22
Dan LeFebvre
There’s a soldier that yells to Tom Hanks, his character, Captain Miller says something like, what are your orders, sir? And he replies, get your men off the beach. Like they had to be told not to just hang out there as as they’re being slaughtered. But from here, we see soldiers managed to take, berm in the sand.

00:10:36:22 – 00:10:57:11
Dan LeFebvre
They use that as cover, and then they use what they call Bangalore’s, which look like long metal tubes. You see them put an explosive in one end and then basically just throw the entire thing over. Almost seems like movie magic to me because it’s just like they throw it over, there’s a massive explosion, and then the men are able to advance closer to the machine gun nests.

00:10:57:13 – 00:11:19:27
Dan LeFebvre
And the next step of this advance inland here is on the movie is, Barry Peppers character, Jackson. He’s a sniper, so they use covering fire to get him into position to take out the men and machine gun nest. And then from there, the American soldiers make their way to the German bunker. They use a mixture of grenades and, flamethrowers to clear out the bunker.

00:11:19:29 – 00:11:45:26
Dan LeFebvre
And, of course, you know, we see the soldiers on the other side tell the other soldiers not to shoot them because they want them to burn up with the flamethrower, that, act of cruelty there. But, after this, we see Captain Miller sit down to survey the beach, and it’s just a very high level overview of how the movie shows, basically the troops gaining a foothold on D-Day.

00:11:45:28 – 00:11:55:11
Dan LeFebvre
How accurate is that depiction of how the soldiers advance from their landing craft to establish a foothold? How accurate was that?

00:11:55:14 – 00:12:32:15
Marty Morgan
Let me put it this way. It is the most accurate cinema depiction to date. That’s as nice as I can be. Because once you once you begin to pick this scene apart, with what’s with some advanced, like with an advanced course and knowledge and the history of D-Day invasion? It’s hard not to acknowledge the fact that there are some substantial errors and authenticity and the way that the scene is depicted, it feels almost wrong for me to harp on those, and I try to stay away from them as much as possible.

00:12:32:17 – 00:12:55:06
Marty Morgan
But because I believe that the scene I think that’s the most memorable takeaway of the entire motion picture, that whole first 20 minutes of that film is what galvanized everyone. It’s what grabs you by the throat and pulls you into that story. It’s such an effective moment in filmmaking, and it, I remember the first time I sat through it.

00:12:55:12 – 00:13:40:12
Marty Morgan
I mean, it was it took my breath away. It was it’s such an impactful, moment in cinema. With that said, it’s got lots of problems. And let’s just start with, the flamethrower. Don’t shoot. Let them burn. There is absolutely no use whatsoever of the flamethrower on Omaha Beach on Tuesday, June 6th, 1944. So right there, we got a big problem because, as a person who leads tours to Normandy many, many times every year and has been doing so for over 20 years, I have basically been doing so in the era since the movie Private Ryan came out, because it came out what was July 24th, 1998.

00:13:40:15 – 00:14:02:28
Marty Morgan
It’s been almost 22 years since the movie came out. I’ve been leading tours during that era. That’s sort of something that comes up basically with every tour. And I’m not saying that we did not conduct the interviews landing without flamethrowers. There were flamethrower was used on D-Day, just not on Omaha Beach. It was used in the British Canadian sectors, for example, with great effect.

00:14:02:28 – 00:14:41:07
Marty Morgan
They were used on armored fighting vehicles, particularly with great effect, not in the American sector and definitely not on Omaha Beach. So a scene that I believe provided this lasting impact for the viewer. Ammo, I should say a moment that provides a lasting impact for the viewer is built around a core level historical inaccuracy that I personally have to spend kind of a lot of time dealing with when I’m on the scene on Omaha Beach, taking people through the advanced course of what actually happened on D-Day, because what I’m finding is that people have maybe read a little bit about June 6th.

00:14:41:10 – 00:15:07:15
Marty Morgan
They’ve watched the movies, they’ve watched Private Ryan, and they come to Normandy. And it’s almost like when they get to Normandy, then the actuality of the learning experience can begin again. I feel like Saving Private Ryan did wonders for this subject. I think it created the era where there’s an enormous thirst for knowledge about D-Day. It put Normandy kind of back on the map as a tourist destination for Americans.

00:15:07:15 – 00:15:30:04
Marty Morgan
I can speak to that with authority because I might not have that tour guide work were it not for that movie. In other words, if Steven Spielberg had not decided that this was his next passion project, I might be working at the post office. But instead I spent. I get to spend a great deal of time on Omaha Beach every year, and I absolutely love every bit of it.

00:15:30:07 – 00:16:03:09
Marty Morgan
And I have to acknowledge and thank the movie Saving Private Ryan for making all that possible. Because these movies really offer such a powerful tool for getting people interested in the subject matter and getting people enthusiastic about the subject matter. So it feels. I feel bad when I harp on things like no flamethrowers on Omaha Beach, horses landed on Omaha Beach with flamethrowers, but a major moment for the landings of the US Army Corps on Omaha Beach, is that the troops are, for the most part, landed.

00:16:03:09 – 00:16:28:09
Marty Morgan
The troops of the first wave are landed for the most part on a sandbar off shore. That compelled them as they waited ashore to wade through water that got deeper and deeper. You can see this in this famous photograph that was taken by U.S. Coast Guardsman Bob Sergeant. And the sergeant. Photos show a group of men from 16th Infantry Regiment, first Infantry Division, landing in front of the easy Read sector of Omaha Beach.

00:16:28:12 – 00:16:47:28
Marty Morgan
And there’s a photograph that shows them on the landing craft right before they land. And then there’s a photo of the ramp down in the LCP, and the men are wading through water that comes all the way up to their chest. That, I think, provides a really powerful piece of evidence as to why things went wrong with things like flankers.

00:16:47:28 – 00:17:20:28
Marty Morgan
And also radios is where pieces of equipment that were never meant to be submerged in salt water, and yet they were submerged in salt water on D-Day. Which is why for the most part, radios and flamethrowers do not work on Omaha Beach. So you’ve got a big problem there with the flamethrower scene. Something that attaches nicely to the flamethrower point is that the depiction of the bunker from the don’t let them burn moment, that bunker is not something that appears anywhere on the landing area.

00:17:20:28 – 00:17:58:07
Marty Morgan
The 50 mile wide stretch of beaches in northern France, where the multinational coalition landed on D-Day. There is no bunker like that. There are none. Absolutely not. It’s a complete falsehood. There are bunkers that look like that, that are in the overall German system of of prefabricated design. But you don’t have one like that on Omaha Beach, so that when you see the flamethrower come into the back of the position and then he hits the flame and you see, a hardened position that’s on the face of the bluff, looking straight out to the water.

00:17:58:09 – 00:18:19:05
Marty Morgan
What? That looks more like an observation position than anything. You don’t have that on Omaha Beach. What you have are a series of fighting positions that present a much more modest profile. And when I say that, I mean a profile that’s a little bit harder to shoot and destroy. Their basic with two types, I should say three types of fighting positions.

00:18:19:05 – 00:18:44:27
Marty Morgan
On a small beach, there are fighting positions or heavy weapons like anti-tank guns, 88 millimeter guns, 75 millimeter guns, 50 millimeter guns. Those positions are, for the most part, oriented not out to sea, but oriented to direct info, lighting, fire gun, the length of the beach. And all of them have a traverse wall that protects the armature, which is the opening through which the gun points.

00:18:45:00 – 00:19:07:09
Marty Morgan
Then there are a series of fighting positions for automatic weapons. They’re much smaller in overall scale, and those fighting positions in some cases do point out to sea. But the Germans, also on Omaha Beach, had a large number of fighting positions that were, basically improvised, meaning they were dug positions that use logs and sandbags to to reinforce them.

00:19:07:11 – 00:19:48:18
Marty Morgan
Then you also have positions that concrete underground positions for mortars. And since I just spoke that word, I feel like I should jump ahead real quick and just address one other subject. There’s a there’s a very arresting moment in that opening scene of Private Ryan where you see an LCD landing craft on the beach. The camera perspective is over the right shoulder of a German MG 42 gunner, and that gunner is, just dumping a built of eight millimeter ammunition straight down through the ramp into the landing craft and slaughtering everybody on board the landing craft.

00:19:48:20 – 00:20:12:22
Marty Morgan
I’m not saying that there’s, a basic problem with that depiction, but I would say this, it has led people to believe that there were a very large number of MG 42 machine guns on Omaha Beach on D-Day, and it has led people to the further misapprehension that the MG 42 was a decisive weapon against Americans landing on Omaha Beach.

00:20:12:25 – 00:20:54:13
Marty Morgan
It certainly was not. That is definitely not what happened there. There were there was an assortment of different types of automatic weapons on Omaha Beach. Not all of them were MG 42. In fact, the minority of them were Ng 42 and the MG 42. Well, I should say this. The engine 40 and all of the other different types of automatic weapons, many of which were foreign, by the way, those weapons were far less effective than the opening scene of Private Ryan would have you believe, because what they what that scene but lead you to believe is that the entire area, everyone’s being slaughtered because the entire area is being swept by machine gun fire.

00:20:54:16 – 00:21:17:01
Marty Morgan
And it makes you furthermore think that the entire Al-hol Beach area was being swept with a machine gun fire and energy for it. There were MG 40 twos. They were the minority of all of the different diverse types of automatic weapons that were there. And automatic weapons fire did not produce anywhere close to the total number of casualties that the actual big killer on D-Day did.

00:21:17:03 – 00:21:32:20
Marty Morgan
And the big killer on Omaha Beach was a German model like 1934 80 millimeter mortar. That weapon does most of the dirty work against American forces landing during those early hours of June 6th.

00:21:32:22 – 00:21:50:05
Dan LeFebvre
There was a moment there, I think it was Tom Hanks, his character, when when the when the, I don’t remember the soldier’s name. I was talking to him, asking him what the orders were, but, he made a comment where they’ve cited in every inch of this beach, and I’m assuming that was referring to the mortars. Would that be correct?

00:21:50:07 – 00:22:17:26
Marty Morgan
That would be correct. And I should just mention this, that the one cool thing that Private Ryan does is that it borrows from stories from a number of actual living people, because I can see why Spielberg made the movie the way that he did, and I appreciate the movie that he made, and I like the movie that made, but he didn’t want to make a 100% pure and actuality based documentary the way that The Longest Day was.

00:22:17:26 – 00:22:40:29
Marty Morgan
For example, he wanted to create a story that he had some freedom to be flexible with, to create circumstances, to create tension between characters. He did the things that storytellers do, and it was all based on the story of Tuesday, June 6th, 1944, and a few days thereafter. One of the things he for the Tom Hanks character, he borrows from a few different people.

00:22:40:29 – 00:23:07:15
Marty Morgan
I’ll probably mention them as we continue speaking, but since you mentioned the quote of get your men off the beach, I would just say that in that moment, they borrowed from the story of the man who commanded the U.S. Army’s 16th Infantry Regiment on D-Day. His name was Colonel George Taylor and Colonel Taylor, and landing noticed that there were that the assault toward the beach had largely lost momentum.

00:23:07:17 – 00:23:29:24
Marty Morgan
And the reason that that momentum was lost was because that as men came off of their landing craft, they found that they were vulnerable to enemy small arms fire and more importantly, fragmentation from enemy mortar fire. The men then moved quickly through the built where the obstacles were located. And they found that when they reached the beach itself.

00:23:29:26 – 00:23:50:17
Marty Morgan
I’m not talking about the water line, but they’re reaching the basically the high water line. Because we landed at low tide as the tide was beginning to come in and at the high water line on Omaha Beach back then. It’s not like this today. But 75 years ago, there was this thing that they called the shingle, and the shingle was riprap.

00:23:50:17 – 00:24:16:27
Marty Morgan
So they were they were river rocks about the size of your fist by the millions. They were poured right at the water’s edge to prevent scouring of the beach from seasonal winter storms. The the shingle will as a result of wave action. It will sort of take the form of a little bit of a ledge. And there are only two places that I know of today on the overall length of Omaha Beach, where there’s a little bit of shingle still left.

00:24:16:27 – 00:24:38:13
Marty Morgan
The shingle has largely been removed. So the Omaha beach that you see today looks quite a bit different than the Omaha Beach did on June 6th, 1944. But what George, Colonel Taylor was finding was that as men came off the landing craft, as they made it up to the beach obstacles, they were being, hit by small arms fire and fragmentation from mortars.

00:24:38:15 – 00:25:02:28
Marty Morgan
The men pressed forward from there, and when they reached the shingle, they found that this ledge, created in the shingle by wave action, provided a degree of shelter, meaning that when the men reached that ledge at the shingle, that the enemy automatic weapons fire could no longer get to them, and the only way that the enemy could get to them would be to drop mortars and right on top of them.

00:25:03:00 – 00:25:28:04
Marty Morgan
And so what Colonel Taylor noticed was that the men had gotten off the landing craft, gotten through the obstacles, reached the shingle, and then the entire drive inland lost momentum right there because the troops had cover, ahead, cover and concealment. And I can’t say that I blame those men for stopping at the point where they were at least out of the small arms fire and the mortar fire.

00:25:28:06 – 00:25:49:18
Marty Morgan
The only problem was that the enemy could then begin dropping mortar fire in on them. And Colonel Taylor realized that so that when Colonel Taylor came off of his landing craft, as he moved across the beach through the obstacles, and when he reached the shingle and looked around and saw that nobody was moving inland, he realized, okay, we can’t stay here, because if we stay here, they’re going to get us.

00:25:49:18 – 00:26:17:28
Marty Morgan
They’re going to stop, start dropping mortar fire on us. And that’s where you see the first movement, the first moment that Tom Hanks’s character, John Miller, is inspired by something that was done by an actual historical character. And in this case, Colonel George Taylor and Colonel Taylor, he he he provided this quote right then that became memorable and is often cited in the quote was, there are two kinds of people who are staying on this beach.

00:26:18:00 – 00:26:39:28
Marty Morgan
Those are those who are dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here. And that quote, as time goes by, has has changed and merged a little bit. And to a certain degree, it informs the Captain Miller character’s quote when he when he instructs Sergeant Horvath to get your men off the beach.

00:26:40:00 – 00:26:50:15
Marty Morgan
But there you have a moment where his experience is based on someone who actually survived the Battle of Omaha Beach on D-Day. There will be a few more, before the scene is over with.

00:26:50:17 – 00:27:07:27
Dan LeFebvre
Would you say it’s fair to say that what what they did and Doug Green Sector in the movie was basically take all of these different experiences that were happening on D-Day and, and compress them into as if they all happened in this one location.

00:27:07:29 – 00:27:36:17
Marty Morgan
It is a fair assessment. In fact, I would I would say that what happened there is I live in Louisiana and everything gets compared to a gumbo. It is a gumbo. It’s everything all mixed together to create a scene that provides the absolute greatest possible, tension, suspense, action and drama. I mean, and that’s the sign of good storytelling and therefore good filmmaking.

00:27:36:19 – 00:27:45:06
Marty Morgan
But we should also be careful that when someone tells a story well and provides excellence in filmmaking, we should understand it’s not a documentary.

00:27:45:09 – 00:28:04:09
Dan LeFebvre
Now, I’m curious because I did time it mentioned the first 20 minutes or so, and it was about 2020 one minutes or so, depending on where you start and stop, from when the landing craft drops the ramp to when Captain Miller is surveying the beach. How long did it actually take for them to establish that foothold?

00:28:04:12 – 00:28:25:24
Marty Morgan
It changes from place to place. I hate to give you typical story and answers because historians like to qualify things, but I recognize basically six battles for Omaha Beach. And in those six battles, you can mark how in each one of these pods of action men land, get off the beach, get up to the top of the bluffs.

00:28:25:24 – 00:28:52:21
Marty Morgan
And typically the point where we acknowledge that they’ve reached the end of the line is when they reach the top of the bluff, the first force to make it off the beach to the top of the bluff on D-Day. That was a cumulative period of time of, I’d say, a little over two hours approaching three, which says something powerful about what happened on Omaha Beach.

00:28:52:24 – 00:29:19:14
Marty Morgan
Because the plan was not that we would spend almost three hours bogged down by enemy machine guns and mortars. The plan was that we would land, overwhelm the enemy and move quickly into the interior, bypassing the enemy’s beach defenses, because we knew that once you move beyond the beach and you moved into the interior, the enemy’s ability to defend was greatly undermined by density of defensive forces and terrain.

00:29:19:16 – 00:29:45:04
Marty Morgan
We, in other words, we were not planning to lose a lot of great people trying to punch through the beach defenses. And that’s that’s what happened. So the first force is up and off the beach, way down at the far left, the far eastern end of Long Beach. And that is a force that was led for the most part by a lieutenant by the name of Jimmy Montes Lopes, on which Monteith gets his men off the beach.

00:29:45:04 – 00:30:20:00
Marty Morgan
He actually leads to Sherman tanks up the cardboard draw. They engage in intense action against a German bunker complex. At the top of the cardboard draw, the far eastern end of Omaha Beach in the Fox sector, a place called in 60. And they’re up some point between 9 and 9:30 a.m.. They’re the first off the beach, the air, the place where you get the men, the last group to get off the beach or to the top of the blast, that’s turning, that’s happening in the area, 16th Infantry Regiment.

00:30:20:03 – 00:30:38:15
Marty Morgan
And the eighth entry. That’s just to the, to the east, Green Sector. So that by 10:00, basically the entire first wave assault force has achieved the objective of getting off the beach and reaching the summit of the bluff behind the beach.

00:30:38:17 – 00:30:52:03
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. So it sounds like not only did they compress everything as far as the events themselves, but also the timeline was compressed some as well to tell. Like you said, end of the day, it’s not a documentary, but to tell the story.

00:30:52:06 – 00:31:14:11
Marty Morgan
Precisely like a great example of how it’s done. And another project that’s worked quite famous is people love to talk about episode two of the HBO mini series Band of Brothers, and in that episode, it depicts this battle at a place called Breaker Manor, where Lieutenant Dick winters leads his men in an assault on a German gun battery.

00:31:14:13 – 00:31:45:03
Marty Morgan
And in the HBO in episode two of the HBO series That attack unfolds over about a 20 minute time period when in actuality, the battle at Break Manor goes on for almost six hours during the day. On June 6th. Film making requires you to strip down timelines and compress fat, and that process of compression is something, but it exerting itself on the movie, Saving Private Ryan in a powerful way in that early scene.

00:31:45:05 – 00:32:23:14
Marty Morgan
But I would I would just say this, because as much as I like to go, actually, but and then point out a bunch of, of obscure facts that nobody cares about. So the fact that you do get a scene that is effectively 20 minutes of nothing but, combat and action, for all of its shortcomings, I would say that there is no living filmmaker on this planet that could get away with doing that, except Steven Spielberg, because any other filmmaker would be under the supervision of studio executives and studio executives.

00:32:23:14 – 00:32:44:17
Marty Morgan
One would want the film to conform to a more traditional action movie format. You can look at other movies that came out in the aftermath of Private Ryan movies that I always like to say, live in the shadow of Private Ryan Rubin’s movies that just didn’t perform like that, like that film movies that didn’t create the legacy that Private Ryan created.

00:32:44:20 – 00:33:06:04
Marty Morgan
I think of movies like, a movie that I actually really like, The Thin Red line. It just didn’t live up to the Private Ryan, like legend, the movie win talkers. I think it’s a great example that a film where the director was under a lot of studio pressure to conform to certain tropes of what an action movie, what they believe an action movie is supposed to be.

00:33:06:07 – 00:33:30:08
Marty Morgan
And the movie’s just it’s not memorable. It’s got a lot of problems with it, and it’s kind of not a good movie on every level. Private Ryan, on the other hand, is Steven Spielberg, who at the point in his career 22 years ago when he sat down to make this film, he was thinking about making that film almost 25 years ago when Spielberg sat down to make that movie.

00:33:30:08 – 00:33:51:02
Marty Morgan
He was at a point in his career where he could do whatever the hell he wanted to do. And it’s, it’s good to be the king, and I’m thankful for that because Spellberg, he did not have studio executives pressuring him to make the movie that they wanted him to make. He was making the movie he wanted to make, and he wanted that 20 minutes to do something to the viewer.

00:33:51:09 – 00:33:53:28
Marty Morgan
And I think it succeeds magnificently.

00:33:54:00 – 00:34:07:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, for sure. Even though there are some historical inaccuracies in there, it was. It throws you in the action and it, if nothing else, at the end of it, it makes you want to find out more about what actually happened.

00:34:07:03 – 00:34:34:01
Marty Morgan
And if I had to indicate an overall greater good served by the movie, that’s got some historical accuracy problems. I think you’ve just identified it. And that is that that flashed that flicker to like that movie caused interest and enthusiasm to flicker to life at a time when interest and enthusiasm in the Second World War was dying off pretty quickly, that movie breathe a new breath of longevity and true enthusiasm for World War Two history.

00:34:34:01 – 00:34:45:12
Marty Morgan
And I just wish that Steven Spielberg would make another World War Two movies as man, that that gave me 20 solid years of work. I could use another 20.

00:34:45:15 – 00:34:49:09
Dan LeFebvre
There you go. Well, it’s Steven if you’re listening to this and yeah.

00:34:49:11 – 00:34:53:15
Marty Morgan
Yeah. No listening. So no, better get out there and get to work with me.

00:34:53:18 – 00:35:15:20
Dan LeFebvre
There you go. All right. Well, after speaking of the movie, going back to it after the invasion, we see these events lead to what is it? What is the main storyline and the title of the movie, Saving Private Ryan. And it starts when we see some of the bodies of the soldiers lying on the beach. And one of them it kind of the camera focuses in on is S Ryan.

00:35:15:22 – 00:35:32:17
Dan LeFebvre
And then from there were taken to rows of desks where women are typing away on typewriters. They’re writing letters to families back home, letting them know that their loved ones are gone. One of the women notices something, and then before long, she’s heading with three letters to one of the offices, and we see some of the names here.

00:35:32:17 – 00:35:59:29
Dan LeFebvre
It’s it goes up the chain to, Colonel Bryce to General George C Marshall, who is the United States Army’s chief of staff. And then we find out that there are three Ryan brothers who have died. Two of them died at Normandy, one in New Guinea. And Colonel Brice explains to General Marshall that the four Ryan brothers, three of them, have passed, but they were all used to be in the same company in the 29th Division.

00:36:00:01 – 00:36:16:09
Dan LeFebvre
But then when the Sullivan brothers died on the Juneau, the Ryan brothers were split up. We don’t get a lot more context around that. He just mentions that in a lot of dialog there. And then he says that the last one left alive. Or maybe he’s alive. We don’t really know. It’s James Ryan and he’s part of the 101st airborne.

00:36:16:11 – 00:36:43:27
Dan LeFebvre
He was dropped about 15 miles inland near Neuville, which is behind German lines. And then that sets in motion the whole plot of the movie. General Marshall pulls out a letter from President Abraham Lincoln, addressed to a woman named Mrs. Bixby in Boston that he’s apparently been keeping stashed away in a book in his office, and after reading the letter, he decides they’re going to go on this mission and try to bring Private Ryan home.

00:36:43:29 – 00:36:55:05
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s how the movie sets up this entire mission. That’s pretty much the whole, plot of the entire movie. How much of that actually happened?

00:36:55:07 – 00:37:27:19
Marty Morgan
All of that is based on effectively two tragic stories. And that’s the stories of the Niland brothers and the Sullivan brothers. It’s most closely associated with what happens to the Niland, because the Niland, the Niland brothers family story has a pretty significant rendezvous with destiny in the Normandy invasion, and now ends with four brothers Edward, Preston, Robert and Fritz.

00:37:27:21 – 00:37:58:24
Marty Morgan
Those four brothers were all serving in uniform. Edward was serving with the B-25 crew in in the Pacific. Preston was serving as a as a platoon leader in the fourth Infantry Division. He landed on D-Day, up in Ireland, was serving in the company of the five Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, and Fritz was serving in in the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.

00:37:58:26 – 00:38:32:17
Marty Morgan
The four brothers, they have. Their story comes to the significant point on June 6th, and that’s because Edward was thought to have been killed in action. He was actually his B-25 was shot down, and he was captured on May 16th, 1944, right before D-Day. Preston Niland, who landed on Utah Beach with the fourth Division, was actually killed in action in the fighting in front of the the Chris Peck Battery, the largest of the German coast artillery batteries in the Normandy invasion area.

00:38:32:20 – 00:39:02:09
Marty Morgan
He was killed in action on June 7th. Bob Niland, Robert, who, jumped in, jumped in with D company of the Five Oaks, fifth. He was killed in action on June 6th. I mentioned the three of them because the Mrs. Niland was therefore in a position to receive three telegrams informing her of how Edward was missing. Preston was dead, and Robert was dead.

00:39:02:12 – 00:39:27:12
Marty Morgan
Fritz was initially missing in action because when he jumped into Normandy, the process of the experience of scattering of airborne units was such that not everyone reported in quickly. And so there was a period of several days during which Fritz was not even fighting with, what, 130? It ended up mixed in with the 82nd Airborne Division, and he was therefore carried as missing in action briefly.

00:39:27:14 – 00:39:55:13
Marty Morgan
And so what was therefore potentially going to happen was that Mrs. Ireland, back in Tonawanda, New York, was going to receive for, she’s going to receive four telegrams announcing the deaths of her four sons. Although, as it turns out, Edward survived eventually. But, Preston and Bob were both killed in action. And for a period of time, it looked like Fritz was also missing.

00:39:55:13 – 00:40:23:24
Marty Morgan
Just like Edward was. The story is loosely based on that. That story was told. It was a story that was well known before the 50th anniversary of D-Day. But the story was was recounted in Stephen Ambrose’s book D-Day The Climactic Battle of World War Two. And it was that book which compiled the stories of a large number of people from the German side, from the US, from the British side, from the Canadian side.

00:40:23:26 – 00:40:59:19
Marty Morgan
It was that book that Steven Spielberg gave to his screenplay writer. Robert wrote it and said, I want you to give me a screenplay that incorporates all of the elements that make this book great. And, and Mr. Spielberg and wrote at both recognized that the Niland story was powerful. It has and has some parallels with and it is influenced by also the story of what happened to the five Sullivan brothers and those five brothers George, Francis, Joseph Madison, and Albert, or L.

00:40:59:21 – 00:41:26:29
Marty Morgan
Those brothers were all serving aboard the, the the Atlantic class light cruiser USS Juneau. And that ship was sunk on November 13th, 1942, during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and Pacific Theater. All five of those brothers were lost with the sinking of Juneau. It was permitted in US naval service prior to that moment, or brothers or family members served together.

00:41:27:01 – 00:41:52:22
Marty Morgan
In fact, there were brothers and there were husband. I’m sorry. There were fathers and sons serving on board the USS Arizona, for example. And here you have five brothers serving on the same light cruiser. It’s lost in action, and all five brothers are lost. They become, something that patriotic spirit in the United States in the aftermath of the naval battle, Guadalcanal rallies behind.

00:41:52:24 – 00:42:22:13
Marty Morgan
We begin to wreck. Another country begins to recognize that that was an especially, precious sacrifice for our family to have made for the war effort. And that’s why, you see, you see posters that feature the Sullivan brothers during the war and the combination of the story of the Sullivans and the story of the islands come together to form the story of Ryan’s and the movie Saving Private Ryan.

00:42:22:15 – 00:42:37:23
Dan LeFebvre
I can’t imagine what that would be like to receive telegrams like that. I mean, that is such a any loss is horrible, but if you think of five losing five brothers at the same time.

00:42:37:25 – 00:43:02:19
Marty Morgan
I agree with you because I love to meditate on this idea of how times today are so very, very different. The wars that we fight today are wars that are characterized by significantly lower most. You have, you know, states now has 50 years of wars that are fought with relatively like casualties and with effectively no interruption of the civilian economy.

00:43:02:19 – 00:43:24:02
Marty Morgan
So it’s possible to be an American living during a time of war from 1969 to present. And there’s a war being fought and you can live your life with without having any, without experiencing any effect from that war. It’s it’s possible to live in the United States today without knowing anyone currently serving in the United States military.

00:43:24:04 – 00:44:13:04
Marty Morgan
In other words, the experience of the modern era has insulated us from of a powerful truism of the experience, the American homefront experience of World War Two. And that is that almost every single family in this country, during that conflict, they experienced loss. On some level. It was either a husband, brother, father or son, or it was someone who was a part of your extended family or the husband, brother, father, son of the next door neighbor to to some level, I don’t believe anyone in this country was not affected by loss during the Second World War, and I believe that is that’s something that Americans share in the 21st century.

00:44:13:06 – 00:44:40:22
Marty Morgan
I believe that we have to struggle to attempt to empathize with that and to comprehend that we had people killed in action last week. It gets it gets what I believe. I’m trying not to be cynical, but it’s, I believe, a passing mention in the news cycle only to be buried quickly by the other palace intrigues and high drama that goes on on a daily basis in this country.

00:44:40:24 – 00:45:04:04
Marty Morgan
And I mentioned the point only because I, I, I like to I’m, I spend most of my time trying to comprehend as best I can the American experience in World War II, you and the American experience. Conflict today is completely different because it’s possible to live your life today, being totally detached from the fact that the United States is fighting a war.

00:45:04:06 – 00:45:10:29
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, you have to put yourself in a different mindset in order to really understand the time. Back then.

00:45:11:02 – 00:45:31:00
Marty Morgan
Everyone was affected to some extent, and if you didn’t lose someone in your family or or among your friends, you were affected by gas rationing, food rationing, or you were part of the wartime economy to some extent, everyone, no one was overlooked in being affected by that conflict. And I believe that Saving Private Ryan addresses that subject powerfully.

00:45:31:00 – 00:45:38:21
Marty Morgan
But I creating the fictional Ryan family based on the violence and and inspired partly by the solvent.

00:45:38:23 – 00:46:06:15
Dan LeFebvre
Speaking of the characters there, I’m curious about some of the other characters that we see in the movie. You mentioned Miller, Captain John Miller, Tom Hanks, his character, being based on a few different people, but there are eight men in the squad that are sent out to find Ryan. There is Captain John Miller. Then there’s Sergeant Horvath, there’s Private Ryan, Private Jackson, Private Mellish, Private Capasso and the T-4 medic Wade and Corporal Upham.

00:46:06:18 – 00:46:09:20
Dan LeFebvre
Are those characters based on real people?

00:46:09:22 – 00:46:49:09
Marty Morgan
I would say they’re influenced by real people to certain extents. Because for example, in the film, the bar gunner, Private Rye, Ben, not Ryan, but Rye, Ben Ryan has painted on the back of his model 1941 field jacket. The words I think it says Brooklyn, New York, USA. And that was partly inspired by a man who actually fought on June 6th and survived D-Day, the late Harold Baumgarten, who painted a big star of David on the back of his jacket and put Brooklyn, USA on it.

00:46:49:12 – 00:47:36:18
Marty Morgan
And and reading Stephen Ambrose’s book Robert wrote at and I believe Mr. Spielberg had noticed it as well, had noticed that in the Baumgarten story that there was that painting on there. So there are elements of these characters that draw inspiration from people who actually lived. And then I should just mention that it’s an interesting series of choices that they chose to represent the American melting pot and our primary cast, a cast of characters, and Private Ryan, they also chose to provide some to serve certain Hollywood war movie tropes, and that you’ve got a Jewish guy and you’ve got an Italian, and you’ve got a guy that’s a mild mannered schoolteacher, and then you’ve

00:47:36:25 – 00:48:05:17
Marty Morgan
you’ve got guys that were kind of at each other’s throats, but they also their risked their lives to save each other in combat. It’s those are some, some core Hollywood war movie tropes in and of themselves. And then you’ve got, since you’re talking about Private Ribbon, the bar gunner, you’ve got the wisecracking louse bob mouth, which is something that, I mean, you can you can recognize that same character in just about every war movie that’s ever been made to get to a certain extent.

00:48:05:20 – 00:48:40:01
Marty Morgan
And so the, the this core group of U.S. Army Rangers with corporal up on the plaque type is thrown in, the unlikely character among Rangers, none of whom, none of whom look very Ranger, in my opinion, but whatever. They’re they’re all serving some, some standard Hollywood tropes about characterization, and they’re also simultaneously partially inspired by actual events, by actual characters who lived as a part of a beat invasion.

00:48:40:04 – 00:48:58:27
Dan LeFebvre
So, again, similar to the opening sequence, we have characters that are essentially composite characters that are trying to capture the essence of what it might have been like, not necessarily these. This was an actual squad of soldiers that were tasked to do this actual thing.

00:48:59:00 – 00:49:24:25
Marty Morgan
Right? Because the process of compositing those characters gives the filmmakers so much more freedom, because if you try to tell the actual story, you will get mired down endlessly in actuality and being held to people holding up the ruler of historical authenticity against your story. And that’s why I respect the filmmakers decision to create a fictitious storyline that’s inspired by actual events.

00:49:24:27 – 00:49:45:26
Dan LeFebvre
While there’s two events I want to ask you about, and this is after this squad makes their way to Neuville in search of Private Ryan. The first is Vin Diesel’s character. When, Private Capasso, he’s hit by a sniper. And then Barry. Jack. Sorry. Barry Pepper’s character, Private Jackson. He sneaks around to get an angle on the German sniper.

00:49:45:26 – 00:50:17:20
Dan LeFebvre
And from the we can see from the German’s perspective, we see him looking for the American soldiers among the rubble, and he sees Private Jackson’s rifle just in time to see him fire. And the shot goes right through the German sniper scope and hits him in the eye as one. And then the other event is when Paul Giamatti’s character, Sergeant Hill, he’s sitting down to try to get something out of his boot, and he accidentally knocks over a board, hits a brick wall, knocks down the entire wall, and then surprise, there’s a room full of German soldiers there and they just yell at each other.

00:50:17:20 – 00:50:41:10
Dan LeFebvre
They’re yelling at each other back and forth. Before then, the Germans are shot by Ted Danson’s version of Captain Hammer and some other soldiers. They’re both of those events to me. When I was watching this, it just seemed like these are movie moments that could never have actually happened. That seemingly impossible shot. And then a surprise stalemate between two groups of enemy soldiers on either side of the wall.

00:50:41:12 – 00:50:44:10
Dan LeFebvre
Are there any stories of things like that actually happening?

00:50:44:12 – 00:51:11:14
Marty Morgan
There are. There are a few instances of our troops and their troops being hopelessly mixed in together. I’m thinking of a of a, a story that was told to me by a veteran, the 507th Parachute Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division, who was trying to cross a hedgerow and hedgerows in Normandy are very dense there. They’re thick branches.

00:51:11:16 – 00:51:38:17
Marty Morgan
They’re, there are a lot of storms and hedgerows making it quite difficult to to push through, put your way through a hedgerow. And this, this soldier named Johnny Marr was. He was a lieutenant and got me 5 or 7. He was trying to push his way through a hedgerow. And as he was pushing his way through, coming from the right side to the left side, there was a German trying to push through at the same spot from the left side to the right side, and the two of them met each other right in the middle of this hedgerow.

00:51:38:20 – 00:52:02:29
Marty Morgan
I think of that sometimes, because that provides the kind of, combat tension that I think war movies love. They feed on that sort of a combat tension, the no random moment where something like that happens, as you see depicted with that moment in the film when when Sergeant Hill tries to he I think he says he’s got a burr and his boot, and that’s why he leans up against the wall to take his boot off.

00:52:03:01 – 00:52:24:06
Marty Morgan
And it just I giggle sometimes when I think about that cast. That cast is so wildly exceptional and great and weird ways. Ted Danson as an airborne officer, Ted Danson, who was, I don’t know how old was at the time, but he was too old to portray a U.S. Army airborne officer. But whatever. He may be your division commander.

00:52:24:06 – 00:52:52:06
Marty Morgan
Original commander or a division commander, maybe, but certainly not a company commander. Nevertheless, Ted Danson plays the role very nicely, I think. And then that you’ve got him there with the person who I think is one of the finest living actors today, Paul Giamatti, who has this bit throwaway role. He’s in there. I have to remind myself at times that Paul Giamatti was in Saving Private Ryan, and he doesn’t really fit the form of your average airborne infantryman.

00:52:52:09 – 00:53:18:02
Marty Morgan
Lee looks a little bit too well served at the dinner table. The stuff that that role. But then again, almost all of them kind of do in the movie. Nevertheless. Giamatti’s good. Danson’s good. It’s all weird. The whole scene, it provides something that Spielberg needs. I mean, there’s, there’s literally a formula to making the perfect action film and I don’t know that it’s fair to describe Private Ryan.

00:53:18:02 – 00:53:49:06
Marty Morgan
It’s just being a pure action film. It’s more than that somehow. It’s it’s suspense, it’s action, it’s drama. It’s it’s a different genre than just your standard action movie. The, the cornerstone that we always point to as perfection in action filmmaking is movie aliens, the sequel from 1986. And there’s pacing to the way that you deliver action and within that formula, and you can see how in private Ryan, they were living according to that formula.

00:53:49:06 – 00:54:11:22
Marty Morgan
Where you go, you go, you open with a bang with the big Omaha Beach scene. Then you pull back and you begin the process of exposition, and you begin laying out your story. And then and you lay out what you need. So you divide a movie into three things. And the beginning, presents what what’s needed, what has to happen.

00:54:11:24 – 00:54:49:00
Marty Morgan
The center point provides tension and drama, and you get you see that clearly in private Ryan and the scene we’re discussing right now, it’s into that center phase when drama is needed and it gives you a nice big, fat battle sequence. That’s totally different than the opening battle sequence of the movie. And it’s and it’s also showing you how combat and comedy is often at close quarters, that the quality and character of that combat is often under unpredictable circumstances, the evidence of which is the Paul Giamatti moment when the wall collapses and there are Germans on the other side.

00:54:49:03 – 00:55:17:29
Marty Morgan
And that then I we’re, we’re now at the point where I have to address the elephant in the room, because you mentioned the Barry Pepper, sniper sequence where the bullet comes through his rifle scope, which is based in fact, it’s based on something that reportedly happened, although it didn’t happen during the Second World War. That is a story that is well remembered from a sniper versus sniper duel that occurred in Vietnam.

00:55:18:01 – 00:55:50:02
Marty Morgan
There’s, there was a sniper by the name of Carlos, half Cock, who wrote a book called Marine Sniper and Half Cock related that exact story of of being stalked by an opposing North Vietnamese sniper who might have been a Russian sniper. It’s just never entirely clear. But he’s being stalked by an opponent’s sniper, and he catches a glint off of his sniper scope and fires a shot and travels right down the the the scope tube and strikes the opponent sniper through his eye socket.

00:55:50:04 – 00:55:55:18
Marty Morgan
So they borrowed something from Vietnam to make that moment and a World War two movie.

00:55:55:20 – 00:55:59:15
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. I would have just assumed it was completely made up.

00:55:59:17 – 00:56:28:10
Marty Morgan
No it’s not. There are some questions about whether or not it actually happened the way that it was reported it. And I read Carlos Hecox book when I was a kid, and I loved it. And I don’t want to question anything that that man wrote. But the problem with Jackson character and Private Ryan is that there’s a it’s believed that it would it would be a 1 in 1,000,000 shot for the bullets trajectory to align perfectly with that scope tube.

00:56:28:13 – 00:56:51:26
Marty Morgan
And also glass decelerates bullets very effectively. A glass, a particularly thin glass is not good at stopping them, but it’s really good at decelerating bullets. And so there’s a lingering question about whether or not a bullet would be able to travel down the entire length of the tube of a sniper scope, with objectives and ocular eyepieces on it.

00:56:51:28 – 00:57:15:26
Marty Morgan
I would just refer anybody listening. Do have a look at, MythBusters tested this twice as one of the cooler episodes of MythBusters, and they were concluding that the their conclusion was the bullet couldn’t get all the way through a sniper scope. Who knows whether or not those circumstances played themselves out in Carlos happy cops experience?

00:57:15:28 – 00:57:48:26
Marty Morgan
That’s less important. What I think is important for this discussion, though, is to say that incident is based on something that happened in Vietnam, and I now have to address this issue of the sniper in private. Ryan, because that’s Barry Peppers character. Jackson, is a complete abuse of power and a misrepresentation on every level of the way that snipers functioned within the United States Army in the European theater of operation during the Second World War.

00:57:48:28 – 00:57:59:28
Marty Morgan
And in addition to that, he’s carrying effectively a Frankenstein of a rifle that did not actually exist during World War Two.

00:58:00:00 – 00:58:06:16
Dan LeFebvre
Really. So so there really would not have been a way that he could have shot that because the rifle didn’t exist to begin with.

00:58:06:18 – 00:58:27:00
Marty Morgan
Right. Well, it’s weird because, I mean, it’s almost like the rifle, Jackson’s rifle. And Private Ryan is the perfect metaphor for Private Ryan. It’s very tough because the rifle kind of exists, but it doesn’t exist in the way that it’s depicted in the movie, and it doesn’t function the way that it’s depicted as functioning in the movie.

00:58:27:02 – 00:58:55:12
Marty Morgan
First of all, the US military really didn’t have a formal sniper approach. During World War Two, snipers were treated more as a squad designated marksman, more than anything with a a level of informality that you didn’t see during World War one. During World War one, we had actual sniper training, and we dissolved all of that sniper training in the interwar period, and when World War Two started, we didn’t actually create a sniper program, and that didn’t really even exist until Vietnam.

00:58:55:15 – 00:59:33:08
Marty Morgan
We had sniper rifles. Yes. But we didn’t have a formal program during by which we trained people to be these precise marksmen, as they’re depicted in Private Eye and, all the rifle did was, was provide a tool that was capable of delivering improved levels of rifle, rifle marksmanship. Now onto the rifle. So the way that the rifle is depicted in the movie for most of the scene is because if you look closely in the movie, you will see the Jackson character carrying two different rifles with two different scopes.

00:59:33:10 – 00:59:58:05
Marty Morgan
The scope that appears in almost all of the scenes. So there’s basically one continuity era error I think might maybe even two, two moments where they show him carrying a different rifle. And I think that’s just a little continuity error on the film. So that’s not really an issue that’s depicting him carrying the model. 19 03A4 sniper rifle, which existed during World War two and was used by the U.S. Army.

00:59:58:08 – 01:00:26:19
Marty Morgan
But it depicts him using it with an M82 scope. But that’s the one that sneaks in a couple of times. That scope was not used by the US Army during World War two, but that’s the rifle that only shows up twice that I think of during the war that I can think of during the movie. The scope that is on the rifle and 90% of the shots of the movie is the internal eight power scope, which was not used by the United States Army during the Second World War.

01:00:26:21 – 01:00:49:26
Marty Morgan
It was used by the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater of Operations only, and then when it was used by the Marine Corps, it was used on a totally different version of the 1903 rifle. So the 1903 rifle was adopted by U.S. military forces in the year 1903. It served the World War One. It served importantly throughout World War Two, and it had a big role on D-Day.

01:00:49:28 – 01:01:16:21
Marty Morgan
The Marine Corps and the Army used that as their platform for sniper rifles, but the two guns were quite a bit different. They use different scopes first and foremost, and the Army version was different than the art, just the rifle. Not even talking about the scope, but the rifle itself was. The Army’s rifle was quite a bit different than the marine course rifle, and the Army rifle used a totally different scope, and they the right.

01:01:16:21 – 01:01:40:09
Marty Morgan
The Army scope was the 70 3B1, which was only a four power scope. It was a was a little bit weak in terms of magnification. And it’s got the scope tube itself is pretty modest in dimension. I think it’s one inch in diameter overall. And it, it has an ocular eyepiece where you would look through, but it doesn’t have the objective eyepiece.

01:01:40:16 – 01:02:24:20
Marty Morgan
It’s not bigger. Whereas the Marine Corps version, there’s a big, long, objective eyepiece on the scope, and it looks gratuitously a lot more like a powerful sniper scope. And and my understanding is that on the set, when they brought out an actual version of the U.S. Army in 1903, a four sniper rifle equipped with the appropriate and correct M 70 3B1 scope that apparently Mr. Spielberg looked at it and went, that doesn’t look very much like a sniper rifle, and that they looked at they did some photographs and that he saw the Marine Corps version, which is the 1903 rifle equipped with the eight power U.

01:02:24:20 – 01:02:57:29
Marty Morgan
Nurdles scope. Anyone? That’s what. That’s a sniper rifle. But can’t we get that scope? And so they took that scope, put it on the Army version of the sniper rifle, which was, for the record, different than the Marine Corps version, sniper rifle. And that’s the scope that you see Jackson hunting and shooting with throughout the movie, except for two occasions that I caught, and that is, of course, a version of the oh three sniper rifle that did not exist at all anywhere during the second World War.

01:02:58:01 – 01:03:25:16
Marty Morgan
And the scope that he’s using is something that did not exist, being used by U.S. Army forces in the European Theater of Operations during the Second World War. So for the keen eyed student of World War two, history and small arms and things like that, the Jackson character is something you kind of have to shrug your shoulders and just learn to live with, because he’s wielding this rifle that is a fantasy.

01:03:25:18 – 01:03:49:21
Marty Morgan
And then come on, guys, left handed sniper in World War two. That’s not the way the world works. 75 years ago, if you were a left handed shooter 75 years ago and you entered the army, you suddenly overnight became a right handed shooter. They really didn’t provide accommodations for people shooting left handed. But you’ve got Jackson there with the sniper rifle that didn’t exist during World War Two.

01:03:49:21 – 01:04:03:22
Marty Morgan
You shooting it is a left handed, marksman. And so those those are little bumps in the road of authenticity that create heartburn or the purest of World War Two history.

01:04:03:25 – 01:04:17:00
Dan LeFebvre
I loved what you said. Where like it’s just a great example of the movie overall. It’s it’s all a composite. Everything kind of thrown together. And that character is just a great it just continues the tradition.

01:04:17:03 – 01:04:19:27
Marty Morgan
Yeah, it’s based on a true story, but it’s obviously.

01:04:20:00 – 01:04:21:16
Dan LeFebvre
There you go. Yeah, exactly.

01:04:21:18 – 01:04:43:15
Marty Morgan
Oh shut up. But I love the sniper rifle thing. I like the fact that they were at least paying attention enough to, to, to depict the diversity of weapons army. Everyone. So within the squad of Rangers to include them the Clarke type of stop them that’s tagging along. You’ve got and you’ve got the diversity of firepower represented.

01:04:43:15 – 01:05:14:15
Marty Morgan
And then when you bring in like when the Matt Damon Ryan character comes in the 101st Airborne Division, paratroopers are brought in, you see another weapon come in, and that’s the 19 1930 caliber machine gun. Yeah. In other words, you’re seeing this diversity of the firearms that were used by US forces on D-Day. And I kind of like that because I find that a large number of the people that come on my church, for example, that they imagine that all Americans landed on June 6th carrying the M1, they shot rifle and that everybody fought with that.

01:05:14:22 – 01:05:41:00
Marty Morgan
But in private, Ryan, instead, you get you have someone with a sniper rifle, albeit wrong. You have Sergeant Horvath, four back carrying the M1 car. B although the sergeant probably carried something different. You’ve got Captain Miller carrying the m1A1 Thompson submachine gun. You’ve got ribbon carrying the 1918 A2 Browning Automatic Rifle. And then you have what, then you have is it three men armed with the M1 rifle.

01:05:41:00 – 01:06:16:00
Marty Morgan
You’ve got Capasso. Upham is carrying an M1 rifle and then Mellish just carrying an M1 rifle. And I like the fact that they’re representing the diversity of firearms that were being used during the era of, of the D-Day invasion. I just wish that that Captain Miller and Sergeant Horvath had switched weapons, because you would typically see an officer carrying the M1 carbine, and you would typically see a technical sergeant, carrying the Thompson submachine go.

01:06:16:03 – 01:06:17:27
Dan LeFebvre
Really? Why is that?

01:06:18:00 – 01:06:37:08
Marty Morgan
It’s just basically the way that the T&E, the table of organization and equipment for U.S. Army fighting units in the European theater, it authorized who would carry a weapon. And it it differed a corn according to the type of unit you were in, whether you were an infantry unit or a supply unit, or, for example, a Ranger unit.

01:06:37:10 – 01:07:00:14
Marty Morgan
And it off it typically authorized officers and ground units, non airborne carrying the M1 carbine. But you know, it’s Tom Hanks character John Miller carrying the Thompson. And then the Sergeant Horvath character armed with the Thompson. But I don’t know Horvath is carrying the carbine. Miller is carrying the Thompson. That’s right.

01:07:00:17 – 01:07:37:27
Dan LeFebvre
I would never have thought about who’s carrying who’s carrying what and whether or not that would have been correct or not. But it’s I like I, I do like that you pointed out the diversity there because that is something that I noticed when I saw the movie. Like it. You’re getting well. Well, again, I mean, it might be a, you know, a bit of a trope as far as the characters themselves are concerned and throwing it, you know, like you’re talking about, you know, you have the loudmouth character and you have, you know, the the different tropes that you get in a lot of war movies, but you also get a pretty good diversity

01:07:37:27 – 01:08:02:08
Dan LeFebvre
of the types of weapons that they’re carrying. And I, I like that about about the movie that, I hadn’t seen a lot of other I’m specifically thinking of, like The Longest Day. And in that where it doesn’t really focus on a single squad with that sort of diversity, I guess, is what I’m trying to say there.

01:08:02:11 – 01:08:24:20
Marty Morgan
Yeah, I absolutely love the fact that the movie did that, because in it, there’s one larger point that I could make about Saving Private Ryan that is that I believe that it is, to date, the greatest achievement and the authentic presentation of a World War Two subject. I’m not saying the movie’s perfect. I’m not even saying that it’s excellent.

01:08:24:20 – 01:08:28:28
Marty Morgan
It’s got lots of problems, but it’s the best that I’ve seen yet.

01:08:29:01 – 01:08:37:27
Dan LeFebvre
End of the day, it is still a movie. It’s not a documentary, so you’re never going to have something that’s going to be 100% authentic. That’s not what movies are.

01:08:37:29 – 01:09:03:22
Marty Morgan
And I believe that what they did achieve in that film, in terms of authenticity, was on such a higher plane than movies that were around it, that came before it, that came at it. I think that what they achieved in terms of authenticity spoke powerfully to a certain audience of people, that the world of World War Two reenacting was basically it basically came alive after that movie was released.

01:09:03:25 – 01:09:28:07
Marty Morgan
And I think it’s because there were people that appreciated the effort that they put into creating and authenticity that you haven’t seen in previous films, and that is I have to acknowledge respectfully the fact that that Mr. Spielberg, turns he turns over issues of authenticity to someone in the film business that that is and has a pretty good track record of delivering authenticity.

01:09:28:09 – 01:09:58:10
Marty Morgan
And that’s got Gale by. He was in charge of training the actors. He was in charge of, helping create the atmosphere of authenticity that generally accompanies the film. And while that atmosphere is not perfect, it’s pretty darn good. And I think that the the goodness up that, created a lot of enthusiasm among a younger audience that probably would not have been reached by World War Two history otherwise.

01:09:58:13 – 01:10:16:27
Dan LeFebvre
Now, there are a lot of iconic scenes from the movie, but I want to ask you about one of the scenes that really stood out to me, and that was the dog tag scene. The men in this squad are given a bag of dog tags to see if Ryan’s name is in there, and we see the men sitting down.

01:10:16:28 – 01:10:38:09
Dan LeFebvre
They start going through them. Before long, they’re joking around and almost being playful about it as they’re going through the dog tags. And then meanwhile, you can see other members of the airborne are watching on, and it’s Wade, the medic, who stops the other men. He reminds them they’re not poker chip. Each dog tag represents a fallen comrade in arms.

01:10:38:11 – 01:11:06:19
Dan LeFebvre
And this scene really stood out to me because I saw it as a turning point. You could clearly see that these soldiers were becoming, or already were desensitized to, the events that were going on around them, as they’re joking around with these dog tags, I can’t help but think maybe just, you know, a few days earlier, before D-Day, they might have had a very different reaction to sifting through a bag of dog tags.

01:11:06:19 – 01:11:21:23
Dan LeFebvre
It kind of shows how the events that they went through in those few days changed them. As people. Was this sort of desensitization common among soldiers in the days after D-Day?

01:11:21:26 – 01:11:53:23
Marty Morgan
I believe that it was. And although I’ve not been in the military, I feel like I have an understanding of it to a certain level in that I have seen how gallows humor typically, accompanies military units as they experience combat, and that the deeper they get into it, the more the gallows humor tends to come out. And that scene does something very powerful in that it humanizes the lost, in combat on June 6th, 1944.

01:11:53:25 – 01:12:31:14
Marty Morgan
And it also sets the stage for this this daunting task of trying to find one person. And I would just if I could sidetrack for one quick moment, I would say that if that scene had been turned over to a lesser actor, I think the scene would have fallen flat. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who’s the best actor in the film, saving Private Ryan, and I believe it might actually be Giovanni Ribisi playing Wade the medic, because in that scene, he he just expresses subtlety in the way that he realizes that the guys are laughing and joking a little bit too much, and that there being a little inappropriate

01:12:31:14 – 01:12:51:28
Marty Morgan
for circumstances and the way that he rushes over and he snatches it from him, I just feel like his acting performance in that scene is excellent. I feel like his acting performance in the entire movie is excellent and acting and I, I he’s in another movie that I really love and it Miracle Lost in Translation, where he plays a totally different kind of character.

01:12:52:00 – 01:13:05:24
Marty Morgan
He’s just a really good actor. I really felt like he brought that scene to life. And Private Ryan, although the scene is completely historically inaccurate on every level, and it really gets under my skin and drives me nuts like I.

01:13:05:27 – 01:13:07:11
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, that was that was a that was a big turn.

01:13:07:11 – 01:13:24:04
Marty Morgan
There was, wasn’t it? Yeah. I’m conflicted. I am about this film because it’s so great. And at the same time I’m like, yeah. Where would you ever have one guy that just like, I’ve got 50 dog tags in this bag of people I’ve just been picking up over the last few days?

01:13:24:07 – 01:13:28:26
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, yeah. The chopper pilot, I think it was, was the one that that threw him the bag. Yeah.

01:13:29:03 – 01:13:30:14
Marty Morgan
And the glider pilot. Yeah.

01:13:30:17 – 01:13:31:10
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, yeah. Glider.

01:13:31:10 – 01:13:54:05
Marty Morgan
And he’s like, yeah, here’s here’s a bunch of dog tags. There was a general. There was a general order in place that, for combat casualties, you would not separate the dog tags from the casualties, because if you the moment everyone has two dog tags. But this was before the military was practicing. This, was tradition of wearing one around your neck and one tied in the laces of your boots.

01:13:54:05 – 01:14:24:06
Marty Morgan
That’s a big, thing. Not a World War two thing. So everyone had two tags suspended from a chain around their neck. You didn’t. You didn’t separate the tags from the bite. And that’s because those tags served a very specific purpose. And that those tags guaranteed that when the unit that came in that was responsible from the point that you would you were killed on the battlefield from that point forward, another unit was responsible for you, the unit you were assigned to up to your death.

01:14:24:06 – 01:14:53:03
Marty Morgan
That unit was in, was responsible for you while you were alive. And if you were killed, they were responsible for processing some paperwork about you. But your body then became fell into the responsibility of mortuary services and graves registration units. And those units had to collect remains, identify remains, and then keep the identification with those remains. And in order to do that, you had to have both tags with the remains.

01:14:53:05 – 01:15:17:10
Marty Morgan
There are extenuating circumstances. There were times when when human bodies were so shattered. As for the use of modern weapons that you no longer had a net for the dog tag to hang from, or you had body parts that were separated from the whole, and under those circumstances, yes, you would lose track of the tags, but when you had a complete set of remains, the tags, both tags stayed with those remains.

01:15:17:13 – 01:15:39:07
Marty Morgan
And that’s why that scene makes me kind of roll my eyes a little bit, because I can see how that scene gave them, a moment of tension in the story that they needed. But I also have to go. They would. That would never happen. Those tags had to stay with the bodies because they stayed with the bodies and the graves.

01:15:39:09 – 01:15:46:13
Marty Morgan
Registration mortuary services guys then knew what to do with the body and to identify that body.

01:15:46:15 – 01:16:06:02
Dan LeFebvre
Well, so were they with would they basically follow me with those divisions, basically following the front lines or how I’m curious how how that worked on that side? Because that is just a it’s a morbid job, but it’s a massive one to keep track of all that.

01:16:06:04 – 01:16:10:12
Marty Morgan
I can’t imagine the nightmares that those men must have had after the war.

01:16:10:15 – 01:16:12:03
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, I can’t, I mean, yeah.

01:16:12:05 – 01:16:36:29
Marty Morgan
Yeah, the men whose jobs it was to collect casualties on the battlefield, take them to a central point where they were being buried, and collect off, collect up, off and incomplete sets of remains. That that must have been traumatizing. And there’s been a great deal written about about that experience in the last few years. And that’s all extremely important and compelling.

01:16:36:29 – 01:17:07:03
Marty Morgan
And, in, in my personal work on one story that I’ve dealt with, I, I’ve had to investigate what happened with the specific graves registration unit and how they, after the fact, recovered the remains of men who were killed in action. And there’s footage associated with it. There’s footage of the men of the 603rd Quartermaster Graves Registration Company collecting bodies, that were that had been temporarily buried and re burying them.

01:17:07:03 – 01:17:52:26
Marty Morgan
And the footage? I can barely watch the footage. It’s so gruesome. And that was the everyday experience of uniform service of the United States Army for the men of these units. And, And I should just throw in one plug for them. I spent a lot of time tracking people who were killed in Normandy, tracking how they were killed, where they were killed, and where they ended up buried, and what overwhelmed me is that the men from the quartermaster graves registration companies and the mortuary services companies, those men carried out what I consider to be an extremely challenging mission, and they carried it out in an analog era of forms with carbon paper and

01:17:52:26 – 01:18:20:12
Marty Morgan
in triplicate and, and in the there with no digital assistance whatsoever. And they carried out that job with so much accuracy that and studying this subject intensely for about two, 20 years now, I have found very few mistakes, and I think all respect needs to be given to the men who picked up our war dead, made sure that they were identified, and made sure that they had a proper burial.

01:18:20:14 – 01:18:25:29
Dan LeFebvre
Well, yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s a side of it that I had never thought about before.

01:18:26:02 – 01:18:50:03
Marty Morgan
And that’s deep. So great for that subject makes its way into the grand narrative of Saving Private Ryan. And that’s almost I hate to criticize the moment because it at least addresses the subject, the subject. If the subject made it into Private Ryan, that’s basically a guarantee that here we are, more than 20 years later, people are still going to be talking about it, because that’s what blows me away about this movie.

01:18:50:05 – 01:19:22:09
Marty Morgan
It this I remember when I first started tour guiding. I remember thinking like 15 years ago, I remember I remember thinking that, I think interest is probably going to begin fading and, and I certainly won’t be able to find much of a livelihood in leading tours to Normandy, certainly not after about 2002, 2003. And here I am almost a decade later, and there’s more interest now than there was ten years ago.

01:19:22:12 – 01:19:25:24
Marty Morgan
I think Saving Private Ryan is to blame for a lot of that.

01:19:25:26 – 01:19:30:06
Dan LeFebvre
And to think that and but at the same time, it’s a conflict that.

01:19:30:09 – 01:19:47:19
Marty Morgan
You know, that movie did more than any book that has ever been written, any book that I will ever write, any book that smarter people than me will ever write. That movie did more than any of us ever could. To ensure the continuing popularity of that subject.

01:19:47:21 – 01:20:11:18
Dan LeFebvre
I want to shift a little bit to some of the geographical side, because we’re given some names in the movie, but we never get a lot of geographical context about the squad’s search for Private Ryan. They start on Omaha Beach, and then from there they head to what the movie says is behind enemy lines to Neuville, where the dog tag scene was.

01:20:11:21 – 01:20:40:26
Dan LeFebvre
And then I did a I look on online and as the crow flies, it’s about 21 miles or 34km between those two locations. And then from there they go to Rommel, which is on, the murder at River. And that’s another four miles or 6.5km. Since the movie makes multiple mentions that Neuville is behind enemy lines and that was their first destination, I can only assume that all of this is taking place behind enemy lines.

01:20:40:26 – 01:21:02:20
Dan LeFebvre
The entire time. Of course, there’s already other soldiers that mentioned the airborne who were already at Neuville, so it’s not like this rescue squad is the only Allied soldiers behind enemy lines. But can you give us a little more geographical context about where the German lines were in relation to these places that we see referenced in the movie?

01:21:02:22 – 01:21:26:09
Marty Morgan
Sure. The reason that they choose Neuville for the film, it’s there. What they’re doing is they’re giving a nod to the 10 million Oplan, which is the place where Bob Niland was killed on June 6th. And so they’re referencing that. Which brings us a little bit of a point of convergence with the story, the true story upon which the the fictional story is based.

01:21:26:12 – 01:22:03:00
Marty Morgan
But, Neuville is to the north and west of Sigma agrees. It’s a McBeal, as you have already calculated. Is pretty far from Omaha Beach. It is much, much closer to Utah Beach. It’s only about ten miles inland from Utah Beach. Maybe a little more, maybe like 11 miles inland from Utah Beach. But it is not located conveniently close to Omaha, which is why you have to suspend reality a little bit just to go with what Steven Spielberg and Robert wrote out want you to go with here.

01:22:03:00 – 01:22:30:14
Marty Morgan
And that is that this group of rangers that land on Omaha Beach at Doc Green Sector are then set far behind the lines behind Utah Beach to look for a missing paratrooper. Because the practical reality at work here is that this would have been a physical impossibility. And the reason I say, the reason I say that is that between Omaha and Utah, there’s this one town called Carrington.

01:22:30:17 – 01:22:50:11
Marty Morgan
Carrington was the point at which, the U.S. Army Fifth Corps landing on Omaha and the US Army Separate Corps landing on Utah were supposed to come together. They were supposed to come together late in the day on June 6th. Maybe on June 7th. They did not come together, for almost a week. It took time. That was not part of the plan.

01:22:50:13 – 01:23:26:24
Marty Morgan
But it’s not until 101st Airborne Division captures Carrington. It’s not even to occur that, actually. And that happens on June 11th. It’s not until after June 11th that Omaha Beach and Utah Beach are able to link up on their flanks. So for a group of rangers who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day to make their way to the area, the drop zone area behind Utah Beach, I would challenge is a physical impossibility because it would have caused it would have called for them to not go straight as the crow flies 2020 miles, but more like 30 miles.

01:23:26:27 – 01:24:14:00
Marty Morgan
Circuitous. Lee is following terrain because the terrain in the area between Omaha and Utah is the area where there it’s, it’s a tributary area for several river systems. In fact, the dove River, the vier River, the river, those are all flowing into the English channels in the area between Utah and Omaha. So these guys would have not only had to have gone through enemy territory, but they would have had to have covered enemy territory, crossing rivers, going well out of their way to go, to move across flooded marsh areas because the Germans had seen to it that there was flooding that was beyond just the normal seasonal flooding in the area in

01:24:14:00 – 01:24:43:05
Marty Morgan
the tributary, the mouth area of the vier, the toilet and the dove and those men would been have had to have made their way without contact with either the enemy or other Americans for mile after mile after mile. And as we know from the film, they do contact other Americans if they do contact the enemy. But I believe it would have been physically impossible for them to move from the area behind Omaha to the drop zone area and land from Utah Beach.

01:24:43:07 – 01:24:50:26
Dan LeFebvre
That helps a lot. Put that into a little more perspective. Again, sounds like it was a a story decision.

01:24:50:29 – 01:25:24:08
Marty Morgan
Yeah, it’s a it’s a storytelling decision, as was the creation of the fictional village Rommel. That is a village that does not exist. That village was created just for the purposes of storytelling, and that what happens in that village is to an extent based on two, maybe three actual events. But there were no 101st Airborne Division Division paratroopers that were sent to babysit a bridge at a village called Rommel because there was no and is no village of Rommel and not interesting.

01:25:24:08 – 01:25:27:15
Dan LeFebvre
So yeah, they are a lot more made up.

01:25:27:18 – 01:25:44:24
Marty Morgan
Yeah, I respect the fact that they wanted to tell a story. They wanted that story to be a D-Day story. They wanted to do it with a level of authenticity that was unprecedented. And they did all of that. But to get there, they had to massage the actuality of the D-Day invasion, and they had to create a few things.

01:25:44:27 – 01:26:03:25
Marty Morgan
And they had they ended up, I think, unintentionally distorting a few things like, I’ve I’ve not gotten down in the weeds of picking out minor little authenticity details like how Spielberg had beach obstacles on Omaha Beach backwards. They were facing the wrong way. They were facing out to the water when they’re supposed to be facing the bluffs. I’m not.

01:26:03:27 – 01:26:28:00
Marty Morgan
I’m not carping on minor issues like like that. However, I mean, I know I mentioned the bunker and how the bunker on Omaha Beach was wrong, but, it there going to be little unintentional authenticity slip ups from time to time in a film. But then they also had to make some major decisions where they consciously departed from the actuality of the historical record.

01:26:28:06 – 01:26:32:14
Marty Morgan
And they certainly did that with the creation of a fictional village, remote.

01:26:32:16 – 01:26:54:09
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Well, well, since you mention it, because that was something that I wanted to ask because according to the movie, that’s again where they find Private Ryan, and Captain Miller gives him the bad news about his brothers. But then Ryan, Matt Damon plays, Private Ryan and he refuses to leave. He says something to the effect of, you can tell my mother that when you found me, I was here.

01:26:54:16 – 01:27:13:24
Dan LeFebvre
And with the only brothers I have left, there’s no way I’m abandoning this bridge. And then we find out from the man in charge, Corporal Henderson, that Allied planes from the 82nd took out all the bridges across the murder at. Except for two of them. One of them, alone, and then the other one that they’re at now.

01:27:13:28 – 01:27:38:24
Dan LeFebvre
And their orders are to defend that bridge at all costs. So we’re left with, Captain Miller making the decision that they’re going to keep the squad there in order to help hold the bridge and then take Ryan back afterwards. Is the assumption. But you mentioned that there there were possibly a couple of stories that this was based on.

01:27:38:27 – 01:28:20:13
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And I would just say that they androgynous Lee kind of inform what’s going on with Rommel and the 101st Airborne Division troopers. They, they borrow a little bit from an action that the 82nd Airborne Division is involved in, where there is a bridge and it is over the major AA river, and it’s in a place that called Lafayette Air, and that is the 82nd Airborne Division’s primary battle for the first three days of the invasion from G6 all the way through the afternoon of June 9th, the 82nd Airborne Division is struggling with German units, in the vicinity of the the Mercury River crossing site at LA here.

01:28:20:15 – 01:28:50:10
Marty Morgan
So it’s sort of based on that, where there’s an old 1840s stone bridge. And then also on another story of a murder, a river crossing that was just about three miles south of there at a place called Ship Depot. And interestingly, Private Ryan, you can when you read a little bit about life here and shift and it all started, suddenly starts to make sense how Robert Rowe that was inspired by those two stories, in addition to another story that I’ll get into later if you want me to.

01:28:50:12 – 01:29:15:28
Marty Morgan
But he’s inspired by last and shifted to a certain extent. There is a there’s a moment at the part that makes its way into Saving Private Ryan powerfully, where, a battalion commander in the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, commanding Edwin Iceberg. They move down and they’re ordered to go and capture this bridge intact. So they move through the town, shift upon the madre River bridge.

01:29:16:00 – 01:29:39:08
Marty Morgan
A stone bridge is just south of town. Lieutenant Colonel Osbourne runs out onto the bridge, and when he’s just as he’s about to put his foot down on the bridge, he’s shot. He falls to the ground, rolls off the bridge, and splashes into the water, which is something that we see in the closing scene. The climactic battle scene in Rommel and Saving Private Ryan.

01:29:39:10 – 01:30:03:07
Marty Morgan
But then the next highest ranking officer takes over. And he was a friend of mine, a person I knew quite well. His name was Roy Creek, and Roy Creek was the iconic commander of the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and Captain Creek took over the fight for the bridge at Shifter Park. And he takes the bridge. He has a small force.

01:30:03:09 – 01:30:30:07
Marty Morgan
It receives a note late in the day on June 6th, instructing him to hold the bridge shift. DuPont instructs him to specifically hold at all costs, and I find that Roy Creek’s story, from report to an extent, expired and inspires the imaginary story of the 101st Airborne Division paratroopers at the fictitious village of Rommel on the Madre.

01:30:30:09 – 01:30:44:24
Dan LeFebvre
Not to shift movies, but there’s the bridge and the longest day that they have to hold as well, and I. I don’t remember the exact line, but it’s, hold until relieved or something like that. Is that the same story.

01:30:44:27 – 01:30:55:10
Marty Morgan
In And Longest Day when you hear hold until really told until relief. That’s, Pegasus Bridge over the Cole Canal in the, Sword Beach area.

01:30:55:13 – 01:30:58:18
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, so not not related at all with with this story.

01:30:58:18 – 01:31:08:10
Marty Morgan
They’re not really, but I think maybe, philosophically and spiritually, it may have contributed some, inspiration to Robert Rota.

01:31:08:12 – 01:31:15:28
Dan LeFebvre
Well, yeah, I guess since it’s a fictional story and Saving Private Ryan, I guess there can be a lot of different, inspirations there.

01:31:16:00 – 01:31:34:20
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And, to me, what it looks like is wrote it, in a commendable way. I’m not criticizing him in the commendable way he treated the the broad story of D-Day as like a cafeteria. You can’t cram it all into one movie. There’s no way to do it. That movie would be 100 hours long and nobody would sit through it.

01:31:34:23 – 01:31:50:02
Marty Morgan
So he had to pick a choose. And as he went down the cafeteria line, he picked, I’ll take a little bit of lucky er, I’ll take a little bit of the part. I’ll take a little bit of rangers on Omaha Beach. I’ll take a little bit of George Taylor on Omaha Beach. I’ll take a little bit of Jenny Monty on Omaha Beach.

01:31:50:09 – 01:32:05:03
Marty Morgan
And he picks and chooses all of these things to create a story. And his objective was not to create a documentary, but provided a factual representation of D-Day invasion. His objective was to create a good story, and I think he succeeded.

01:32:05:05 – 01:32:23:09
Dan LeFebvre
With the strategy that they have in the movie around the bridge. Be correct, though, that, that they were a vital part of the war effort to to maintain those or to keep them. From being destroyed by the enemy.

01:32:23:12 – 01:32:51:23
Marty Morgan
This is where it gets a little weird and yes and no, again, the annoying historian qualified answer. Yes. And so far as the two bridge crossing sites of the murder a lot, the air and shutter port are elevated to an incredible level of importance after June 6th. And that’s because of the fact, particularly Lapeer, and that’s because of the fact that.

01:32:51:26 – 01:33:19:18
Marty Morgan
The Germans had purposely exacerbated seasonal flooding by manipulating locks on the beer River, the river and the Dover River by by manipulating these locks they tracked, they trapped a lot of water in the interior of the Cardington Peninsula, which is where the airborne force landed on D-Day. The American Air Force. And that trap water created a big lake where there normally was not a lake.

01:33:19:21 – 01:33:52:03
Marty Morgan
And by big lake, I mean big. I mean it is almost ten miles wide from top to bottom at a couple of places. It’s it’s two and three miles across. But at one critical point at last year, the flooded area was only about 700m wide, where there was the bridge over the river and then a raised roadway called the Causeway, reading from the east side of the flooded area to the west side of the flooded area.

01:33:52:06 – 01:34:30:09
Marty Morgan
And so this force landing on Utah Beach, the U.S. Army Seventh Corps, composed of multiple divisions of force of over 50,000 men. That force was to land on Utah Beach, push into the interior, and continue pushing westward all the way across the peninsula, the cotangent peninsula, the. By securing the peninsula by cutting up the peninsula, it would then become possible for the U.S. Seventh Corps to engage in maneuver warfare with four divisions that would then push from the south to the north to envelop and capture the port city at Cherbourg from its landward approaches.

01:34:30:09 – 01:34:54:22
Marty Morgan
That was the overall big picture Corps level strategy, and in order to carry out that strategy, the corps had to land all of its men and vehicles on Neutral Beach, and then they had to move westward, and in order to complete that westward movement, they had to get across this flooded area. And there was really only one good place to get across that flooded area.

01:34:54:25 – 01:35:16:26
Marty Morgan
And that was at lock here, which is why the battle of Locks here that unfolds on June 9th, 1944 is climactic and important because it opens up that artery. What was happening in the days before June 9th was effectively a building and growing traffic jam. Think of a traffic jam that’s being counterattacked by the enemy. That’s what was happening.

01:35:16:28 – 01:35:43:04
Marty Morgan
And then the 82nd airborne was given the task of punching through, the bus, recapturing the bridge and causeway, and therefore opening up a route for ground forces to move westward, which was the overall strategy of seventh Corps in the aftermath of the landings. So the stakes for the battle fought by the 82nd Airborne Division on June off year are extremely high.

01:35:43:06 – 01:36:15:10
Marty Morgan
They carry the field of battle. They are victorious. They open up the warfare Causeway, and those horses begin moving westward. And the aftermath of of that victory. And so if we assume that Robert wrote at base part of the fictional battle at Rommel, on what actually happened at Lapeer, you could say you could elevate the importance of that site to the highest level by saying, if we don’t hold this bridge and the enemy takes it, it changes the war.

01:36:15:12 – 01:36:47:06
Marty Morgan
Those those sort of, oh, sort of how dramatic. And I should note, I should say this, those sort of melodramatic terms typically accompany motion pictures and, and it’s a little bit of a Hollywood goofy thing to see moments like that elevated to these incredibly important terms. And it’s a little bit goofy in Hollywood to see, like, the lowest ranking people echoing these visions of grand strategy.

01:36:47:09 – 01:37:12:00
Marty Morgan
But that happens a couple of times in private, Ryan. And I think it had to happen, although it might be a little bit goofy and a little bit laughable. I think it had to happen because you had to have certain levels of character exposition, like there’s a moment where Tom Hanks is talking to Ted Danson, and they’re talking about Montgomery and Hal and Monty’s stall over there near corn, and we have to get to kind of get to Berlin.

01:37:12:00 – 01:37:35:24
Marty Morgan
And we have to get to Berlin to get to the big boat home. I think I’m quoting the movie correctly, and I find it a little bit peculiar that you would have two captains having these discussions of grand strategy. And also my big challenge to that idea will be, how in the world would two U.S. Army captains know all the details of what’s happening far away, and the area around Castle where the British were fighting?

01:37:35:27 – 01:38:01:16
Marty Morgan
I think that they wouldn’t. Maybe captains discussed grand strategy and down moments and Normandy, but I think they wouldn’t have had like up to date current events in terms of what the British were experiencing around Kong. And by that same token, when you see the 101st Airborne Division paratroopers and the fictional town Rommel discussing how we have to hold this bridge if the enemy takes this bridge, it’s all a little bit weird.

01:38:01:18 – 01:38:26:27
Marty Morgan
I’m not entirely convinced that the the ground troops on the lowest possible level are having discussions of grand strategy. I think that their conversations were probably, reflective of more immediate needs and more immediate concerns, like with this is how much ammunition we have, this is how much boom we have, how we do. We have communications established with anybody else.

01:38:26:27 – 01:38:35:26
Marty Morgan
I think they would have been discussing that sort of thing, rather than, we can’t let this bridge fall to the enemy, or else the entire invasion is undermined.

01:38:35:29 – 01:38:52:22
Dan LeFebvre
Well, it’s interesting you mention that, because that is something I wanted to ask you about, because in the movie they do the whole plan to defend the bridge. They do. There’s a mentioned where they talk about how they’re low on weapons and low on ammo, and they know the Germans are coming and they’re going to come with tanks.

01:38:52:24 – 01:39:08:24
Dan LeFebvre
And so, according to the movie side, Tom Hanks, his character, Captain Miller suggests that they make sticky bombs. And of course, they have no idea what those are. So he has to explain that you take a sock, you cram it with as much can’t be as it’ll hold. Coat it with axle grease, and then you throw it sticks to the tank.

01:39:08:24 – 01:39:39:00
Dan LeFebvre
Sticky bomb. That’s their best bet to take off a tank tread. And so we see a mixture of that. We see Jackson with his sniper rifle that we’ve talked about earlier. He set up and there’s a 30 caliber, machine guns that they use as well. And then, of course, there’s hand-to-hand combat. How well do you think that the movie did showing this strategy in this mix of weapons used to even though the bridge itself in the movie is fictional?

01:39:39:00 – 01:39:43:12
Dan LeFebvre
But how well do you think it did showing that battle?

01:39:43:15 – 01:40:08:12
Marty Morgan
Let me get the party pooper stuff out of the way first, and then I’ll give it a couple of minutes to compliment second party pooper. First. First of all, American airborne units within units of the American hundred and first and 82nd Airborne Division are not encountering Waffen SS planes are going to do ERS in that area because this area is androgynous along the length of the mayor de Rey River.

01:40:08:18 – 01:40:33:28
Marty Morgan
And I would just point out that there’s no point during the fighting in Normandy, where Waffen SS units engage American airborne forces along the murder. It doesn’t happen. 101st Airborne Division encounters and are going to doors of the 17th SS and the area of self guarantee and beginning on June 9th, but not up at the murder a river that’s just me being a party pooper.

01:40:34:06 – 01:40:58:28
Marty Morgan
And then also let’s talk tanks for a second, because what you see in the concluding climactic battle scene at mill is an assault gun. A really it’s not a really an assault gun. It’s actually, piece of self-propelled, self-propelled field artillery, C a self-propelled field artillery vehicle, and you see a tank that is supposed to be a Tiger.

01:40:59:01 – 01:41:21:03
Marty Morgan
And just for the record, that is a Soviet T-34 tank that has been modified to look like a German Tiger. It’s not an actual German tiger. They just need a big tank. And they there. There’s really only one functioning tiger anywhere in the world, and that’s in England. Number 131 that was depicted in theory. So they took a Soviet T-34, converted it to make it look like a tiger.

01:41:21:05 – 01:42:00:18
Marty Morgan
And it’s there present in the Rommel battle. Just for the record, no, Americans do not. Americans fighting in Normandy do not encounter a German tiger tank until the Mortein counteroffensive of in August. So from June 4th until August, we don’t encounter tigers. In fact, it’s not until, I think, July 28th that we encounter a pincer. It’s not until like July 28th that we encounter a German marked for tank.

01:42:00:20 – 01:42:28:13
Marty Morgan
I’m saying all of this because I think an important point for us to remember is that American forces, particularly American parachute infantry forces, do not encounter German made battle tanks until later. One. They encounter this this special German vehicle that we call a German or Stig. We encounter those around Saint Aragonese in the afternoon on June 7th. We encounter them in a few other places.

01:42:28:13 – 01:42:58:05
Marty Morgan
But that’s not a tank. It’s an assault gun. It doesn’t have a 360 degree rotating turret, and it is capable of quite a bit less than a Tiger or a Panther or even a mark four, for that matter. And we’re not seeing them. What we are seeing, though, in terms of German armored forces attacking American paratroopers shortly after the invasion, what we’re seeing are German armored forces that are attacking American paratroopers with French made tanks that were captured by the Germans in 1940.

01:42:58:07 – 01:43:29:13
Marty Morgan
In fact, there was a tank battle on the Lafayette Causeway in the afternoon on June 6th, and that tank battle consists of one German made Mach three tank and three French made tanks being used by a German fighting battalion. The battalion was called the Panzer Assets Update, and it was a training and replacement battalion that was almost completely equipped with these French made tanks, so there are no American paratroopers going jaw to jaw against the tiger.

01:43:29:15 – 01:43:51:25
Marty Morgan
It just doesn’t happen. I’m sorry. It’s a fantasy. It makes for a heck of a good scene, and it makes for a lot of tension. That whole tension associated with that. You know that moment in the movie where they show ribbon and Hanks and they’re in the hole and the ground’s shaking, and there’s literally like, rocks bouncing up and down from a rumbling of the approaching tiger that’s suspenseful and it’s almost visceral.

01:43:51:27 – 01:44:19:07
Marty Morgan
It’s just too bad it didn’t actually happen during D-Day, or any or any of the days that came immediately thereafter. So Americans are experiencing, German fighting vehicles, German armored fighting vehicles, but they’re not encountering the most frightening beast of them all, the German tiger. So there’s another license that the film takes with the reality of combat during the Normandy invasion.

01:44:19:09 – 01:44:48:29
Marty Morgan
So the idea of the SS carrying out this coordinated infantry and armor assault against the, village up on the Murdery River. It’s. That’s all a fiction created just for the movie. And it’s all based on, once again, a gumbo, a mixture of battles from different eras or areas of fighting in the European theater from different locations across the European theater.

01:44:49:01 – 01:45:22:06
Marty Morgan
It introduces some truths, and it introduces a lot of distortion and, and mythology. And just for the record, there was a sticky bomb during World War two. It doesn’t end up looking like a stock, stock with grease and composition being stopped in it. Although the training manuals did have a chapter on improvised explosive devices, where it instructed U.S. troops on how to create a bomb that was sort of like that, but not entirely.

01:45:22:06 – 01:45:58:11
Marty Morgan
And again, another fiction that was designed to, to it was designed, I think, to recognize an American, a unique American spirit of of being flexible, of being innovative, of working with what you got. And that is certainly a way that people tend to characterize the American army that fights in the European theater in World War two. But you don’t really see a battle where Tiger tanks come rumbling into the town, with airborne infantrymen.

01:45:58:11 – 01:46:21:28
Marty Morgan
And just for the record, airborne infantry is by its very nature, light infantry, airborne infantry with basically one anti-tank weapon. And that’s it. Because if you remember in the movie, the one anti-tank weapon they have is the one that was carried by, I think it was actually used by the the private Ryan character. It was a model m1A1 anti-tank rocket launcher, what we call the bazooka.

01:46:22:00 – 01:46:44:14
Marty Morgan
So you’re supposed to imagine this force of 101st Airborne Division paratroopers with a group of U.S. Army Rangers and then a 20 night division clerk typist, Browning, on top of it. They have one anti-tank weapon, and they’re supposed to hold off this coordinated assault by Waffen SS. Plans are going to be supported by armor. There’s a lot of fantasy going on in that scenario.

01:46:44:16 – 01:46:47:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, it sounds like it.

01:46:47:03 – 01:47:08:22
Marty Morgan
I forgot to give it compliments. I should give you a compliment. One compliment that I think it deserves is that that scene is an intense combat scene, but it’s got a totally different quality to the intense combat scene that comes at the beginning of the movie. It’s an intense combat scene, but it’s totally different. And I think it’s I mean, it had the first time I saw it having on the edge of my seat.

01:47:08:22 – 01:47:32:00
Marty Morgan
I mean, it’s visceral. It’s powerful. The hand to hand sequence is evocative, and I mean, it’s stimulating and all of the negative ways. I mean, you really empathize with the Mellish character when he’s trying, when he’s engaged in hand-to-hand combat with this top looking Waffen SS Panzer going to be going to mirror that and involves them beating each other and biting fingers off.

01:47:32:00 – 01:47:57:25
Marty Morgan
And then ultimately, the German bayonets. The Mellish character. That’s a powerful scene, and I think it’s powerful and thought provoking as well. That is a part of the exposition of that scene. It also addresses the idea of someone who is, who is traumatized by the experience of being in the middle of a battle because the Upham character is is atomized by this battle that’s going on around him.

01:47:57:26 – 01:48:21:19
Marty Morgan
He’s not ready for it, and he doesn’t cope with it well because he hears Mellish screaming for his life just up the stairs up there with a loaded M1 right click. He could go up and he could save Mellish, and he’s so paralyzed by fear that he doesn’t do it. And I think that is an interesting thing for the movie to have addressed, because that is definitely something that is a part of the American experience of fighting in the European theater, in combat and what we’re to.

01:48:21:19 – 01:48:50:01
Marty Morgan
Because not everybody, but there were Americans who, when it came time for them to to turn on their bravery in battle, some men were not capable of doing it. There are some people that in the face of combat, their instinct drove them to retreat. Whereas there are others who rise to the greatest levels of self-sacrificing courage. And you could imagine.

01:48:50:03 – 01:49:10:23
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Well, yeah, you you hear all those stories about the, the heroic side and the people who do that, you know, they they rise to the challenge. But first time I saw Saving Private Ryan, that scene really stood out to me with with Upham. And because it was one of the first times that it was like, well, yeah, not everybody’s going to rise to that challenge.

01:49:10:23 – 01:49:24:04
Dan LeFebvre
It’s just there’s not everybody can. And so I think that they addressed that, really spoke volumes and told a completely different side in just those few moments.

01:49:24:07 – 01:49:51:02
Marty Morgan
Yeah, that’s that’s a subject I find myself talking about on my tour quite a lot. And just like you said, not everybody is cut out for it. And consider what we what’s the American military became what it had become by 1944. And that is that it wasn’t a military force that was composed of a large number of people that volunteered, and then also a large number of people who did not volunteer, a large number of conscripts, people who were drafted into uniform.

01:49:51:04 – 01:50:17:23
Marty Morgan
And among the draftees. I am fascinated by the way the U.S. Army draft the experience in World War Two. The volunteers are people who I think knew that they were cut out for it to begin with, and then experience basic training and experience during combat. They were cut out before they had been gotten through that evolution. And then a large number of men are drafted to the U.S. Army, put in uniform.

01:50:17:25 – 01:50:42:29
Marty Morgan
They go through accelerated basic training programs. They are delivered to fighting units in Europe. And sometimes the don’t do well. You have to book ends of experience. You have the complete polar opposite. And that I’m fascinated by the number of U.S. Army draftees who go to Europe and earn the Medal of Honor and some of the most amazing acts of bravery you can imagine.

01:50:43:01 – 01:51:08:08
Marty Morgan
And then you also have men like there was a man named Eddie Slovic. It was a the 28th Infantry Division who was a draftee. And once the battle of the bulge began, and there was disorder and chaos created by the German advance in the battle of the bulge, Slovic took the opportunity to desert his unit. It was ultimately found and was tried, or the desertion was ultimately, executed by firing squad.

01:51:08:08 – 01:51:43:26
Marty Morgan
The one and only U.S. Army soldier who was executed for desertion during World War Two. He was a draftee, and I he interests me. He deserted his unit in Luxembourg. There was another U.S. Army soldier in Luxembourg named D.G. Turner, who was a draftee, and who by the time he got to Luxembourg for the battle of the bulge, he had already earned a Bronze Star, and as a draftee he went on to earn the Medal of Honor, and then was engaged in another act of absolutely incredible bravery when he was ultimately killed in a combat on February 7th, 1945.

01:51:43:28 – 01:52:08:11
Marty Morgan
And he was a draftee. So when you when you assemble a citizen soldier army and the the American military ultimately becomes seven, 16 million people in uniform during World War two, whenever you a symbol of course of that scale and you get there by instituting a draft, some of them are going to be people that can handle it, and some of them are going to be people that cannot.

01:52:08:13 – 01:52:13:27
Marty Morgan
And interestingly, very much that the movie Saving Private Ryan addressed that very issue.

01:52:13:29 – 01:52:39:10
Dan LeFebvre
Going back to the movie, despite taking heavy losses at the bridge, the Americans are able to hold back the German assault just long enough. All hope seems lost. Captain Miller is mortally wounded, and he’s shooting at a tank with his pistol, and one of the shots results in a massive explosion. And then we see a P-51 fly over it, and they come out and take out the German tanks.

01:52:39:12 – 01:53:04:14
Dan LeFebvre
Other reinforcements arrive, and they push back. The rest of the German forces. But Captain Miller has been shot. Ryan makes it to him just before he dies and holding him close. Miller tells Ryan two words earn this. And then the movie takes us back to the beginning. We have the elderly man in the cemetery from the beginning of the movie, and this is when we find out it’s James Ryan.

01:53:04:16 – 01:53:29:00
Dan LeFebvre
He’s there with his family, visiting Captain Miller’s grave. He stand in front, says he never forgot what he said that day on the bridge, and we’re left with tears in her eyes as the movie comes to a close. Now, what I gathered from this was that James Ryan felt the pressure to live his life to the fullest, because he came home when so many did not.

01:53:29:03 – 01:53:45:23
Dan LeFebvre
Of course, in his case, it was a specific mission to save his life that cost the lives of others. Was this sort of survivor’s guilt that we see in the movie something common among veterans who managed to make it home after the D-Day invasion, when so many did not.

01:53:45:26 – 01:54:13:02
Marty Morgan
Make it was for my first and second books. I interviewed a couple of hundred D-Day veterans, almost all of whom are gone now. And they spoke to that right away. In addition to that, I was raised in a household by a Vietnam veteran and spent two years, two tours of duty in Vietnam, and he was traumatized. And I was raised by a man who obviously felt survivor’s guilt.

01:54:13:05 – 01:54:47:00
Marty Morgan
My father’s unit was attacked in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive at a place called coochie, right after my father had rotated out to go home. And his first sergeant, whom I’m named after, was killed. And, I saw the way that my my father felt guilt all the way until his life ended. And that guilt, I think, simultaneously tortured him and then admonished him to live the fullest possible life that he could.

01:54:47:03 – 01:54:56:17
Marty Morgan
And although he wasn’t a survivor of D-Day or the Second World War, I feel like the experience of combat between these conflicts is the same.

01:54:56:20 – 01:55:14:10
Dan LeFebvre
I’m not a member of the military. My dad was was in the Army, but, I think it’s just a great and great message. Overall, it still hit me even though I’m not in the military. It’s still hit me like, you know, live, live your life to the fullest because you never know.

01:55:14:12 – 01:55:33:07
Marty Morgan
You know, Dan, when that movie, when I saw the first time I watched it, Georgia. And when the credits rolled, I looked around and I was like, what the hell just happened in this theater? What I did when I went into that movie, that was not what I expected. I did expect an emotional drama. I did not expect the levels of authenticity.

01:55:33:07 – 01:55:59:17
Marty Morgan
Although they weren’t perfect, they were great. And I certainly didn’t expect a film where if you pay close attention to that movie, establishing shot number one as a waving American flag, it fades up from credits to the southern flagpole on the northern plughole at the Normandy American Cemetery. And when I saw that, my first thought was like waving American flag, what am what’s about to happen to me in this theater?

01:55:59:20 – 01:56:20:15
Marty Morgan
And then 2.5 hours later, I came out going, this is not what I expected because I felt like the movie Saving Private Ryan. Keep in mind the era, but my maybe I’m just unique in timing because my era of movie watching was the war movies that I got addicted to when I was young was stuff like Longest Day.

01:56:20:17 – 01:56:42:25
Marty Morgan
Stuff like Tor, Tora Bridge. Too far from an era when war movies were a bit different, but they were about to change. And then the movies that were new releases that dealt with World War Two subject matter. When movies like big Red won and then moved into the 1980s, and the movies that came out in the 1980s, really the one stand out World War two movie, the 1980s.

01:56:42:25 – 01:57:17:14
Marty Morgan
For me is Memphis Belle, and this Belle kind of I bleeds. It wasn’t celebratory, and romanticized in the way that Private Ryan was. I felt like Memphis Belle was a little bit of, a world War Two Vietnam movie. And of course, in the 80s, that’s when the big Vietnam movies were out, the biggest of them all, of course, platoon, which I argue established an overall narrative about the experience of Vietnam that is completely distorted and and not really factually accurate.

01:57:17:16 – 01:57:48:12
Marty Morgan
But regardless of what I think about these movies, these movies had a quality of, of of disenchantment and, and cynicism that you don’t see in the movie Saving Private Ryan. When I sat down in the theater before the credits, before the theater lights dimmed a bit, I, I was not expecting to go down the line of a movie that was going to be a little patriotic, a little triumphal.

01:57:48:14 – 01:58:17:06
Marty Morgan
I didn’t expect it to be quite as reflective. There are moments where it’s about as subtle as a barn door, but then there are moments where it’s pretty subtle and emotional. I did not expect the film that Steven Spielberg gave me, and it’s anything I feel like. Though the lasting popularity of Saving Private Ryan is because Steven Steven Spielberg did not give us a Vietnam movie that was set in World War Two.

01:58:17:08 – 01:58:33:14
Dan LeFebvre
I wasn’t expecting that either. The first time that I saw it, it was I wasn’t expecting it to be as emotional as it ended up being. I thought they did a great job of showing the human side.

01:58:33:17 – 01:58:54:25
Marty Morgan
It did, and I. I struggle with this because I, like every other historian out there, were a dime a dozen, and we all have added ideas of screenplays that we’re going to write and how we’re going to make the next Saving Private Ryan. And we’re going to be a responsible sport. And I, I often argue that it is not possible to match that, that achievement.

01:58:54:27 – 01:59:15:08
Marty Morgan
And here’s why I think it’s not possible. And I think it’s not possible because of Steven Spielberg. That movie happened because Steven Spielberg wanted to make that movie. And people didn’t tell Steven Spielberg how to make his movie. He made a movie he wanted to. So the man who brought us E.T. brought us the way the American flag and earned this.

01:59:15:10 – 01:59:27:29
Marty Morgan
And I don’t mean mentioned it to be negative or cynical. I mention it because he clearly makes movies that want to pull at your heart strings. And the movie Saving Private Ryan definitely did that.

01:59:28:01 – 01:59:53:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about Saving Private Ryan. I think one of the biggest takeaways that I’ve heard from people after seeing the movie and after our discussion, is just how it visualizes what it must have been like during D-Day. But that leads us right into an even better way to visualize D-Day with your book called D-Day A Photographic History of the Normandy Invasion.

01:59:53:05 – 01:59:58:06
Dan LeFebvre
Can you share a little bit of information about your book and where someone can pick up a copy?

01:59:58:08 – 02:00:24:03
Marty Morgan
Sure, yeah. The the book was released just early mid last year for just in time for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. It’s it features 450 photographs of the Normandy invasion. Something earlier some never been before. What I sought to do in the book was to bring, a greater level of specificity to captioning an explanation of where certain famous photographs were taken and what they depict.

02:00:24:05 – 02:00:45:27
Marty Morgan
I also do a little bit of then and now photography, and I do a little bit of storytelling in the book as well, and it was a compilation of my experiences of having conducted interviews with hundreds of D-Day veterans and spent a lot of time around the subject and spent a lot of time in Normandy. And, I’m just glad that it was rereleased in time for the 75th anniversary.

02:00:45:29 – 02:01:04:19
Marty Morgan
I think it is for the most part, the rerelease is for the most part sold out now, but I see that copies are available on Amazon. You can find it on there. The only Martin K Morgan that has published books on Amazon.com. And I hope that, somebody out there interested me, they might go buy it.

02:01:04:19 – 02:01:27:23
Marty Morgan
So that would mean that I have sold maybe at least two copies in 2020. I I’m proud of it. I like the book a lot. I, I look back on it as a positive moment. It didn’t really burn the world down in terms of reaching people, and it wasn’t a bestseller. But, the economics of publishing in the 21st century are pretty complicated, and I’m just glad to have a book out.

02:01:27:26 – 02:01:30:01
Dan LeFebvre
Thank you again so much for your time, Marty.

02:01:30:03 – 02:01:39:13
Marty Morgan
Well, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for the honor of inviting me to be a part of a discussion.

00:04:08:10 – 00:04:26:20
Dan LeFebvre
We have a few movies to talk about today, but before we do that, let’s start by flipping things around a little bit. Normally here on the podcast, we talk about things that filmmakers change from the true story. But I know you’ve been working to get your book called Not a Real Enemy About Your Father urban story told into a movie.

00:04:26:22 – 00:04:43:03
Dan LeFebvre
Of course, we can’t predict the future to know when or if that will happen soon, but let’s hope for the best and say it is turned into a movie. So what’s one key thing that you want to make sure the filmmakers don’t change from the true story in the film adaptation?

00:04:43:06 – 00:05:01:18
Robert Wolf
Well, hopefully all of it, of course. But, that’s the easy answer. My dad’s for escapes or what? For example, my dad was a four time escape artist, and he missed an escape, too. He was fortunate, and he sports enough to go to the wrong train station under communist Hungary. And everybody made that train got arrested, including his, medical school classmate.

00:05:01:18 – 00:05:08:07
Robert Wolf
So all of that. I’d like to be, as accurate as possible as, cinematography. Cinematography.

00:05:08:10 – 00:05:09:02
Dan LeFebvre
Cinematography.

00:05:09:04 – 00:05:29:27
Robert Wolf
Yeah, yeah, as close as possible. Color movie, color in color. Obviously, a lot of the older movies are black and white, like Schindler’s List, which I hope we talk about a little bit more. That movie I just saw the movie and a resonates very, very much so with the story that I’m that we’re telling here. And then his upbringing, you know, it doesn’t have to be a long part of his upbringing.

00:05:30:00 – 00:05:49:23
Robert Wolf
And if I could cast a movie, it’d be Tom Hanks playing my dad and Tom, or that Tom Hanks Tom cruise. Tom Hanks plays one of the nicer, guards in the labor camp, a forced labor camp. A lot of the movie should cover the forced labor camp, the beatings, getting urinated on, getting shot at by Russian planes, all that kind of thing.

00:05:49:23 – 00:06:09:12
Robert Wolf
So there’s a lot of content. And, you know, of course, we wanted as close as possible, but any good producer writer screenplay would, would switch it up a little. I just hope they keep the, you know, as they keep the fidelity as much as possible. I mean obviously you got to make changes to capture an audience and hopefully that would be the case.

00:06:09:16 – 00:06:29:04
Robert Wolf
And you know the other thing is some people say could be a feature film. Some people say a documentary docu drama series. I wouldn’t care as long as they did a good job with it. There’s 40 chapters in our book, so, you could. I don’t think it’d be a 40, 40, show series, but certainly 10 or 15 would be, you know, one season’s worth at least.

00:06:29:04 – 00:06:45:15
Robert Wolf
So it’s always up to the producer, or whoever gets a hold of, the story. The it’s not in a screen stand in a screenplay yet, but, I, I leave that to the I leave that to Hollywood or whatever, discovers whatever we’re doing here. And if they do so it’s a, it’s a wing and a prayer.

00:06:45:15 – 00:07:02:01
Robert Wolf
And I know it’s a such a long shot. It’s easier to get into medical school, which I’m a position. I’m a radiologist, recently retired. It’s easier to get into medical school than to sell a New York Times bestseller. A bigger story and a movie, as we well know, nobody knew Schindler was, you know, 20, 30 years ago and nobody knew who.

00:07:02:01 – 00:07:18:29
Robert Wolf
And Frank was way back in the day. And, the, Life is Beautiful story I never wanted I mean, I never even think about, Italy and the Holocaust until I saw that movie and both of them the second time. Both great movies. And we could talk about those details and how they resonate with what we’re doing.

00:07:19:01 – 00:07:29:01
Robert Wolf
And I’m glad I saw them after I wrote a book regarding the Holocaust and beforehand to what a what a different viewpoint or what a, what a difference that makes.

00:07:29:01 – 00:07:48:26
Dan LeFebvre
Certainly we’re going to we’re going to talk about those for sure. But as we shift into some of the movies that that have been made, there are a lot of movies that are set before and during World War Two. So what I’d love to do is to get your take on some of those and how they compare to your family’s experiences that you talk about in your book.

00:07:48:28 – 00:08:06:05
Dan LeFebvre
And the first movie that I’d like to start with is a classic film, The Sound of Music, and it tells the story of how life changes for the von Trapp family as Nazi Germany annexes Austria in 1938. And as we watch a movie like Sound of Music, it’s possible to see the warning signs when we watch the movie now.

00:08:06:05 – 00:08:26:00
Dan LeFebvre
But of course, anytime we’re watching a movie like that, we’re also looking at it through a historical lens because we already know what’s going to happen from history instead of being there in the moment. And correct me if I’m wrong, but Austria is like less than 100km from where your father grew up in Hungary, so he wasn’t that far from where the annexation unfolded.

00:08:26:03 – 00:08:30:24
Dan LeFebvre
What were things like in that region as Germany annexed Austria?

00:08:30:27 – 00:08:57:20
Robert Wolf
Well, as you know, the fact the rise of fascism almost simultaneously with the Great Depression, the Roaring 20s, were okay in Hungary and throughout the world. We think the war was over. Things were doing well. And meantime, of course, Hitler was it was a building, the military machine that he was, because Germany’s economy was, it was, that’s how they that’s that was their economy was the military, of course, 33 is where fascism was on a rise in 38, 1938.

00:08:57:20 – 00:09:17:28
Robert Wolf
And in Hungary, there were anti-Jewish laws were initiated. So you couldn’t on the radio, you could only go out at certain times. There was, no Jews or dog signs up, of course, Kristallnacht. If, I’m not mistaken, in Germany, Austria was 1938, a very big event. That’s where they started taking force.

00:09:17:28 – 00:09:39:06
Robert Wolf
Laborers, the men, the young men that were wealthy, they started to take them away to forced labor camps and, really didn’t affect Hungary. I mean, the anti-Jewish laws were there. So they were persecuted and shunned, if you will. But the the killings and the, the the the most of it didn’t really, happened in Hungary till 1943, 1944.

00:09:39:09 – 00:10:03:00
Robert Wolf
My dad ended up going to after his first forced labor camp in 1943 and October, and then his parents were taken away to Auschwitz, in 1944. So Poland got hit first, obviously in 1939, Kristallnacht before that, 1938. And then Hungary, a little bit later, what I’m told. And from when I’ve read Hungary had the fastest, the fastest pace of homicide, of genocide of any of them.

00:10:03:00 – 00:10:33:07
Robert Wolf
So, that includes Ukraine and Russia, which they were brutalized and the Polish, 1939 of the refugees went to Hungary. And, the Hungarian government sent the refugees back, unfortunately. And, and it really badly for them. And so this resonates with Poland, with the, with the Schindler idea too, because, a lot of similarities between that and what happened to Hungary, although we’re talking about 1941 versus 1943 and 1944, but it could be the same, the same idea that, you know, a little bit, a little bit different background, different scenario.

00:10:33:07 – 00:10:36:09
Robert Wolf
But, a lot of the common, a lot of common themes.

00:10:36:13 – 00:10:59:15
Dan LeFebvre
Since you mentioned it didn’t really touch Hungary, but it’s touching all these countries around. And I’ve, I’ve never visited Hungary, but I can imagine that the proximity isn’t that far. I mean, there’s borders, you know, it’s technically a different country, but there’s these atrocities that are happening. What was it like for your your father as a child and your your grandparents?

00:10:59:15 – 00:11:04:12
Dan LeFebvre
And when they’re, when they’re seeing, I mean, they had been seeing in the news what’s going on where they.

00:11:04:15 – 00:11:30:29
Robert Wolf
Well, what a great question. Well, you say seeing in the news, we realize that my dad in Hungary and his parents never own a car. They never owned a TV. You bring up a great point. Jews were not allowed to have radios. So. And so they had a radio. He, his dad had enough courage to hide a radio, and they would quietly listen to the BBC, during the uprise of the uprising, with a lot of hope and a lot of prayer that that it end soon and relevant to that.

00:11:31:01 – 00:11:50:08
Robert Wolf
During my dad’s first escape toward. They thought it was the end of Lord, they don’t get much news that the forced labor camp, but they’re in the middle of nowhere, about near the Austria Hungary border. And even though they escaped, the Jews first of four, which some are remarkable, they didn’t know whether to flee to Budapest or stay in Hungary or go to Austria because they didn’t know who’s going to win the war.

00:11:50:11 – 00:12:04:24
Robert Wolf
And, you know, the Nazis won the war and they end up in Austria. They’re dead men. And if there’s a chance in Hungary, not Hungary proper, but the West, turns out it’s not the West. It was Soviet Union. If they win the war, maybe they’re better off in Hungary. It turns out either way, you know, you’re a Jew.

00:12:04:24 – 00:12:28:23
Robert Wolf
You’re screwed. I mean, those men, only 5% of the forced labor survived, in the in that process, including my dad, because he was on the run and hiding at the time. He wasn’t the. The rest of them that survived were treated as prisoners of war. Unfortunately. So 5% of forced labor, they had death marches. And that’s why my my dad and his friend Frank decided to, escape the first time because they thought they were on a death march.

00:12:28:28 – 00:12:59:27
Robert Wolf
And nobody knows about death marches in Europe. They don’t. I mean, historians might know. We all know about Okinawa and, the Pacific, but not a lot of people know. So when they thought you weren’t useful anymore, they killed you. So. And that was true at the Danube, very end of the war. Unlike Schindler, where the guards just go home, I, I’d like to talk about that for a few minutes, too, but, it’s a fantasy that these people, because the, guardians were treated and my mom and dad said that, that, the the Arrow Cross, for example, was like a Hungarian Gestapo and the the White Terror or the Red

00:12:59:27 – 00:13:17:14
Robert Wolf
terror or the the Nazis. The communists, they didn’t treat if you felt like if you’re Jewish, you were still scared of whoever was in charge. And, the Hungarians, the police and the military treated the Jewish people worse than the Nazis themselves. And that’s another thing that resonates with some of these movies, too. Women versus men.

00:13:17:14 – 00:13:26:27
Robert Wolf
Women guards versus Benghazi, pets. A lot of the, you know, a lot of things, humiliation. There are a lot of compare, a lot of things to talk about that are that resonate, big time.

00:13:27:00 – 00:13:48:21
Dan LeFebvre
I love that you mentioned the the radio and the communications there, because that’s something that I think I kind of like what I mentioned before, you know, when we watch a movie, we’re looking at it with a historical lens. So we think of, oh yeah, you can get news from all around there. And in my question I ask, you know, seeing things, but there’s that there has to be that almost added level of fear.

00:13:48:21 – 00:14:06:13
Dan LeFebvre
I would imagine, of not knowing, like, you know, that there’s some bad things going on, but you don’t know the full extent of it. And you then there’s that fear of just not knowing, because then your mind would start to go make things up that, I mean, there were some horrible things, but I, I mean, and it’s something I have a hard time wrap my head around.

00:14:06:14 – 00:14:12:26
Dan LeFebvre
What, like put yourself in the historical context of what that must have been like. It had to have been just terrifying for your for your father.

00:14:12:28 – 00:14:31:13
Robert Wolf
Well, part of the reason. Yeah. No intervention for many, many years, after the war started, it, because the United States had the, for example, had the, had the, the duty to protect its own citizens. So getting involved with the war, it was, was tough communications. I couldn’t say it better. You know, the real cell phones there, no lawyers or no courtrooms.

00:14:31:15 – 00:14:50:23
Robert Wolf
The cops and the. And the military pointing guns. It. Yeah. And fortunately, in this country, we. That’s not happened yet. So there’s one thing. No communication, just the radio, which was illegal. It probably would’ve been shot and killed if they got caught with it. And, and forced labor camps out in the middle of nowhere, even less communication than we had a regular camp in the US growing up, you know?

00:14:50:23 – 00:15:11:04
Robert Wolf
So, word of mouth. So things got a little easier for the men? Not much. But as the their guards got bribed, dental treat, free dental treatments. But, yes, there was a dentist. Obvious, obvious threat to society, killed at Auschwitz and his mom as well. And Deb didn’t find out about two months afterwards. Another miracle, from an eyewitness.

00:15:11:06 – 00:15:29:04
Robert Wolf
And, that’s another point that, the witnesses besides no cell phones, no video, a lot of photographs taken, as we know, the Nazis took many, many photographs. So denying the Holocaust and even communist Hungary just. There’s no way you can’t sell that. But the witness, the witness was the next victim is how it turned out.

00:15:29:04 – 00:15:46:14
Robert Wolf
Like at the Danube walk and death marches. Or as we’ve seen, these mass burial, sites, in Ukraine for example, or in the concentration camps. So the witnesses were literally the next victim. So very, very hard to, to wrap my arms around that. And like you said, very hard to get information again.

00:15:46:20 – 00:16:07:03
Dan LeFebvre
I it’s it’s hard to wrap your head around, but but putting yourself in that context of what that must have been like, I, I love the like in your book when you’re when you’re telling that story, it, it it does a really good job of, of helping to put the, the reader in that place of what that must have been like in there.

00:16:07:07 – 00:16:23:18
Dan LeFebvre
And I’m curious because there are a lot of details of your, your father’s earlier life were those things that he that he told you specifically or were they things that you had to research after the fact? Or how did that part kind of come together for that story as you’re putting all these pieces together?

00:16:23:21 – 00:16:41:21
Robert Wolf
A little bit of both. I can’t imagine the boredom in living in quarters like that packed when with people or even hiding out in your own home, with, you know, yellow stars, yellow armbands, the anxiety, the depression, the fear. I can’t imagine that. And but like you say, you can feel it, like during my dad’s first escape.

00:16:41:21 – 00:17:00:02
Robert Wolf
So, Yeah, my dad. Mom wrote an autobiography. They wrote the his story, from World War one. The of World War one to the end of the Hungarian Revolution. So literally 1916, 19 1718 to the end of the Revolution, 1956. They wrote the story in the 1970s. They they wrote it as though it happened the previous day.

00:17:00:09 – 00:17:17:04
Robert Wolf
Sharp. Chris. And I turned into a biography many, many years later. Growing up, the first half of my life, not so much as I went to college and medical school at a career as a radiologist, family, all of that things. So I didn’t, but I did read the it went from paper and pencil to typewriter to computer to disk.

00:17:17:06 – 00:17:36:04
Robert Wolf
And, when it was a manuscript maybe 30 years ago, I read it once and didn’t think much of it and didn’t remember much except my dad’s first escape. But then when I reread it after my my dad passed and fortunately my mom, a historian friend, handed me the story on the disk, and I turned his autobiography to biography and, just doing that alone.

00:17:36:07 – 00:17:52:25
Robert Wolf
Long story short, I went back to radiology, and that brought me to the book. And, long story short, the stories were so amazing. At least 20 miracles in my dad’s life and hungry for escapes and 20 miracles. I couldn’t leave it on a computer. I couldn’t leave it on a disk. I wanted to share it with the world and,

00:17:52:27 – 00:18:07:18
Robert Wolf
And so I did. And that’s been my that’s been my charge. That’s been my mission the last 6 or 7 years. The book’s been out a little while now, but, that doesn’t stop me from trying to fight antisemitism. So, this is my main thing, the why I’m doing this, and, but, yeah, it’s my own little corner.

00:18:07:18 – 00:18:23:07
Robert Wolf
I need help with that, obviously, but, no, my my mom and dad, they did this as though they knew I would like if you know me, six years ago, and my mom was a Holocaust educator, by the way. My dad, too, but he was an ObGyn, by the way, deliver 10,000 babies in the Detroit area, which is so a form of redemption.

00:18:23:10 – 00:18:41:06
Robert Wolf
That’s the punch line. It doesn’t bring back 6 million and doesn’t beat back 50 million that died in World War two. But at least he brought some life back in jovial and jolly. No PTSD. My mom to they they educated. They were well-rounded people. And the stories like I said, they were crisp and and then they had a lot of friends in the unlike what’s going on in the world now.

00:18:41:06 – 00:19:00:00
Robert Wolf
They had a lot of friends where I grew up in Michigan and throughout the world, from continental Africa, Asia had Indian friends, a muslim, Christian, Jewish, fellow Holocaust survivors. They shared the stories and, and I, I bought into it. I got a little burnout from it. And then, I brought it back to life, at least in my own legacy towards my family.

00:19:00:00 – 00:19:15:00
Robert Wolf
So, I got this app, you know, Superman’s Kryptonite. You just sort of called out to me, you know? It’s summoned me back in me. So. And so I’m doing it, and I. I couldn’t leave this on a disc. I couldn’t leave it on computer. And so that’s why we’re sharing it. But, very well done by my mom and dad, you know.

00:19:15:00 – 00:19:16:09
Robert Wolf
So.

00:19:16:11 – 00:19:43:12
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, well, I’m glad that you are telling that story to to because the world does need to know. And the part that kind of made me think that was when you talking about the the photos and things like the Nazis and the Soviets took. But again, putting yourself in that perspective, a difference from watching a movie today versus versus being there when you like the people that took the photographs to document a lot of that, those wouldn’t be photographs that you’re parents and grandparents would have had access to because they were taken by the people doing a lot of it.

00:19:43:12 – 00:19:53:06
Dan LeFebvre
So it’s not something that they’re going to show. So I was very curious how that story then survives despite trying to be suppressed.

00:19:53:09 – 00:20:12:02
Robert Wolf
Yeah. No, you’re right. I mean, but very, very little, belongings left over, from my dad’s side of the family. My mom saved a lot of photographs, and somehow they were preserved, by my mom. So it was a little less harrowing. My mom was in hiding, you know, with her mom, grandma, uncle, grandfather who’s different, you know, on farms and sometimes in Budapest.

00:20:12:02 – 00:20:35:14
Robert Wolf
So she was able to preserve more things. And as a and she also was into genealogy. And I wish I followed it a little bit more, but I do at least have back to World War one. I can’t go back there beyond that. But no, it’s unimaginable. The fear that my mom must add in hiding to and and the fear my dad must have had every day competing and starving and and doing forced labor for hours from, you know, dawn to dusk.

00:20:35:16 – 00:20:52:07
Robert Wolf
Can’t. I can’t imagine it. So, the reality and also photographs. So the Nazis were they took a lot of photographs. They, they sent them home to their families, let them know what they’re doing. And I have a collection of about 18,000 photos on my phone, and some of them are exceptionally disturbing. The last guy surviving in Vilna.

00:20:52:09 – 00:21:18:00
Robert Wolf
They’re about to kill him, and he’s surrounded by, mostly Nazi, officers. And there’s a gun pointed aside, and he knows he’s next. Reminds a little Schindler to you, but he’s the last survivor. They’re a very disturbing photo. I haven’t shared it because they’ll probably kick me out of X and meta and LinkedIn. If I were, were to, the, you know, the burning synagogue is another one, the smashed in homes, the burning homes, one disturbing one.

00:21:18:05 – 00:21:40:09
Robert Wolf
Well, they’re marching off the Jewish people. And I’m thinking, well, who’s taken a picture of all of this and not helping? You know, and these people lived in fear, of course. Another, disturbing photo. I’ve got some from juror. My dad’s home town. Very, very few, very few available. Another one is Kristallnacht. Whether the business, the glass is all broken up and the lady’s walking by the business smiling, I mean, I.

00:21:40:10 – 00:22:00:02
Robert Wolf
How do you smile when she got what? Are you, Jewish? You’re not smiling. If you’re Christian, you smiling, then, Well, I, I guess I know what party you’re in. You’re in the Nazi party or the Christmas party are very sadistic. Some and Christians were afraid for their lives, too. So the ones that helped the Jewish people or the gays, you know, almost sexual, LGBTQ, disabled, they’re there to be loud.

00:22:00:02 – 00:22:15:03
Robert Wolf
It, including guys like Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg is another one that comes to mind. So a lot going on. I can’t imagine being so remote and, and, secluded from the truth, let alone the news.

00:22:15:06 – 00:22:50:28
Dan LeFebvre
If we shift back to the movies you mentioned life is beautiful, and that’s another movie I want to talk about. That one starts in 1939, just after the annexation of Austria. And it follows the story of how life changes around a Jewish man named Guido before and during the rise of fascism in Italy. And the movie, it starts off with everyday life, but one of the key differences between life is Beautiful and the Sound of Music that we talked about before is that Life Is Beautiful shows how life changes for the main character because he’s an Italian Jewish man, whereas the Von Trapp family in the sound of Music, they’re not so well.

00:22:50:28 – 00:23:12:22
Dan LeFebvre
I, I we see little signs here and there and Sound of Music. We can see the signs in life and beautiful. Life is beautiful. Those signs are clearly the rise of anti-Semitism. They’re going on in Italy now. In particular, there was a scene where Guido pretended to be an inspector of Rome teaching children in school how they are pure Aryan, the superior race.

00:23:12:25 – 00:23:34:00
Dan LeFebvre
He doesn’t have very comical way in the movie, similar to later in the movie, when Guido’s young son just reads a sign in business window that says no Jews or dogs, and Guido makes a joke about there’s just saying. There’s also a drug store nearby saying that I’m not going to let Chinese in with kangaroo. Right. And he’s making a joke out of out of this very serious situation.

00:23:34:03 – 00:23:49:21
Dan LeFebvre
And that storyline in like Life Is Beautiful is a fictional one. Guido is not a real person, but how old do you think life is beautiful? Did showing signs of anti-Semitism slowly growing in everyday life before the outbreak of World War two?

00:23:49:24 – 00:24:06:05
Robert Wolf
Great question. I mean, that’s an our answer, but fantastic movie. Beautifully done. The cinematography is outstanding. I’m glad you mentioned that scene, because to me, that’s the turning point in the movie. The better part of the first half of the movie is about It’s a Beautiful Life. It’s a wonder it’s not It’s a Wonderful Life.

00:24:06:05 – 00:24:27:20
Robert Wolf
That’s a different, fantastic movie, too. But life is beautiful there. He falls in love with this lady. He’s on the bicycle. It’s a lot of humor. I mean, a lot of humor in that movie. Even to the end. And, you know, it’s admirable how he hides the truth from his son throughout, but, yeah, that’s the turning point in the movies when he’s up there talking about the the perfect race or our rewards it.

00:24:27:27 – 00:24:45:01
Robert Wolf
And then the poor, his relatives horse getting painted, I think was green and purple. I forget the color. Maybe green. That’s good. And. Yeah. And and that’s the turning point there. And then all of a sudden, boom, they’re, they’re in prison and they’re going off to, to concentration camps, different some different things.

00:24:45:09 – 00:25:04:29
Robert Wolf
Some of the similarities with my, my parent, they don’t talk about women that much, but both that movie and similar, the, the women, the women guards, especially at Auschwitz and then in these concentration camps were to me more sadistic and more brutal to the prisoners than, than otherwise. Interestingly, a lot of Nazis, the people that were guarding them were the Germans, the Nazis.

00:25:04:29 – 00:25:22:27
Robert Wolf
So where were the Italians? That’s that’s a little bit different than Hungary, I think, because the Hungarians were the ones who keep an eye on the force. Laborers, and child, my dad’s parents were taken from their home. That was, that was a Nazi. Blue striped pajamas. Interesting. It’s a, you know, we don’t know what color stripes they have in general because black and white movie, but it’s blue stripes.

00:25:22:27 – 00:25:39:21
Robert Wolf
But we all know that, you know, outfits in other places, they were, red stripes. So that was, another thing that, that was those was a familiar, but, or different, I should say. I thought, one thing similar with the both of those movies is the language was a little fast for me. It’s in subtitles.

00:25:39:24 – 00:25:56:13
Robert Wolf
Well, I think they just talked a little bit faster. Was a little. Because, you know, we can read fast, but it just won’t have the pace or the how they talk. Maybe at the very beginning, speed it up because it makes the humor, the humor scenes a little more humorous, so to say, so to speak. But, yeah, they kind of slow that down a little bit, too.

00:25:56:15 – 00:26:12:21
Robert Wolf
What else are we? Yeah. I mean, that’s, just a fact. The met the end was unbelievable. The way the they say, do they want or try? They’re playing in a game to win a tank and they won. You know, the kid survives, but he doesn’t. The mom survives. Was a Dora. And, you know, of course you gets shot.

00:26:12:23 – 00:26:31:18
Robert Wolf
He gets shot for warning. The ladies, including his wife, as are being hauled away in a truck. So another thing that may not be realistic is the son and the father in the same bunk. Because the kids were separated, like in Auschwitz and other places, and like a and Schindler, you know, the kids are all the way, in bundles.

00:26:31:18 – 00:26:52:14
Robert Wolf
And boy, are the parents freaking. They’re all running towards the fences and trying to follow the trucks and talk about learned helplessness and senior kids being all the way to who knows where. So that part may not have been as realistic. But yeah, it was such a well-done movie. And, and I don’t know that much about the Italian history in, in World War Two, so that’s that.

00:26:52:14 – 00:27:11:10
Robert Wolf
But comparing what you to the other movie and to what I’ve read and done, and learned about pretty realistic, I mean, in their own way. Obviously not every concentration camps will be the same. Not a forced labor camps going to be the same. The different guards, different, food supply, who knows? Different amounts of sadism.

00:27:11:12 – 00:27:21:00
Robert Wolf
It’s people to take orders and people that delight in torturing others. And that’s so hard to put your arms around to. It’s just. I don’t know how people could be like that at all.

00:27:21:02 – 00:27:41:21
Dan LeFebvre
But you mentioned Schindler’s List, and whenever we think of movies that depict the Holocaust, that’s probably the first one that does come to mind. In that movie, we see what life is like in the Jewish ghetto. Of course, Schindler’s List depicts the ghetto in Krakow, Poland, but your grandparents were forced to move to another Nazi controlled Jewish ghetto in your Hungary.

00:27:41:23 – 00:27:44:15
Dan LeFebvre
I’m probably mispronouncing that, but.

00:27:44:18 – 00:27:49:18
Robert Wolf
My Hungarians not so. They never taught me, so I. It’s fine. That was their shooting around which.

00:27:49:20 – 00:27:57:21
Dan LeFebvre
But based on the research that you did for your book, were there similarities to what we see in Schindler’s List and in the ghetto there, and what your grandparents dealt with?

00:27:57:24 – 00:28:19:27
Robert Wolf
Many, many, many. First, I want to talk about, so many. I mean, unfortunately, the movie was in black and white, but the cinematography in that movie is unbelievable. Like I said, they talk a little fast, especially when they’re talking about people’s names a little fast for me, some of the conversation, but, amazing. Some overlap when when they’re taken to Auschwitz, we don’t know if it’s accidentally or if it’s on purpose.

00:28:20:04 – 00:28:37:05
Robert Wolf
And they put them in the chamber and they think that that’s it. The gas chamber and the relief showers. I can picture my mom, my my grandmother, in the in the gas chamber. And, of course, when they’re on trains, when I visit Holocaust museums, when I do book talks, book lectures, I can’t even go into the I.

00:28:37:05 – 00:29:01:10
Robert Wolf
It’s hard to even look in the train, let alone go in the train just because. Just because that imagery. So, so that resonates. The dramatic irony. I guess I can get that, in a minute, but, the random shooting. Okay, so dramatic irony. I’m going to mention the three things where I well, first of all, the turning point is when they’re horseback riding and they’re randomly shooting all the people in the ghetto, the people that stayed, the people that that tried to hide very, very sad scene.

00:29:01:10 – 00:29:18:21
Robert Wolf
Because every. And you know, another thing that’s not talked about is pets. You know, how many did the pets get left behind and the pets get killed. And we know in, life is beautiful. There’s a little kitten, is strolling around the, the clothes that were stolen. Another thing. And I’m going to go back to the dramatic irony, another thing that resonates.

00:29:18:24 – 00:29:35:21
Robert Wolf
With all of it is the stolen luggage. They bring your goods, leave them here, and they’ll come. They will arrive. Big deception. And when my dad’s parents were all to Auschwitz, it was to be they were going to go to forest or farm, plant flowers, trees. Do you know, do, work on the foliage? That’s what.

00:29:35:21 – 00:29:53:15
Robert Wolf
That’s how they were to see. And they end up going to Auschwitz. So. So three points of dramatic irony, not necessarily related to my, my dad, but one is actually. So when, the, engineer they’re building the they’re constructing the building and the engineer comes up to, I think it’s almond goes, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing or I’m on both.

00:29:53:15 – 00:30:09:27
Robert Wolf
He’s the I think he’s a lieutenant, but he’s the most sadistic guy around. And, she says to me now, the structure is not sound, and we need to do this and maybe even start again. And, what does he say? We are not going to argue with these people. And and then he asks the guy shooter, shooter.

00:30:09:27 – 00:30:28:01
Robert Wolf
And it’s one of the few scenes where somebody gets shot and it’s not him doing it. So amazingly enough. And then the irony is that he decides to he changes his mind and, and decides to, to take it down and start all over again. Another irony was, the the lady that comes to Schindler, I don’t know if that was Helen Hirsch.

00:30:28:04 – 00:30:50:13
Robert Wolf
Helen, her hair, shoes, how to pronounce it. I don’t know if it’s her or the other one, but she comes to Schindler and says, can you get my parents into this? Into the factory here? And he says, you know, he’s practically screaming at her, saying, no, I can’t save everybody this and that and that. And then the guy escapes from the camp and, and just, randomly shoots 25 guys and then just Clarkston.

00:30:50:13 – 00:31:23:23
Robert Wolf
If I’m pronouncing Sharon I love, they really did their best trying to do the correct pronunciation and I think an accurate job. But stern tells Schindler that, you know, 25 people died. So Schindler, goes out of his way to bring in, the lady’s parents, which is which is pretty cool, too. I mean, and, so the other irony and oh, that resonates with my dad in the forced labor camp where, an officer would get drunk and some, some little piece of malfeasance, like somebody chirping a word or or moving in the line, and the guy gets past and he’s,

00:31:23:25 – 00:31:40:18
Robert Wolf
And he’s got the he’s got the gun. And, you threatened to shoot every tense man, in his drunk, in his drunk, state, and, in the end, doesn’t. But imagine the fear. You know, you dad, it can seem like that. And everybody else counting 1 to 1 through ten, you know, every 10th man they’re going to kill.

00:31:40:20 – 00:31:58:01
Robert Wolf
And, And the guy does that, too. He’s got the whole line of the men, and he shoots the guy with the, with the, I don’t remember. It’s a gun shot. I think it was a, shotgun. And then they shoot him in the head and and that, like, that scene is so vivid. The way that was bleeding, it would’ve been even more so in color.

00:31:58:04 – 00:32:16:22
Robert Wolf
But the irony there is the same thing. Just like when he randomly shoots the 25 men and, also the one person, and then he says, who’s, you know, who’s next? And then the kid smart enough to step forward and said, you know, you who did this? Who’s the one who created the malfeasance? And the kid points at the dead guy and probably saved a lot of lives, just by doing that.

00:32:16:22 – 00:32:36:01
Robert Wolf
So that’s more irony. And then and, and comparable with my dad had to go through, you know, random threaten to be killed randomly and thank God, they, they didn’t carry that out. The other piece of irony, which is almost redemption itself, is when, the I think it was the rabbi, was one of the older men making the parts, and his productivity was on the low side that compared it.

00:32:36:01 – 00:32:52:17
Robert Wolf
You know, it took some a minute to make the part, which is where you got so few partially take him out to shoot him and his gun jams and, you know, his backup gun jams, and he gets a gun from his, mother, the fellow officers and or soldiers, I don’t remember. It was an officer. And that gun jams and there’s 15 or 20 clicks.

00:32:52:19 – 00:33:08:03
Robert Wolf
We shoot this guy, and the poor guy’s got his neck going down. He knows he’s going to die any second. It reminds me of that, the Vilna, the Vilna photograph. And then he ends up just sitting with the butt of the gun and and lets him live. Imagine going through that kind of trauma and not having PTSD.

00:33:08:05 – 00:33:23:13
Robert Wolf
It’s amazing. But the irony is, when they hang golf, they have a trouble date. They’ve got him by the rope, but they have trouble checking out those. The step stool underneath him, it takes some at least like a half a minute. They can’t do it in the guy. So that’s a little bit of redemption too. But, more dramatic irony.

00:33:23:13 – 00:33:42:17
Robert Wolf
So I it’s a fantastically bad movie. And and so, so similar in in his point, you know, the trains and the, or the, forced labor and, you know, we see forced labor, of course, in concentration camps to sometimes women, sometimes men. We don’t talk about much about forced labor in, with women in our story.

00:33:42:17 – 00:33:48:08
Robert Wolf
But lately I’ve been taught and enlightened about that part, that part of it as well.

00:33:48:10 – 00:34:06:19
Dan LeFebvre
Something that we don’t see in Schindler’s List much is, is how others in the city reacted to the ghetto being set up and the Nazis moving the Jews into it. How did the civilians in and around Europe react to the Jewish ghetto being established for when your your grandparents were there?

00:34:06:21 – 00:34:23:12
Robert Wolf
Well, once they were in the ghetto, they had no access to the outside world. They had limited food, limited medical supplies and my dad, being a dentist, brought what he had. But it wasn’t enough. And ultimately it was to carry him off to Auschwitz to kill them. Most of them immediately, unfortunately. So I don’t think they had much time to even think about it.

00:34:23:12 – 00:34:48:26
Robert Wolf
But during, I’ll say this, that, but they were shunned. No doubt it was hard to go out shopping without being, bullied or picked on or even mugged. We talk about that in the or the fear of it. And also when my, my dad and his friend Frank were out on leave or whatever it was in town, or in that they were on camp, for one thing they didn’t have, then my dad needed a haircut.

00:34:48:26 – 00:35:06:12
Robert Wolf
And if you remember that scene, the anti-Semitic barber. But, they had the yellow bands was ridiculous hats that they had to wear and yellow bit unarmed paramilitary. And yeah, a couple what beautiful women walk by and they, they, they won’t even look at them. And believe me, the matter, they’re dying to meet A and B with a a warm blooded girl.

00:35:06:12 – 00:35:26:18
Robert Wolf
And it just didn’t happen. You were shunned. So, in its learned helplessness. I mean, people feared for their lives, for sure. And, they did what they were told, and and it’s scary stuff. So, and then. Oh, that remind me of another scene where in Schindler, the young girl, is yelling out, Goodbye Jews, goodbye Jews!

00:35:26:18 – 00:35:44:17
Robert Wolf
And, it’s awful to see that, because I think it reminds me of, what we just talked about. The Christians turning on the Jews. It also reminds me of what’s going on in Gaza at the, these children are being educated to hate Jewish people, hate Israel, hate Americans. And it’s that’s got to stop. That really has to stop.

00:35:44:20 – 00:36:03:18
Dan LeFebvre
There is a scene in in Schindler’s List where we see the Nazis going in there clearing everyone out of the ghetto, to take them to the concentration camps. You talked a little bit about that in the movie. The camps they take them to first is off, and then later in the movie we see Auschwitz, which you mentioned, and we’ll talk about Auschwitz in a moment, because I know your grandparents were there.

00:36:03:18 – 00:36:22:07
Dan LeFebvre
But according to Schindler’s List, seeing the brutality of the Nazi soldiers during the liquidation of the ghetto, that’s what leads Liam Neeson’s version of Oskar Schindler to start working with one of his employees. You mentioned him earlier. Is Doc Stern, Ben Kingsley’s character, to hire more and more Jews to help save them from being murdered by the Nazis.

00:36:22:09 – 00:36:36:13
Dan LeFebvre
Were there any transformational points like this for the civilians in Darfur in Hungary, where they started to change their minds about what they’re seeing? But the brutality of the Nazis, like, we kind of start seeing it happening in Schindler’s List with Oskar Schindler.

00:36:36:16 – 00:36:52:09
Robert Wolf
Well, great point. You know, that’s the turning point of that movie. If I haven’t already mentioned, when they’re horseback riding. Yeah, they’re looking down at that. One thing that resonates, too, is, the humiliation, the the general, the the men, the rabbis, you know, religious with the pious ain’t undercutting it. And they’re cutting their hair and laughing.

00:36:52:15 – 00:37:11:18
Robert Wolf
So that kind of humiliation, was there so humiliation we don’t talk about, as much. I think the Aryans were. And Hungary gets mentioned later that they were bringing in Hungarians, to one of the camps late, later in the movie. And that was true later in time, during at least a couple of years later. But that humiliation really, really resonates.

00:37:11:18 – 00:37:30:24
Robert Wolf
Well, what else is it? Yeah. The marching, the other humiliation is that, Gough has his own personal woman slave that he ends up abusing y’all. She’s. She goes the food and probably sex. Well, there is there is a sex scene or two in there. And of course, at the end he beats her up and but she survives.

00:37:30:27 – 00:37:46:29
Robert Wolf
But he beats her up and it’s drunk or whatever. It’s the wine cellar. I basically remember that scene, but, humiliation is a big thing about it. So, and then, of course, starvation is another one thing that resonates people to didn’t have food to eat. There was no there was no trade. There was nothing coming in. So shunned is the best word.

00:37:46:29 – 00:38:08:15
Robert Wolf
And like we said before, the the witness, the witness was the next victim. I also remember, golf shooting randomly at people that were sitting down and taking a break. So, Oh, and know the dramatic irony. He has a kid cleaning out his bathtub, and he’s trying to put the saddle on his horse. I don’t know if it’s the same kid, but, the guy that the kid that can’t put the kettle on the horse properly.

00:38:08:17 – 00:38:25:12
Robert Wolf
It’s right after Schindler talks about power and the power of the power, if you can forgive. And he remembers that for a while. So he forgives the kid, for the for the saddle. But then when he screws up using the wrong material to clean his bathtub, he ends up shooting him. And, it’s just, What a sadistic guy.

00:38:25:12 – 00:38:40:24
Robert Wolf
I mean, I was a guy who deserved to be executed without, without trial. I mean, so many witnesses. So, Yeah, that whole process, of course, it’s never going to be the same at every camp, but what? People running around in fear that they might get shot or killed, or if they take a break, they’re going to get killed.

00:38:41:02 – 00:38:48:14
Robert Wolf
You can’t. It’s just, some furthermore that what people had to think in their minds and stay strong while they’re doing it.

00:38:48:17 – 00:39:11:18
Dan LeFebvre
That those, those types of things are, like you said, unfathomable. Like it’s I, it’s what I’m trying to unravel. A lot of this. But, you know, in our discussion here, but also there are just some things like we there’s only so much that we can do as we’re talking here in this conversation that just it’s not. It will never be enough.

00:39:11:18 – 00:39:20:03
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, there’s to to to tell the true story of it. I mean, it’s yeah, I’ve tried to have words, but yeah, I can’t even do that.

00:39:20:10 – 00:39:42:08
Robert Wolf
Well, it was talk about Christians. You know, if we had Hamas, we had Hamas tanks and armored armored cars, guns, tanks, then that horrible flag, you know, marched in the streets here and, and, Florida or where you’re from, Oklahoma. God bless, the heartland. We would be thinking different then, it would affect us more then we would have.

00:39:42:10 – 00:40:03:26
Robert Wolf
We’d have a lot more fear. Yeah, but it’s it’s patchy areas. It’s Canada, Australia, parts of the U.S anti-Semitic. So it’s not it’s not directly in our face. But that’s why I’m doing this is so that it doesn’t happen. I mean, that’s why, 99% of us are good people. 99% of us believe in work, family, occasional vacation, religion, and if possible, whatever the freedom to vote, freedom speech.

00:40:03:29 – 00:40:26:01
Robert Wolf
Is that 1% or less that the ruins are for everybody and not just Hamas, you know, Osama bin laden and Saddam Hussein? Hitler, Pol Pot, the list goes on and on. We can counteract with better names Jesus, Moses, Noah, MLK, Gandhi, that. So there’s a nice there’s a balance there. But, we’re still talking about hate and war rather than these other guys.

00:40:26:01 – 00:40:41:27
Robert Wolf
I mean, unless you’re a staunch Christian or Jewish or Muslim, I don’t think a lot I meant for this to happen. Where? I don’t know, I don’t know much about the Muslim religion, but I do have Muslim friends, and they’re peaceful, and, So what’s going. I mean, I can’t get my arms around it. And, the thing about this book.

00:40:42:01 – 00:40:59:15
Robert Wolf
Yeah. And the story is my parents knew that it would be necessary to share it because they didn’t think that the hate and the Jewish scapegoating issue would go away. And each year they’re right, 60, 80 on our years. And the disturbing part is people find different ways to maim and torture, punish, kill each other. And it’s really sad.

00:40:59:15 – 00:41:16:27
Robert Wolf
And I just I can’t feel it because as a radiologist, we’re into preservation of life. The beauty of the human body, the beauty of the anatomy, the cell and all this training to go through it. There’s no room for racism or prejudice in my field. But these people would just. They would think nothing about chopping your head off or killing somebody instantly.

00:41:17:00 – 00:41:37:07
Robert Wolf
No respect for human life. And I can’t wrap my my hands around that. It’s just not that. It’s not what I was built for. And so we educate, we try to spread the word. We do podcasts, we do, book talks, book presentations, TV interviews, in some cases radio. And, we get the point across while sharing good stories, amazing stories throughout.

00:41:37:07 – 00:42:05:13
Dan LeFebvre
A lot of if you go back to Schindler’s List throughout a lot of that movie, it it does recreate the I mentioned your passion and and Auschwitz and where there were hundreds of thousands of people that were murdered. And unfortunately, that number also includes your grandparents, which is a very moving story told in the book. I think a lot of people base their knowledge of concentration camps today on what we see in movies like Schindler’s List.

00:42:05:15 – 00:42:23:23
Dan LeFebvre
But I remember the story of like The Latrine. And in your book, we don’t ever see in the movie Schindler’s List at all. So there’s obviously other things there that we don’t we’re not going to see in the movie. But based on what you know of your grandparents experience, how well do you think Schindler’s List does capturing the horrors of Auschwitz?

00:42:23:26 – 00:42:44:19
Robert Wolf
I think it’s amazing. Like I said, the cinematography is amazing. The storyline and the brutality. We’ll go back to the women guards that were were tougher than one thing that resonates. So, I mean, I don’t like spoiling too meaning, but my my dad’s a miracle. And my dad found out what happened to his parents. An eyewitness who happened to survive Auschwitz and meet, meet up with him in his hometown of Jura.

00:42:44:19 – 00:43:06:28
Robert Wolf
I mean, all of those. That’s a miracle after miracle that that happened. But, Yeah, being in the train reminded me of, my my my grandmother, the grandparents I never met, but my grandmother, was an orphan, a little girl orphan. And they went straight to the chamber. So, and actually, when I did that, when I first did this project, turning it from autobiography to biography, I had to walk away from from the book.

00:43:06:28 – 00:43:25:24
Robert Wolf
I had to walk away from the story for at least a week, ten days, because it profoundly affected me. So, so. And, you know, I hate to say this, but fortunately, she didn’t have to it. Her life didn’t have to linger on for months, months at a time. And where you’re starving and you’re trapped and you were on your forced labor, and you don’t know when your last day is going to be, Schindler.

00:43:25:24 – 00:43:40:00
Robert Wolf
I think they capture all of that pretty well. I mean, everybody’s going to have a different story. But it didn’t go well. And then another thing that resonates is my my grandfather, who was a dentist who told the the, the intake people at the intake that he was a dentist was a doctor, and he might be useful.

00:43:40:06 – 00:43:55:27
Robert Wolf
So they assign him to cleaning latrines, and we don’t see that in Schindler. But we sure see all these kids hiding in Auschwitz, including the one that you get shut out by every other letter, every other kid. And then he’s up, he ends up diving into the feces and he hides in the latrine or whatever you want.

00:43:56:04 – 00:44:07:07
Robert Wolf
It’s disgusting. I mean, I can’t imagine what was the movie with the kid from India who does the same thing. He ends up diving into the, into the feces, and it just, the. Joe, remember that movie?

00:44:07:07 – 00:44:07:24
Dan LeFebvre
Yes.

00:44:07:29 – 00:44:10:07
Robert Wolf
And he’s on jeopardy or something like.

00:44:10:09 – 00:44:11:14
Dan LeFebvre
Slumdog Millionaire.

00:44:11:16 – 00:44:15:27
Robert Wolf
Yes. Very good. Thank you. I knew you were. No, you got a brilliant memory. I can.

00:44:15:27 – 00:44:17:01
Dan LeFebvre
Go on.

00:44:17:03 – 00:44:35:10
Robert Wolf
And that’s the. Yeah. That’s good. I mean, I need more people like you helped me with the message. This is why we’re doing this, too. But, talking about great movies and and a story that could be a movie. At least some people say that, so, so that resonate. Yeah. And then. So these were I went by at least my, my dad’s parents, didn’t have to endure all that.

00:44:35:12 – 00:44:51:20
Robert Wolf
I mean, if you’ve ever fasted just one day without food, it’s tough enough. I can’t imagine week after week, we would bury little food. And, you know, you’ve seen the pictures of the people that are skin and bones. Those that were lucky enough to survive. But, what a what a terrible life. They must have adapted and they had to live then.

00:44:51:22 – 00:44:56:13
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, it goes back to the words don’t really do it justice to to.

00:44:56:15 – 00:45:13:09
Robert Wolf
Not only that that personal. It’s the light. The light. So. So my dad’s father died probably of cholera week from the feces, you know. So that was, but there’s tuberculosis. There’s lice. My dad had a foot infection, when he was in, when he was forced labor camp, and he had lice a couple times. He had hepatitis.

00:45:13:09 – 00:45:30:10
Robert Wolf
He had a bad back. He had a lot going on. And then. And then recently talking about women in forced labor camps. There’s this guy in England, super nice and super dedicated to what we’re doing. He’s turning black and white photos into color photos, and he’s doing a good job, and he’s trying to get financial support for that.

00:45:30:12 – 00:45:48:13
Robert Wolf
But he did a, it was a short it was a short little documentary, maybe 2 or 3 minutes, maybe five, with conversion from black and white to color. And it was the forced labor. The women forced laborers from Hungary. And a lot of them had gangrene. They had gangrenous legs and gangrenous feet. And they actually, they depicted, what their skin look like.

00:45:48:13 – 00:46:12:14
Robert Wolf
And it’s brutal that. So, you know, you’d never think of gangrene. I mean, so a lot of health issues besides the starvation and lack of water to, of course, dehydration and, you know, electrolytes going to be off and, and, muscle mass goes and eventually you die because you’re, you’re malnourished. So I’m sure many, many people died from, I don’t know the exact numbers, but malnourishment, I’m sure, was not just getting shot or put in the gas chambers.

00:46:12:14 – 00:46:33:06
Robert Wolf
Just. Or other sickness, malnourishment, sickness. It’s just too much. It’s too much to think about. It’s 200. It is. And that need doesn’t need to happen. And it also resonates with Gaza. It with what’s the prisoners that are still there? I can’t imagine even if they released them today, the ones that are still alive, just talk about PTSD, talk about trying to overcome that kind of trauma, not knowing when your last day is.

00:46:33:06 – 00:46:38:03
Robert Wolf
Mostly that’s that’s the big thing, the wait and the boredom and, horror fun.

00:46:38:05 – 00:46:49:06
Dan LeFebvre
If we shift back to the movie, there’s, we’re talking about Schindler’s List, and that’s going to be the most popular movie about someone saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust. But it’s not the.

00:46:49:08 – 00:46:56:08
Robert Wolf
The Ten Commandments. Well, I gotta say, that’s a fantastic movie, too. But, I don’t mean. Sorry to interrupt. Yes.

00:46:56:09 – 00:47:01:15
Dan LeFebvre
No no no no no, that’s a that’s a classic a little bit outside the time frame that we’re talking about now.

00:47:01:15 – 00:47:07:18
Robert Wolf
And I’m kidding then Fiddler on the roof was another one. But it was a Rorschach. But, you know, that was a lot of anti-Semitism there too. But go ahead. I’m sorry.

00:47:07:18 – 00:47:41:02
Dan LeFebvre
I know you’re there’s another movie, called walking with the enemy about a Hungarian Jew named Ella Cohen, who he dresses up in an SS uniform to help rescue other Jews. Now, Ella Cohen is another fictional character, but he is based on a real person. Again, with with pronunciation. I believe it’s, Pincus Rosenbaum. He was disguised. He disguised himself in uniforms of the SS, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, which you mentioned earlier, the the Hungarian Lavant and the with the purpose of of saving, I believe hundreds of Jews.

00:47:41:04 – 00:47:51:15
Dan LeFebvre
During your research, did you come across other stories like Oskar Schindler or like Rosenbaum, of people who risked their lives to save the lives of others?

00:47:51:18 – 00:48:11:04
Robert Wolf
Raoul Wallenberg, my my, my dad and his friend Frank had those, passes, those forged papers. And he did, I don’t know, hundreds, thousands of them to help save people. Wallenberg was from Sweden, if I’m not mistaken. And I believe he was Jewish, but fantastic what he did. You going back to Schindler real quick is the way he laments.

00:48:11:04 – 00:48:26:23
Robert Wolf
You know this. Amongst all the murders he did no lamentation. You know. No. No sense of, of of, of mortality, no sense of, what’s the word I’m looking for? It just does. It doesn’t bother. And it doesn’t affect you.

00:48:26:25 – 00:48:29:21
Dan LeFebvre
No sense of decency. I mean, humanity, like Mr..

00:48:29:25 – 00:48:49:17
Robert Wolf
Schindler saving all these people. And he’s still got his car and he’s still got, like, enough jewelry or whatever. Yet on on him, he used his rings and he still your e remorse about. That’s the what I was and will remark you remorse is he elements about how he could have saved another eight or 10 or 12 Jewish people and and they had to console him because of that.

00:48:49:17 – 00:49:19:28
Robert Wolf
He cries, he breaks down. It’s a real it’s a real irony too. So, Yeah, but, but so he helps. So like Wallenberg, probably countless, Christian people, the Christians out, my dad, I mean, he wouldn’t survive without a lot of Christian help. Now, these aren’t famous stories, but being able to go to a casino, and hide in a casino, hide in a, a nunnery or, nursing home, with demented people and and, where else did he, his friend, hiding in a haberdashery and a hatbox, that kind of thing.

00:49:19:28 – 00:49:36:08
Robert Wolf
A lot of Christians help them. And then even after that, during communist Hungary, my my dad was getting, a few shekels sent, from Israel, from my mother’s mother and stepfather at this point, who was a Marky Mark in Israel, a consulate to Hungary. So they’d sneak them a few shekels, to, to this place in Budapest.

00:49:36:08 – 00:49:53:03
Robert Wolf
And my dad, it was a cloak and dagger story, the way my dad had to weave in and out of buildings to sneak to get that money, because he could have been in prison for that, too. So, a lot of people helped Jewish and Christian. Those that could a lot didn’t, again, fear for their lives. Not a lot of famous, well, here’s one actually.

00:49:53:03 – 00:50:14:15
Robert Wolf
Sorry. In communist Hungary, though, it’s not. My parents had an illegal Jewish wedding in 1953. My mom’s uncle, what? He sponsored that in his home. And like I say, it was illegal, and KGB was there, so, and my parents, when my parents, were on their honeymoon, the. He got arrested. He was a surgeon, chief of surgery in a Budapest hospital.

00:50:14:18 – 00:50:30:28
Robert Wolf
And they Waldemar for 13 months tortured him and, try to get him to confess to the to the murder. I think it was Wallenberg, if I’m not mistaken. So. And he wouldn’t he wouldn’t do it. And he was he came back a broken man, and obviously. And then they put him out in some rural clinic or something.

00:50:31:00 – 00:50:55:22
Robert Wolf
He ended up, ironically, in Sweden, where he had a successful career, and, solo daughter Susie, who was the last survivor in my book and just died in Jerusalem. Couple that soon after the attacks. 12 or 7. So she was comatose at the time and long standing on. And so as bad as that was, and it was great busier the year before, at least enough to know, about what was happening in Gaza and Israel.

00:50:55:22 – 00:51:22:01
Robert Wolf
So, all of them rest in peace. But yeah, so there’s famous and there’s not so famous in the autobiography. My dad mentions Mengele, that that is that Mengele greeted his father. But, the research that we this was a lot of research in our book, multiple people, historians, but, Berenbaum, Michael Berenbaum, who was one of the professors who wrote a tremendous, testimonial to other professors, did too.

00:51:22:02 – 00:51:38:06
Robert Wolf
They’re all good. But he mentions that don’t mix up where we’re talking about an Auschwitz because he had been there. He knows the history. And so we we took out Mengele. But, it may well be. And this is speculation that my dad’s father met Mengele, and he was the one that appealed since he was a doctor, too.

00:51:38:08 – 00:51:54:27
Robert Wolf
He was brutal himself, right? I mean, taking our feelings and using, humans as, for experiments and all that. But, if it was him or whoever it was, I guess I can’t call it nice, but got him a week’s worth. Two weeks worth of life, even though that week was miserable. So there are people that,

00:51:54:29 – 00:52:04:00
Robert Wolf
Yeah, the circles there are overlapping circles, for sure. And, as soon as we are done, I’ll probably think a couple more or two, but, you never know. And that’s a great question.

00:52:04:02 – 00:52:23:15
Dan LeFebvre
I think it’s great to know that. I mean, there are the famous one. Oskar Schindler obviously is famous, but he’s famous because of the movie and and the book and the as well. But he wasn’t doing it for fame. And there’s, you know, a lot of these stories, like you’re talking about the they’re not well known now, but that’s not why they were doing it.

00:52:23:15 – 00:52:54:21
Dan LeFebvre
They were doing it to help fellow humans. And I think that’s that in and of itself is a little bit of a light in, you know, in this dark time of history where there’s all this going on. But there are some people that will help. And I I’m happy to hear that. Yes, there were others that even though we might not know their names and whoever’s listening to this may not know their names, but they were still hoping because it was the right thing to do, not because they wanted to get their name, you know, a movie made about them.

00:52:54:26 – 00:53:00:16
Dan LeFebvre
So that we’d be talking about them on a podcast later. But, you know, it’s just the right thing to do.

00:53:00:18 – 00:53:20:26
Robert Wolf
Yeah. No, it’s it’s very palpable. And, you know, you really identify with Schindler and you always have the it’s another ironic thing. You have the swastika. Yeah. The little swastika on a super all the time. But it was, it was this guys, you know, that was it. But you’re right. He just did it out of, the love for human beings and and that that goes for Moses and that goes for Jesus and Gandhi and all these other former leaders.

00:53:20:26 – 00:53:35:03
Robert Wolf
And, of course they got some recognition, of course. But, and another one that comes to mind is Captain Khomeini. If you remember his, he’s the one who got them the forged papers. And, and I believe if I did my memory short, I’m going through my book again. You have to. Every so often. There’s never all the details.

00:53:35:11 – 00:53:54:17
Robert Wolf
But, he might have been Jewish, but since he was a big guy in the military, he had, privileges. So he helped my dad out to more than once, too. So that was another one. You may have been Christian, maybe Jewish, but, I’m glad that my parents didn’t know more famous people because. Or my grandparents, I should say, because, that to me, been more apt to be killed.

00:53:54:19 – 00:54:10:25
Robert Wolf
It didn’t matter anyway. But, if they lived in the out in the middle of nowhere, which Jer was, and it was a, pretty, very populated, industrial town. So, and that was it. They were they were in Transylvania first. And Albert. Julia, if I’m not pronouncing that right, might be I mean, if it was Spanish would be Albert.

00:54:10:27 – 00:54:42:04
Robert Wolf
Julia, I guess, or Julia it might be, but. Albert. Julia. So they they loved Mother Hungary, as do my parents. And, they decided to go back to George. So instead of living Transylvania. So. And that might have been an ill fated decision to my mom and dad. Love mother Hungary, too, by the way, and would have probably stayed if the Americans had taken over rather than the Soviets, because they had had enough with the two wars and, and and countless persecution, illegal weddings, torture, deaths and, deception.

00:54:42:04 – 00:54:58:18
Robert Wolf
You know, their, their colleagues and friends and fellow doctors were trying to get them to convert to the communist ideal. And my parents wouldn’t buy into that. And, and that state, the the Soviets, in their arrogance, called my dad not a real enemy. And that’s what they really were. They love Mother Hungary, but they weren’t going to stay.

00:54:58:21 – 00:55:13:17
Robert Wolf
My mom was a med school, by the way, to winning them. So. And dad was already in okay. And and he had to double down as a trauma surgeon during a revolution. So they’re both frontliners. And after that they said and they were closing the borders and people were leaving in droves. But they managed to get out.

00:55:13:21 – 00:55:19:13
Robert Wolf
That’s my dad’s fourth escape, which is they’re all harrowing, but, memorable for sure.

00:55:19:15 – 00:55:42:17
Dan LeFebvre
Right. Mentioning Hungary and, earlier I mentioned Ben Kingsley and Schindler’s List and that how that movie started in 1939. But Ben Kingsley is in another movie called walking with the enemy, and he plays another person that you mentioned, Regent Horthy, the Hungarian leader. That movie takes place in 1944, when the Germans finally occupy Hungary. And Regent Horthy doesn’t want to let the Nazis take the Jews.

00:55:42:17 – 00:55:58:02
Dan LeFebvre
So he’s trying to sign a deal with the Soviet Union to get the Nazis out of Hungary. But then in a group called Arrow Cross, which you had also mentioned earlier, takes control of Hungary up until the Red Army pushes the Nazis out of the during the siege of Budapest. This is all as far as the movie is concerned.

00:55:58:02 – 00:56:03:09
Dan LeFebvre
But what really happened with Hungarian, Polish artists during World War Two?

00:56:03:11 – 00:56:20:21
Robert Wolf
Oh well, that’s you. And you kind of said it yourself. I mean, you needed a guide. You needed it literally. So Horthy takes over after he was an admirable admiral in World War One. He takes over Hungary again. The Jews feel like he’s he’s not, friendly to the Jews, even though what if what you say is true, that might be the opposite.

00:56:20:21 – 00:56:23:24
Robert Wolf
But, kudos to him for for trying to prevent that.

00:56:23:26 – 00:56:26:25
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I was in the movie. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s the way the movie presents.

00:56:26:25 – 00:56:40:06
Robert Wolf
Oh, yeah. Got to see the movie in and review the book and compare notes. There’s not a lot in the book about there’s a lot of history, but it’s it’s history light. I call it my coauthor, Janice. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be here. She’s a fantastic writer, but helped me turn the book and something really special.

00:56:40:06 – 00:56:56:26
Robert Wolf
But, if you were a junior school, they had the red chair. There’s a white chair. You know, you didn’t have communism. It was in then. They’re trying to say communism is no good. They’re beating up people. They’re going door to door. And then, of course, the rise of fascism, the Nazis entering, the, entering Hungary.

00:56:56:26 – 00:57:27:26
Robert Wolf
So the political climate then was you did what the Nazis said or you’re screwed. You know, that was Hungary trying to fight Germany. It was horse horses versus tanks, you know. How does that let me know how that goes for you. Right. And then, finally 1944 or 45, you Arrow cross, tremendously anti-Semitic. In my, I, maybe like a Gestapo or KGB type thing, they were worse to the Jews and they went out of their way opposite of Schindler, where, you know, the last day of the war and all the guards you only day, that’s all the guards.

00:57:27:26 – 00:57:42:24
Robert Wolf
And, in with the, prisoners, the laborers, and, he openly invites them to, to do what they want with them. Kill them or not. Or you can go home to your families, he says, and they all even go, well, that’s not what it was like in Hungary that at the end of the war, they went out of their way to kill as many Hungarians as they could.

00:57:42:27 – 00:58:07:09
Robert Wolf
And we all know about this. The Danube River, 21,000 Jewish people were shot to death, in cold blood, without their clothes on in the winter. December 43rd, January 44th. And, so that’s, it’s complete. Opposite of Schindler and it’s very set. So that’s the politics then. And of course, communism takes over. And, you know, we get the Stalin years and, and they wouldn’t go away.

00:58:07:09 – 00:58:25:20
Robert Wolf
And the irony is, like if the Americans had one or the West, the allies, then I probably wouldn’t be here. And I’d probably been born and raised in Hungary and maybe got lucky enough to go to med school. But they they left for the U.S., so. And then obviously, the Soviet, the Red Army and Soviet stayed on for forever and ever and ever.

00:58:25:23 – 00:58:45:13
Robert Wolf
Maybe now it’s a little bit of a democracy, but I don’t know much about recent Hungarian politics. But what I’ve seen and heard, the, Orban is, is Putin’s puppet. And, I could see him doing land for people. Deal, without dropping out. And let’s listen on. Jared’s never got a break for 80, 100 years, the most the majority of the 20th century was.

00:58:45:20 – 00:59:03:23
Robert Wolf
And the sad thing is, Hungarian Jews were. Well, if we’re going to flash, flash back to before World War one, 1890s, you know, the gay 90s and all that, Hungarian Jews and Jews in Europe were well treated. They were well respected. And and that boy that that climate turned, between world War one, World War two and and beyond with the Communist.

00:59:03:23 – 00:59:21:27
Robert Wolf
So, so Stalin dies in 53. That was good news. Hungarian, because he was really brutal, and I and Hungary in 56, they have their revolution. And, it goes badly for them. And then the hard liners became even more so because they were clamping down on the citizens. They didn’t want people to revolt.

00:59:21:27 – 00:59:37:12
Robert Wolf
And and they almost they didn’t almost win, but they almost got the Soviets out of there. And then just something changed about it. But instead of less, it became more with all the tanks coming in. And, that’s something that my dad said to the were that the men that were driving the tanks were from the Far East.

00:59:37:12 – 00:59:55:04
Robert Wolf
They were from, I don’t think it was Malaysia, maybe Burma. But they thought they were in Egypt. They thought they were in the Sinai, the Sinai War in 56. But they weren’t. They were. They were in Hungary fighting. So, that’s that was an interesting little tidbit. So it’s kind of like, oh, sorry, the North Koreans, you know, going to fight with the Russians kind of sounds like that, right?

00:59:55:04 – 01:00:01:08
Robert Wolf
They, they, you know, they recruit, they recruit people from other countries. Well, World War II was all about that, too.

01:00:01:08 – 01:00:26:05
Dan LeFebvre
But you you mentioned World War One and even before World War One, and that lead right into the last movie that I want to talk to you about, today’s, 1999 film, epic film called sunshine. I know up until now we’ve mostly talked about World War Two, but sunshine focuses on three generations of characters, all played by Ray finds across generations of a family called the Sun Shines, a, Hungarian Jewish family.

01:00:26:11 – 01:00:44:23
Dan LeFebvre
And the movie goes from the end of the 19th century with Hungarian nationalism through World War One, World War Two, and then into the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. And the first generation of the movie we see refines version of ignite, Sun and Shine. He wants to be a judge, but to do that he has to change his last name to something.

01:00:44:23 – 01:01:03:18
Dan LeFebvre
According to the movie is more Hungarian, so he changes it to show where there pressure even before the rise of fascism. Because in the movie this is happening, you know, before World War one and 19th century, was there pressure for Hungarians to hide their Jewish heritage?

01:01:03:20 – 01:01:18:12
Robert Wolf
Yeah. I’m thank you for reminding me of that movie, because I’ve heard of it recently and I didn’t remember the title. So if you don’t mind, please email me that, because that’s something that sounds like. But it’s totally, it’s encountered distinction too. Oh, he was in Schindler. I mean, that that kind of, that kind of wants to be a judge.

01:01:18:18 – 01:01:37:27
Robert Wolf
And he’s an excellent actor, don’t get me wrong. But, and so is the guy that played Schindler, you know, Liam, Liam Neeson, and we back to Ben Kingsley. But yeah, my dad’s parents converted. They converted to Christianity, reluctantly, but they did. And, it was so he could practice dentistry and hide his heritage. And my dad’s mother hated it, and.

01:01:37:27 – 01:01:55:00
Robert Wolf
But they did. So, and I’m sure a lot of other Hungarian Jews did. I mean, I’ve read about it and heard that other Hungarian used it in it, and of course, hiding certain valuables, hiding radios, hiding your religion. That was a part of your heritage. And it’s horrible thing. Now, they weren’t that religious, but for the Orthodox Jew either.

01:01:55:00 – 01:02:14:14
Robert Wolf
Good luck having that up. And, until they got to Auschwitz and you weren’t allowed to practice religion or do anything, they shaved off all your hair, humiliated you, killed you, clowns too. Not just the religious were clowns. But they were fortunate enough to convert back. My. I’m a mr. Cronenberg. My dad’s father’s, his cousin, just turns up.

01:02:14:14 – 01:02:30:21
Robert Wolf
I forget how the circumstances of how they meet, but he’s he’s wealthy, and he helps him open up a private practice, and they’re in their home and, lends the money or whatever. Maybe if ghost money and we don’t really talk about how it’s returned, if at all. But he has to convert. They have to convert back to Judaism.

01:02:30:21 – 01:02:45:13
Robert Wolf
And as soon as they get that news, my dad’s mom’s taking the cross off the wall. And, not that they didn’t like Christians because most of their friends were Christians, no doubt. Because they didn’t always share in with the Jewish people, especially the Orthodox. So, and so they converted back. So it was a big sacrifice for them.

01:02:45:18 – 01:03:02:19
Robert Wolf
I can’t imagine converting to Christianity. I love Christianity, I think it’s great religion and theory. I think, that Christians have had a hard time over the last, you know, thousand, 2000 years in certain cases. The Bible talks about the Spanish Inquisition. We talk about the Crusades. So all of that, both at both ends of it. Right.

01:03:02:19 – 01:03:23:06
Robert Wolf
And also Muslims and Jews as well, too. So, yeah, a lot of sacrifices they had to make, to finally get a life going, finally having my dad, who grows up, not wealthy, but, you know, upper middle, grows up as a spoiled kid, ironically ends up forced labor and gets through that. But, so the 20s were kind of easy on them.

01:03:23:09 – 01:03:37:02
Robert Wolf
But, in between where during, during certain times they had to convert at the either. And then of course, you couldn’t if you didn’t wear your yellow star or a yellow band. In my dad’s case, in the forced labor, you’d be punished or shot for sure. You’ll.

01:03:37:05 – 01:04:00:04
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you might have already answered my my next question on that one, because in sunshine, the next generation is very finds plays the same. He, he plays different characters in each generation. So in the first generation refines, character is ignites, and he’s trying to become a judge. And then the next generation, once the child grows up, they have a younger, you know, different actor playing the younger version, and he grows up.

01:04:00:04 – 01:04:18:27
Dan LeFebvre
And it’s also a great find, you know? But this time he’s Adam Shaw. And in Adam’s timeline, this is during World War two, and he has to convert. He converts to Roman Catholicism because Jews aren’t allowed to join the fencing club, which is what he wants to do. But then in the movie, obviously that doesn’t work. They find out about his Jewish ancestry.

01:04:18:27 – 01:04:31:29
Dan LeFebvre
And so you can’t just convert. It doesn’t doesn’t really work. So would it be with the movie’s concept there be correct that switching religions wouldn’t work as far as the brutality of the Nazis to escape that?

01:04:32:02 – 01:04:51:13
Robert Wolf
Probably not. I mean, I don’t even know how people know who’s Jewish and who is. And I mean, I have no idea what’s happened once the traumas, on the door. I mean, I, you know, I don’t know how they, how they could masterfully and systematically find them all and exterminate them. But, you bring up a good point, because my dad, my dad’s father, was Jewish.

01:04:51:13 – 01:05:13:02
Robert Wolf
He lost a government job as a dentist. They he had to be, first of all, let them do part time. And then they laid him off and they said, you know, no pension, no benefits. And then ultimately laid off. We talked about the sign. No Jews or dogs. That was out there in Hungary, too. So you weren’t allowed to fencing, you know, certain, bars, restaurants, places of worship, places of business.

01:05:13:02 – 01:05:27:14
Robert Wolf
So Jews weren’t allowed to go to. So and that same sign that we, we talk about in, life was beautiful and, also my dad was not allowed to be on the swim team because he was Jewish. And, my dad loved to swim. I was a pretty good swimmer in high school. I guess I got that from my dad.

01:05:27:14 – 01:05:44:23
Robert Wolf
I swam for four years, and, he did breaststroke, me butterfly and freestyle. But anyway, he had he was kicked off the swim team because he was Jewish. So, yeah, ramifications were there. And, very sad. And it’s too bad because his coach liked him and and his friends like them. And they were very sad for him, but there was nothing they could do,

01:05:44:25 – 01:06:02:03
Dan LeFebvre
Those sort of things. Again, it’s hard to wrap my head around because. So what does that have to do with swimming? Like it? Like you’re swimming in a pool in water. I mean, you’re competing in not to not to take away from how serious it can be for competitions and stuff, but it’s it’s still a sport and it’s similar.

01:06:02:03 – 01:06:21:02
Dan LeFebvre
We see the similar sort of thing in, in the movie with sunshine, except it’s fencing. He’s, you know, he’s fencing. He’s like, that’s part of the reason why he ends up he converts is because he’s like, this doesn’t really it doesn’t affect my how good I am at fencing and with my practicing. And I imagine a similar thing for, for swimming like it does, it doesn’t affect that.

01:06:21:02 – 01:06:29:17
Dan LeFebvre
And so it’s, it’s, it goes back to that concept of what as we’re talking about, it, there’s so much more that, you know, it’s just it’s hard to wrap your head around.

01:06:29:18 – 01:06:48:00
Robert Wolf
And so it’s awful now, you know, ironically, the Olympics came up in a recent podcast too, and y can every day be like the Olympics? Yeah. Why can’t we do peace negotiations and tear off negotiations in the hot tub, or over find a nice table with a tablecloth and, you know, nice silverware? The the Olympics, exemplifies that.

01:06:48:00 – 01:07:06:14
Robert Wolf
It’s the one time where for the 2 or 3 weeks that the all these countries get together, they compete, they put all the bibs, all the politics, all the disagreements off you know, back. They leave it on the field or behind them and they compete. And it’s great sportsmanship. And why can’t, why can’t our politicians, why can’t our leaders, do that?

01:07:06:14 – 01:07:24:14
Robert Wolf
I mean, it’s such a such a great lesson. So I love the Olympics, not only because I love sports, but also just that concept of, worldwide, a worldwide peace and, the amicable feeling that you got, and I just love it. I mean, third place, person congratulating the first on the gold medal winner, that kind of thing.

01:07:24:17 – 01:07:44:16
Robert Wolf
Arm in arm in arm, holding our flags. Just the fact, you know, we’re talking about kneeling and and, during, it’s not a big thing lightly, thank God. But kneeling or not respecting the national anthem, my mom and dad would spit in those people. They would be. How dare you? You know, we we were barely allowed to practice what we want in a free country.

01:07:44:16 – 01:08:04:15
Robert Wolf
How dare you do that in this country? And they would, think. I mean, they got to their dad, but they. I got the narrative experience, the the the people kneeling and and not respecting the flag, multi-millionaires, people that are privileged, privileged enough and talented enough, and marketable enough to to be in sports and make lots of money, be very popular.

01:08:04:15 – 01:08:24:06
Robert Wolf
And when they do that, it’s it just doesn’t hurt the snarling. And so those kind of things, that’s what we’re battling here. You know, we got to respect our country and our freedoms, and our luck and realize that what happened to my dad could happen to any one of us. Could be a bad neighbor. Bad local government, federal government, foreign government, natural disaster, bad business deal.

01:08:24:06 – 01:08:39:07
Robert Wolf
Whatever it is could happen to us where we’re on the run not knowing where your next meal is. So not only are we going to sleep, not not knowing if you’re going to get a job or where you will, and you still you’re still, you don’t know. You can’t meet people. You can’t be around people that that spot you and say, oh, there’s a Jew.

01:08:39:07 – 01:08:47:24
Robert Wolf
There’s, Because you hear that. So there’s we talk about the light at the end of the tunnel. Even during escapes, there was no such thing.

01:08:47:27 – 01:09:11:23
Dan LeFebvre
If we go back to sunshine, the last generation in that movie is Adam, son Ivan. And he survives World War two. But then he joins the communists because they seem to be the liberators of the brutality of the Nazis had inflicted in Hungary. But then, as the Hungarian Revolution breaks out in 1956, in the movie we see Ivan, he realizes the communists are brutal and corrupt also.

01:09:12:00 – 01:09:38:14
Dan LeFebvre
And then at the very end of that movie, Ivan learns from an old letter from his great grandfather, who was at the very beginning of the movie. It’s it’s a long movie. But he finds out that in this letter, it’s the goal is not to be accepted by others. And in this letter, as you reads it, Ivan then has the inspiration to change his name from shores back to sunshine to embrace his Jewish ancestry.

01:09:38:16 – 01:09:58:14
Dan LeFebvre
And like a lot of the movie characters that we’ve talked about today, the Shine is high. Family from the movie sunshine are fictional. They’re not real. But of course, the unimaginable hardships that they faced in the movie were real events that generations of of your family faced as well. So just like Ivan took lessons from his family’s past at the end of the movie and build a better life for himself.

01:09:58:14 – 01:10:09:04
Dan LeFebvre
As we kind of start to wrap up our discussion today, if you took a look at your family’s history, what’s one lesson that you’ve learned that people today can apply to create a better future?

01:10:09:06 – 01:10:26:04
Robert Wolf
I have to see that movie sunshine. It sounds. I mean, it sounds like they stole my stole my own story. Now, would you remind me? Because I do want to, but yeah, my, my mom’s uncle, Zoltan was she. He converted. He was a communist because he wanted to. He wanted to survive. And, my mom probably hated it, but he was.

01:10:26:04 – 01:10:43:18
Robert Wolf
It helped him. He was a he was a monkey in the government and in the economic the economic plan after World War two. And, I read some of the notes, those turned up and I it was really and I don’t mean to get off the subject, but it was really poignant and depressing actually saying, well, what what do we do with our, our Jews?

01:10:43:25 – 01:11:03:10
Robert Wolf
And they are mostly farms and factories. I’m not going to talk about military. I’m talking about the civilian Jews because they couldn’t work. They couldn’t be educated. Finally, they let my dad get into medical school, 10%, quota, which is 10% quota, which is amazing that he even got in. But, so but he was a communist, so he, you know, resonates really, really well with whatever.

01:11:03:10 – 01:11:23:24
Robert Wolf
My mom and dad wouldn’t buy into it as we already mentioned, that, like I said, this country is amazing. Accountability is an important. It’s an important message. Don’t point at people. It just, you know, after 911, we had Islamophobia. After the coronavirus epidemic. We had the Asian eight. Now tober seventh. That’s the Jewish people.

01:11:23:24 – 01:11:39:12
Robert Wolf
Well, what do I have to do with Gaza? And October 7th, I support Israel, I support peace, and, that that that unnecessary. You know, you’re wasting your time, with these protests, these kids in Colombia, you don’t know how good you have it. You know, I, I think people would tell the end of Harvard or Columbia or privilege.

01:11:39:12 – 01:12:03:24
Robert Wolf
They would be. And, people that are doing this and and protesting and calling for the death of Israel and America, it’s just there’s no room for it. Not for me, not for you, and not in this country. And so I identify with the peaceful people, try to get a handle around, at least. Finally, they’re curtailing funding for universities everywhere I could in there, I’d be showing them and and suing them and suing them and and doing more talks in the area.

01:12:03:24 – 01:12:20:28
Robert Wolf
I mean, believe me, that’s all I’m doing anyway, but we need to, appreciate what we have. Accountability. And if you’re bored with what you have, you got if you’re complaining, change vectors. If you don’t like your job, change jobs, work part time, write a book. Everybody’s got a story. Write a poem, write an opera. Go to the library.

01:12:20:28 – 01:12:37:28
Robert Wolf
Go to the museum. Spend more time with your family. Give back to the community. It’s not just about food, shelter, clothing. Unlike for my mom and dad and, all the victims, it’s all food, shelter and clothing. But for now, for us, I put a little more into your life, put a more pot, and, love your neighbor, you know, and I don’t I don’t mean to be corny.

01:12:37:28 – 01:12:57:02
Robert Wolf
Bring a neighbor some macaroons or whatever. Invite them for the Seder. Just get to know them better and embrace them. And things. And things. Well, it all starts. Leadership starts from within. You know, you’re not going to be a leader if you’re not a good person. If you’re not. And I don’t mean no Hitler leader because he just led by charisma and, and, all his, his garbage is, propaganda.

01:12:57:04 – 01:13:14:01
Robert Wolf
But, you can lead by example, and it’s never too late to do the right thing. There’s no substitute for experience. I got a lot of, you know, the trend is your friend, you can learn something from every case, as we say in radiology. But as now, I’ve been on both sides of the needle. You can learn something from every person you know.

01:13:14:01 – 01:13:30:13
Robert Wolf
You can learn from every situation. And don’t forget that, don’t be that. That dead shark swim in the water. Just keep on moving. And if you don’t like what you’re doing and don’t don’t watch and complain, do something else. Life is short here. It’s our only commodity. It’s. You know, time is. Our time is our only commodity.

01:13:30:13 – 01:13:41:24
Robert Wolf
It’s not gold or silver stocks, real estate. It’s time. So use it. Use it wisely. Like my dad used to say. Enjoy every moment. And now I understand why.

01:13:41:26 – 01:14:02:10
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I love that I love that, and that’s one thing as we’ve talked about you just looking back to some of the movies we talked about, the concept that I get is a lot of the things that led to like the atrocities Auschwitz that we talked about. It didn’t jump right to that. It was there were steps that they got there.

01:14:02:13 – 01:14:26:01
Dan LeFebvre
And although we’ve we talked mostly about historical events that took place around World War Two today, a lot of people have compared the current climate here in the United States as I’m recording this, similar to the rise of fascism that resulted in Nazi Germany. And I’m just curious, from your perspective, do you think there’s any truth to those comparisons, or is that kind of overblown just, extremism?

01:14:26:03 – 01:14:44:26
Robert Wolf
That’s such a great question. It’s hard to know. I hope not. That’s why there’s people like me trying to prevent that from happening. Call Congress, call you local government. What are you guys doing about anti-Semitism? I’m still doing it. I hate getting ghosted. That’s a big part of it being rejected. I don’t mind getting rejected like people that are apathetic, but too much apathy is going to be the danger to us.

01:14:44:26 – 01:15:04:25
Robert Wolf
And if the Jewish population doesn’t survive, you know, the LGBTQ, the criticize the Jewish and African-Americans, if you guys are next and and those those that glorify Hitler, you guys were next. You just don’t even realize it. So, now in some ways, yeah, in some countries worse than here. But even in America, in World War two, there was the rise of anti-Semitism.

01:15:04:25 – 01:15:23:16
Robert Wolf
And, fortunately not fascism. But until the guns are pointed at me, I feel relief. As long as the government and the local police are protecting us, then I feel safe. Whatever. If it starts to turn. And we talked about the your armored trucks and tanks going down the streets with the flags. If it ever comes to that, then I’d say, well, no, we’re doomed.

01:15:23:16 – 01:15:45:23
Robert Wolf
But, at least for the short term. But, hopefully that never happens. I can’t see that happening. But you never know. I mean, Australia and Canada, Europe, it’s still going on. So it’s up to the government, the people that are supposed to protect others. As Reagan said, that’s what government’s job is not to and not to, to to take from others or its or to use the people.

01:15:45:23 – 01:15:52:00
Robert Wolf
It’s, it’s I’m paraphrasing, but a government’s job is to protect us. Jewish. Christian doesn’t matter. Muslim.

01:15:52:03 – 01:15:58:26
Dan LeFebvre
We’re all human. We’re all. We’re all. What is it? The JFK quotes, we all share this planet together or something. Something along.

01:15:58:26 – 01:16:17:23
Robert Wolf
Those lines. Exactly. No. It’s true, it’s true. And we’re we’re getting beyond that. Why are the Soviets and the Americans get along in space stations and the moon or whatever, but they can’t get along and Mother Earth, right? I mean, so that’s, it’s another thing like the Olympics. Yeah. It doesn’t even make sense to me. And probably Antarctica and Greenland and everybody is going to set up whatever.

01:16:17:25 – 01:16:33:08
Robert Wolf
And that works for me. You know, it’s so how about annexing Canada? What about that kind of concept? I, you know, people are thinking out of the box lately and maybe I like it, maybe I don’t, but it’s worth a look because things have to change. Canada needs a security alternative to the US. On and on and on.

01:16:33:13 – 01:16:55:13
Robert Wolf
And maybe it’s good economically too, unless it’s come up. And I don’t know that it would be so complicated. And I know our resistance. The natives would be, Mexico. Maybe not so much, but that would be scary for me because I think it’s a it’s got it’s violent areas and etc.. But interestingly, a Jewish woman is the new president of Mexico, so and a Jewish lady is, is the new mayor of Beverly Hills.

01:16:55:13 – 01:17:15:18
Robert Wolf
So, that gives me hope. I think that’s great. I mean, I love California, and if it weren’t so expensive, I maybe I would live there instead of Florida. But, with who knows? And it’s one of the liberal for me, too. But, you know, it’s a great state and, many, many people. So it’s good to see that some people that are in leadership positions are going to be on the side of peace, not just because they’re Jewish.

01:17:15:18 – 01:17:29:03
Robert Wolf
That’s the side of peace. So they get it. They care. That’s another lesson. It’s good to care. It’s important to care if you, you’re doomed if you don’t. So whatever is your own life or the life of others? It’s important.

01:17:29:05 – 01:17:44:00
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show to chat about all these various movies. I know we’ve mentioned your book called Not a Real Enemy The True Story of the Hungarian Jewish Man’s Fight for freedom. We’ve mentioned a few times throughout our discussion today, but there’s so many things in the book that we didn’t even get a chance to talk about.

01:17:44:00 – 01:18:01:06
Dan LeFebvre
I’m going to add a link to it in the show notes, so anyone watching or listening to this right now can pick up their own copy. As I was reading your book, it really read like a movie and I can’t wait until it is turned into one. And since all movies have teasers and trailers before I let you go, can you share a teaser of your book for everyone watching this?

01:18:01:06 – 01:18:03:06
Dan LeFebvre
Now?

01:18:03:09 – 01:18:23:14
Robert Wolf
Wow. Yeah, yeah, from your mouth to God’s ears. Because, we we’ve been trying to clear some producers. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s a long shot, but a teaser. A man who escapes four times, I can’t imagine one escape. I mean, I’ve been reading books, guys escaping, and they’re not even Jewish. They’re. They’re prisoners of war from Poland or whatever, escaping from thousands of miles away.

01:18:23:16 – 01:18:40:12
Robert Wolf
And that’s like a one big, huge escape. But for escapes, 20 miracles in this book, like you as you know it. Or the way my dad got into medical school, cloak and dagger stories, arguing with armors and soldiers. That’s a scene I’d like to see, and winning the argument, but bluffing his way through it.

01:18:40:15 – 01:19:03:19
Robert Wolf
Of course, his first and last escape. But I think all of them would need to be included. Split second timing. The luck of God. What else? I mean, the fact that my dad was spoiled, but he was also beaten as a kid. It’s another interesting, interesting tidbit. Tidbit? So many, the way the table set, the way the way that you went from, being an upper middle says to starving and how life could change on a dime.

01:19:03:21 – 01:19:24:18
Robert Wolf
So many messages. Resilience, determination, hope, integrity, and ultimately redemption. So it’s it’s loaded. It’s packed with it’s history. It’s an adventure. It’s a biography. And, trials and tribulations. My dad and family and, must read and hopefully, more and more people read it. This is all I do is my charge is fighting anti-Semitism. You help me with that.

01:19:24:18 – 01:19:48:24
Robert Wolf
10% of my, I’m on socials across the board, so please, finally, Robert J. Wolfe, MD, or Google not relented me 10% of my proceeds henceforth and even when I’m gone and my trust are going to the Holocaust Museum in DC. So not only I’m educating in my own little corner, but I’m also contributing. And people that buy the book are contributing to education through the, to the mothership, as I call it, the U.S. Holocaust Museum in DC.

01:19:48:27 – 01:20:06:02
Robert Wolf
I’ve been fortunate enough to be there twice or two to the book signings. I could do that every day, educating kids and families about what’s going on now and then, genocide, etc.. So, it’s a must read. And, I hope that you do enjoy it and reach out to me. I do podcasts and and presentations programs.

01:20:06:02 – 01:20:09:03
Robert Wolf
Please help me fight antisemitism. Can’t do it alone.

01:20:09:05 – 01:20:16:27
Dan LeFebvre
I love education is is the key. Thank you so much for everything you do for educating. Thank you for for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

01:20:17:00 – 01:20:24:22
Robert Wolf
Pleasure. I learned a lot today to.

00:02:26:21 – 00:02:42:11
Dan LeFebvre
Our chat today will be a little different than a usual episode of based on a true story, because we’re not looking at a single movie and we’re not even really looking at a real person from history. But what we are looking at is a very real job, how it’s portrayed onscreen by one of the most popular police officers in the movies.

00:02:42:13 – 00:02:52:16
Dan LeFebvre
So if you were to give the Die Hard franchise a letter, grade for how accurately John McClane shows us what a real police officer’s job is like, I wouldn’t get.

00:02:52:18 – 00:02:59:09
Patrick O’Donnell
I would go D plus to C minus. I think that would be my grade for for John. Yeah, honestly.

00:02:59:09 – 00:03:01:19
Dan LeFebvre
It’s a little higher than I was expecting.

00:03:01:22 – 00:03:03:17
Dan LeFebvre

00:03:03:19 – 00:03:16:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. I’m trying to be very charitable here. It’s. And I like Bruce Willis. I, I love the first Die Hard movie. The rest of them. Yeah, but, hey, that’s Hollywood right there.

00:03:16:16 – 00:03:24:03
Dan LeFebvre
That’s how it goes. And, you know, I guess as with many franchises, it it starts off and then it just kind of starts.

00:03:24:05 – 00:03:44:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. And I was thinking about that this morning, you know, it’s like one, one that pops into my head that was almost a little bit better was Terminator two. I thought I loved the first Terminator, but T2, you know, the way John Cameron filmed that and you know, the stunts and man, it was so over the top for that time period.

00:03:44:16 – 00:03:57:23
Dan LeFebvre
I think that’s one of those things that, it movies like that will stand out more because so many sequels in the franchises just do drop down that when you have one where actually this is better, it stands out that much more.

00:03:57:26 – 00:04:17:11
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes, exactly. Yeah. It’s like now I was thinking about Rocky and I was I loved the Rocky series and the first one, of course, was amazing. Second one was like, yeah, third one, I love Mr. T, so I mean, for comedic value. It was awesome. Yeah. I was like, what do you predict for yo the fight yo clubber.

00:04:17:11 – 00:04:27:00
Patrick O’Donnell
He’s like pain. I predict in the end I was like, oh, I wanted to follow the ground. I was laughing so hard. I’m like, I love this stuff.

00:04:27:02 – 00:04:28:25
Dan LeFebvre
It makes for great entertainment, that’s for sure.

00:04:29:01 – 00:04:30:06
Patrick O’Donnell
It does.

00:04:30:09 – 00:04:54:19
Dan LeFebvre
If we go back to the franchise of Die Hard, John McClane in the first movie is a cop from New York City visiting his estranged wife in Los Angeles. And of course, he happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time when all hell breaks loose. Throughout the movie, there are numerous lines of dialog about how McClane is out of his jurisdiction, but as a cop, McClane still takes it upon himself to do something about the situation unfolding around him.

00:04:54:21 – 00:05:12:04
Dan LeFebvre
Let’s say an off duty police officer is visiting a different city for personal reasons, like we see in the movie, and then they find themselves in the middle of the wrong place at the wrong time. Major crime happening in the movie. How realistic is it for the police officer to take it upon themselves to fight back against the criminals like we see John McClane doing in the movie?

00:05:12:07 – 00:05:29:10
Patrick O’Donnell
Most of the time you’re just going to be a good witness. Yeah, you you’re going to look at everything through cop eyes. You know, it’s like, okay, I’m going to look at you. You know, let’s say I’m in a situation where, like, something is getting robbed. You know, I’m in a grocery store or a bank or something like that.

00:05:29:12 – 00:05:56:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Nine out of ten times, nobody’s going to get shot. Nothing’s going to go too crazy, you know? And most of the time they don’t even have guns. They threaten like a gun or an explosive or whatever. So it’s like, I’m going to be aware of my surroundings. You know, and I’m going to be like, okay, the guy that’s doing all this is a white male about 40 years of age with a beard, mustache, you know, medium build, wearing a gray, not shirt.

00:05:56:16 – 00:06:16:07
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. And glasses. Yeah. That’s where my head is going. Then I’m just like, okay. Is he right or left handed? You know. What’s he holding? Like the bag. What’s he doing most of his stuff with. Is there any piercings tattoos. You know, anything that’s you know, so you’re going to be looking like a cop. You know, that’s what you’re going to be doing.

00:06:16:09 – 00:06:40:03
Patrick O’Donnell
But I will use a caveat. If you think somebody is in imminent danger of getting killed, you’re going to take action. You’re it’s the cop inside of you. Yeah. We can’t help ourselves, you know? So as far as jurisdiction goes, you know, if I’m out in LA, you know, I was out in LA. Oh, man. About 20 years ago, I couldn’t go around, like arresting people or anything like that.

00:06:40:03 – 00:07:00:19
Patrick O’Donnell
You could do a citizen’s arrest, quote unquote. But all you’re doing is opening yourself up to liability, and you know, you’re going to let anything short of an ax murderer get away because you don’t want to get sued later, and then you’re going to get into trouble with your department, etc.. So the chances are very, very, very slim, very slim.

00:07:00:21 – 00:07:14:18
Dan LeFebvre
They start off, if I remember right from that, from the movie, like the first thing that John McClane notices is something going wrong is there’s gunfire. So right away he’s like, okay, somebody’s life might be in danger. And so it kind of switches into that mode, it seems.

00:07:14:21 – 00:07:30:15
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. And, you know, and he’s talking to himself. That’s one thing I did like about that movie was the insurgents. I was like, why didn’t you go in there and try to stop him, John? And then he’s like, well, John, you would be dead right now, John, if you tried doing that, you know, and it’s like, absolutely. You know, that that makes total sense to me.

00:07:30:15 – 00:07:32:27
Patrick O’Donnell
It was like, yep.

00:07:33:00 – 00:07:36:08
Dan LeFebvre
The inner monologue that he speaks out loud so we can understand.

00:07:36:14 – 00:07:39:11
Patrick O’Donnell
So we can hear it. Right? Exactly. Yes.

00:07:39:13 – 00:08:00:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Another key plot point for John McClane in the first Die Hard movie is how he has to fight the local law enforcement, and I don’t mean physically fighting him like he does with the bad guys, but he can’t seem to get anyone to believe what’s happening. For example, when he first calls for help, the dispatch operator scolds him, saying that she’s going to report McClane for using a channel reserved for emergencies.

00:08:00:00 – 00:08:18:06
Dan LeFebvre
So it’s like, what do you think I’m calling for? And then later on, there’s cops that do arrive at Nakatomi Plaza, and the deputy chief of police doesn’t like John McClane because he’s a mouthy cop from New York City. And then, even after the federal agents arrive on the scene, they never seem to listen to any of John McClane warnings from the inside of the building.

00:08:18:12 – 00:08:33:00
Dan LeFebvre
And then that culminates at the end of the movie, when the federal agents actually in the helicopter shooting and they start shooting at McClane on the roof because they think he’s one of the criminals. How well does the movie do, showing the way local law enforcement would react to a crime being reported by an off duty police officer?

00:08:33:00 – 00:08:34:09
Dan LeFebvre
From another scene?

00:08:34:11 – 00:09:00:21
Patrick O’Donnell
That almost never happens. But obviously, you know, you know, like most of the time, is there an out of jurisdiction cop in our city if they’re official business, they’re going to check in hopefully. Yeah. It’s like, hey, you know what? I’m a Chicago cop. I’m coming up to Milwaukee to interview a witness for a homicide. So I’m going to let you know for two reasons.

00:09:00:21 – 00:09:21:21
Patrick O’Donnell
One, it’s the right thing to do. And two, if you go sideways, then at least you know somebody knows where I am and when. If I was like the acting lieutenant, I was a sergeant for 17 years. Once in a blue moon, I got pulled off the street and I’d have to sit behind a desk and run the shift if my boss wasn’t there.

00:09:21:23 – 00:09:41:13
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, I was. I started using whodunit, so I would get a phone call from, you know, hey, I’m from blah, blah, blah city. We’re going to be tracking for a suspect that we have a warrant on. And, you know, it’s not high risk. We’re just going to do a door knock. And my first the first things out of my mouth is like, you want some help?

00:09:41:15 – 00:10:09:11
Patrick O’Donnell
And I would try to get them some help. So there’s usually not always but usually good cooperation. The feds are really bad at that, especially the FBI. They don’t want anybody playing in their sandbox. So unless they need you, then all of a sudden they’re super cooperative. But that’s another story for another day. But yeah, you know, as far as, okay, I’m an out of jurisdiction cop, I’m in your city.

00:10:09:13 – 00:10:25:05
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. Mean in 25 years, I rarely had an off duty cop that was, like, on vacation or visiting their kid or whatever in Milwaukee. All of a sudden get involved in some high stakes arrest it. Almost. It it really doesn’t happen. Yeah.

00:10:25:07 – 00:10:26:20
Dan LeFebvre
That’s why it’s for the movies. Yeah.

00:10:26:20 – 00:10:28:02
Patrick O’Donnell
Sorry, John.

00:10:28:05 – 00:10:30:02
Dan LeFebvre
And.

00:10:30:05 – 00:10:49:10
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we move to the second movie, Die Hard two, this time, John McClane is an LA police officer who’s waiting for his wife’s plane to land at Washington’s Dulles Airport. And just like the last movie again, he finds himself the wrong place at the wrong time. And at first, now we have airport police involved, and they don’t believe McClane.

00:10:49:11 – 00:11:04:23
Dan LeFebvre
But then, as things start to go from bad to worse, we see McClane actually working with the local law enforcement at the airport. So not only do we have John McClane as an off duty police officer for a different city from a different city for there for personal reasons, but then it’s also happening at an airport where they have their own law enforcement.

00:11:04:23 – 00:11:22:13
Dan LeFebvre
And then on top of that, since Die Hard two came out in 1990, before the TSA was formed in 2001, I felt like things would probably be a little bit different now. But is it likely that a city police officer would collaborate with the TSA or airport police, like we see John McClane doing in the movie?

00:11:22:15 – 00:11:47:13
Patrick O’Donnell
Well, like TSA, you know, there are a branch of Homeland Security and they really aren’t cops. The way cops look at TSA is kind of we we look at them as, gee, I mean, there’s some fine, there’s some fine TSA agents and they do a thankless job, and it’s a very important job. But a lot of them, yeah, I shouldn’t say a lot.

00:11:47:15 – 00:12:07:27
Patrick O’Donnell
There are some that are that guy or that gal that has a little bit of power and you could tell, you know, they’re abusing it and, you know, they couldn’t get a job as a quote unquote real cop somewhere. I know I’m hurt some feelings out there. Sorry, but yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of people that I know that are TSA agents.

00:12:07:29 – 00:12:27:15
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, I have one friend that’s a TSA agent that did 30 years as a cop, and he didn’t have a pension where he worked. There was no pension. So he had to go work for the feds. You know, that’s a federal job. And they offered a pension and health insurance until he hits, you know, well, health insurance was the biggie.

00:12:27:19 – 00:12:47:10
Patrick O’Donnell
He had zero health insurance after he retired. And he was like 55. So he got ten years before he’s going to go on Medicare. So he kind of had to do something like that. You know. And he’s not a he’s not a, you know, idiot or anything like that. And then I knew some people that just wanted to do it because they thought it looked cool and, you know, whatever.

00:12:47:10 – 00:13:08:27
Patrick O’Donnell
And they’re doing it as a job and they treat it like that. And hey, yeah, you know, good on them. But cops aren’t going to be, you know, like the airport cuffs. Most of them. Well, all of them are, you know, sworn police officers that have full arrest powers. And if I’m out of jurisdiction. Yeah, I’m John McClane.

00:13:09:00 – 00:13:34:01
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, you’re with whatever is going on. If I was the airport police, I would use that cop as much as possible for Intel of what’s going on. I’d try and get some information and. But I wouldn’t include them in any, like, you know, like, takedowns or any action, because first off, he has no arrest power. So where he’s at, you know, you can’t arrest anyone.

00:13:34:01 – 00:14:02:16
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, he’s he’s drawn to you, citizen running around an airport with a gun. Yeah. It’s like, why are you doing that? Become a judge. You shouldn’t do that. So you know. Yeah, it silly to answer your question. Yeah. I mean, the TSA really wouldn’t be coordinating with that. It would be the cops from the airport. If there is a situation like that and if they have to call in help, they’ll call it help, you know, from other agencies they wouldn’t be relying on anybody.

00:14:02:16 – 00:14:05:08
Patrick O’Donnell
That’s the civilian job. It’s like.

00:14:05:11 – 00:14:34:27
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, you know what? I appreciate you clarifying that because, I mean, the movie did come out before TSA was even a thing. So I just know security has changed so much that when this movie takes place in in the airport, it’s like, well, there’s got to be maybe this extra layer to it, but it sounds like maybe there even wouldn’t be as much different other than, you know, setting aside all the fictional aspect of it, but just from the, you know, the airport security and police officer, it sounds like that that sort of relationship would still be pretty similar to the way it is now.

00:14:34:29 – 00:14:57:00
Patrick O’Donnell
Well, yeah, I did an internship when I was in college with the sheriff’s department in Milwaukee, and they had the airport. They still do. They’re in charge of security for the airport, and they have a little substation there. And you have sheriff’s deputies there, you know, walking around doing whatever. Some and some are plainclothes, some are uniformed, and they take care of business at the airport.

00:14:57:02 – 00:15:19:05
Patrick O’Donnell
And I had a real good, tour and, understanding of the airport when I was an intern. And one of the things that struck out was really stuck in my head with the movie was, you know, the tower is a sacred place. John McClane would not be in the tower, period. I mean, that is like super. Yeah, I mean, that is secure.

00:15:19:07 – 00:15:46:13
Patrick O’Donnell
And the air traffic controllers are in the basement. They’re not upstairs in the tower. They’re all in the basement looking at scopes, you know, looking at their computer screens, doing whatever. And you can’t even say a word. I mean, that is like, that’s hollow ground. They can’t have any distractions for obvious reasons. Yes, for very obvious reasons. And when I retired from being a cop, I got a job with Delta throwing bags.

00:15:46:13 – 00:16:11:06
Patrick O’Donnell
I was, I unloaded and loaded planes at the airport and Waukee, and that gave me a real good understanding to of the security, because almost everything is restricted and you have a badge, you know, it’s just like a ID, you know, either around your arm or a lanyard or whatever, and that gets you into certain areas that you have to get it to, you know, to do your job.

00:16:11:09 – 00:16:31:13
Patrick O’Donnell
But the thing about it is you only go in one person at a time. So you and I are in the concourse and we have to go unload a plane, and we’re by one of the gates, you know, you see the doors where the gate agent, like, enters like a keypad, you know, some numbers into a keypad. And then there’s two layers.

00:16:31:13 – 00:16:53:21
Patrick O’Donnell
You do the keypad and you flash the your little ID thing, and then the little green light goes on and unlocks the door. Well, I can’t just follow you. I have to go through the same ritual. Every person that goes through that restricted area has to do that. So there are layers. There’s so many layers of security when it comes to an airport.

00:16:53:21 – 00:16:55:17
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh my God. So it was which.

00:16:55:17 – 00:16:56:16
Dan LeFebvre
Is probably a good thing.

00:16:56:19 – 00:17:06:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh Lord. Yes. You know it’s like but you know, it’s it’s borderline laughable. Well it is laughable what you know, I’m watching that. I’m like, I’ll never, ever, ever.

00:17:06:14 – 00:17:07:15
Dan LeFebvre
He just kind of walks in.

00:17:07:15 – 00:17:12:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, yeah. He’s doing. Yeah, yeah. Why not? You know.

00:17:12:24 – 00:17:20:02
Dan LeFebvre
Well, they don’t want to go to the intricacies of the airport security for movies. Be a little more boring.

00:17:20:04 – 00:17:21:28
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. So it would be.

00:17:22:00 – 00:17:41:07
Dan LeFebvre
There is another form of collaboration that we see happening in Die Hard two, when, John McClane uses a connection that he made in the first movie. That’s original Val Johnson’s character, Al Powell. So in Die Hard two, we see McClane calling up Powell to get some information on the new villains outside of official channels. So the movie implies that there was this kind of ongoing connection between McClane and Powell.

00:17:41:12 – 00:17:52:16
Dan LeFebvre
And now law enforcement agencies work together a lot in official capacities. But is it normal for individual police officers to work with other police officers from other precincts that they met in the past, kind of like we see in the movie?

00:17:52:18 – 00:18:14:05
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes. You know, if you work together in the past. Yeah. And, you know, maybe they’re, you know, they text on the regular or they go out for drinks or whatever. You know, you can’t help that. But I will use a caveat. Whenever you run somebody on a computer, you know, like for warrants or their driver’s license or a criminal history, there’s a history of you doing that.

00:18:14:07 – 00:18:37:24
Patrick O’Donnell
You’re logged on as Patrick O’Donnell. You know, Sergeant Patrick O’Donnell was looking to see what, you know, Dan’s criminal history was done. You know, February 17th, you know, 1015 in the morning, everything is recorded. So, you know, you have to be able to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing.

00:18:37:26 – 00:18:39:21
Dan LeFebvre
Again, for good reason, I’m sure.

00:18:39:26 – 00:18:50:15
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s see what my ex wife is up to, all right. Yeah. Well, yeah yeah, yeah. You don’t want to abuse the power. So. Yes. Absolutely.

00:18:50:18 – 00:19:11:28
Dan LeFebvre
Makes make sense. Makes sense. But in Die Hard two, we see another returning character from the first movie. That’s Thornburg. He’s played by William Atherton. Thornburg is the pesky TV reporter who’s always trying to get in the way. So he’s he’s getting a scoop on the story, right? So he’s always getting in the way. So if we’re to believe the first two Die Hard movies, the media can get in the way of cops trying to do their jobs.

00:19:12:03 – 00:19:18:18
Dan LeFebvre
From your experience, have you ever heard of the media a hampering the ability for cops to do their jobs like we see in a movie?

00:19:18:20 – 00:19:39:18
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, we have a tenacious relationship with the press. Sometimes they can be your ally. You know, if you have like, say, a Silver Alert, you know, have some, you know, a senior citizen that has dementia or some cognitive issue. And, you know, right now, you know, I live in Wisconsin and we just got to zero. It’s been below zero.

00:19:39:19 – 00:19:59:05
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, all morning. So if you know, grandma’s out there and she’s just wearing like a windbreaker, you know, we could use the press. It’s like, you know, hey, you know what? Come on down. This is what she looks like. You know, this is the last place she was seen. So you know what? You could use the power of the press for that.

00:19:59:07 – 00:20:17:08
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, they can be your ally most of the time. They’re annoying, you know, most of the time, they’re trying to sneak through the they they go over the line both literally and metaphorically. And I it’s the yellow crime scene tape. They just want to get through it so badly. But if you’re.

00:20:17:09 – 00:20:19:05
Dan LeFebvre
It’s like a race running through break to tape.

00:20:19:12 – 00:20:50:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. But if you’re in a big scene, what happens usually is we’ll corral the media into like a staging area. And most police departments have a Pio. It’s called a, the PIOs, the public information officer, and they are usually the ones that are going to talk to the press. If it’s a real big deal. Sometimes the chief may come out and talk to the press, etc. you know, it all depends on what’s going on.

00:20:50:14 – 00:21:13:29
Patrick O’Donnell
I mean, we had an officer that was shot. Thankfully he’s okay now, but you shot in the chest with a rifle and the mayor came out, the chief came out and they all talk to the press. Now dealing with. Yeah, elected officials of every street, you know, they love being behind the microphone. They love the camera in their face.

00:21:14:02 – 00:21:34:03
Patrick O’Donnell
Us absolutely not. We don’t want anything to do with, you know, a camera in our face, especially at a crime scene because we got stuff we got to do. So it’s. Yeah, it’s more of a pain in the butt than anything else. And one thing that really stood out to me, I was a rookie cop at a pretty high profile homicide.

00:21:34:06 – 00:21:58:00
Patrick O’Donnell
It was a cold Wisconsin night, and there’s this reporter out there and I recognize them from, you know, TV back then. You know, you watch the network TV shows, you know, I mean, the network TV stations for your news. And I’m like, oh my God, that’s, you know, Dan, whatever his last name was. And I come up to I look and I’m like, oh my God, you’re really ugly.

00:21:58:00 – 00:22:17:12
Patrick O’Donnell
Holly. He had like 20 pounds of makeup on his face. I mean, it was caked on thick. It was like Phyllis Diller, for God’s sakes. And I was just like, wow. And I’ve never seen a man before that that wore makeup, but, you know, and I was just like, well, this is an interesting night, all right.

00:22:17:14 – 00:22:20:12
Dan LeFebvre
Before 4K TVs where they could see every point.

00:22:20:13 – 00:22:32:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, yeah. You want to see them on 4K? TV? Yeah. You’d want a tube TV for that guy. It was. It was bad news. Or he had a face for radio. Let’s just say that. Yeah.

00:22:32:23 – 00:22:36:22
Dan LeFebvre
That I was going to say I’ve heard that phrase. Yeah, I hate the face for radio.

00:22:36:25 – 00:22:44:06
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. You know, I had a couple more observations about this, this, diet, if you don’t mind.

00:22:44:08 – 00:22:44:22
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah.

00:22:44:22 – 00:22:53:13
Patrick O’Donnell
For sure. Okay. Starting out with the naked keto, like, the bad guy is doing this, like karate. Kind of like the they’re called. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

00:22:53:13 – 00:22:56:00
Dan LeFebvre
He’s all sweaty. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah.

00:22:56:05 – 00:23:19:15
Patrick O’Donnell
Why is that there? I don’t understand it. And like, you know, this is kind of gross. What why is this here. You know, and I’m like, okay. And then John McLean is a lieutenant all of a sudden at LAPD, he’s like anointed. You know, if he was, if he would go to especially back then, you start out as a cop and you know, you’re going to go through all the selection stuff.

00:23:19:22 – 00:23:22:07
Patrick O’Donnell
He wouldn’t be a lieutenant. They don’t care.

00:23:22:08 – 00:23:24:08
Dan LeFebvre
Transfer from New York to LA. I think, you.

00:23:24:15 – 00:23:24:22
Patrick O’Donnell
Know, the.

00:23:24:22 – 00:23:28:17
Dan LeFebvre
Movie implies because his wife was in LA, so he wanted to move closer to be.

00:23:28:18 – 00:23:48:22
Patrick O’Donnell
Correct. There’s no such thing as lateral transfer back then from there. Okay. So he maybe he would be a cop. Maybe, you know, he with the time frame, you probably still be in the academy. You know he’d be nothing. So that was amusing to me then. You know there was a woman with a stun gun on the airplane.

00:23:48:22 – 00:23:52:11
Patrick O’Donnell
I’m like, how the hell did she get that? Through security? Yeah. Yeah.

00:23:52:11 – 00:24:00:17
Dan LeFebvre
Again, that was kind of one of those things of like this. This is before 9/11, right? I mean, things are different, but still, I feel like they still take in that.

00:24:00:19 – 00:24:21:07
Patrick O’Donnell
One thing from working as a baggage guy. We call ourselves baggage. It’s just really throwing the bags around. Yeah. There was an open golf bag on a conveyor belt and I’m like, oh, are you kidding me? Come on. Those golf clubs would be all over the place. I hated golf bags. Well, what? I’d see just a card for those coming at me.

00:24:21:07 – 00:24:42:11
Patrick O’Donnell
I’d be like, oh, they’re so awkward and just. They sucked. And then also, I noticed one of the bad guys in, like, one of the big, shooting scenes, and he starts out with a Glock, and then he ends the scene with a Beretta, and I’m like, how did he do that? Yeah. So my I caught that right away.

00:24:42:11 – 00:24:58:11
Patrick O’Donnell
And I’m like, no, that’s that’s not going to happen. And then probably the final thing with the Army coming in, there’s no way the Army is coming into that. The Army doesn’t the Army doesn’t respond to that. They’re not law enforcement. That’s a totally different thing.

00:24:58:14 – 00:25:13:21
Dan LeFebvre
That’s a really great point. I mean, in the first movie, it’s, I feel like with the second one, it was a lot of the first movie over again and then stepping it up. So like in the first movie, the people coming in were the feds. And then the second movie, it’s like, well, how do we go one step higher?

00:25:13:21 – 00:25:15:20
Dan LeFebvre
It’s the army, right?

00:25:15:22 – 00:25:24:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. I’m like, why are yeah, this is making zero sense to me right now. Like, what the hell? Yeah.

00:25:24:23 – 00:25:27:00
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, if you’re going to be fictional, might as well just go. All right.

00:25:27:02 – 00:25:30:19
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. You know what? You’re absolutely right. Absolutely.

00:25:30:21 – 00:25:48:01
Dan LeFebvre
Well, on the third movie, it’s Die Hard with a vengeance. At the beginning of this movie, John McClane is forced to go to Harlem wearing a sandwich board with some very racist phrase that I won’t repeat here, but the movie shows this. That’s it’s the first of a series of things that the bad guy is going to do in the movie.

00:25:48:01 – 00:26:09:22
Dan LeFebvre
It’s Jeremy Irons character, Simon, and he’s forcing McClane to do all of these things. And McClane doesn’t comply with Simon’s demands. Then Simon says he’s going to blow up a bomb in a very public place. Obviously, police officers risk their lives in the line of duty, but how realistic is it for a police officer to comply with the bad guys demands to avoid disaster, like we see John McClane doing in this movie?

00:26:09:25 – 00:26:15:12
Patrick O’Donnell
Almost not. Never. Not very, well, that’s it.

00:26:15:15 – 00:26:18:20
Dan LeFebvre
We don’t know. Go sheet with terrorists is one of the first things that kind of comes to mind.

00:26:18:20 – 00:26:46:03
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, well, and here’s the thing. They never negotiate it. You know, you would get we the police department has negotiators and that’s what would be used. You know, most police departments, y’all were trained in negotiating. And then there are negotiator orders. That’s there. That’s their forte. That’s what they train on and they train us up on that, etc., etc. but in a pinch, I guess, you know, if it was, I didn’t have any other choice.

00:26:46:03 – 00:26:59:22
Patrick O’Donnell
And I knew somebody was going to get blown up. You know, it’s like, yeah, I’ll, I’ll do whatever it takes to do that. And then John McClane was, suspended. He wasn’t even he was on an active duty. Well, you know, remember, that’s true.

00:26:59:24 – 00:27:02:15
Dan LeFebvre
They had to find him like he was all drunk and everything and hung over.

00:27:02:15 – 00:27:03:02
Patrick O’Donnell
And like.

00:27:03:07 – 00:27:04:05
Dan LeFebvre
A headache. Yeah.

00:27:04:07 – 00:27:21:20
Patrick O’Donnell
This is so stupid that they’re just like, okay, if guys. Yeah, in this inspector’s in this van with them before they. They put him out on the street. And, you know, his backup is like ten blocks away. That would not happen. They would have eyes on him. The entire time. They would not. Just like.

00:27:21:20 – 00:27:40:24
Dan LeFebvre
That was really weird. I like I think the movie, you know, the movie tries to explain away why they call McClane, you know, because Simon specifically asked for McClane to find out towards the end of the movie. Why? But, the backup being further away, it’s like that. That seemed really weird, especially in a major city like that.

00:27:40:24 – 00:27:45:09
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, you could be in buildings or there’s so many ways that you can be.

00:27:45:10 – 00:27:57:28
Patrick O’Donnell
There are all kinds of ways we could be close. And, you know, we wouldn’t just throw them to the wolves, you know, knowing that his ass is going to get kicked. You know, it’s like, no, that’s not going to happen.

00:27:58:00 – 00:28:05:12
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. And then hand him a gun to. So, he’s not like he’s going to, you know, get his ass kicked, but, they’re going to take the gun and.

00:28:05:17 – 00:28:05:27
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, yeah.

00:28:06:01 – 00:28:07:11
Dan LeFebvre
Probably do something worse. Right?

00:28:07:11 – 00:28:27:22
Patrick O’Donnell
I mean, absolutely. Yeah. Know that’s that. I was looking at that and I’m like. And the chief inspector and I don’t think they have chief inspectors in New York, but whatever. And you know, he’s back to being a New York cop again. Yeah. You flip flops around from department to department. Yeah. What the greatest be is New York, you know, just welcomes them back.

00:28:27:22 – 00:28:36:03
Patrick O’Donnell
I was like, oh, we missed you. Come on back down and we’ll make you a detective again without doing anything. You know, it’s like no work. Like that.

00:28:36:05 – 00:28:39:28
Dan LeFebvre
So this will be the third time he’s going through training again, right?

00:28:39:28 – 00:28:55:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Exactly. That’s all. I mean, like, they have, like, this highest ranking person in this, like, surveillance van. That wouldn’t happen. They’d be in their office. We have people for that. You know, that’s that’s what it all boils down to.

00:28:55:16 – 00:29:18:08
Dan LeFebvre
What we find out at the end of Diablo the vengeance that Simon’s plan all along was to make John McClane do all of these things. Basically, it’s a distraction from his real goal robbing billions of dollars worth of gold from the Federal Reserve. And obviously, the movie’s storyline is fictional. But in your experience as a police officer, have you ever had criminals using distractions to try to keep you from noticing the true intentions?

00:29:18:10 – 00:29:39:08
Patrick O’Donnell
Not anything this big, you know, most, you know, yeah. Billions of dollars, right? Yeah, I, I find it humorous that, you know, it’s like you need a new plotline. I mean, come on, you know? Okay, they’re who they’re trying to rob this, you know, whatever. It was like, okay, but it’s been used a few times, but okay, you know, retread that baby.

00:29:39:10 – 00:30:05:17
Patrick O’Donnell
But yeah, of course, the main, bad guy has to have an accent. I don’t know why. Maybe it makes some more villainy or something, but I every other foreigner. Yeah, it has to be something like that. But as far as distractions go. No, I mean, the closest I came was we had, two kids, you know, they’re like 18, 19 years old, detained.

00:30:05:20 – 00:30:29:28
Patrick O’Donnell
It was like some kind of girlfriend calls on the boyfriend, blah, blah, blah, allegations of this. And the other thing. And two of my cops find this guy and his body by a, bus stop maybe about five blocks down. And it’s like we’re just talking to them, and I could tell something is weird. You. I’m like, this kid has ants in his pants.

00:30:30:00 – 00:30:49:24
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, it’s summertime. His eyes are darting all over the place, and he’s just real squirrely. So I’m like, stand up. So I put handcuffs on him and I’m like, you know what? These come off just as easy as, you know. They go on and said, I just don’t trust you right now. And he says, okay. And then, you know, he’d calm down.

00:30:49:26 – 00:31:19:23
Patrick O’Donnell
And my cop is in her squad car running him, you know, for warrants, etc., etc. and he’s like, we’re buy a car dealership visa. Oh man, look at that car over there. So I look like that. And I look back and he’s gone. He’s running like the fastest track star in the Olympics with handcuffs behind his back. And I’m just like, I mean, he’s wearing, like, athletic shorts and a t shirt and, you know, tennis shoes.

00:31:19:25 – 00:31:46:24
Patrick O’Donnell
I’m wearing combat boots and I’ve got about 30 pounds of gear. He’s 18, I’m 53, and I like, oh, yeah. And I weigh 220 without the gear. And this kid maybe weighs a buck 60, and he’s sprinting and I’m like, oh my God, I can’t let this I can’t let this happen. So, you know, the cop tries to chase him with her car, then she runs out of pavement.

00:31:46:24 – 00:32:07:13
Patrick O’Donnell
Then I’m going four wheeling with this guy running after him, and I finally get him. And the only reason I got him was he’s got asthma. And I’m like, oh, thank God for asshole. Yeah. Because he he probably would. I ran me and I’m like, that’d be embarrassing. But he distracted me enough to, you know, and it happened like in half a second.

00:32:07:15 – 00:32:27:18
Patrick O’Donnell
And I felt so stupid. And I’m the boss, you know, I’m just like, But, you know, we scooped him up, got him an ambulance, and he was fine. And it turns out he had a warrant for bank robbery. That’s why he was running. So. Yeah, the feds wanted them. He robbed a bank. So I’m just like, okay, that’s a good pinch.

00:32:27:18 – 00:32:34:19
Patrick O’Donnell
That’s a good arrest. You know? I’ll take it, but I’m just glad I’m just glad I got.

00:32:34:22 – 00:32:39:01
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I guess there’s there’s a little difference between what we see in the movie. And. Look over there.

00:32:39:03 – 00:33:02:18
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it wasn’t anything like, you know, pre-planned or anything and. Yeah, there’s clues, you know, when they start, like if you have somebody that’s like in like stopped on the street or something like that, that their eyes are darting around, they’re looking for an escape. They’re looking for the, the safest, fastest egress away from you.

00:33:02:21 – 00:33:12:08
Patrick O’Donnell
So I should have been smarter. I I’m a big car guy. I’m like, oh, really? I don’t like to like son of a biscuit. But, there he goes.

00:33:12:10 – 00:33:31:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, we often see these things in action movies, where people are shooting each other, and this diet is no different from that. Obviously, there’s a ton of Hollywood fiction, but in this movie, there seems to be really no hesitation for him to just shoot off any gun and gets a hand on it really stood out to me.

00:33:31:03 – 00:33:50:15
Dan LeFebvre
There was one scene where John McClane just kind of walks up to one of the dump trucks. He knew the bad guys were in it, so he just starts shooting inside without even verifying that they’re actually who he thought was driving the truck. Of course, it’s a movie, and he was right. They were the bad guys. But can you share what it’s like for a police officer to discharge their weapon, compared to what we see happening in the movie?

00:33:50:18 – 00:34:13:09
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, if you’re shooting at a human, there has to be an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to yourself or others. That’s like the statue that the that’s the criminal statute. Because if I shoot and kill somebody, say you have a hostage, you know, you have the gun to the, poor person’s. Yeah. Like had that’s.

00:34:13:09 – 00:34:34:27
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. It was in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re you’re robbing the convenience store, and, you know, I just walk it, you know, kind of thing as a cop, you know? Will I shoot you? Probably depending, you know. But if there’s 2 or 3 innocent people behind, you know, I’m not you. There’s so many things to consider because it’s not just, you know, it’s like.

00:34:34:27 – 00:35:01:27
Patrick O’Donnell
Like I said before, there has to be an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to yourself or others and great bodily harm is some type of harm that is most likely to cause death. So doesn’t that that kind of thing. So you have to be really cognizant of, okay, do I meet the statute statutory requirements? Because if I shoot you one human being, killing another human being is homicide.

00:35:02:00 – 00:35:24:00
Patrick O’Donnell
Now, if it’s, you know, in the line of duty where you’re preventing, i.e. me getting killed, you know, in self-defense or somebody else that’s justifiable homicide, you’re not going to get criminally charged, but it’s still a homicide and that’s how it gets investigated. But you can’t. So you have things to think about is like, okay, is this statutorily okay?

00:35:24:02 – 00:35:51:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Then you think, okay, am I going to hurt somebody doing this or kill somebody else? You know, it’s, you know, that’s why people are like, why can’t you shoot the gun out of the bad guys hand? You know? ET cetera, etc.. In the most people aren’t that good of a shot. You go for, you know, that’s it’s so silly because, you know, it’s hard to that’s a skill and it’s a diminish some some cops are great shots.

00:35:51:21 – 00:36:12:29
Patrick O’Donnell
Some aren’t so great. We have to qualify every year. And I still do. I have a nature to 18. So I have to go through the same course and I can still I’m a good shot, but, nighttime, I’m chasing somebody. My heart rate and blood pressure are way up. There’s so many things to consider. And, you know, again, you have to consider the risk to civilians.

00:36:13:05 – 00:36:29:23
Patrick O’Donnell
And you have to consider the risk of, blue on blue shooting where you accidentally shoot another cop in, like, crossfire. So you have to be aware of a lot of different stuff before you pull that trigger. And what we would always say is like, you can’t put the you can’t put the bullet back in the gun.

00:36:29:25 – 00:36:34:12
Dan LeFebvre
Very different than what we see with John McClane in the movies, that’s for sure.

00:36:34:15 – 00:36:46:11
Patrick O’Donnell
Well, you’re fucking I’m a huge dirty Harry fan, and it’s like, man, that guy would. I don’t know how many guys you would kill in one episode. You’re in one movie. Excuse me? And I’m just like, oh, look out. Just. Yeah.

00:36:46:14 – 00:37:04:17
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, in the movie with John McClane, he’s. He obviously isn’t putting that much thought into anything. It’s, I mean, not anything, but, you know, when he when he’s shooting, you know, he shoots when he feels he wants to shoot, it’s not really. I’m going to, you know, think about who is driving in that scene. You know what?

00:37:04:17 – 00:37:19:10
Dan LeFebvre
The dump truck he’s not even really putting any thought into before. He just pulls out the gun and just shoots into the door and kills the driver. Right. It’s not I’m going to put this guy in handcuffs or whatever. It’s kill first. I ask questions later.

00:37:19:13 – 00:37:40:00
Patrick O’Donnell
It’s true. Yeah. And the couple of things, you know, to finish up with this, die Hard. Yeah. Samuel Jackson is working with the cop. No, they would use him for information, you know, they would interview him, and that would be the end of it. He wouldn’t be riding around with them. Is like his sidekick, the. That’s not going to happen.

00:37:40:02 – 00:37:40:23
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah.

00:37:40:25 – 00:37:47:06
Dan LeFebvre
I think this movie’s excuse for that was Simon forced them to do it right, which was kind of goes back to the whole doing whatever Simon says.

00:37:47:06 – 00:38:04:23
Patrick O’Donnell
That would not happen. No, because, you know, it’s like, okay, now we’re putting his life in jeopardy. Yeah. He’s, you know, he’s an innocent civilian, you know, that’s trying to help out. Yeah. It’s like, absolutely not. No way. You know? And then, you know, Bruce Willis is trying to get the fire department. So he calls him an officer down.

00:38:04:23 – 00:38:26:12
Patrick O’Donnell
That’s not necessary. And it’s really bad taste to tell you the truth. And then the subway cop, there was a, scene when the subway is drawn down. You know, he’s pointing a gun at a kid for hopping a turnstile and using his phone. And I’m like, well, this is just silly. You wouldn’t do that. I mean, unless you you thought he was armed or something like that.

00:38:26:14 – 00:38:49:25
Patrick O’Donnell
And then I don’t know who outfitted these guys, but like the extras that were cops, they’re wearing their police hats, but they don’t have a cap shield at it. That’s the. It’s like a little badge that goes on the hat. The police hat. We call them cap shields. And like, half of them had those. And I’m like you, they they wouldn’t let you walk out of the precinct house unless you were.

00:38:49:27 – 00:38:52:25
Patrick O’Donnell
You had that capsule that you go through an inspection.

00:38:52:25 – 00:39:01:00
Dan LeFebvre
So what is the I mean, is that, for what is the purpose of of that as to why they wouldn’t be allowed to walk out?

00:39:01:00 – 00:39:08:11
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, because you have to be in full uniform if you don’t have the capsule on your hat. You’re looking for a uniform, you know? Okay, that’s like I wasn’t sure there was.

00:39:08:14 – 00:39:10:09
Dan LeFebvre
You know, a utilitarian purpose of it.

00:39:10:12 – 00:39:15:04
Patrick O’Donnell
Was more, you know, it’s it’s like having the badge on your outermost garment. If you’re in need, I.

00:39:15:04 – 00:39:15:27
Dan LeFebvre
Gotcha. Okay.

00:39:15:29 – 00:39:20:24
Patrick O’Donnell
That’s a that’s a part of the uniform. You have to have the entire uniform.

00:39:20:26 – 00:39:25:02
Dan LeFebvre
Makes sense, because otherwise you could be the bad guy that, gets shot by John McClane.

00:39:25:05 – 00:39:41:05
Patrick O’Donnell
And then there was the scene where there was a bunch of cops, and maybe half of them had their holsters empty. There were holding on guns. They just didn’t give them one. Not even a pretend one. And I’m just like, come on, guys. Yeah, yeah, I guess. Yeah. They ran out of like, you know, rubber.

00:39:41:10 – 00:40:04:05
Dan LeFebvre
We don’t have a big enough budget. McClane is stealing all the guns. So he’s going back to the movie franchise. Where up to Live Free or Die Hard. And that movie, when the FBI Cyber Security division in Washington, DC is hacked, they call in everybody to help track down some of their top suspects. And that brings John McClane into the picture as he’s tasked with picking up, just in character, Matthew Farrell.

00:40:04:07 – 00:40:15:11
Dan LeFebvre
Immediately when McClane shows up to Farrell’s apartment, he shows him his badge and Farrell thinks the badge is fake. Have you ever encountered a situation like that where someone you were there to help, didn’t think you were a real cop?

00:40:15:13 – 00:40:47:12
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, it’s kind of funny. You know, it’s I spent most of my career in uniform, but every now and then I was tasked with undercover assignments or plainclothes assignments. And it’s amazing how the world looks different to you and how people know. It’s like, oh, so this is how it really works. Because when people see a police car in person, you know, in an officer in uniform, you know, they act this specific way when you’re plainclothes, you know, it’s like, okay, I remember it was like 3:00 in the morning.

00:40:47:12 – 00:41:12:15
Patrick O’Donnell
I was on a plainclothes assignment, and I was monitoring the radio, and I heard a stalker, a call for a stalker outside this girl’s apartment window. And I’m like, oh, this could be fun. So I’m going to use I’m going to use C, which is an undercover car. There’s plainclothes. There’s unmarked cars and undercover cars. An undercover car is I mean, I think I was driving like, a Plymouth.

00:41:12:21 – 00:41:47:16
Patrick O’Donnell
What was this? Oh, Chrysler. Cordoba. I mean, it was old. It was just a jalopy. And y’all, we had, like, beans on the rearview mirror. You know, the. There’s no way anybody could tell that’s a cop car. They know that there’s a cop in there where an unmarked car is usually like a Crown Vic. And now they’re going to be like the explorers, and they don’t have decals on the outside or lights on the outside, but they do have lights and a siren, and they’re fully equipped, like a squad car.

00:41:47:19 – 00:41:54:29
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I’ve seen those. They they’re not cop car. They’re not painted a cop cars. But you can still tell, you know, that they’re cop cars.

00:41:55:01 – 00:42:13:00
Patrick O’Donnell
You could tell. Yeah, absolutely. And we’re not trying to be undercover with those. We’re just trying to be not as noticeable with those. And it’s amazing how, you know, right away when you see that light bar and you see the decals on the side, you’re like, oh, shit. You know, I was like, okay, you know, and cops would do that too.

00:42:13:00 – 00:42:28:03
Patrick O’Donnell
I, I can’t tell you how many times I’d be going to a call or something. I see red and blue lights behind me. I’m like, oh, what did I do wrong? There’s that incident. Even though I’m going to the same call, I’m like, oh wait, I am the cops. Okay, yeah, I’m okay now. I know, like, all right, yeah, it does happen.

00:42:28:06 – 00:42:55:15
Patrick O’Donnell
But anyways, so I get out, I’m wearing jeans and a t shirt and I’ve got a necklace badge and, you know, it’s just my badge is on, you know, like a necklace thing, a chain and one side is the badge and the other side is my ID, and I’ve got, I’ve got a gun and handcuffs and my radio, and I’m just walking up and this guy is just, like, leering into this girl’s apartment and on the.

00:42:55:15 – 00:43:15:01
Patrick O’Donnell
Hey, dude, what’s up? He said, oh, not much. I’m like, what you up to, dude? And he’s just like, who are you? And I pointed to the badge and he says, well, that ain’t real. I’m like, oh, okay. So then I pulled up my t shirt and you can see my gun in my, handcuffs. And he said, those do look real.

00:43:15:01 – 00:43:35:09
Patrick O’Donnell
I’m like, yeah, they are this, oh. That was kind of okay. Those are real. Yeah. And then at the same time, you know, like two uniform, coppers start walking up and he’s just like, all right, whatever you got me. You know, he he couldn’t let go of the you can’t stop love, I guess. But he just couldn’t let go.

00:43:35:12 – 00:43:46:10
Dan LeFebvre
I’m trying to remember. I think that’s basically what McLean had in this part, too, was that, you know, on the necklace, his badge to to show, very similar situation. It sounds like all the different purpose to be there, of course.

00:43:46:13 – 00:44:04:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Right, right. Yeah. If you know you’re going to be arresting people, you almost all if you’re plainclothes, you almost always have a uniform with you just in case something bells go south. You know, some defense attorneys like, hey, my client just thought it was just some random dude with a gun and a fake badge, you know, blah, blah, blah.

00:44:04:16 – 00:44:11:08
Patrick O’Donnell
So it’s always nice if it’s if you can, to have some guys in uniform.

00:44:11:11 – 00:44:28:15
Dan LeFebvre
That makes that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned earlier with the FBI. And so when we saw that, you know, in the first movie with some federal law enforcement, when this one too, we also see John McClane being called in to help federal law enforcement, is that a common thing for local law enforcement to be called to assist federal agents.

00:44:28:17 – 00:44:53:18
Patrick O’Donnell
All the time? You know, there the ratio of city cops or county cops compared to feds is, yeah, there’s probably like 100 to 1. There isn’t a lot of feds there. Just just numbers. You know, there aren’t many of them. If they are going to arrest somebody, usually they call us and they don’t do a lot of arresting, to tell you the truth.

00:44:53:21 – 00:45:21:00
Patrick O’Donnell
I remember one time I got a call from the dispatcher and she’s like, could you meet the Secret Service and bring a couple of your guys with you at blah blah, blah location? I’m like, oh, wow, this could be cool. So I’m like, yeah, sounds fun. So it’s like 8:00 at night. I meet this guy and he’s just wearing jeans and a t shirt, and he’s got a lot cooler gun than I do, a lot more expensive gun.

00:45:21:02 – 00:45:39:14
Patrick O’Donnell
And he’s got a little back then the next tall, cell phone that, like, shirked. He had a really. He had one of those and he had a BlackBerry. I’m showing my age, and he had a lot nicer equipment than we did. And he says there’s some counterfeiters in this apartment. I’m just. I’m just going to knock on the door.

00:45:39:17 – 00:45:56:18
Patrick O’Donnell
I have a warrant. He said it’s not high risks. They’re not supposed to be armed, but you never know, he said. I just want some uniforms. And I’m like, I totally get it. So we go in there, knocks on the door, Secret Service. And it’s like, no. First he had me do it. Know I’m like, yeah, Milwaukee police.

00:45:56:18 – 00:46:23:04
Patrick O’Donnell
And they open the door for the police. And sure enough, there this is an apartment. They had a computer and a printer and there were literally printing money. It was so bad. It was like. So just like a regular printer. Yeah. And they’re they’re printing money. And I’m just like, wow. Like this. You’re not even trying, man. This this is almost like monopoly money.

00:46:23:07 – 00:46:25:18
Dan LeFebvre
And they didn’t print it off I guess.

00:46:25:18 – 00:46:42:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. And they’re doing it in front of a Secret Service agent. I’m just like, oh, this is awesome. I absolutely love it. Yeah, it was very anticlimactic. I thought it was something really cool. And I’m just like, this is kind of boring. Really. And he said, yeah, it is. He said, you mind coughing them up and taking them downtown?

00:46:42:14 – 00:47:10:00
Patrick O’Donnell
He said, I’ll take it from there. And I’m like, yeah, no problem. So yeah, we know we do help, you know, FBI, Ice, ATF. Yeah. And DEA, they kind of keep to themselves. They do help us. Let’s see. So FBI. Yeah. The FBI is an interesting relationship. You know, we have or at least when I was still there.

00:47:10:00 – 00:47:34:29
Patrick O’Donnell
I’m sure they do. We had a human trafficking, like, task force, and we had 1 or 2 FBI agents assigned to that, and they were with our detectives and police officers from our Sensitive Crimes Division, and they were there more or less, because, again, Washington has a lot more money than we do. They had a lot more resources and they would help us out with stuff.

00:47:35:02 – 00:48:02:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. See, that was one example that bank robberies people think that the FBI responds to like every bank robbery. No they don’t, they don’t. And if you do get an agent, usually it’s like an hour after the fact and they’re taking down like notes about, okay, they’re interested to see, okay, is this like a robbery crew, you know, are they going from city to city or crossing state lines, you know, that kind of thing.

00:48:02:16 – 00:48:17:08
Patrick O’Donnell
So that’s that’s why the FBI is going to be there. Or if it’s a bank robbery and they start popping rounds off and somebody gets shot or God forbid, killed, then the FBI is going to respond. But it’s still our baby. It’s we’re still taking care of the investigation.

00:48:17:11 – 00:48:35:28
Dan LeFebvre
It sounds like, and a in a different situation, but as similar to what you talked about before where like, even when you were undercover, you wanted to have some uniformed cops there for the arrest itself. It sounds like it’s a similar sort of thing with except just, you know, federal agents and then you’re the uniform cop that’s there to, to help.

00:48:36:00 – 00:48:38:15
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

00:48:38:18 – 00:48:57:15
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if there is one scene from Live Free or Die Hard that really stands out to me. It’s that scene where John McClane takes his car and he drives it into the helicopter. Obviously a Hollywood stunt, right? But that scene, as they end the sequence where we see McClane doing some pretty masterful driving, and as moviegoers, we just assume he’s capable of doing this because of his training as a police officer.

00:48:57:18 – 00:49:01:09
Dan LeFebvre
And I’m sure your training did not have anything to do with driving cars into helicopters.

00:49:01:15 – 00:49:05:21
Patrick O’Donnell
But here, a little bit after intervention? No, there was none of that going on.

00:49:05:21 – 00:49:10:27
Dan LeFebvre
But what was, what kind of driving training do real police officers get?

00:49:10:29 – 00:49:48:00
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, when you’re in the academy, you go through what’s called evac emergency vehicle operations course, and you’re trained how to, you know, do high speed pursuits, how to do them safely, you know, and they actually took us out to a racetrack here in Milwaukee. And that was a lot of fun. We had mock chases where you would you’re in a squad car and you would chase the instructor and you’d, you’re, you know, you’re chasing, you’re talking on the radio at the same time, you know, and it’s not just like, I don’t know, like a free for all.

00:49:48:00 – 00:50:13:17
Patrick O’Donnell
There’s rules when it comes to chasing cars, you know, it’s like, okay, when you’re when you’re pursuing somebody, if you’re the squad, you have to go, okay, you give your squad name, you have to give your location. You know, it’s like, okay, squad five, I’m northbound on university Drive, the 5400 block, you know, pursuing a, red Toyota Corolla with blah, blah, blah license plate.

00:50:13:19 – 00:50:35:06
Patrick O’Donnell
And the reason, okay, he’s wanted for homicide, all right, as a boss would try was I would let that go a lot further than. Yeah, I’m pursuing him because he blew a stop sign. All right, risk reward. And it’s like, am I going to risk this cop’s life or other civilians, you know, this high speed pursuit for something?

00:50:35:08 – 00:50:56:19
Patrick O’Donnell
Not that, you know, big of a deal, but sometimes not in a lot of time. What I thought wasn’t a big deal all of a sudden, you know, there’s a lot of guns in the car, or they’re wanted for something pretty heinous. You don’t know what you’re chasing. So we get all trained up, you know, they’re behind the science and they will hammer, you know, the rules.

00:50:56:19 – 00:51:40:05
Patrick O’Donnell
You know the department every department has their own rules, and they’re a state statute. You have to you have to drive with due regard. You can’t just go out there, you know, and think you’re, you know, a NASCAR driver or anything like that, or drive and helicopters or whatever. But, you know, when I was new and for quite a chunk of my career, there were no cameras in the squads or body cameras, so it wasn’t critiqued like it was once those things, you know, got up, you know, it’s like I remember being going down city streets at over 100 miles an hour, where if you make one little mistake, you’re dead and you, who’s

00:51:40:05 – 00:51:54:11
Patrick O’Donnell
learn by it was on the job training. Let’s just say that you and some were really good at it, and some cops were really bad at it and shouldn’t be driving cars, I think. But hey, that’s how you get trained up.

00:51:54:13 – 00:52:06:27
Dan LeFebvre
Well, maybe, like you were talking about before, you know, with McClane going from New York and then to LA, back to New York, like he would have to go through the Academy multiple times. He’s just gone through so many times that now he knows how to drive into helicopters.

00:52:06:27 – 00:52:14:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Right? Yeah, it’s very true. Yeah. I guess maybe I was absent that day in the academy when we had to work after intervention training.

00:52:14:14 – 00:52:16:00
Dan LeFebvre
But that day.

00:52:16:02 – 00:52:24:06
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes, I, I must have missed it. Yeah. I didn’t go to that in-service. Whatever. My bad, my bad.

00:52:24:09 – 00:52:45:21
Dan LeFebvre
Well, the last film in the franchise is A Good Day to Die Hard. This time, the franchise pushes the stakes even higher as it brings John McClane into international affairs. The plotline in this movie revolves around his son Jack, who’s in trouble in Russia. But then it turns out Jack is a CIA operative. And so together we see this father son team trying to stop a nuclear weapons heist from this fictional storyline.

00:52:45:21 – 00:52:57:15
Dan LeFebvre
We kind of get the concept of there’s a parent and child who are both in law enforcement working together. How realistic is it for multiple generations and different branches of law enforcement to work together, like we see happening in the movie?

00:52:57:18 – 00:53:23:09
Patrick O’Donnell
There are legacy cops more, you know, like my first partner on the job, her dad was a cop in Milwaukee for years, but they never worked together. Like, especially on a case that’s almost unheard of maybe in small towns or something. That might be the case, but for the most part, no. And most places don’t have hard and fast rules.

00:53:23:09 – 00:53:51:05
Patrick O’Donnell
But I wouldn’t want to be in the same, district or on the same assignment as my kid because I would be overprotective. I would yeah, I, I wouldn’t be thinking of him as a cop. I would I’d be thinking of him, you know? And it’s only natural. I’m a dad, you know, it’s like that instinct is going to kick in first, and you may not do your job efficiently and effectively if you’re thinking like that.

00:53:51:09 – 00:54:01:09
Patrick O’Donnell
But yeah, there’s a ton of legacy cops. Yeah. It’s not unusual. It’s like, oh, you see the nameplate? And I’m like, hey, I know your dad. You know, that kind of thing. It’s like this kind of cool.

00:54:01:11 – 00:54:17:26
Dan LeFebvre
That makes a lot of sense. And I didn’t really think about it this way, but, I’m not sure. Like the Sullivan brothers is, is something that comes up in the military. But, you know, when when that ship sank and just like in World War two, all five brothers were lost. And so I could see it almost being a similar sort of concept, they wanted to separate.

00:54:17:26 – 00:54:40:18
Dan LeFebvre
Then from there on out, the military started separating siblings. I could see it almost being a similar thing to like if you’re there was with your kid. Not only are you not doing your job as well, which means that your life could be an even more danger. Not only your life then, but also your your child’s life. And it just makes everything that much worse, not only for who you’re trying to help, but yourselves as well.

00:54:40:21 – 00:54:48:22
Patrick O’Donnell
Right? Yeah. And your kid might be acting a little differently than they normally would if you’re there. I mean, it’s just human nature.

00:54:48:25 – 00:54:50:13
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, it goes both ways, for sure.

00:54:50:15 – 00:54:51:17
Patrick O’Donnell
Absolutely.

00:54:51:19 – 00:55:11:14
Dan LeFebvre
Well, since the last movie takes place in Russia, we end up with a similar plot point that we saw in the first movie, except in the first, Die Hard. It was New York Cop going to LA when he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This time the wrong place is Russia. So I asked about police officers in different jurisdictions earlier, but now I need to ask about an international jurisdiction.

00:55:11:14 – 00:55:20:24
Dan LeFebvre
So as a police officer, if you’re traveling to another country like John McClane doing in the movie, what would really happen if you found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time outside of the US?

00:55:20:27 – 00:55:47:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Why? You are truly a fish out of water. You are just John Hughes citizen. You. You have no special powers. There’s no police friendship. There’s no, you know, whatever. You’re just another dude, you know, or another chick. That’s you. You got a whole lot of nothing. And if you’re in Russia, who isn’t exactly our ally, you know, and I’ve heard stories about Russian prisons.

00:55:47:21 – 00:56:10:12
Patrick O’Donnell
I know, like in China, the Chinese police can arrest you and not charge you for up to a year. So you could be rotting in a jail for a year without even getting charged with a crime. And, you know, just there’s no such thing as due process in Russia. You know, the lines between the military and the police in Russia are very, very blurred.

00:56:10:15 – 00:56:21:06
Patrick O’Donnell
It’s it’s, I would not want to be on the business end of an AK 47 with some Russian police officer. Hell, no. I you know, it has all the. You’re.

00:56:21:09 – 00:56:26:19
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I wouldn’t want to be in the business end of anywhere, anywhere, whoever is holding it, but. Yes, definitely. Yeah.

00:56:26:21 – 00:56:49:25
Patrick O’Donnell
Right. Exactly. But yeah, I just think of gulag, you know, or, you know, something like that. And I’m like, no, thank you. You know, that’s something it’s it should be an international incident. You know, hopefully our embassy would get involved in this even if hopefully they would know, you know, this happened in the you know, the government can help you, that kind of thing.

00:56:49:25 – 00:57:02:24
Patrick O’Donnell
But you know, with all the stuff blowing up and people getting killed and all that, it’s hard to like cover that up. It’s like, okay, the police are going to be coming to this. And I never saw them.

00:57:02:27 – 00:57:12:14
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, that’s true. I was trying to think, if they ever showed up and I don’t. Yeah. Now. No, I mean, I guess that would be an extractor. Yes. MPP so maybe that was.

00:57:12:17 – 00:57:30:04
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, I think I saw a couple of Russian like, squad cars. Maybe they had like the little blue light on top. But other than that, I never saw like cops coming out and like, trying to do cop stuff. They were pretty much they had the run of the whole area there to do all their blowing up and shooting and all that cool stuff.

00:57:30:07 – 00:57:51:19
Dan LeFebvre
It’s almost a complete inverse of the first movie, where there were a lot of cops, and then just the feds came at the very end, but then at the end and movie, it’s like, you know, CIA and. Well, and then John McClane, and, you know, and then all these other, you know, high military or, you know, secret things and then, you know, oh, there’s some kind of cops in the background.

00:57:51:26 – 00:57:57:24
Patrick O’Donnell
Maybe you’re exac, you know, I you’re right. I didn’t think of that. Yeah. It’s like the polar opposite really.

00:57:57:27 – 00:58:10:06
Dan LeFebvre
Since you do offer your services to help screenwriters be more authentic with their stories, if they had hired you for the diehard franchise, what’s one of the primary things that you think needs to change to help the storyline be a little more accurate?

00:58:10:08 – 00:58:30:28
Patrick O’Donnell
Well, you know, I looked at that question. I’m like, it’s so far fetched. I think I would have took an A pass. I, I’m like, how can I, I can’t fix this. It’s so far off the rails that it’s I mean, we talked about, you know, just there’s so much stuff even with like my favorite was the first to die Hard.

00:58:30:28 – 00:58:51:20
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, yeah. He he’s got a gun on a plane. You know how it is. Even back then, even if we’re transporting prisoners, you still have to make all these notifications. And the captain of the airplane can say no, even if you get all these clearances and everything’s hunky dory, you know, you load, you know, you get, you get seated before anybody else in your own.

00:58:51:20 – 00:59:10:25
Patrick O’Donnell
You’re the last one to leave. Obviously, if you have a prisoner and if you’re just armed every 99.9% of the time, you know it has to be stowed in your luggage and there’s all kinds of hoops you have to jump around to have a gun in your luggage, and it’s not gonna be your carry on. It’s going to be in the belly of the plane.

00:59:10:27 – 00:59:29:06
Patrick O’Donnell
And it’s kind of a big deal. I mean, it’s to me, I think it’s a pain in the butt. I don’t even I could, but I don’t I don’t deal with it. It’s just like it’s one more pain in the button. What if my luggage gets lost? I don’t want my gun. Get lost. You know, it’s. No, thanks.

00:59:29:08 – 00:59:31:13
Dan LeFebvre
And think about that. That never happens in the movie.

00:59:31:15 – 00:59:40:08
Patrick O’Donnell
No. Hey. Yeah. Oh, shoot. They lost my luggage. Hey, like I said, I was a baggage handler. This stuff does happen. That’s real.

00:59:40:10 – 00:59:49:13
Dan LeFebvre
Diehard, too. Is just John McClane at the little kiosk waiting for his luggage. That’s. The entire movie’s just waiting.

00:59:49:15 – 00:59:51:15
Patrick O’Donnell
But be funny. I like that.

00:59:51:18 – 01:00:06:09
Dan LeFebvre
There are a lot of people I think are inspired by movies. And, you know, for example, I’ve heard stories of, like, Indiana Jones inspiring people to become archeologists. In your experience, have you ever seen a police officer like John McClane inspire people to become police officers in the real world?

01:00:06:11 – 01:00:10:04
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes. And I would not want to work with them or go on a plane with them.

01:00:10:06 – 01:00:14:06
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, because they want to be John McClane shooting. Yeah, that’s true for sure.

01:00:14:08 – 01:00:35:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Exactly. Yeah. We had some cowboys I worked with, but even the cowboys or cowgirls would have to play by the rules, or they get fired and criminally charged. I mean, there’s only so far you could push the boundaries and. Yeah, I mean, police work in a nutshell, a lot of it’s really boring. Until it is.

01:00:35:16 – 01:00:39:20
Dan LeFebvre
I wouldn’t want John McClane to be in my my district. Yeah.

01:00:39:22 – 01:00:44:18
Patrick O’Donnell
Is absolutely. Well.

01:00:44:21 – 01:01:02:17
Dan LeFebvre
One of the common movie tropes that we see happening in Die Hard in a lot of movies, too, is when the bad guy tells they’re playing just as they’re about to kill the good guy. And this one, for example, in the first movie, Hans tells John McClane the reason he started the fire in Nakatomi Towers, because they’ll keep looking for him unless they think he’s dead.

01:01:02:20 – 01:01:16:11
Dan LeFebvre
I’m guessing that whole idea of the bad guy revealing their plan is something that’s made up for the movies. But then again, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. Have you ever heard of the bad guys revealing their plan like we see happening time and time again in the movies now?

01:01:16:11 – 01:01:39:07
Patrick O’Donnell
Most criminals I was were really stupid and it was either. And most of this, the criminality that I dealt with was kind of spur of the moment. It wasn’t like a plan hit. It was in the air, like most of the homicides I went to was they started as a fight and they escalated. I mean, yeah, there were like revenge or jealousy.

01:01:39:07 – 01:02:00:22
Patrick O’Donnell
I’ll follow the money, follow the sex. Well, you know, whatever. But for the most part it was like, hey, we’re playing cards. You’re cheating. It gets into a fight, I’m losing. I’m going to grab that knife out of that butcher block, and I’m going to stab you, you know, that kind of thing. Whereas, yeah, I never met a criminal mastermind of any kind.

01:02:00:24 – 01:02:08:14
Patrick O’Donnell
I read that just. Yeah, yeah, there ain’t a whole lot of those running around, thank goodness.

01:02:08:16 – 01:02:11:12
Dan LeFebvre
And John McClane just happens to run into all of them. You know? Right.

01:02:11:18 – 01:02:17:18
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. Darn the luck. And they all have accents and they’re all really scary.

01:02:17:21 – 01:02:35:25
Dan LeFebvre
Well, from the first Die Hard movie is in 1988, and then the last one is in 2013. There’s like a 25 year span and something that we see John McClane seemingly struggling with in those 25 years is technology that, for example, in Die Hard two, McClane asks his wife how she’s calling him, and she’s like, it’s the 90s now.

01:02:35:25 – 01:02:59:28
Dan LeFebvre
So they have phones on the airplane. And 2007 Live Free or Die Hard is all about hackers, and the movie makes it seem like McClane just doesn’t get along with the new technology. And I know your career as a police officer was also 25 years different years from 95 to 2020. Correct me if I’m wrong on that, but, although it’s not the same years as the Die Hard franchise, it’s still 25 years of changing technology.

01:03:00:01 – 01:03:12:13
Dan LeFebvre
Can you share how cops have used or maybe as individual officers have struggled with technology, like we see McClane seeming to do over the course of the movies, and then your own 25 year career?

01:03:12:16 – 01:03:39:18
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes. When I started in 95, we handwrote all of our reports. The only computer in the whole district station was to run people, you know, in their license plates. And there was only one of those, and there was a couple of typewriters. And you handwrote your reports, you use carbon paper, you used white out, green out, pink out, depending on what the report was.

01:03:39:20 – 01:03:57:15
Patrick O’Donnell
So, you know, it was pretty medieval. And I remember I got like out there and I’m like, where the computers. And some day guy was like, what are you talking about, kid? We don’t need those damn computers. And I’m just like, there was two dictionaries in the assembly that most of the pages were, like, missing out of them and stuff.

01:03:57:15 – 01:04:18:09
Patrick O’Donnell
And I’m just like, oh, God, in my handwriting is terrible. So I’m like, oh, this is no bueno. But, you know, I started out with that and the squad cars had no computers, no cameras. There was no body cameras back then. We didn’t have tasers. You know, people didn’t use a Taser like we’re poor. Big cities don’t have big budgets.

01:04:18:11 – 01:04:51:00
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, we we don’t have the money, you know, so, you know, so we handwrote reports and like I said, there was no squad computers. And slowly that stuff, you know, started coming into fruition. And when we started getting all the computers, etc., I became a sergeant, I was boss. Now the cop on the streets relies on that computer quite a bit, and they have cameras in their squads that automatically turn on when you activate the lights and the siren, you know?

01:04:51:02 – 01:05:11:03
Patrick O’Donnell
And same thing with the body camera. Body cameras came about three years before I retired as a sergeant. I didn’t have to wear one. They didn’t require bosses to wear, so it was something new, etc. I mean, I had a computer in my squad and most of the time I was a beverage holder, you know, or an arborist.

01:05:11:03 – 01:05:28:16
Patrick O’Donnell
That’s the I’d have my arm up either on the computer, like if I was sitting around, you know, smoking a cigar or whatever, like art. I wonder if my cigar fits on that. All right, that’ll work. But but, you know, for the most part, no. And you know, the younger sergeants would make fun of me all the time.

01:05:28:21 – 01:05:55:08
Patrick O’Donnell
Like, you didn’t even turn that thing I did. It did do. I’m like, oh, sure. Didn’t like, I don’t need it. It makes you I mean, they’re they’re great tools, but they also make the cops lazy because you develop an ear for the radio. See, you’re in a district and it’s day shift that might be like 25, 30 cops somewhere in that ballpark.

01:05:55:10 – 01:06:25:27
Patrick O’Donnell
And you keep an ear out for the radio, whereas it’s like, okay, Dan just got sent to a battery, domestic violence actor still on the scene. They send you and your partner now I’m going to keep that in the back of my head because I was like, well, those can turn south pretty quick sometimes. And it sounds like, you know, and the dispatcher says, and there’s sounds of people fighting in the background, okay, initially they’re going to send two squads.

01:06:25:29 – 01:06:47:27
Patrick O’Donnell
I’m going to keep that in the back of my head. Then they’re going to send me to something else. Okay. Even though they sent me to something else, I’m going to keep in the back of my head where you are in case something bad happens. So you develop, in the ears for the radio. And the newer cops don’t have that as well because they’re constantly checking their screen like, we’re okay.

01:06:47:27 – 01:07:05:04
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, Dan is that blah blah, blah. You know, that fraction of a second or 2 or 3 seconds can be a big deal. So I, I was never a huge fan of them. Every now and then I’d power it up if I had to, but for the most part, I just ignored it.

01:07:05:06 – 01:07:24:17
Dan LeFebvre
Were you then being asked to do more and more, just assuming that you could rely on the technology to do some of that for you? I think of, you know, even today, just, you know, a lot of people are doing a lot more things are being asked to do a lot more things in their job because they’re like, oh, well, you can just kind of allow the technology to remember that for you.

01:07:24:19 – 01:07:35:12
Dan LeFebvre
But you’re saying, you know, remembering it in your head, which there’s definitely a benefit to that. But then also I’m wondering if are you being asked to do so much more? Then it becomes hard to remember things.

01:07:35:14 – 01:07:58:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, you know that that’s part of it. And, you know, when we did get squad computers, they didn’t have GPS. Now I do believe they have GPS, but I knew the neighborhood that I worked in like the back of my hand. And if I heard, you know, 1234 North Astro Street, I could vision I could visualize it or I’d have a pretty good idea of where it was.

01:07:58:24 – 01:08:21:06
Patrick O’Donnell
The newer kids, they’re not kids or adults, you know, they’re relying on GPS. It kind of makes you dumb, you know? It’s like, you know, they’re they’re looking at a computer screen, whatever. And then another thing, you know, they’re expecting more. It’s like, okay, well, you don’t have to go to the district station to do your reports. You have a squad computer, you can do them on your computer in the car.

01:08:21:09 – 01:08:37:25
Patrick O’Donnell
And it’s like, okay, because I want the cops on the street for visibility sake, too. You know, more cops out there instead of sitting in a district station. But the problem with that is, hey, it’s not safe at all, because where’s your face? Where’s your eyes start?

01:08:37:27 – 01:08:41:03
Dan LeFebvre
Because you’re not looking at. Yeah. You’re not focused on a computer screen.

01:08:41:03 – 01:09:03:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Yep. Absolutely. So I don’t think it’s very safe and it’s really awkward. If you ever try to type with your arms up like this, it’s nothing is. You know, they have all this equipment crammed in this little area and it’s just incredibly uncomfortable. And. Yeah, and nobody wants to sit in the same car for eight hours or 10 hours or 12 hours.

01:09:03:17 – 01:09:08:00
Patrick O’Donnell
You got to get out and stretch your legs. It’s nice to have a change of scenery every now on that.

01:09:08:03 – 01:09:27:03
Dan LeFebvre
I hadn’t thought about that of, you know, if you’re focused on your computer so much that, yeah, I mean, you don’t know what’s going on around you and you’re you always have to have situational. I think even being a citizen, you know, it’s good to have situational awareness, know what’s going on around you. Yeah. Especially when you’re in a car because you don’t know what other people are doing.

01:09:27:03 – 01:09:31:08
Dan LeFebvre
You might be parked, but there might be a crazy, reckless driver out there too. Who knows?

01:09:31:15 – 01:09:56:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You know, we call it head on a swivel where, you know, it’s like you’re constantly scanning for threats and you don’t have to be a cop for that. You know, I’ve dealt with a lot of victims of crimes, obviously, and a lot of them had zero situational awareness. I never saw them coming. Yeah, because your face was buried in your phone or you EarPods, you know, AirPods in, and you you didn’t hear them.

01:09:56:14 – 01:10:18:11
Patrick O’Donnell
You didn’t see them. You you’re in your own little world. You know, people are like, I get a kick out and people are literally walking into each other now because their faces are buried and it’s like, let alone some like, scary dude that’s going to rob you or do something worse. Do you? You you have no idea. And the same thing with cars, you know, like safety tips for cars.

01:10:18:13 – 01:10:41:11
Patrick O’Donnell
I exaggerate how much space I leave between me and the car in front of me. If I’m rolling up to a red light, I’m thinking of escape plans, you know, because I’ve been to so many carjackings and a lot of them happened up at red lights. You know, it’s like, okay, before you know it, you have some guy who’s shoving a gun in your face and, you know, trying to drag you out of your car.

01:10:41:13 – 01:11:02:04
Patrick O’Donnell
Well, first off, it is like, okay, see that sidewalk? I’m going up on the sidewalk. Yeah, I’m going to drive through somebody’s lawn to get out. But if I’m if I don’t leave any space in front of me, then I have nowhere to go. I’m trapped. I hate that feeling of being trapped. I always yeah, I always try to have some kind of escape route.

01:11:02:06 – 01:11:04:09
Dan LeFebvre
Probably not going through the helicopter like John McClane.

01:11:04:15 – 01:11:09:15
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, yeah, that’d be. That is frowned upon. Yeah.

01:11:09:16 – 01:11:11:00
Dan LeFebvre
Not a viable escape.

01:11:11:03 – 01:11:12:03
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes.

01:11:12:06 – 01:11:22:06
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask for your take on the one question that everyone always debates when it comes to this franchise in your mind, is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

01:11:22:08 – 01:11:38:17
Patrick O’Donnell
Hell, yes. It’s it’s the best Christmas movie. I love Die Hard as a Christmas movie. I play Die Hard every Christmas. And my kids, you know, they’re adults now and they, you know, they’ve got kids are like, you’re going to like, die. And I’m like, oh, hell yeah. I got to play that and it’s Christmas for God’s things.

01:11:38:20 – 01:11:44:12
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, we’re in agreement on that. Yes, I watch it every Christmas as well. Not the entire franchise, but at least one.

01:11:44:14 – 01:11:45:25
Patrick O’Donnell
No. Yeah, the first one for sure.

01:11:45:26 – 01:12:14:17
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about the accuracy of a police officer like John McClane on screen. Before I let you go, I have a two part question for you because not only do you have a fantastic podcast called Cops and Writers, where you help authors and screenwriters write more accurate stories, you’ve also written multiple books yourself, including a brand new book called The Good Collar, and I’ll make sure to add a link to in the show notes for everyone to order right now, before I let you go, can you share a little bit more about your inspiration behind starting cops and writers, and maybe give my audience a sneak peek

01:12:14:17 – 01:12:15:17
Dan LeFebvre
into your new book?

01:12:15:19 – 01:12:22:11
Patrick O’Donnell
Sure. The podcast. I started the podcast almost four years ago, as of yesterday, has been four years.

01:12:22:14 – 01:12:23:22
Dan LeFebvre
And I congrats.

01:12:23:24 – 01:12:38:24
Patrick O’Donnell
Thank you. And as you know, it’s a lot of work sometimes for not a whole lot of reward. But you know, you get to meet cool people. I think that’s the best part of it. Some interesting people that you never would have if you didn’t have the podcast.

01:12:38:27 – 01:12:45:12
Dan LeFebvre
And exactly. We wouldn’t have a chance to talk about John McClane driving through helicopters. I keep going back to that one, but why wouldn’t?

01:12:45:13 – 01:13:16:22
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the first. So I started the podcast to promote two books that I just wrote called Cops and Writers and those books were for writers to get their police facts straight, more or less. And I started a Facebook group and I started the podcast to promote my books. Well, before I know it, the Facebook group has 7500 people in it from all over the world, and the podcast grew legs and just took off.

01:13:16:24 – 01:13:29:02
Patrick O’Donnell
And I’m like, I didn’t. And I didn’t at first really mean to do that. You know, all of a sudden it’s like, oh, wow, look at that. People are listening, you know? I mean, you know what it’s like sometimes you think you’re just talking to a microphone and nobody’s listening.

01:13:29:04 – 01:13:36:09
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, for sure. It can be hard sometimes just talking to it, like like you’re talking about, you know, typing on the screen. You just talking to a screen, right? Yeah.

01:13:36:11 – 01:13:56:24
Patrick O’Donnell
Exactly. So you know, and then the as far as, you know, the podcast and everything else, I started out writing other books that had nothing to do with police work and I was going to writers conferences, and I bumped into people and made friendships with people that knew a lot more about this than I do. And they’re like, you should really write a book.

01:13:56:27 – 01:14:18:18
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, helping out, writers, you know, authors and screenwriters. And I’m like, okay, that sounds that sounds like a good idea. And when you go to these conferences, inevitably people are going to be like, oh, you’re that cop guy. And I’m like, I’m not advertising it. I don’t have a t shirt on saying I’m a cop guy or whatever, but and they’re always very respectful.

01:14:18:21 – 01:14:41:11
Patrick O’Donnell
They’re very nice. They’re like, hey, would you need a warrant for this? You know, would my character, would he really do this? Yeah, yeah, she’s a detective. And one would have, you know, blah, blah blah. And I’m like, yeah, I’d be more than happy to help you. So that’s kind of spawned another industry for me where I’ve. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve helped, you know, screenwriters, I’ve helped authors.

01:14:41:11 – 01:15:15:12
Patrick O’Donnell
So it’s been a lot of fun that way. And as far as my newest book, the, The Good Collar, it’s just imagine Dexter, Deathwish and John Wick got together and had a baby. That’s what I love. I love Dexter, I always liked Dexter, and I thought to myself, well, could you think of Dexter? But instead of being the serology, the blood spatter guy, you’d be the police chaplain.

01:15:15:14 – 01:15:43:17
Patrick O’Donnell
That everybody trusts, everybody loves. But he’s got that vigilante thing in them where, you know. Okay, Dan, just, you know, murdered a bunch of orphans. Yeah, and burned the school bus or whatever he did, and he got away on a technicality, and it’s like. So he writes the wrongs and actually the good car, we can circle back to Bruce Willis because he did a remake of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish.

01:15:43:19 – 01:15:45:00
Dan LeFebvre
That’s true. He did, didn’t he? Yeah.

01:15:45:01 – 01:16:01:02
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes. That was you. He played a Chicago E.R. doc and his wife and daughter. I think the wife got killed and the daughter was, like, brutalized in their own home. And he gets a gun and he turns into this, like, Doctor vigilante.

01:16:01:05 – 01:16:06:22
Dan LeFebvre
Well, that sounds like we have a lot of, potential future episodes to talk about, for sure.

01:16:06:25 – 01:16:10:01
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

01:16:10:04 – 01:16:12:12
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you again so much for your time, Patrick.

01:16:12:15 – 01:16:20:01
Patrick O’Donnell
Thank you. Dan.

00:02:26:21 – 00:02:42:11
Dan LeFebvre
Our chat today will be a little different than a usual episode of based on a true story, because we’re not looking at a single movie and we’re not even really looking at a real person from history. But what we are looking at is a very real job, how it’s portrayed onscreen by one of the most popular police officers in the movies.

00:02:42:13 – 00:02:52:16
Dan LeFebvre
So if you were to give the Die Hard franchise a letter, grade for how accurately John McClane shows us what a real police officer’s job is like, I wouldn’t get.

00:02:52:18 – 00:02:59:09
Patrick O’Donnell
I would go D plus to C minus. I think that would be my grade for for John. Yeah, honestly.

00:02:59:09 – 00:03:01:19
Dan LeFebvre
It’s a little higher than I was expecting.

00:03:01:22 – 00:03:03:17
Dan LeFebvre

00:03:03:19 – 00:03:16:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. I’m trying to be very charitable here. It’s. And I like Bruce Willis. I, I love the first Die Hard movie. The rest of them. Yeah, but, hey, that’s Hollywood right there.

00:03:16:16 – 00:03:24:03
Dan LeFebvre
That’s how it goes. And, you know, I guess as with many franchises, it it starts off and then it just kind of starts.

00:03:24:05 – 00:03:44:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. And I was thinking about that this morning, you know, it’s like one, one that pops into my head that was almost a little bit better was Terminator two. I thought I loved the first Terminator, but T2, you know, the way John Cameron filmed that and you know, the stunts and man, it was so over the top for that time period.

00:03:44:16 – 00:03:57:23
Dan LeFebvre
I think that’s one of those things that, it movies like that will stand out more because so many sequels in the franchises just do drop down that when you have one where actually this is better, it stands out that much more.

00:03:57:26 – 00:04:17:11
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes, exactly. Yeah. It’s like now I was thinking about Rocky and I was I loved the Rocky series and the first one, of course, was amazing. Second one was like, yeah, third one, I love Mr. T, so I mean, for comedic value. It was awesome. Yeah. I was like, what do you predict for yo the fight yo clubber.

00:04:17:11 – 00:04:27:00
Patrick O’Donnell
He’s like pain. I predict in the end I was like, oh, I wanted to follow the ground. I was laughing so hard. I’m like, I love this stuff.

00:04:27:02 – 00:04:28:25
Dan LeFebvre
It makes for great entertainment, that’s for sure.

00:04:29:01 – 00:04:30:06
Patrick O’Donnell
It does.

00:04:30:09 – 00:04:54:19
Dan LeFebvre
If we go back to the franchise of Die Hard, John McClane in the first movie is a cop from New York City visiting his estranged wife in Los Angeles. And of course, he happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time when all hell breaks loose. Throughout the movie, there are numerous lines of dialog about how McClane is out of his jurisdiction, but as a cop, McClane still takes it upon himself to do something about the situation unfolding around him.

00:04:54:21 – 00:05:12:04
Dan LeFebvre
Let’s say an off duty police officer is visiting a different city for personal reasons, like we see in the movie, and then they find themselves in the middle of the wrong place at the wrong time. Major crime happening in the movie. How realistic is it for the police officer to take it upon themselves to fight back against the criminals like we see John McClane doing in the movie?

00:05:12:07 – 00:05:29:10
Patrick O’Donnell
Most of the time you’re just going to be a good witness. Yeah, you you’re going to look at everything through cop eyes. You know, it’s like, okay, I’m going to look at you. You know, let’s say I’m in a situation where, like, something is getting robbed. You know, I’m in a grocery store or a bank or something like that.

00:05:29:12 – 00:05:56:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Nine out of ten times, nobody’s going to get shot. Nothing’s going to go too crazy, you know? And most of the time they don’t even have guns. They threaten like a gun or an explosive or whatever. So it’s like, I’m going to be aware of my surroundings. You know, and I’m going to be like, okay, the guy that’s doing all this is a white male about 40 years of age with a beard, mustache, you know, medium build, wearing a gray, not shirt.

00:05:56:16 – 00:06:16:07
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. And glasses. Yeah. That’s where my head is going. Then I’m just like, okay. Is he right or left handed? You know. What’s he holding? Like the bag. What’s he doing most of his stuff with. Is there any piercings tattoos. You know, anything that’s you know, so you’re going to be looking like a cop. You know, that’s what you’re going to be doing.

00:06:16:09 – 00:06:40:03
Patrick O’Donnell
But I will use a caveat. If you think somebody is in imminent danger of getting killed, you’re going to take action. You’re it’s the cop inside of you. Yeah. We can’t help ourselves, you know? So as far as jurisdiction goes, you know, if I’m out in LA, you know, I was out in LA. Oh, man. About 20 years ago, I couldn’t go around, like arresting people or anything like that.

00:06:40:03 – 00:07:00:19
Patrick O’Donnell
You could do a citizen’s arrest, quote unquote. But all you’re doing is opening yourself up to liability, and you know, you’re going to let anything short of an ax murderer get away because you don’t want to get sued later, and then you’re going to get into trouble with your department, etc.. So the chances are very, very, very slim, very slim.

00:07:00:21 – 00:07:14:18
Dan LeFebvre
They start off, if I remember right from that, from the movie, like the first thing that John McClane notices is something going wrong is there’s gunfire. So right away he’s like, okay, somebody’s life might be in danger. And so it kind of switches into that mode, it seems.

00:07:14:21 – 00:07:30:15
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. And, you know, and he’s talking to himself. That’s one thing I did like about that movie was the insurgents. I was like, why didn’t you go in there and try to stop him, John? And then he’s like, well, John, you would be dead right now, John, if you tried doing that, you know, and it’s like, absolutely. You know, that that makes total sense to me.

00:07:30:15 – 00:07:32:27
Patrick O’Donnell
It was like, yep.

00:07:33:00 – 00:07:36:08
Dan LeFebvre
The inner monologue that he speaks out loud so we can understand.

00:07:36:14 – 00:07:39:11
Patrick O’Donnell
So we can hear it. Right? Exactly. Yes.

00:07:39:13 – 00:08:00:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Another key plot point for John McClane in the first Die Hard movie is how he has to fight the local law enforcement, and I don’t mean physically fighting him like he does with the bad guys, but he can’t seem to get anyone to believe what’s happening. For example, when he first calls for help, the dispatch operator scolds him, saying that she’s going to report McClane for using a channel reserved for emergencies.

00:08:00:00 – 00:08:18:06
Dan LeFebvre
So it’s like, what do you think I’m calling for? And then later on, there’s cops that do arrive at Nakatomi Plaza, and the deputy chief of police doesn’t like John McClane because he’s a mouthy cop from New York City. And then, even after the federal agents arrive on the scene, they never seem to listen to any of John McClane warnings from the inside of the building.

00:08:18:12 – 00:08:33:00
Dan LeFebvre
And then that culminates at the end of the movie, when the federal agents actually in the helicopter shooting and they start shooting at McClane on the roof because they think he’s one of the criminals. How well does the movie do, showing the way local law enforcement would react to a crime being reported by an off duty police officer?

00:08:33:00 – 00:08:34:09
Dan LeFebvre
From another scene?

00:08:34:11 – 00:09:00:21
Patrick O’Donnell
That almost never happens. But obviously, you know, you know, like most of the time, is there an out of jurisdiction cop in our city if they’re official business, they’re going to check in hopefully. Yeah. It’s like, hey, you know what? I’m a Chicago cop. I’m coming up to Milwaukee to interview a witness for a homicide. So I’m going to let you know for two reasons.

00:09:00:21 – 00:09:21:21
Patrick O’Donnell
One, it’s the right thing to do. And two, if you go sideways, then at least you know somebody knows where I am and when. If I was like the acting lieutenant, I was a sergeant for 17 years. Once in a blue moon, I got pulled off the street and I’d have to sit behind a desk and run the shift if my boss wasn’t there.

00:09:21:23 – 00:09:41:13
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, I was. I started using whodunit, so I would get a phone call from, you know, hey, I’m from blah, blah, blah city. We’re going to be tracking for a suspect that we have a warrant on. And, you know, it’s not high risk. We’re just going to do a door knock. And my first the first things out of my mouth is like, you want some help?

00:09:41:15 – 00:10:09:11
Patrick O’Donnell
And I would try to get them some help. So there’s usually not always but usually good cooperation. The feds are really bad at that, especially the FBI. They don’t want anybody playing in their sandbox. So unless they need you, then all of a sudden they’re super cooperative. But that’s another story for another day. But yeah, you know, as far as, okay, I’m an out of jurisdiction cop, I’m in your city.

00:10:09:13 – 00:10:25:05
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. Mean in 25 years, I rarely had an off duty cop that was, like, on vacation or visiting their kid or whatever in Milwaukee. All of a sudden get involved in some high stakes arrest it. Almost. It it really doesn’t happen. Yeah.

00:10:25:07 – 00:10:26:20
Dan LeFebvre
That’s why it’s for the movies. Yeah.

00:10:26:20 – 00:10:28:02
Patrick O’Donnell
Sorry, John.

00:10:28:05 – 00:10:30:02
Dan LeFebvre
And.

00:10:30:05 – 00:10:49:10
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we move to the second movie, Die Hard two, this time, John McClane is an LA police officer who’s waiting for his wife’s plane to land at Washington’s Dulles Airport. And just like the last movie again, he finds himself the wrong place at the wrong time. And at first, now we have airport police involved, and they don’t believe McClane.

00:10:49:11 – 00:11:04:23
Dan LeFebvre
But then, as things start to go from bad to worse, we see McClane actually working with the local law enforcement at the airport. So not only do we have John McClane as an off duty police officer for a different city from a different city for there for personal reasons, but then it’s also happening at an airport where they have their own law enforcement.

00:11:04:23 – 00:11:22:13
Dan LeFebvre
And then on top of that, since Die Hard two came out in 1990, before the TSA was formed in 2001, I felt like things would probably be a little bit different now. But is it likely that a city police officer would collaborate with the TSA or airport police, like we see John McClane doing in the movie?

00:11:22:15 – 00:11:47:13
Patrick O’Donnell
Well, like TSA, you know, there are a branch of Homeland Security and they really aren’t cops. The way cops look at TSA is kind of we we look at them as, gee, I mean, there’s some fine, there’s some fine TSA agents and they do a thankless job, and it’s a very important job. But a lot of them, yeah, I shouldn’t say a lot.

00:11:47:15 – 00:12:07:27
Patrick O’Donnell
There are some that are that guy or that gal that has a little bit of power and you could tell, you know, they’re abusing it and, you know, they couldn’t get a job as a quote unquote real cop somewhere. I know I’m hurt some feelings out there. Sorry, but yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of people that I know that are TSA agents.

00:12:07:29 – 00:12:27:15
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, I have one friend that’s a TSA agent that did 30 years as a cop, and he didn’t have a pension where he worked. There was no pension. So he had to go work for the feds. You know, that’s a federal job. And they offered a pension and health insurance until he hits, you know, well, health insurance was the biggie.

00:12:27:19 – 00:12:47:10
Patrick O’Donnell
He had zero health insurance after he retired. And he was like 55. So he got ten years before he’s going to go on Medicare. So he kind of had to do something like that. You know. And he’s not a he’s not a, you know, idiot or anything like that. And then I knew some people that just wanted to do it because they thought it looked cool and, you know, whatever.

00:12:47:10 – 00:13:08:27
Patrick O’Donnell
And they’re doing it as a job and they treat it like that. And hey, yeah, you know, good on them. But cops aren’t going to be, you know, like the airport cuffs. Most of them. Well, all of them are, you know, sworn police officers that have full arrest powers. And if I’m out of jurisdiction. Yeah, I’m John McClane.

00:13:09:00 – 00:13:34:01
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, you’re with whatever is going on. If I was the airport police, I would use that cop as much as possible for Intel of what’s going on. I’d try and get some information and. But I wouldn’t include them in any, like, you know, like, takedowns or any action, because first off, he has no arrest power. So where he’s at, you know, you can’t arrest anyone.

00:13:34:01 – 00:14:02:16
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, he’s he’s drawn to you, citizen running around an airport with a gun. Yeah. It’s like, why are you doing that? Become a judge. You shouldn’t do that. So you know. Yeah, it silly to answer your question. Yeah. I mean, the TSA really wouldn’t be coordinating with that. It would be the cops from the airport. If there is a situation like that and if they have to call in help, they’ll call it help, you know, from other agencies they wouldn’t be relying on anybody.

00:14:02:16 – 00:14:05:08
Patrick O’Donnell
That’s the civilian job. It’s like.

00:14:05:11 – 00:14:34:27
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, you know what? I appreciate you clarifying that because, I mean, the movie did come out before TSA was even a thing. So I just know security has changed so much that when this movie takes place in in the airport, it’s like, well, there’s got to be maybe this extra layer to it, but it sounds like maybe there even wouldn’t be as much different other than, you know, setting aside all the fictional aspect of it, but just from the, you know, the airport security and police officer, it sounds like that that sort of relationship would still be pretty similar to the way it is now.

00:14:34:29 – 00:14:57:00
Patrick O’Donnell
Well, yeah, I did an internship when I was in college with the sheriff’s department in Milwaukee, and they had the airport. They still do. They’re in charge of security for the airport, and they have a little substation there. And you have sheriff’s deputies there, you know, walking around doing whatever. Some and some are plainclothes, some are uniformed, and they take care of business at the airport.

00:14:57:02 – 00:15:19:05
Patrick O’Donnell
And I had a real good, tour and, understanding of the airport when I was an intern. And one of the things that struck out was really stuck in my head with the movie was, you know, the tower is a sacred place. John McClane would not be in the tower, period. I mean, that is like super. Yeah, I mean, that is secure.

00:15:19:07 – 00:15:46:13
Patrick O’Donnell
And the air traffic controllers are in the basement. They’re not upstairs in the tower. They’re all in the basement looking at scopes, you know, looking at their computer screens, doing whatever. And you can’t even say a word. I mean, that is like, that’s hollow ground. They can’t have any distractions for obvious reasons. Yes, for very obvious reasons. And when I retired from being a cop, I got a job with Delta throwing bags.

00:15:46:13 – 00:16:11:06
Patrick O’Donnell
I was, I unloaded and loaded planes at the airport and Waukee, and that gave me a real good understanding to of the security, because almost everything is restricted and you have a badge, you know, it’s just like a ID, you know, either around your arm or a lanyard or whatever, and that gets you into certain areas that you have to get it to, you know, to do your job.

00:16:11:09 – 00:16:31:13
Patrick O’Donnell
But the thing about it is you only go in one person at a time. So you and I are in the concourse and we have to go unload a plane, and we’re by one of the gates, you know, you see the doors where the gate agent, like, enters like a keypad, you know, some numbers into a keypad. And then there’s two layers.

00:16:31:13 – 00:16:53:21
Patrick O’Donnell
You do the keypad and you flash the your little ID thing, and then the little green light goes on and unlocks the door. Well, I can’t just follow you. I have to go through the same ritual. Every person that goes through that restricted area has to do that. So there are layers. There’s so many layers of security when it comes to an airport.

00:16:53:21 – 00:16:55:17
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh my God. So it was which.

00:16:55:17 – 00:16:56:16
Dan LeFebvre
Is probably a good thing.

00:16:56:19 – 00:17:06:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh Lord. Yes. You know it’s like but you know, it’s it’s borderline laughable. Well it is laughable what you know, I’m watching that. I’m like, I’ll never, ever, ever.

00:17:06:14 – 00:17:07:15
Dan LeFebvre
He just kind of walks in.

00:17:07:15 – 00:17:12:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, yeah. He’s doing. Yeah, yeah. Why not? You know.

00:17:12:24 – 00:17:20:02
Dan LeFebvre
Well, they don’t want to go to the intricacies of the airport security for movies. Be a little more boring.

00:17:20:04 – 00:17:21:28
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. So it would be.

00:17:22:00 – 00:17:41:07
Dan LeFebvre
There is another form of collaboration that we see happening in Die Hard two, when, John McClane uses a connection that he made in the first movie. That’s original Val Johnson’s character, Al Powell. So in Die Hard two, we see McClane calling up Powell to get some information on the new villains outside of official channels. So the movie implies that there was this kind of ongoing connection between McClane and Powell.

00:17:41:12 – 00:17:52:16
Dan LeFebvre
And now law enforcement agencies work together a lot in official capacities. But is it normal for individual police officers to work with other police officers from other precincts that they met in the past, kind of like we see in the movie?

00:17:52:18 – 00:18:14:05
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes. You know, if you work together in the past. Yeah. And, you know, maybe they’re, you know, they text on the regular or they go out for drinks or whatever. You know, you can’t help that. But I will use a caveat. Whenever you run somebody on a computer, you know, like for warrants or their driver’s license or a criminal history, there’s a history of you doing that.

00:18:14:07 – 00:18:37:24
Patrick O’Donnell
You’re logged on as Patrick O’Donnell. You know, Sergeant Patrick O’Donnell was looking to see what, you know, Dan’s criminal history was done. You know, February 17th, you know, 1015 in the morning, everything is recorded. So, you know, you have to be able to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing.

00:18:37:26 – 00:18:39:21
Dan LeFebvre
Again, for good reason, I’m sure.

00:18:39:26 – 00:18:50:15
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s see what my ex wife is up to, all right. Yeah. Well, yeah yeah, yeah. You don’t want to abuse the power. So. Yes. Absolutely.

00:18:50:18 – 00:19:11:28
Dan LeFebvre
Makes make sense. Makes sense. But in Die Hard two, we see another returning character from the first movie. That’s Thornburg. He’s played by William Atherton. Thornburg is the pesky TV reporter who’s always trying to get in the way. So he’s he’s getting a scoop on the story, right? So he’s always getting in the way. So if we’re to believe the first two Die Hard movies, the media can get in the way of cops trying to do their jobs.

00:19:12:03 – 00:19:18:18
Dan LeFebvre
From your experience, have you ever heard of the media a hampering the ability for cops to do their jobs like we see in a movie?

00:19:18:20 – 00:19:39:18
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, we have a tenacious relationship with the press. Sometimes they can be your ally. You know, if you have like, say, a Silver Alert, you know, have some, you know, a senior citizen that has dementia or some cognitive issue. And, you know, right now, you know, I live in Wisconsin and we just got to zero. It’s been below zero.

00:19:39:19 – 00:19:59:05
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, all morning. So if you know, grandma’s out there and she’s just wearing like a windbreaker, you know, we could use the press. It’s like, you know, hey, you know what? Come on down. This is what she looks like. You know, this is the last place she was seen. So you know what? You could use the power of the press for that.

00:19:59:07 – 00:20:17:08
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, they can be your ally most of the time. They’re annoying, you know, most of the time, they’re trying to sneak through the they they go over the line both literally and metaphorically. And I it’s the yellow crime scene tape. They just want to get through it so badly. But if you’re.

00:20:17:09 – 00:20:19:05
Dan LeFebvre
It’s like a race running through break to tape.

00:20:19:12 – 00:20:50:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. But if you’re in a big scene, what happens usually is we’ll corral the media into like a staging area. And most police departments have a Pio. It’s called a, the PIOs, the public information officer, and they are usually the ones that are going to talk to the press. If it’s a real big deal. Sometimes the chief may come out and talk to the press, etc. you know, it all depends on what’s going on.

00:20:50:14 – 00:21:13:29
Patrick O’Donnell
I mean, we had an officer that was shot. Thankfully he’s okay now, but you shot in the chest with a rifle and the mayor came out, the chief came out and they all talk to the press. Now dealing with. Yeah, elected officials of every street, you know, they love being behind the microphone. They love the camera in their face.

00:21:14:02 – 00:21:34:03
Patrick O’Donnell
Us absolutely not. We don’t want anything to do with, you know, a camera in our face, especially at a crime scene because we got stuff we got to do. So it’s. Yeah, it’s more of a pain in the butt than anything else. And one thing that really stood out to me, I was a rookie cop at a pretty high profile homicide.

00:21:34:06 – 00:21:58:00
Patrick O’Donnell
It was a cold Wisconsin night, and there’s this reporter out there and I recognize them from, you know, TV back then. You know, you watch the network TV shows, you know, I mean, the network TV stations for your news. And I’m like, oh my God, that’s, you know, Dan, whatever his last name was. And I come up to I look and I’m like, oh my God, you’re really ugly.

00:21:58:00 – 00:22:17:12
Patrick O’Donnell
Holly. He had like 20 pounds of makeup on his face. I mean, it was caked on thick. It was like Phyllis Diller, for God’s sakes. And I was just like, wow. And I’ve never seen a man before that that wore makeup, but, you know, and I was just like, well, this is an interesting night, all right.

00:22:17:14 – 00:22:20:12
Dan LeFebvre
Before 4K TVs where they could see every point.

00:22:20:13 – 00:22:32:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, yeah. You want to see them on 4K? TV? Yeah. You’d want a tube TV for that guy. It was. It was bad news. Or he had a face for radio. Let’s just say that. Yeah.

00:22:32:23 – 00:22:36:22
Dan LeFebvre
That I was going to say I’ve heard that phrase. Yeah, I hate the face for radio.

00:22:36:25 – 00:22:44:06
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. You know, I had a couple more observations about this, this, diet, if you don’t mind.

00:22:44:08 – 00:22:44:22
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah.

00:22:44:22 – 00:22:53:13
Patrick O’Donnell
For sure. Okay. Starting out with the naked keto, like, the bad guy is doing this, like karate. Kind of like the they’re called. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

00:22:53:13 – 00:22:56:00
Dan LeFebvre
He’s all sweaty. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah.

00:22:56:05 – 00:23:19:15
Patrick O’Donnell
Why is that there? I don’t understand it. And like, you know, this is kind of gross. What why is this here. You know, and I’m like, okay. And then John McLean is a lieutenant all of a sudden at LAPD, he’s like anointed. You know, if he was, if he would go to especially back then, you start out as a cop and you know, you’re going to go through all the selection stuff.

00:23:19:22 – 00:23:22:07
Patrick O’Donnell
He wouldn’t be a lieutenant. They don’t care.

00:23:22:08 – 00:23:24:08
Dan LeFebvre
Transfer from New York to LA. I think, you.

00:23:24:15 – 00:23:24:22
Patrick O’Donnell
Know, the.

00:23:24:22 – 00:23:28:17
Dan LeFebvre
Movie implies because his wife was in LA, so he wanted to move closer to be.

00:23:28:18 – 00:23:48:22
Patrick O’Donnell
Correct. There’s no such thing as lateral transfer back then from there. Okay. So he maybe he would be a cop. Maybe, you know, he with the time frame, you probably still be in the academy. You know he’d be nothing. So that was amusing to me then. You know there was a woman with a stun gun on the airplane.

00:23:48:22 – 00:23:52:11
Patrick O’Donnell
I’m like, how the hell did she get that? Through security? Yeah. Yeah.

00:23:52:11 – 00:24:00:17
Dan LeFebvre
Again, that was kind of one of those things of like this. This is before 9/11, right? I mean, things are different, but still, I feel like they still take in that.

00:24:00:19 – 00:24:21:07
Patrick O’Donnell
One thing from working as a baggage guy. We call ourselves baggage. It’s just really throwing the bags around. Yeah. There was an open golf bag on a conveyor belt and I’m like, oh, are you kidding me? Come on. Those golf clubs would be all over the place. I hated golf bags. Well, what? I’d see just a card for those coming at me.

00:24:21:07 – 00:24:42:11
Patrick O’Donnell
I’d be like, oh, they’re so awkward and just. They sucked. And then also, I noticed one of the bad guys in, like, one of the big, shooting scenes, and he starts out with a Glock, and then he ends the scene with a Beretta, and I’m like, how did he do that? Yeah. So my I caught that right away.

00:24:42:11 – 00:24:58:11
Patrick O’Donnell
And I’m like, no, that’s that’s not going to happen. And then probably the final thing with the Army coming in, there’s no way the Army is coming into that. The Army doesn’t the Army doesn’t respond to that. They’re not law enforcement. That’s a totally different thing.

00:24:58:14 – 00:25:13:21
Dan LeFebvre
That’s a really great point. I mean, in the first movie, it’s, I feel like with the second one, it was a lot of the first movie over again and then stepping it up. So like in the first movie, the people coming in were the feds. And then the second movie, it’s like, well, how do we go one step higher?

00:25:13:21 – 00:25:15:20
Dan LeFebvre
It’s the army, right?

00:25:15:22 – 00:25:24:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. I’m like, why are yeah, this is making zero sense to me right now. Like, what the hell? Yeah.

00:25:24:23 – 00:25:27:00
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, if you’re going to be fictional, might as well just go. All right.

00:25:27:02 – 00:25:30:19
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. You know what? You’re absolutely right. Absolutely.

00:25:30:21 – 00:25:48:01
Dan LeFebvre
Well, on the third movie, it’s Die Hard with a vengeance. At the beginning of this movie, John McClane is forced to go to Harlem wearing a sandwich board with some very racist phrase that I won’t repeat here, but the movie shows this. That’s it’s the first of a series of things that the bad guy is going to do in the movie.

00:25:48:01 – 00:26:09:22
Dan LeFebvre
It’s Jeremy Irons character, Simon, and he’s forcing McClane to do all of these things. And McClane doesn’t comply with Simon’s demands. Then Simon says he’s going to blow up a bomb in a very public place. Obviously, police officers risk their lives in the line of duty, but how realistic is it for a police officer to comply with the bad guys demands to avoid disaster, like we see John McClane doing in this movie?

00:26:09:25 – 00:26:15:12
Patrick O’Donnell
Almost not. Never. Not very, well, that’s it.

00:26:15:15 – 00:26:18:20
Dan LeFebvre
We don’t know. Go sheet with terrorists is one of the first things that kind of comes to mind.

00:26:18:20 – 00:26:46:03
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, well, and here’s the thing. They never negotiate it. You know, you would get we the police department has negotiators and that’s what would be used. You know, most police departments, y’all were trained in negotiating. And then there are negotiator orders. That’s there. That’s their forte. That’s what they train on and they train us up on that, etc., etc. but in a pinch, I guess, you know, if it was, I didn’t have any other choice.

00:26:46:03 – 00:26:59:22
Patrick O’Donnell
And I knew somebody was going to get blown up. You know, it’s like, yeah, I’ll, I’ll do whatever it takes to do that. And then John McClane was, suspended. He wasn’t even he was on an active duty. Well, you know, remember, that’s true.

00:26:59:24 – 00:27:02:15
Dan LeFebvre
They had to find him like he was all drunk and everything and hung over.

00:27:02:15 – 00:27:03:02
Patrick O’Donnell
And like.

00:27:03:07 – 00:27:04:05
Dan LeFebvre
A headache. Yeah.

00:27:04:07 – 00:27:21:20
Patrick O’Donnell
This is so stupid that they’re just like, okay, if guys. Yeah, in this inspector’s in this van with them before they. They put him out on the street. And, you know, his backup is like ten blocks away. That would not happen. They would have eyes on him. The entire time. They would not. Just like.

00:27:21:20 – 00:27:40:24
Dan LeFebvre
That was really weird. I like I think the movie, you know, the movie tries to explain away why they call McClane, you know, because Simon specifically asked for McClane to find out towards the end of the movie. Why? But, the backup being further away, it’s like that. That seemed really weird, especially in a major city like that.

00:27:40:24 – 00:27:45:09
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, you could be in buildings or there’s so many ways that you can be.

00:27:45:10 – 00:27:57:28
Patrick O’Donnell
There are all kinds of ways we could be close. And, you know, we wouldn’t just throw them to the wolves, you know, knowing that his ass is going to get kicked. You know, it’s like, no, that’s not going to happen.

00:27:58:00 – 00:28:05:12
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. And then hand him a gun to. So, he’s not like he’s going to, you know, get his ass kicked, but, they’re going to take the gun and.

00:28:05:17 – 00:28:05:27
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, yeah.

00:28:06:01 – 00:28:07:11
Dan LeFebvre
Probably do something worse. Right?

00:28:07:11 – 00:28:27:22
Patrick O’Donnell
I mean, absolutely. Yeah. Know that’s that. I was looking at that and I’m like. And the chief inspector and I don’t think they have chief inspectors in New York, but whatever. And you know, he’s back to being a New York cop again. Yeah. You flip flops around from department to department. Yeah. What the greatest be is New York, you know, just welcomes them back.

00:28:27:22 – 00:28:36:03
Patrick O’Donnell
I was like, oh, we missed you. Come on back down and we’ll make you a detective again without doing anything. You know, it’s like no work. Like that.

00:28:36:05 – 00:28:39:28
Dan LeFebvre
So this will be the third time he’s going through training again, right?

00:28:39:28 – 00:28:55:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Exactly. That’s all. I mean, like, they have, like, this highest ranking person in this, like, surveillance van. That wouldn’t happen. They’d be in their office. We have people for that. You know, that’s that’s what it all boils down to.

00:28:55:16 – 00:29:18:08
Dan LeFebvre
What we find out at the end of Diablo the vengeance that Simon’s plan all along was to make John McClane do all of these things. Basically, it’s a distraction from his real goal robbing billions of dollars worth of gold from the Federal Reserve. And obviously, the movie’s storyline is fictional. But in your experience as a police officer, have you ever had criminals using distractions to try to keep you from noticing the true intentions?

00:29:18:10 – 00:29:39:08
Patrick O’Donnell
Not anything this big, you know, most, you know, yeah. Billions of dollars, right? Yeah, I, I find it humorous that, you know, it’s like you need a new plotline. I mean, come on, you know? Okay, they’re who they’re trying to rob this, you know, whatever. It was like, okay, but it’s been used a few times, but okay, you know, retread that baby.

00:29:39:10 – 00:30:05:17
Patrick O’Donnell
But yeah, of course, the main, bad guy has to have an accent. I don’t know why. Maybe it makes some more villainy or something, but I every other foreigner. Yeah, it has to be something like that. But as far as distractions go. No, I mean, the closest I came was we had, two kids, you know, they’re like 18, 19 years old, detained.

00:30:05:20 – 00:30:29:28
Patrick O’Donnell
It was like some kind of girlfriend calls on the boyfriend, blah, blah, blah, allegations of this. And the other thing. And two of my cops find this guy and his body by a, bus stop maybe about five blocks down. And it’s like we’re just talking to them, and I could tell something is weird. You. I’m like, this kid has ants in his pants.

00:30:30:00 – 00:30:49:24
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, it’s summertime. His eyes are darting all over the place, and he’s just real squirrely. So I’m like, stand up. So I put handcuffs on him and I’m like, you know what? These come off just as easy as, you know. They go on and said, I just don’t trust you right now. And he says, okay. And then, you know, he’d calm down.

00:30:49:26 – 00:31:19:23
Patrick O’Donnell
And my cop is in her squad car running him, you know, for warrants, etc., etc. and he’s like, we’re buy a car dealership visa. Oh man, look at that car over there. So I look like that. And I look back and he’s gone. He’s running like the fastest track star in the Olympics with handcuffs behind his back. And I’m just like, I mean, he’s wearing, like, athletic shorts and a t shirt and, you know, tennis shoes.

00:31:19:25 – 00:31:46:24
Patrick O’Donnell
I’m wearing combat boots and I’ve got about 30 pounds of gear. He’s 18, I’m 53, and I like, oh, yeah. And I weigh 220 without the gear. And this kid maybe weighs a buck 60, and he’s sprinting and I’m like, oh my God, I can’t let this I can’t let this happen. So, you know, the cop tries to chase him with her car, then she runs out of pavement.

00:31:46:24 – 00:32:07:13
Patrick O’Donnell
Then I’m going four wheeling with this guy running after him, and I finally get him. And the only reason I got him was he’s got asthma. And I’m like, oh, thank God for asshole. Yeah. Because he he probably would. I ran me and I’m like, that’d be embarrassing. But he distracted me enough to, you know, and it happened like in half a second.

00:32:07:15 – 00:32:27:18
Patrick O’Donnell
And I felt so stupid. And I’m the boss, you know, I’m just like, But, you know, we scooped him up, got him an ambulance, and he was fine. And it turns out he had a warrant for bank robbery. That’s why he was running. So. Yeah, the feds wanted them. He robbed a bank. So I’m just like, okay, that’s a good pinch.

00:32:27:18 – 00:32:34:19
Patrick O’Donnell
That’s a good arrest. You know? I’ll take it, but I’m just glad I’m just glad I got.

00:32:34:22 – 00:32:39:01
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I guess there’s there’s a little difference between what we see in the movie. And. Look over there.

00:32:39:03 – 00:33:02:18
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it wasn’t anything like, you know, pre-planned or anything and. Yeah, there’s clues, you know, when they start, like if you have somebody that’s like in like stopped on the street or something like that, that their eyes are darting around, they’re looking for an escape. They’re looking for the, the safest, fastest egress away from you.

00:33:02:21 – 00:33:12:08
Patrick O’Donnell
So I should have been smarter. I I’m a big car guy. I’m like, oh, really? I don’t like to like son of a biscuit. But, there he goes.

00:33:12:10 – 00:33:31:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, we often see these things in action movies, where people are shooting each other, and this diet is no different from that. Obviously, there’s a ton of Hollywood fiction, but in this movie, there seems to be really no hesitation for him to just shoot off any gun and gets a hand on it really stood out to me.

00:33:31:03 – 00:33:50:15
Dan LeFebvre
There was one scene where John McClane just kind of walks up to one of the dump trucks. He knew the bad guys were in it, so he just starts shooting inside without even verifying that they’re actually who he thought was driving the truck. Of course, it’s a movie, and he was right. They were the bad guys. But can you share what it’s like for a police officer to discharge their weapon, compared to what we see happening in the movie?

00:33:50:18 – 00:34:13:09
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, if you’re shooting at a human, there has to be an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to yourself or others. That’s like the statue that the that’s the criminal statute. Because if I shoot and kill somebody, say you have a hostage, you know, you have the gun to the, poor person’s. Yeah. Like had that’s.

00:34:13:09 – 00:34:34:27
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. It was in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re you’re robbing the convenience store, and, you know, I just walk it, you know, kind of thing as a cop, you know? Will I shoot you? Probably depending, you know. But if there’s 2 or 3 innocent people behind, you know, I’m not you. There’s so many things to consider because it’s not just, you know, it’s like.

00:34:34:27 – 00:35:01:27
Patrick O’Donnell
Like I said before, there has to be an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to yourself or others and great bodily harm is some type of harm that is most likely to cause death. So doesn’t that that kind of thing. So you have to be really cognizant of, okay, do I meet the statute statutory requirements? Because if I shoot you one human being, killing another human being is homicide.

00:35:02:00 – 00:35:24:00
Patrick O’Donnell
Now, if it’s, you know, in the line of duty where you’re preventing, i.e. me getting killed, you know, in self-defense or somebody else that’s justifiable homicide, you’re not going to get criminally charged, but it’s still a homicide and that’s how it gets investigated. But you can’t. So you have things to think about is like, okay, is this statutorily okay?

00:35:24:02 – 00:35:51:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Then you think, okay, am I going to hurt somebody doing this or kill somebody else? You know, it’s, you know, that’s why people are like, why can’t you shoot the gun out of the bad guys hand? You know? ET cetera, etc.. In the most people aren’t that good of a shot. You go for, you know, that’s it’s so silly because, you know, it’s hard to that’s a skill and it’s a diminish some some cops are great shots.

00:35:51:21 – 00:36:12:29
Patrick O’Donnell
Some aren’t so great. We have to qualify every year. And I still do. I have a nature to 18. So I have to go through the same course and I can still I’m a good shot, but, nighttime, I’m chasing somebody. My heart rate and blood pressure are way up. There’s so many things to consider. And, you know, again, you have to consider the risk to civilians.

00:36:13:05 – 00:36:29:23
Patrick O’Donnell
And you have to consider the risk of, blue on blue shooting where you accidentally shoot another cop in, like, crossfire. So you have to be aware of a lot of different stuff before you pull that trigger. And what we would always say is like, you can’t put the you can’t put the bullet back in the gun.

00:36:29:25 – 00:36:34:12
Dan LeFebvre
Very different than what we see with John McClane in the movies, that’s for sure.

00:36:34:15 – 00:36:46:11
Patrick O’Donnell
Well, you’re fucking I’m a huge dirty Harry fan, and it’s like, man, that guy would. I don’t know how many guys you would kill in one episode. You’re in one movie. Excuse me? And I’m just like, oh, look out. Just. Yeah.

00:36:46:14 – 00:37:04:17
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, in the movie with John McClane, he’s. He obviously isn’t putting that much thought into anything. It’s, I mean, not anything, but, you know, when he when he’s shooting, you know, he shoots when he feels he wants to shoot, it’s not really. I’m going to, you know, think about who is driving in that scene. You know what?

00:37:04:17 – 00:37:19:10
Dan LeFebvre
The dump truck he’s not even really putting any thought into before. He just pulls out the gun and just shoots into the door and kills the driver. Right. It’s not I’m going to put this guy in handcuffs or whatever. It’s kill first. I ask questions later.

00:37:19:13 – 00:37:40:00
Patrick O’Donnell
It’s true. Yeah. And the couple of things, you know, to finish up with this, die Hard. Yeah. Samuel Jackson is working with the cop. No, they would use him for information, you know, they would interview him, and that would be the end of it. He wouldn’t be riding around with them. Is like his sidekick, the. That’s not going to happen.

00:37:40:02 – 00:37:40:23
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah.

00:37:40:25 – 00:37:47:06
Dan LeFebvre
I think this movie’s excuse for that was Simon forced them to do it right, which was kind of goes back to the whole doing whatever Simon says.

00:37:47:06 – 00:38:04:23
Patrick O’Donnell
That would not happen. No, because, you know, it’s like, okay, now we’re putting his life in jeopardy. Yeah. He’s, you know, he’s an innocent civilian, you know, that’s trying to help out. Yeah. It’s like, absolutely not. No way. You know? And then, you know, Bruce Willis is trying to get the fire department. So he calls him an officer down.

00:38:04:23 – 00:38:26:12
Patrick O’Donnell
That’s not necessary. And it’s really bad taste to tell you the truth. And then the subway cop, there was a, scene when the subway is drawn down. You know, he’s pointing a gun at a kid for hopping a turnstile and using his phone. And I’m like, well, this is just silly. You wouldn’t do that. I mean, unless you you thought he was armed or something like that.

00:38:26:14 – 00:38:49:25
Patrick O’Donnell
And then I don’t know who outfitted these guys, but like the extras that were cops, they’re wearing their police hats, but they don’t have a cap shield at it. That’s the. It’s like a little badge that goes on the hat. The police hat. We call them cap shields. And like, half of them had those. And I’m like you, they they wouldn’t let you walk out of the precinct house unless you were.

00:38:49:27 – 00:38:52:25
Patrick O’Donnell
You had that capsule that you go through an inspection.

00:38:52:25 – 00:39:01:00
Dan LeFebvre
So what is the I mean, is that, for what is the purpose of of that as to why they wouldn’t be allowed to walk out?

00:39:01:00 – 00:39:08:11
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, because you have to be in full uniform if you don’t have the capsule on your hat. You’re looking for a uniform, you know? Okay, that’s like I wasn’t sure there was.

00:39:08:14 – 00:39:10:09
Dan LeFebvre
You know, a utilitarian purpose of it.

00:39:10:12 – 00:39:15:04
Patrick O’Donnell
Was more, you know, it’s it’s like having the badge on your outermost garment. If you’re in need, I.

00:39:15:04 – 00:39:15:27
Dan LeFebvre
Gotcha. Okay.

00:39:15:29 – 00:39:20:24
Patrick O’Donnell
That’s a that’s a part of the uniform. You have to have the entire uniform.

00:39:20:26 – 00:39:25:02
Dan LeFebvre
Makes sense, because otherwise you could be the bad guy that, gets shot by John McClane.

00:39:25:05 – 00:39:41:05
Patrick O’Donnell
And then there was the scene where there was a bunch of cops, and maybe half of them had their holsters empty. There were holding on guns. They just didn’t give them one. Not even a pretend one. And I’m just like, come on, guys. Yeah, yeah, I guess. Yeah. They ran out of like, you know, rubber.

00:39:41:10 – 00:40:04:05
Dan LeFebvre
We don’t have a big enough budget. McClane is stealing all the guns. So he’s going back to the movie franchise. Where up to Live Free or Die Hard. And that movie, when the FBI Cyber Security division in Washington, DC is hacked, they call in everybody to help track down some of their top suspects. And that brings John McClane into the picture as he’s tasked with picking up, just in character, Matthew Farrell.

00:40:04:07 – 00:40:15:11
Dan LeFebvre
Immediately when McClane shows up to Farrell’s apartment, he shows him his badge and Farrell thinks the badge is fake. Have you ever encountered a situation like that where someone you were there to help, didn’t think you were a real cop?

00:40:15:13 – 00:40:47:12
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, it’s kind of funny. You know, it’s I spent most of my career in uniform, but every now and then I was tasked with undercover assignments or plainclothes assignments. And it’s amazing how the world looks different to you and how people know. It’s like, oh, so this is how it really works. Because when people see a police car in person, you know, in an officer in uniform, you know, they act this specific way when you’re plainclothes, you know, it’s like, okay, I remember it was like 3:00 in the morning.

00:40:47:12 – 00:41:12:15
Patrick O’Donnell
I was on a plainclothes assignment, and I was monitoring the radio, and I heard a stalker, a call for a stalker outside this girl’s apartment window. And I’m like, oh, this could be fun. So I’m going to use I’m going to use C, which is an undercover car. There’s plainclothes. There’s unmarked cars and undercover cars. An undercover car is I mean, I think I was driving like, a Plymouth.

00:41:12:21 – 00:41:47:16
Patrick O’Donnell
What was this? Oh, Chrysler. Cordoba. I mean, it was old. It was just a jalopy. And y’all, we had, like, beans on the rearview mirror. You know, the. There’s no way anybody could tell that’s a cop car. They know that there’s a cop in there where an unmarked car is usually like a Crown Vic. And now they’re going to be like the explorers, and they don’t have decals on the outside or lights on the outside, but they do have lights and a siren, and they’re fully equipped, like a squad car.

00:41:47:19 – 00:41:54:29
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I’ve seen those. They they’re not cop car. They’re not painted a cop cars. But you can still tell, you know, that they’re cop cars.

00:41:55:01 – 00:42:13:00
Patrick O’Donnell
You could tell. Yeah, absolutely. And we’re not trying to be undercover with those. We’re just trying to be not as noticeable with those. And it’s amazing how, you know, right away when you see that light bar and you see the decals on the side, you’re like, oh, shit. You know, I was like, okay, you know, and cops would do that too.

00:42:13:00 – 00:42:28:03
Patrick O’Donnell
I, I can’t tell you how many times I’d be going to a call or something. I see red and blue lights behind me. I’m like, oh, what did I do wrong? There’s that incident. Even though I’m going to the same call, I’m like, oh wait, I am the cops. Okay, yeah, I’m okay now. I know, like, all right, yeah, it does happen.

00:42:28:06 – 00:42:55:15
Patrick O’Donnell
But anyways, so I get out, I’m wearing jeans and a t shirt and I’ve got a necklace badge and, you know, it’s just my badge is on, you know, like a necklace thing, a chain and one side is the badge and the other side is my ID, and I’ve got, I’ve got a gun and handcuffs and my radio, and I’m just walking up and this guy is just, like, leering into this girl’s apartment and on the.

00:42:55:15 – 00:43:15:01
Patrick O’Donnell
Hey, dude, what’s up? He said, oh, not much. I’m like, what you up to, dude? And he’s just like, who are you? And I pointed to the badge and he says, well, that ain’t real. I’m like, oh, okay. So then I pulled up my t shirt and you can see my gun in my, handcuffs. And he said, those do look real.

00:43:15:01 – 00:43:35:09
Patrick O’Donnell
I’m like, yeah, they are this, oh. That was kind of okay. Those are real. Yeah. And then at the same time, you know, like two uniform, coppers start walking up and he’s just like, all right, whatever you got me. You know, he he couldn’t let go of the you can’t stop love, I guess. But he just couldn’t let go.

00:43:35:12 – 00:43:46:10
Dan LeFebvre
I’m trying to remember. I think that’s basically what McLean had in this part, too, was that, you know, on the necklace, his badge to to show, very similar situation. It sounds like all the different purpose to be there, of course.

00:43:46:13 – 00:44:04:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Right, right. Yeah. If you know you’re going to be arresting people, you almost all if you’re plainclothes, you almost always have a uniform with you just in case something bells go south. You know, some defense attorneys like, hey, my client just thought it was just some random dude with a gun and a fake badge, you know, blah, blah, blah.

00:44:04:16 – 00:44:11:08
Patrick O’Donnell
So it’s always nice if it’s if you can, to have some guys in uniform.

00:44:11:11 – 00:44:28:15
Dan LeFebvre
That makes that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned earlier with the FBI. And so when we saw that, you know, in the first movie with some federal law enforcement, when this one too, we also see John McClane being called in to help federal law enforcement, is that a common thing for local law enforcement to be called to assist federal agents.

00:44:28:17 – 00:44:53:18
Patrick O’Donnell
All the time? You know, there the ratio of city cops or county cops compared to feds is, yeah, there’s probably like 100 to 1. There isn’t a lot of feds there. Just just numbers. You know, there aren’t many of them. If they are going to arrest somebody, usually they call us and they don’t do a lot of arresting, to tell you the truth.

00:44:53:21 – 00:45:21:00
Patrick O’Donnell
I remember one time I got a call from the dispatcher and she’s like, could you meet the Secret Service and bring a couple of your guys with you at blah blah, blah location? I’m like, oh, wow, this could be cool. So I’m like, yeah, sounds fun. So it’s like 8:00 at night. I meet this guy and he’s just wearing jeans and a t shirt, and he’s got a lot cooler gun than I do, a lot more expensive gun.

00:45:21:02 – 00:45:39:14
Patrick O’Donnell
And he’s got a little back then the next tall, cell phone that, like, shirked. He had a really. He had one of those and he had a BlackBerry. I’m showing my age, and he had a lot nicer equipment than we did. And he says there’s some counterfeiters in this apartment. I’m just. I’m just going to knock on the door.

00:45:39:17 – 00:45:56:18
Patrick O’Donnell
I have a warrant. He said it’s not high risks. They’re not supposed to be armed, but you never know, he said. I just want some uniforms. And I’m like, I totally get it. So we go in there, knocks on the door, Secret Service. And it’s like, no. First he had me do it. Know I’m like, yeah, Milwaukee police.

00:45:56:18 – 00:46:23:04
Patrick O’Donnell
And they open the door for the police. And sure enough, there this is an apartment. They had a computer and a printer and there were literally printing money. It was so bad. It was like. So just like a regular printer. Yeah. And they’re they’re printing money. And I’m just like, wow. Like this. You’re not even trying, man. This this is almost like monopoly money.

00:46:23:07 – 00:46:25:18
Dan LeFebvre
And they didn’t print it off I guess.

00:46:25:18 – 00:46:42:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. And they’re doing it in front of a Secret Service agent. I’m just like, oh, this is awesome. I absolutely love it. Yeah, it was very anticlimactic. I thought it was something really cool. And I’m just like, this is kind of boring. Really. And he said, yeah, it is. He said, you mind coughing them up and taking them downtown?

00:46:42:14 – 00:47:10:00
Patrick O’Donnell
He said, I’ll take it from there. And I’m like, yeah, no problem. So yeah, we know we do help, you know, FBI, Ice, ATF. Yeah. And DEA, they kind of keep to themselves. They do help us. Let’s see. So FBI. Yeah. The FBI is an interesting relationship. You know, we have or at least when I was still there.

00:47:10:00 – 00:47:34:29
Patrick O’Donnell
I’m sure they do. We had a human trafficking, like, task force, and we had 1 or 2 FBI agents assigned to that, and they were with our detectives and police officers from our Sensitive Crimes Division, and they were there more or less, because, again, Washington has a lot more money than we do. They had a lot more resources and they would help us out with stuff.

00:47:35:02 – 00:48:02:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. See, that was one example that bank robberies people think that the FBI responds to like every bank robbery. No they don’t, they don’t. And if you do get an agent, usually it’s like an hour after the fact and they’re taking down like notes about, okay, they’re interested to see, okay, is this like a robbery crew, you know, are they going from city to city or crossing state lines, you know, that kind of thing.

00:48:02:16 – 00:48:17:08
Patrick O’Donnell
So that’s that’s why the FBI is going to be there. Or if it’s a bank robbery and they start popping rounds off and somebody gets shot or God forbid, killed, then the FBI is going to respond. But it’s still our baby. It’s we’re still taking care of the investigation.

00:48:17:11 – 00:48:35:28
Dan LeFebvre
It sounds like, and a in a different situation, but as similar to what you talked about before where like, even when you were undercover, you wanted to have some uniformed cops there for the arrest itself. It sounds like it’s a similar sort of thing with except just, you know, federal agents and then you’re the uniform cop that’s there to, to help.

00:48:36:00 – 00:48:38:15
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

00:48:38:18 – 00:48:57:15
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if there is one scene from Live Free or Die Hard that really stands out to me. It’s that scene where John McClane takes his car and he drives it into the helicopter. Obviously a Hollywood stunt, right? But that scene, as they end the sequence where we see McClane doing some pretty masterful driving, and as moviegoers, we just assume he’s capable of doing this because of his training as a police officer.

00:48:57:18 – 00:49:01:09
Dan LeFebvre
And I’m sure your training did not have anything to do with driving cars into helicopters.

00:49:01:15 – 00:49:05:21
Patrick O’Donnell
But here, a little bit after intervention? No, there was none of that going on.

00:49:05:21 – 00:49:10:27
Dan LeFebvre
But what was, what kind of driving training do real police officers get?

00:49:10:29 – 00:49:48:00
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, when you’re in the academy, you go through what’s called evac emergency vehicle operations course, and you’re trained how to, you know, do high speed pursuits, how to do them safely, you know, and they actually took us out to a racetrack here in Milwaukee. And that was a lot of fun. We had mock chases where you would you’re in a squad car and you would chase the instructor and you’d, you’re, you know, you’re chasing, you’re talking on the radio at the same time, you know, and it’s not just like, I don’t know, like a free for all.

00:49:48:00 – 00:50:13:17
Patrick O’Donnell
There’s rules when it comes to chasing cars, you know, it’s like, okay, when you’re when you’re pursuing somebody, if you’re the squad, you have to go, okay, you give your squad name, you have to give your location. You know, it’s like, okay, squad five, I’m northbound on university Drive, the 5400 block, you know, pursuing a, red Toyota Corolla with blah, blah, blah license plate.

00:50:13:19 – 00:50:35:06
Patrick O’Donnell
And the reason, okay, he’s wanted for homicide, all right, as a boss would try was I would let that go a lot further than. Yeah, I’m pursuing him because he blew a stop sign. All right, risk reward. And it’s like, am I going to risk this cop’s life or other civilians, you know, this high speed pursuit for something?

00:50:35:08 – 00:50:56:19
Patrick O’Donnell
Not that, you know, big of a deal, but sometimes not in a lot of time. What I thought wasn’t a big deal all of a sudden, you know, there’s a lot of guns in the car, or they’re wanted for something pretty heinous. You don’t know what you’re chasing. So we get all trained up, you know, they’re behind the science and they will hammer, you know, the rules.

00:50:56:19 – 00:51:40:05
Patrick O’Donnell
You know the department every department has their own rules, and they’re a state statute. You have to you have to drive with due regard. You can’t just go out there, you know, and think you’re, you know, a NASCAR driver or anything like that, or drive and helicopters or whatever. But, you know, when I was new and for quite a chunk of my career, there were no cameras in the squads or body cameras, so it wasn’t critiqued like it was once those things, you know, got up, you know, it’s like I remember being going down city streets at over 100 miles an hour, where if you make one little mistake, you’re dead and you, who’s

00:51:40:05 – 00:51:54:11
Patrick O’Donnell
learn by it was on the job training. Let’s just say that you and some were really good at it, and some cops were really bad at it and shouldn’t be driving cars, I think. But hey, that’s how you get trained up.

00:51:54:13 – 00:52:06:27
Dan LeFebvre
Well, maybe, like you were talking about before, you know, with McClane going from New York and then to LA, back to New York, like he would have to go through the Academy multiple times. He’s just gone through so many times that now he knows how to drive into helicopters.

00:52:06:27 – 00:52:14:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Right? Yeah, it’s very true. Yeah. I guess maybe I was absent that day in the academy when we had to work after intervention training.

00:52:14:14 – 00:52:16:00
Dan LeFebvre
But that day.

00:52:16:02 – 00:52:24:06
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes, I, I must have missed it. Yeah. I didn’t go to that in-service. Whatever. My bad, my bad.

00:52:24:09 – 00:52:45:21
Dan LeFebvre
Well, the last film in the franchise is A Good Day to Die Hard. This time, the franchise pushes the stakes even higher as it brings John McClane into international affairs. The plotline in this movie revolves around his son Jack, who’s in trouble in Russia. But then it turns out Jack is a CIA operative. And so together we see this father son team trying to stop a nuclear weapons heist from this fictional storyline.

00:52:45:21 – 00:52:57:15
Dan LeFebvre
We kind of get the concept of there’s a parent and child who are both in law enforcement working together. How realistic is it for multiple generations and different branches of law enforcement to work together, like we see happening in the movie?

00:52:57:18 – 00:53:23:09
Patrick O’Donnell
There are legacy cops more, you know, like my first partner on the job, her dad was a cop in Milwaukee for years, but they never worked together. Like, especially on a case that’s almost unheard of maybe in small towns or something. That might be the case, but for the most part, no. And most places don’t have hard and fast rules.

00:53:23:09 – 00:53:51:05
Patrick O’Donnell
But I wouldn’t want to be in the same, district or on the same assignment as my kid because I would be overprotective. I would yeah, I, I wouldn’t be thinking of him as a cop. I would I’d be thinking of him, you know? And it’s only natural. I’m a dad, you know, it’s like that instinct is going to kick in first, and you may not do your job efficiently and effectively if you’re thinking like that.

00:53:51:09 – 00:54:01:09
Patrick O’Donnell
But yeah, there’s a ton of legacy cops. Yeah. It’s not unusual. It’s like, oh, you see the nameplate? And I’m like, hey, I know your dad. You know, that kind of thing. It’s like this kind of cool.

00:54:01:11 – 00:54:17:26
Dan LeFebvre
That makes a lot of sense. And I didn’t really think about it this way, but, I’m not sure. Like the Sullivan brothers is, is something that comes up in the military. But, you know, when when that ship sank and just like in World War two, all five brothers were lost. And so I could see it almost being a similar sort of concept, they wanted to separate.

00:54:17:26 – 00:54:40:18
Dan LeFebvre
Then from there on out, the military started separating siblings. I could see it almost being a similar thing to like if you’re there was with your kid. Not only are you not doing your job as well, which means that your life could be an even more danger. Not only your life then, but also your your child’s life. And it just makes everything that much worse, not only for who you’re trying to help, but yourselves as well.

00:54:40:21 – 00:54:48:22
Patrick O’Donnell
Right? Yeah. And your kid might be acting a little differently than they normally would if you’re there. I mean, it’s just human nature.

00:54:48:25 – 00:54:50:13
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, it goes both ways, for sure.

00:54:50:15 – 00:54:51:17
Patrick O’Donnell
Absolutely.

00:54:51:19 – 00:55:11:14
Dan LeFebvre
Well, since the last movie takes place in Russia, we end up with a similar plot point that we saw in the first movie, except in the first, Die Hard. It was New York Cop going to LA when he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This time the wrong place is Russia. So I asked about police officers in different jurisdictions earlier, but now I need to ask about an international jurisdiction.

00:55:11:14 – 00:55:20:24
Dan LeFebvre
So as a police officer, if you’re traveling to another country like John McClane doing in the movie, what would really happen if you found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time outside of the US?

00:55:20:27 – 00:55:47:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Why? You are truly a fish out of water. You are just John Hughes citizen. You. You have no special powers. There’s no police friendship. There’s no, you know, whatever. You’re just another dude, you know, or another chick. That’s you. You got a whole lot of nothing. And if you’re in Russia, who isn’t exactly our ally, you know, and I’ve heard stories about Russian prisons.

00:55:47:21 – 00:56:10:12
Patrick O’Donnell
I know, like in China, the Chinese police can arrest you and not charge you for up to a year. So you could be rotting in a jail for a year without even getting charged with a crime. And, you know, just there’s no such thing as due process in Russia. You know, the lines between the military and the police in Russia are very, very blurred.

00:56:10:15 – 00:56:21:06
Patrick O’Donnell
It’s it’s, I would not want to be on the business end of an AK 47 with some Russian police officer. Hell, no. I you know, it has all the. You’re.

00:56:21:09 – 00:56:26:19
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I wouldn’t want to be in the business end of anywhere, anywhere, whoever is holding it, but. Yes, definitely. Yeah.

00:56:26:21 – 00:56:49:25
Patrick O’Donnell
Right. Exactly. But yeah, I just think of gulag, you know, or, you know, something like that. And I’m like, no, thank you. You know, that’s something it’s it should be an international incident. You know, hopefully our embassy would get involved in this even if hopefully they would know, you know, this happened in the you know, the government can help you, that kind of thing.

00:56:49:25 – 00:57:02:24
Patrick O’Donnell
But you know, with all the stuff blowing up and people getting killed and all that, it’s hard to like cover that up. It’s like, okay, the police are going to be coming to this. And I never saw them.

00:57:02:27 – 00:57:12:14
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, that’s true. I was trying to think, if they ever showed up and I don’t. Yeah. Now. No, I mean, I guess that would be an extractor. Yes. MPP so maybe that was.

00:57:12:17 – 00:57:30:04
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, I think I saw a couple of Russian like, squad cars. Maybe they had like the little blue light on top. But other than that, I never saw like cops coming out and like, trying to do cop stuff. They were pretty much they had the run of the whole area there to do all their blowing up and shooting and all that cool stuff.

00:57:30:07 – 00:57:51:19
Dan LeFebvre
It’s almost a complete inverse of the first movie, where there were a lot of cops, and then just the feds came at the very end, but then at the end and movie, it’s like, you know, CIA and. Well, and then John McClane, and, you know, and then all these other, you know, high military or, you know, secret things and then, you know, oh, there’s some kind of cops in the background.

00:57:51:26 – 00:57:57:24
Patrick O’Donnell
Maybe you’re exac, you know, I you’re right. I didn’t think of that. Yeah. It’s like the polar opposite really.

00:57:57:27 – 00:58:10:06
Dan LeFebvre
Since you do offer your services to help screenwriters be more authentic with their stories, if they had hired you for the diehard franchise, what’s one of the primary things that you think needs to change to help the storyline be a little more accurate?

00:58:10:08 – 00:58:30:28
Patrick O’Donnell
Well, you know, I looked at that question. I’m like, it’s so far fetched. I think I would have took an A pass. I, I’m like, how can I, I can’t fix this. It’s so far off the rails that it’s I mean, we talked about, you know, just there’s so much stuff even with like my favorite was the first to die Hard.

00:58:30:28 – 00:58:51:20
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, yeah. He he’s got a gun on a plane. You know how it is. Even back then, even if we’re transporting prisoners, you still have to make all these notifications. And the captain of the airplane can say no, even if you get all these clearances and everything’s hunky dory, you know, you load, you know, you get, you get seated before anybody else in your own.

00:58:51:20 – 00:59:10:25
Patrick O’Donnell
You’re the last one to leave. Obviously, if you have a prisoner and if you’re just armed every 99.9% of the time, you know it has to be stowed in your luggage and there’s all kinds of hoops you have to jump around to have a gun in your luggage, and it’s not gonna be your carry on. It’s going to be in the belly of the plane.

00:59:10:27 – 00:59:29:06
Patrick O’Donnell
And it’s kind of a big deal. I mean, it’s to me, I think it’s a pain in the butt. I don’t even I could, but I don’t I don’t deal with it. It’s just like it’s one more pain in the button. What if my luggage gets lost? I don’t want my gun. Get lost. You know, it’s. No, thanks.

00:59:29:08 – 00:59:31:13
Dan LeFebvre
And think about that. That never happens in the movie.

00:59:31:15 – 00:59:40:08
Patrick O’Donnell
No. Hey. Yeah. Oh, shoot. They lost my luggage. Hey, like I said, I was a baggage handler. This stuff does happen. That’s real.

00:59:40:10 – 00:59:49:13
Dan LeFebvre
Diehard, too. Is just John McClane at the little kiosk waiting for his luggage. That’s. The entire movie’s just waiting.

00:59:49:15 – 00:59:51:15
Patrick O’Donnell
But be funny. I like that.

00:59:51:18 – 01:00:06:09
Dan LeFebvre
There are a lot of people I think are inspired by movies. And, you know, for example, I’ve heard stories of, like, Indiana Jones inspiring people to become archeologists. In your experience, have you ever seen a police officer like John McClane inspire people to become police officers in the real world?

01:00:06:11 – 01:00:10:04
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes. And I would not want to work with them or go on a plane with them.

01:00:10:06 – 01:00:14:06
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, because they want to be John McClane shooting. Yeah, that’s true for sure.

01:00:14:08 – 01:00:35:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Exactly. Yeah. We had some cowboys I worked with, but even the cowboys or cowgirls would have to play by the rules, or they get fired and criminally charged. I mean, there’s only so far you could push the boundaries and. Yeah, I mean, police work in a nutshell, a lot of it’s really boring. Until it is.

01:00:35:16 – 01:00:39:20
Dan LeFebvre
I wouldn’t want John McClane to be in my my district. Yeah.

01:00:39:22 – 01:00:44:18
Patrick O’Donnell
Is absolutely. Well.

01:00:44:21 – 01:01:02:17
Dan LeFebvre
One of the common movie tropes that we see happening in Die Hard in a lot of movies, too, is when the bad guy tells they’re playing just as they’re about to kill the good guy. And this one, for example, in the first movie, Hans tells John McClane the reason he started the fire in Nakatomi Towers, because they’ll keep looking for him unless they think he’s dead.

01:01:02:20 – 01:01:16:11
Dan LeFebvre
I’m guessing that whole idea of the bad guy revealing their plan is something that’s made up for the movies. But then again, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. Have you ever heard of the bad guys revealing their plan like we see happening time and time again in the movies now?

01:01:16:11 – 01:01:39:07
Patrick O’Donnell
Most criminals I was were really stupid and it was either. And most of this, the criminality that I dealt with was kind of spur of the moment. It wasn’t like a plan hit. It was in the air, like most of the homicides I went to was they started as a fight and they escalated. I mean, yeah, there were like revenge or jealousy.

01:01:39:07 – 01:02:00:22
Patrick O’Donnell
I’ll follow the money, follow the sex. Well, you know, whatever. But for the most part it was like, hey, we’re playing cards. You’re cheating. It gets into a fight, I’m losing. I’m going to grab that knife out of that butcher block, and I’m going to stab you, you know, that kind of thing. Whereas, yeah, I never met a criminal mastermind of any kind.

01:02:00:24 – 01:02:08:14
Patrick O’Donnell
I read that just. Yeah, yeah, there ain’t a whole lot of those running around, thank goodness.

01:02:08:16 – 01:02:11:12
Dan LeFebvre
And John McClane just happens to run into all of them. You know? Right.

01:02:11:18 – 01:02:17:18
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah. Darn the luck. And they all have accents and they’re all really scary.

01:02:17:21 – 01:02:35:25
Dan LeFebvre
Well, from the first Die Hard movie is in 1988, and then the last one is in 2013. There’s like a 25 year span and something that we see John McClane seemingly struggling with in those 25 years is technology that, for example, in Die Hard two, McClane asks his wife how she’s calling him, and she’s like, it’s the 90s now.

01:02:35:25 – 01:02:59:28
Dan LeFebvre
So they have phones on the airplane. And 2007 Live Free or Die Hard is all about hackers, and the movie makes it seem like McClane just doesn’t get along with the new technology. And I know your career as a police officer was also 25 years different years from 95 to 2020. Correct me if I’m wrong on that, but, although it’s not the same years as the Die Hard franchise, it’s still 25 years of changing technology.

01:03:00:01 – 01:03:12:13
Dan LeFebvre
Can you share how cops have used or maybe as individual officers have struggled with technology, like we see McClane seeming to do over the course of the movies, and then your own 25 year career?

01:03:12:16 – 01:03:39:18
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes. When I started in 95, we handwrote all of our reports. The only computer in the whole district station was to run people, you know, in their license plates. And there was only one of those, and there was a couple of typewriters. And you handwrote your reports, you use carbon paper, you used white out, green out, pink out, depending on what the report was.

01:03:39:20 – 01:03:57:15
Patrick O’Donnell
So, you know, it was pretty medieval. And I remember I got like out there and I’m like, where the computers. And some day guy was like, what are you talking about, kid? We don’t need those damn computers. And I’m just like, there was two dictionaries in the assembly that most of the pages were, like, missing out of them and stuff.

01:03:57:15 – 01:04:18:09
Patrick O’Donnell
And I’m just like, oh, God, in my handwriting is terrible. So I’m like, oh, this is no bueno. But, you know, I started out with that and the squad cars had no computers, no cameras. There was no body cameras back then. We didn’t have tasers. You know, people didn’t use a Taser like we’re poor. Big cities don’t have big budgets.

01:04:18:11 – 01:04:51:00
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, we we don’t have the money, you know, so, you know, so we handwrote reports and like I said, there was no squad computers. And slowly that stuff, you know, started coming into fruition. And when we started getting all the computers, etc., I became a sergeant, I was boss. Now the cop on the streets relies on that computer quite a bit, and they have cameras in their squads that automatically turn on when you activate the lights and the siren, you know?

01:04:51:02 – 01:05:11:03
Patrick O’Donnell
And same thing with the body camera. Body cameras came about three years before I retired as a sergeant. I didn’t have to wear one. They didn’t require bosses to wear, so it was something new, etc. I mean, I had a computer in my squad and most of the time I was a beverage holder, you know, or an arborist.

01:05:11:03 – 01:05:28:16
Patrick O’Donnell
That’s the I’d have my arm up either on the computer, like if I was sitting around, you know, smoking a cigar or whatever, like art. I wonder if my cigar fits on that. All right, that’ll work. But but, you know, for the most part, no. And you know, the younger sergeants would make fun of me all the time.

01:05:28:21 – 01:05:55:08
Patrick O’Donnell
Like, you didn’t even turn that thing I did. It did do. I’m like, oh, sure. Didn’t like, I don’t need it. It makes you I mean, they’re they’re great tools, but they also make the cops lazy because you develop an ear for the radio. See, you’re in a district and it’s day shift that might be like 25, 30 cops somewhere in that ballpark.

01:05:55:10 – 01:06:25:27
Patrick O’Donnell
And you keep an ear out for the radio, whereas it’s like, okay, Dan just got sent to a battery, domestic violence actor still on the scene. They send you and your partner now I’m going to keep that in the back of my head because I was like, well, those can turn south pretty quick sometimes. And it sounds like, you know, and the dispatcher says, and there’s sounds of people fighting in the background, okay, initially they’re going to send two squads.

01:06:25:29 – 01:06:47:27
Patrick O’Donnell
I’m going to keep that in the back of my head. Then they’re going to send me to something else. Okay. Even though they sent me to something else, I’m going to keep in the back of my head where you are in case something bad happens. So you develop, in the ears for the radio. And the newer cops don’t have that as well because they’re constantly checking their screen like, we’re okay.

01:06:47:27 – 01:07:05:04
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, Dan is that blah blah, blah. You know, that fraction of a second or 2 or 3 seconds can be a big deal. So I, I was never a huge fan of them. Every now and then I’d power it up if I had to, but for the most part, I just ignored it.

01:07:05:06 – 01:07:24:17
Dan LeFebvre
Were you then being asked to do more and more, just assuming that you could rely on the technology to do some of that for you? I think of, you know, even today, just, you know, a lot of people are doing a lot more things are being asked to do a lot more things in their job because they’re like, oh, well, you can just kind of allow the technology to remember that for you.

01:07:24:19 – 01:07:35:12
Dan LeFebvre
But you’re saying, you know, remembering it in your head, which there’s definitely a benefit to that. But then also I’m wondering if are you being asked to do so much more? Then it becomes hard to remember things.

01:07:35:14 – 01:07:58:21
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, you know that that’s part of it. And, you know, when we did get squad computers, they didn’t have GPS. Now I do believe they have GPS, but I knew the neighborhood that I worked in like the back of my hand. And if I heard, you know, 1234 North Astro Street, I could vision I could visualize it or I’d have a pretty good idea of where it was.

01:07:58:24 – 01:08:21:06
Patrick O’Donnell
The newer kids, they’re not kids or adults, you know, they’re relying on GPS. It kind of makes you dumb, you know? It’s like, you know, they’re they’re looking at a computer screen, whatever. And then another thing, you know, they’re expecting more. It’s like, okay, well, you don’t have to go to the district station to do your reports. You have a squad computer, you can do them on your computer in the car.

01:08:21:09 – 01:08:37:25
Patrick O’Donnell
And it’s like, okay, because I want the cops on the street for visibility sake, too. You know, more cops out there instead of sitting in a district station. But the problem with that is, hey, it’s not safe at all, because where’s your face? Where’s your eyes start?

01:08:37:27 – 01:08:41:03
Dan LeFebvre
Because you’re not looking at. Yeah. You’re not focused on a computer screen.

01:08:41:03 – 01:09:03:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Yep. Absolutely. So I don’t think it’s very safe and it’s really awkward. If you ever try to type with your arms up like this, it’s nothing is. You know, they have all this equipment crammed in this little area and it’s just incredibly uncomfortable. And. Yeah, and nobody wants to sit in the same car for eight hours or 10 hours or 12 hours.

01:09:03:17 – 01:09:08:00
Patrick O’Donnell
You got to get out and stretch your legs. It’s nice to have a change of scenery every now on that.

01:09:08:03 – 01:09:27:03
Dan LeFebvre
I hadn’t thought about that of, you know, if you’re focused on your computer so much that, yeah, I mean, you don’t know what’s going on around you and you’re you always have to have situational. I think even being a citizen, you know, it’s good to have situational awareness, know what’s going on around you. Yeah. Especially when you’re in a car because you don’t know what other people are doing.

01:09:27:03 – 01:09:31:08
Dan LeFebvre
You might be parked, but there might be a crazy, reckless driver out there too. Who knows?

01:09:31:15 – 01:09:56:14
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You know, we call it head on a swivel where, you know, it’s like you’re constantly scanning for threats and you don’t have to be a cop for that. You know, I’ve dealt with a lot of victims of crimes, obviously, and a lot of them had zero situational awareness. I never saw them coming. Yeah, because your face was buried in your phone or you EarPods, you know, AirPods in, and you you didn’t hear them.

01:09:56:14 – 01:10:18:11
Patrick O’Donnell
You didn’t see them. You you’re in your own little world. You know, people are like, I get a kick out and people are literally walking into each other now because their faces are buried and it’s like, let alone some like, scary dude that’s going to rob you or do something worse. Do you? You you have no idea. And the same thing with cars, you know, like safety tips for cars.

01:10:18:13 – 01:10:41:11
Patrick O’Donnell
I exaggerate how much space I leave between me and the car in front of me. If I’m rolling up to a red light, I’m thinking of escape plans, you know, because I’ve been to so many carjackings and a lot of them happened up at red lights. You know, it’s like, okay, before you know it, you have some guy who’s shoving a gun in your face and, you know, trying to drag you out of your car.

01:10:41:13 – 01:11:02:04
Patrick O’Donnell
Well, first off, it is like, okay, see that sidewalk? I’m going up on the sidewalk. Yeah, I’m going to drive through somebody’s lawn to get out. But if I’m if I don’t leave any space in front of me, then I have nowhere to go. I’m trapped. I hate that feeling of being trapped. I always yeah, I always try to have some kind of escape route.

01:11:02:06 – 01:11:04:09
Dan LeFebvre
Probably not going through the helicopter like John McClane.

01:11:04:15 – 01:11:09:15
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, yeah, that’d be. That is frowned upon. Yeah.

01:11:09:16 – 01:11:11:00
Dan LeFebvre
Not a viable escape.

01:11:11:03 – 01:11:12:03
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes.

01:11:12:06 – 01:11:22:06
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask for your take on the one question that everyone always debates when it comes to this franchise in your mind, is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

01:11:22:08 – 01:11:38:17
Patrick O’Donnell
Hell, yes. It’s it’s the best Christmas movie. I love Die Hard as a Christmas movie. I play Die Hard every Christmas. And my kids, you know, they’re adults now and they, you know, they’ve got kids are like, you’re going to like, die. And I’m like, oh, hell yeah. I got to play that and it’s Christmas for God’s things.

01:11:38:20 – 01:11:44:12
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, we’re in agreement on that. Yes, I watch it every Christmas as well. Not the entire franchise, but at least one.

01:11:44:14 – 01:11:45:25
Patrick O’Donnell
No. Yeah, the first one for sure.

01:11:45:26 – 01:12:14:17
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about the accuracy of a police officer like John McClane on screen. Before I let you go, I have a two part question for you because not only do you have a fantastic podcast called Cops and Writers, where you help authors and screenwriters write more accurate stories, you’ve also written multiple books yourself, including a brand new book called The Good Collar, and I’ll make sure to add a link to in the show notes for everyone to order right now, before I let you go, can you share a little bit more about your inspiration behind starting cops and writers, and maybe give my audience a sneak peek

01:12:14:17 – 01:12:15:17
Dan LeFebvre
into your new book?

01:12:15:19 – 01:12:22:11
Patrick O’Donnell
Sure. The podcast. I started the podcast almost four years ago, as of yesterday, has been four years.

01:12:22:14 – 01:12:23:22
Dan LeFebvre
And I congrats.

01:12:23:24 – 01:12:38:24
Patrick O’Donnell
Thank you. And as you know, it’s a lot of work sometimes for not a whole lot of reward. But you know, you get to meet cool people. I think that’s the best part of it. Some interesting people that you never would have if you didn’t have the podcast.

01:12:38:27 – 01:12:45:12
Dan LeFebvre
And exactly. We wouldn’t have a chance to talk about John McClane driving through helicopters. I keep going back to that one, but why wouldn’t?

01:12:45:13 – 01:13:16:22
Patrick O’Donnell
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the first. So I started the podcast to promote two books that I just wrote called Cops and Writers and those books were for writers to get their police facts straight, more or less. And I started a Facebook group and I started the podcast to promote my books. Well, before I know it, the Facebook group has 7500 people in it from all over the world, and the podcast grew legs and just took off.

01:13:16:24 – 01:13:29:02
Patrick O’Donnell
And I’m like, I didn’t. And I didn’t at first really mean to do that. You know, all of a sudden it’s like, oh, wow, look at that. People are listening, you know? I mean, you know what it’s like sometimes you think you’re just talking to a microphone and nobody’s listening.

01:13:29:04 – 01:13:36:09
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, for sure. It can be hard sometimes just talking to it, like like you’re talking about, you know, typing on the screen. You just talking to a screen, right? Yeah.

01:13:36:11 – 01:13:56:24
Patrick O’Donnell
Exactly. So you know, and then the as far as, you know, the podcast and everything else, I started out writing other books that had nothing to do with police work and I was going to writers conferences, and I bumped into people and made friendships with people that knew a lot more about this than I do. And they’re like, you should really write a book.

01:13:56:27 – 01:14:18:18
Patrick O’Donnell
You know, helping out, writers, you know, authors and screenwriters. And I’m like, okay, that sounds that sounds like a good idea. And when you go to these conferences, inevitably people are going to be like, oh, you’re that cop guy. And I’m like, I’m not advertising it. I don’t have a t shirt on saying I’m a cop guy or whatever, but and they’re always very respectful.

01:14:18:21 – 01:14:41:11
Patrick O’Donnell
They’re very nice. They’re like, hey, would you need a warrant for this? You know, would my character, would he really do this? Yeah, yeah, she’s a detective. And one would have, you know, blah, blah blah. And I’m like, yeah, I’d be more than happy to help you. So that’s kind of spawned another industry for me where I’ve. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve helped, you know, screenwriters, I’ve helped authors.

01:14:41:11 – 01:15:15:12
Patrick O’Donnell
So it’s been a lot of fun that way. And as far as my newest book, the, The Good Collar, it’s just imagine Dexter, Deathwish and John Wick got together and had a baby. That’s what I love. I love Dexter, I always liked Dexter, and I thought to myself, well, could you think of Dexter? But instead of being the serology, the blood spatter guy, you’d be the police chaplain.

01:15:15:14 – 01:15:43:17
Patrick O’Donnell
That everybody trusts, everybody loves. But he’s got that vigilante thing in them where, you know. Okay, Dan, just, you know, murdered a bunch of orphans. Yeah, and burned the school bus or whatever he did, and he got away on a technicality, and it’s like. So he writes the wrongs and actually the good car, we can circle back to Bruce Willis because he did a remake of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish.

01:15:43:19 – 01:15:45:00
Dan LeFebvre
That’s true. He did, didn’t he? Yeah.

01:15:45:01 – 01:16:01:02
Patrick O’Donnell
Yes. That was you. He played a Chicago E.R. doc and his wife and daughter. I think the wife got killed and the daughter was, like, brutalized in their own home. And he gets a gun and he turns into this, like, Doctor vigilante.

01:16:01:05 – 01:16:06:22
Dan LeFebvre
Well, that sounds like we have a lot of, potential future episodes to talk about, for sure.

01:16:06:25 – 01:16:10:01
Patrick O’Donnell
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

01:16:10:04 – 01:16:12:12
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you again so much for your time, Patrick.

01:16:12:15 – 01:16:20:01
Patrick O’Donnell
Thank you. Dan.

00:03:43:04 – 00:04:02:21
Dan LeFebvre
Before we look at some of the details of the movie, I always like to kick things off with an overall letter grade. Now, our movie today adds a little extra challenge since it’s ancient history, and that often means there’s a mix of myth and legends as well. What letter grade would you give 2004 as Troy for its historical accuracy?

00:04:02:23 – 00:04:28:04
Neil Laird
I mean, it’s a tricky one, and we’ve talked before in other podcast, and it’s easier when you’re looking at something it happens and not in the full light of history, certainly in history and the Trojan War, as we would talk about is numbers on this, though we know there’s a Troy and other things. So I would say on that level, looking at how it’s based, we say how it is, based on Homer and the story we know.

00:04:28:06 – 00:04:38:25
Neil Laird
I probably give it a C. We’d make a lot, take a lot of liberties, which we’ll get into. Again, we’re not talking about history. We’re talking about are they sticking to the source material?

00:04:38:28 – 00:05:06:19
Dan LeFebvre
Not the beginning of the movie. We see two princes of Troy named Paris and Hector visiting King Menelaus of Sparta to solidify a peace between Troy and Sparta. That piece is short lived in the movie, when parents falls for the Queen of Sparta, Helen, and brings her back to Troy with him, that understandably enrages her husband, the King of Sparta, who happens to be the brother of a Greek power hungry warlord named Agamemnon.

00:05:06:21 – 00:05:21:21
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s basically the Cassius belly that Agamemnon needs to attack Troy. Which the movie also seems to suggest is something he’s always wanted to do anyway. How much of this justification for war between the Greeks and Trojans really happened?

00:05:21:23 – 00:05:45:05
Neil Laird
Well, here’s an interesting, you know, answer to that, because some of that is based on Bronze Age life, and they get that right. Most of the stuff that you talked about didn’t happen at all in Homer. There’s this thing about the Iliad for those who haven’t read it, even though we think about the Iliad as the Trojan years of Trojan War that ends with Achilles death and and the Trojan horse and all that.

00:05:45:08 – 00:06:08:27
Neil Laird
None of that happens in the book. What happens in the book is about the last 50 days of a ten year siege. So when we open up, it’s already the 10th year. Trojans are already frustrated and tired, and they want to go back to Greece. And the Trojans are looking down and thumbing their nose. So all this stuff we talk about is really that great drama between Achilles and Hector and Agamemnon.

00:06:08:27 – 00:06:30:17
Neil Laird
Everything. So we don’t know what spurred on the war. Other than two sources, one is in the Odyssey, if you would call it a sequel, or I suppose the world’s first sequel is about Odysseus getting coming home after the war, also being lost for ten years, and then finally getting back to Ithaca and trying to get Penelope back and all of that.

00:06:30:19 – 00:06:56:29
Neil Laird
And it’s only there we get some information about how Achilles died if we talk about and also about how Paris and Helen shacked up and why. And the little he says with just a few lines is that there was some sort of of meeting in, Mycenae where Agamemnon, the, the king lived, and Paris and Hector were there, and then Helen left with Paris.

00:06:57:01 – 00:07:20:14
Neil Laird
We don’t know. Under duress. We don’t know she fell in love. Most sources suggest that, she actually went willingly. Homer is very ambivalent about it. Helen is barely a character in the play, which is interesting, even though she’s the one that launches a thousand ships. She’s rather passive, so, you know, she knows she loves, Paris. Or if she was dragged off and she’s trying to get out.

00:07:20:16 – 00:07:49:01
Neil Laird
She’s very, very much in the shadows. But conversely, how they describe Agamemnon and how they describe all the tribes of, of, of Greece is quite fascinating as a historian, as someone who loves history. That’s pretty close to how Bronze Age life was. It was very much a series of city states and the Bronze Age, you know, for those who don’t know, it was 2 or 300 years, maybe a bit longer, when bronze was obviously the key weapon.

00:07:49:04 – 00:08:15:14
Neil Laird
And that’s when you had these great empires like the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Mycenaeans, the Phoenicians. It all collapsed around 1100 BC, and Troy was part of that. So we think that the Trojan War happened probably around that around 1180 BC. Towards the end of the Bronze Age. But the way they all basically function at the time was dealing with each other, making pact with each other, and then breaking those pact and then going after each other.

00:08:15:19 – 00:08:41:20
Neil Laird
Troy was a very big city at the time. It was the gateway to the East. Mycenae was one of the biggest cities on the Greek mainland, so it’s highly likely they wanted to form some sort of pact, some sort of economic pact. And if Agamemnon’s modus operandi was to bring down, you know, the greatest empire there, then he had his he had his reasoning in Menelaus, his brother being slighted when his wife is taken.

00:08:41:25 – 00:08:54:29
Neil Laird
So although that’s all liberties taken by the film, by Wolfgang Petersen in the film and whoever wrote it, it is very true to life of what Bronze Age culture could have been. Do it.

00:08:55:01 – 00:09:15:02
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Well, it sounds like basically they’re just taking a few lines of text and then turning an entire movie into a few lines. So obviously a lot is going to be filled in and fictional, but that leads into something else I’ve always been curious about when it comes to ancient texts and such. Do we just assume that they didn’t have fiction writers back then, that everything that they wrote actually happened?

00:09:15:09 – 00:09:20:04
Dan LeFebvre
And when we think of movies today, there’s so many movies that are strictly for entertainment purposes.

00:09:20:12 – 00:09:37:00
Neil Laird
And in a way it’s more that in the Amazon, they say the first historian is Herodotus, and he doesn’t come around to the fourth century BCE. So people didn’t give a toss about the facts back of the day. If you look at mythology of mythologies, the Greek gods and all that stuff, they’re all crazy. They’re all they’re all fantastical.

00:09:37:07 – 00:10:03:01
Neil Laird
People did not pick up a book for veracity. They did pick up, and it did get a gut check on what life was like. So while there was no novel per se, Homer or Homer is called an epic poet. And he’s, you know, he’s he’s, ascribed to these two great pieces. But, of course, remember, in the Greek time, few years later, after Troy, you have, all of the Greek playwrights, the, Sophocles and Eurydice and all those kind of people.

00:10:03:01 – 00:10:20:09
Neil Laird
And those are all fiction. So people very much love to escape into the world of fiction, more so than fact historians and even then was a word yet. So I think when people sat there under a tree listening to Homer tell the Iliad, and it was almost all oral, which is why things changed. They weren’t looking for facts.

00:10:20:09 – 00:10:26:22
Neil Laird
They weren’t saying, wait a minute. Last time you told me that was in life, and it’s 1080.

00:10:26:24 – 00:10:30:21
Dan LeFebvre
And no historical letter grade for for them.

00:10:30:24 – 00:10:35:11
Neil Laird
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exact. You know, in these books, man. Tell me a day. Oh, that’s a good one.

00:10:35:13 – 00:11:01:06
Dan LeFebvre
Well, a couple other key figures in the movie on the Greek side are King Odysseus of Ethical, you mentioned. And then the greatest warrior in the world, Achilles. At Agamemnon’s bidding, Odysseus convinces Achilles and his elite fighting force called the Myrmidons to fight for Greece against the Trojans. And it’s not until later in the movie that we find out Odysseus is doing Agamemnon’s bidding, basically out of fear.

00:11:01:08 – 00:11:11:09
Dan LeFebvre
If he doesn’t, then Agamemnon is going to destroy Ithaca. Does the movie do a good job showing the way Odysseus and Achilles fit into the story?

00:11:11:12 – 00:11:32:15
Neil Laird
No they don’t. They do a pretty dodgy, representation. And again I say again, we talk about the film itself. I think one of the great strengths of the film that I enjoy was Brian Cox’s performance as Agamemnon. He’s this bullish little pug of a man going around. He’s funny, he’s enjoyable, and you know, you like him being a villain in The Iliad.

00:11:32:17 – 00:11:55:02
Neil Laird
He, Agamemnon, is very much full of himself, and he’s very much, full of bravado and makes mistakes, some key ones, which is the crux of the book. But he’s also a hero. He’s still one of the greatest heroes of the day. In fact, I remember when there’s one scene where Hector is asked, you can fight anybody. On a one on one, you know who who would you fight?

00:11:55:03 – 00:12:19:16
Neil Laird
He goes, well, I won’t fight Achilles, Odysseus or Agamemnon. They’re all better than me. So even in the Iliad, Agamemnon is killing men by the dozens. By the thousands. He is a he is definitely a formidable foe. He’s not quite the buffoon, the blustering buffoon that he is in the film. And there’s no there’s no suggestion in the book that Odysseus is his patsy.

00:12:19:16 – 00:12:40:09
Neil Laird
Now, Odysseus, you know, again, he has the great sequel comes up. And if you and I just we read the Odyssey just a few weeks ago, and reminded how many stupid mistakes Odysseus makes, he was often his own worst enemy. But in the Iliad he is not some sort of like patsy for Agamemnon. He very much wants the war to end.

00:12:40:11 – 00:13:05:04
Neil Laird
He wants to get the bloody hell home. And the only way to do that after ten years is to get to to get Achilles, who they cannot win without to rejoin the war. So he is doing Agamemnon’s bidding because he wants to go bloody hell, back to Penelope and he’s sick of it all. So that is kind of whitewashed in the film, and it makes it more like Agamemnon is sort of this big warlord that everybody else sort of like, you know, kowtowed to.

00:13:05:06 – 00:13:07:26
Neil Laird
That’s not quite the way it is in the book.

00:13:07:28 – 00:13:41:01
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Well, that might answer my next question, because that’s I was watching the movie. Something that really seemed odd to me was how clear it was that Odysseus and particular Achilles really don’t like Agamemnon. That’s why Agamemnon doesn’t go to Achilles himself, because, as the movie says, there’s only one man he’ll listen to. But all I could think of was, if Achilles is the best warrior and he and Odysseus and maybe all of these other Greek provinces conquered by Agamemnon really don’t like Agamemnon, why don’t Achilles and Odysseus lead a revolt against Agamemnon instead of fighting Troy?

00:13:41:03 – 00:13:50:01
Dan LeFebvre
Is there anything from history that helps fill in some more context around why so many who didn’t like Agamemnon would still fight for him?

00:13:50:03 – 00:14:11:18
Neil Laird
Because at the end of the day, this is the age of heroes. And when people listened to the play, it was all no, no one, you know, you know, no one’s going to go home. You know, no one is going to go with their tail between their legs and go back. So Odysseus and all the others, Nestor and all the other people, the Ajax, all these other people that are in there, none of them want to disappear.

00:14:11:18 – 00:14:37:11
Neil Laird
None of them. None of them want to end the war. They want to win the war, but they don’t want it. So despite his bluster, they’re still there. They’re on Agamemnon’s side because they want the same thing. They’re all fighting for the same thing, and they’re all heroes. Keep in mind, this is mythology. So everybody is, you know, painted in a way where they’re making great sacrifices and they’re doing it for posterity and that kind of stuff.

00:14:37:14 – 00:14:59:26
Neil Laird
So writing roughshod over the King and then going around him wouldn’t be something that a Greek warrior would do. The Greeks were together. They were a unified force, you know. That said, the key tension in the the both the I keep talking about the book, but of course, the film too is the tension between Achilles and Agamemnon, which is very personal.

00:14:59:26 – 00:15:26:21
Neil Laird
It’s all over a woman, and it’s all like two thin skinned men who can’t get on with it. Thousands die because these two people have these petty problems. So Agamemnon definitely comes across if there’s any villain in the book, like the film, and I think the film wisely chose him as a villain, it is Agamemnon because he sets the whole, slaughter of the Greeks and sets the whole tragedy in motion.

00:15:26:23 – 00:15:49:27
Neil Laird
He he’s too proud to apologize to Achilles after he slighted him. So those are all very personal things. So I think I just see us in the other just kind of want to stay clear of it. It’s going to get back to war. So I don’t think, you know, going around the king who’s who’s the leader of men is this keep call in the book would be the way to do that in a Greek play.

00:15:49:29 – 00:16:12:13
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. That makes a lot more sense because in the movie, it just kind of seems like, Achilles is in the center of it all. And whatever side he’s on, he’s going to win. So why would he bother to fight for somebody he doesn’t even like when he, you know, he can turn the tides as the greatest warrior of all to fight against Agamemnon if he wanted to, whoever, whatever side he’s on is going to win.

00:16:12:16 – 00:16:30:01
Neil Laird
And it’s true. And he is. And certainly in the play, too, they talk about how he’s a fleet footed greatest warrior of all time. He can kill a thousand with one slice. So, you know, and we buddy, you know, the, the, the whole weak army starts to die because he decides to sit the war out of. That’s how important one guy’s.

00:16:30:05 – 00:16:54:06
Neil Laird
So he certainly could take over for Agamemnon. But there’s also in terms of, you know, the one thing, the one thing the film did and it’s got a lot of controversy from, I guess, people who know the place. So well or the poem so well is that got rid of the gods, and I understand why they do. But the one thing that you get when you read Homer that is not in the films is the gods are always meddling.

00:16:54:09 – 00:17:23:01
Neil Laird
So someone is always whispering, you know, Athena is always whispering in and, and, Agamemnon’s ears do this, do that. So they’re all being spurred on by the gods and and of course, the others don’t want to piss the god off by going against their favorite. So you have that key element where all of this is the reason all of these people are the gift of men is because they have help from Mount Olympus and, you know, want to piss off Mount Olympus.

00:17:23:03 – 00:17:26:16
Neil Laird
So you just kind of ride it out.

00:17:26:18 – 00:17:46:24
Dan LeFebvre
You don’t want to piss off Mount Olympus, I like that. Well, back in the movie, the Greeks launched their attack, sending a thousand ships bearing 50,000 soldiers to Troy. The battle begins with Achilles and his Myrmidons landing on the beaches of Troy first, and he leads them in slaughtering the defending Trojan archers. Then they move on to the nearby temple to Apollo.

00:17:47:02 – 00:18:10:29
Dan LeFebvre
Their Achilles kills all the priests and desecrate the temple itself by cutting off the head of a statue and telling his men they’re free to take whatever treasure they want. Hector’s soldiers arrive, but they’re all killed as well, and there are only two Trojans who survive this initial battle. One is Hector, who Achilles lets go free because he says it’s too early in the day for killing Princess.

00:18:11:02 – 00:18:20:06
Dan LeFebvre
And the other is Hector’s cousin Perseus, which Achilles takes as a captive. Is that how the Battle of Troy really began?

00:18:20:08 – 00:18:37:11
Neil Laird
None of that. None of that happened. In fact, I think it’s one of the weakest scenes in the film. I can only imagine they put that in there to show Brad Pitt, you know, being strong willed to get a battle scene early on to show he almost a Troy, all muscled up, annoyed up. And he’s taken charge. Okay.

00:18:37:16 – 00:19:01:09
Neil Laird
You know, remind you again, the Iliad opens in year ten. So they’re already been entrenched in the muddy, you know, camps for ten years. But even then, it’s a very curious and I think a very, very weak sequence because a historically, it’s it’s a mess. Those are, those are Greeks, the Egyptian statues in the back there, basing them more on Egyptian myths rather than anything Greeks.

00:19:01:09 – 00:19:23:21
Neil Laird
And they’re, they’re borrowing from Abydos and, and Abu Simbel and a lot of Egyptian and messing it up with some of the Syrian stuff. They’re making it up by making it look a little Greek, but it’s very much an Egyptian motif, which is totally wrong there. And then also the whole thing just seems so crude for Achilles to come in and start killing the gods and killing the priest and everything.

00:19:23:23 – 00:19:44:02
Neil Laird
It feels like it was done by committee to show an action sequence early in the film, and it does nothing to advance the plot. None of that is is in the book. Achilles and Hector don’t meet until they’re one on one. You know, out front there’s there’s a scene that there’s no sense of that. So no. So actually none of that is accurate.

00:19:44:04 – 00:20:02:21
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Well, maybe it’s like you’re saying doing an action sequence right up front, for entertainment purposes. But also they just mentioned Achilles being the greatest warrior. And so they have to show him being the greatest warrior. And they also point out that in the movie, at least, they point out that clearing the beaches is this great feat.

00:20:02:21 – 00:20:05:16
Dan LeFebvre
And Achilles is basically able to do that by himself.

00:20:05:19 – 00:20:25:04
Neil Laird
That’s true. It’s a good point because you got to show if he is the greatest warrior. We got to see why early on we can’t just talk about it. But of course, all he kills is a bunch of priests in one temple. It’s not exactly the most impressive, win of all time. That’s the whole thing is is a very curious sequence that just rang hollow to me.

00:20:25:06 – 00:20:45:18
Dan LeFebvre
That’s a very, very good point. Well, after that vicious start to the battle on the beaches, Paris offers to end the war in the movie before it goes any further, he wants to fight King Menelaus of Sparta in this one on one battle for Helen. And in this fight, Menelaus gets the advantage of Paris, who then turns to his brother Hector for help.

00:20:45:20 – 00:21:04:27
Dan LeFebvre
Menelaus is about to kill Paris when Hector ends up killing Menelaus, and this just enrages Agamemnon and the Greeks, who then launch a full scale attack on Troy. But according to the movie, they’re driven back and forced to retire to their camp on the beaches. Did this battle between Paris and Menelaus actually happen?

00:21:04:29 – 00:21:30:25
Neil Laird
It did, but not. It doesn’t end the way it does in the film. And another very curious change they make. And again, I think because the filmmaker is just another doing a one off, they’re not they’re not talking about Gregory cos they’re going to be around forever. They’re making one. They’re done. So the beginning starts the way it does in the book where, where Paris, and Menelaos fight.

00:21:30:27 – 00:21:55:08
Neil Laird
And what’s interesting in the book is it’s also makes Paris out to be sort of like the dweeb he is, because he’s very much mismatched by Menelaos. And, what happens there is Menelaos is about to kill him, and I forget which goddess it is, comes and saves them and cocoons them so he doesn’t die. He doesn’t call underneath his brother’s, legs.

00:21:55:08 – 00:22:16:00
Neil Laird
But he’s he is about to be killed by Menelaos, and he survives. That’s how it ends. Menelaos does not die. In fact, Menelaos goes on and he goes back, and he’s a big character in the Odyssey. He goes back to his, his family and his wife and his Greek kingdom, and he has Helen in his arms. Helen goes back with them.

00:22:16:06 – 00:22:38:25
Neil Laird
So when the Odyssey, when Odysseus popped by to say hello, he’s there with Helen and she’s like, you know, mixing up drinks for them is kind of like just popping by. Menelaos does not die. There’s a very curious thing that they did to kill him off. And I guess it is because the characters to it, to a film audience in 2004 don’t have quite the resonance they do to a Greek scholar or something.

00:22:38:25 – 00:22:57:17
Neil Laird
So it’s like a Greek people and they make him very much. He is kind of a crass character in Homer too, so they they kind of get that right where he’s not exactly. He’s he’s not like his brother. He’s a brute. And while he’s strong, he’s not bright at all. He’s definitely a hothead, if you don’t mind. Is probably seeing him die.

00:22:57:23 – 00:23:05:17
Neil Laird
He’s a good person to kill off, but, he is not killed off the way he is. He is, in the book by Hector.

00:23:05:20 – 00:23:11:14
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, okay. It just seems a tad bit different than what we see in the movie.

00:23:11:16 – 00:23:13:22
Neil Laird
But.

00:23:13:24 – 00:23:38:26
Dan LeFebvre
According to the movie, a relationship starts to form between Achilles and the Trojan priestess Perseus. That’s how they pronounce it in the movie that he captured Achilles seems tired of fighting for Agamemnon, so he orders his men to stay while Agamemnon goes to battle. But then, while Achilles is in his tent with Perseus, Achilles belove cousin Patrick List wears Achilles armor and leads the Myrmidons into battle.

00:23:38:27 – 00:23:57:17
Dan LeFebvre
They think it’s Achilles that they’re following, and then when these soldiers fight their way to Hector, Hector ends up killing the man they all think is Achilles until taking off his helmet, and it’s revealed that it’s Patrick was. So that’s how the movie shows Achilles ending up recommitting to the fight against the Trojans to avenge his cousin’s death.

00:23:57:19 – 00:24:00:08
Dan LeFebvre
How much of that is based on real history?

00:24:00:10 – 00:24:17:14
Neil Laird
That is a very, very key point in the book, and that’s very close to what happens. The emotional core of the book is just that. It is it is, and and they say brass, brass. This is different ways of saying it. But essentially the whole plot of the Iliad in nutshell is in the 10th year of the war.

00:24:17:21 – 00:24:39:11
Neil Laird
They’re sitting around, they’re trying to bring down Troy. And one way to do that is to do a bunch of raids and attack the villages and fill up the, the gates with, refugees and then take a bunch of war brides and then, you know, have their way with them. Brass actually comes in that she’s not related in any way to anyone inside the, Troy that is, Achilles.

00:24:39:13 – 00:25:02:25
Neil Laird
War booty from from a recent raid that happens off camera. And, at the same time, Agamemnon gets his own. I forget her name. What is it? Christmas? Or I forgot to say it. And, her father come by and and he’s he’s a priest of Apollo and says, give her back. And he says, as we joke, and I’m going to kill you if you don’t leave right now, I need I need my daughter back.

00:25:02:25 – 00:25:32:24
Neil Laird
I will give you everything I own. Just give me my daughter back. So she’s the daughter of a priestess, not a priestess herself. Agamemnon. And his bluster sends him out, says, I will kill you if you don’t leave now. And as he leaves, he curses them and says, you will regret this. And they do so as soon as the priest leaves, he he calls out to Apollo, who sends a plague down and wipes out half of the Trojans or half of the Greeks, and kills them until his daughters return.

00:25:32:27 – 00:25:56:06
Neil Laird
Agamemnon refuses for a while and then eventually says, oh, you know what? I’ll give her back. I’ll take I’ll take Achilles war bride instead. So he takes braces, brass as as his, as his concubine instead. And that pisses Achilles off so much. He sits out the war, he stops and that’s when things go to shit. So basically, that is all of the unity is really about these.

00:25:56:12 – 00:26:29:10
Neil Laird
These two men and these two women and and these women are pretty powerless. Unfortunately, in the book. But because his, his war bride or his war booty with her car has been taken away, Achilles refuses to fight and they start to suffer a they come and they beg him and they beg him. And it’s only when Patrick class who and in my book and in many other, in many other, historians believe it was, was, Achilles real lover.

00:26:29:12 – 00:26:49:29
Neil Laird
He’s his fucking cousin, but also his same sex lover and they say, well, we have to get them out there if you will not fight. How can we get the Greeks to go out there and fight as if you are? They need to believe you’re with them. So he and Patrick Kless form a, you know, major decision.

00:26:49:29 – 00:27:13:15
Neil Laird
You go out there, you wear my armor, and they think it’s me and they will win. And I still won’t fight because he’s that. He’s because he’s a petulant child, too. Unfortunately, Patrick isn’t as strong as them, and he goes on and gets slaughtered by Hector. So all of that happens. And then then, then when Achilles finds out that his beloved has been killed by Hector, he rejoins the war effort.

00:27:13:15 – 00:27:16:05
Neil Laird
And then Troy falls.

00:27:16:07 – 00:27:22:26
Dan LeFebvre
So many people killed just because of these yes egos.

00:27:22:28 – 00:27:43:04
Neil Laird
It all comes down. These two, these two arrogant men who just refuse to think about anybody but themselves. First, Agamemnon let thousands die because of a plague. Because he won’t give up some random chemical. You got ten women in his tent, and then Achilles watches all his brethren die because they took away this woman who he barely has any relationship with.

00:27:43:06 – 00:28:00:21
Neil Laird
If they’re in love, Homer doesn’t suggest it as much more love, even in Homer between him and Patrick, less than it is in him and her. So it’s a very it’s a very it’s a very strange thing that he just sits out the war and lets thousands and thousands of people he grew up with die because of one woman.

00:28:00:24 – 00:28:24:24
Dan LeFebvre
It almost sounds similar to what we were talking about before, with Agamemnon using the slide against Menelaus as an excuse to do something he already wanted to do attacking Troy. It sounds like maybe Achilles might be doing a similar thing, and using just this minor slight against a woman that maybe he didn’t even really care that much about to do something he didn’t want to do anyway, which is set out to fight.

00:28:24:24 – 00:28:29:11
Dan LeFebvre
Or, you know, he didn’t want to fight, so he’s just going to do that anyway.

00:28:29:13 – 00:28:50:19
Neil Laird
Well, there was there’s one other. And again, the Greek, the Greek writers wouldn’t say this because I think the age of the other hero wouldn’t allow it. But some other people have interpreted his sitting out the war memory as a very early scene in the film where Julie Christie as as his mom, comes and says, if you go to Troy, you will die.

00:28:50:21 – 00:29:14:28
Neil Laird
It is, you go to try, you will live forever, but you will die. Or you can not go to Troy. You will be anonymous and you will have a full life. So? So some have speculated maybe when the reason he sits it out as he realizes, why do I want to die? I’d rather anonymity and live like a human being, then be a hero and then die at age 18 or whatever the hell he is.

00:29:15:00 – 00:29:51:08
Neil Laird
You know that that is not in Homer, but certainly there is. The book is shot through with this idea of everyone becoming immortal. So just by him being there, he will die just by him partaking, because everything is written by the gods. So you could argue that maybe one of the reasons he did it, if you’re if you’re adding some elements and maybe you human but necessary in the Homer original is that he’s sitting it out again because he’s decided that, you know, living forever isn’t worth it.

00:29:51:09 – 00:30:21:10
Neil Laird
There’s a wonderful scene in the Odyssey where, Odysseus is looking. Has he go to Hades? I forget the reason why he goes to Hades, looking for his way home or something. And he meets all the people who died after the war, including Agamemnon and, Achilles. And Achilles says quite famously, I’d rather be a beggar to some man up above than the king of the gods down below.

00:30:21:12 – 00:30:45:01
Neil Laird
And it’s. And then that basically said he’s regretting dying. So when he’s in Hades, when you basically you live forever, but you’re no longer human. He regrets that he would rather be up above being a nobody than down below and being a hero forever. So that is something is very much a theme throughout all of Homer. This idea of destiny, this idea of fate, fate is really what it is.

00:30:45:03 – 00:30:58:02
Neil Laird
And he is fated to die. And if he had one chance to do what it would have been then by sitting at the war. It isn’t until his lover is taken from him that he realizes he has to see his fate through.

00:30:58:05 – 00:31:21:10
Dan LeFebvre
I could see that too. You mentioned this scene in the movie with his mother where he’s, you know, talking about living in immortality. But, you know, in that moment before the fighting actually begins, especially being that young, you might think, oh, this is such a great thing, you know, living in immortality. And then once the fighting begins, you might have a change of heart.

00:31:21:12 – 00:31:26:03
Neil Laird
And keep in mind for what, at the end of the day, they’re all fighting so one guy can get his wife back.

00:31:26:08 – 00:31:30:21
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. And yeah, not even fighting for yourself. You’re fighting for somebody else? Yeah.

00:31:30:24 – 00:31:52:10
Neil Laird
So there’s a bunch of boorish, brutish men that really should just get over it, you know, that he’ll go over and spend ten years and die. And certainly there’s a lot of sequences in the end, home or where people are already sick and they want to go home, and it’s very unpleasant. They’re living in rain among rats and and pestilence, and they’re living in the boats and tents along the shore.

00:31:52:17 – 00:32:06:24
Neil Laird
And, you know, it’s is an ugly existence. They’re away from home. They’re all dreaming about their wives and their families. Most of them don’t make it. So certainly it’s not a rosy picture, what life is like and what war is like in the Bronze Age.

00:32:06:27 – 00:32:31:13
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we can go back to the movie as soon as Achilles finds out his cousin has been killed, he races to the Trojan city walls and yells for Hector to face him in one on one combat. Hector complies and goes out to face Achilles, and it’s a valiant fight between two great warriors. But Achilles is the better warrior, so he kills Hector and then drags Hector’s body from his chariot in front of the city walls for all the Trojans to watch.

00:32:31:15 – 00:32:37:25
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know if this fight between two legendary warriors happened? The way we see it in the movie.

00:32:37:27 – 00:33:05:12
Neil Laird
It happens that way in the book. They got that right and you call right or wrong again, it’s not. They have to be gospel when it comes to interpreting a 3000 year old. You take liberties that they want, I suppose much, you know, but that is very much what happens. There’s a very strong sequence in the chapter in the book, and by that point it’s very interesting because what what Homer does is he has created sympathies on both sides.

00:33:05:19 – 00:33:25:02
Neil Laird
Hector is a man of honor. And they kind of they kind of do that in the film. They make they make, Paris much more of a dweeb, which maybe he is. But certainly Hector, in both the film and in the poem, is very much the strongest man in Troy, and he is obviously meant to take over from King Prime, his father.

00:33:25:09 – 00:33:46:12
Neil Laird
So his loss would be a great thing. So it is a it is not an evenly match because Achilles is Achilles, but Hector is a very strong and formidable opponent, and he has a lot of people on his side who respect that. So, you know, it is probably the one of the most powerful scenes in the play, or an example in the, the poem.

00:33:46:12 – 00:33:50:25
Neil Laird
Because because you have sympathies on both sides. You really care about the characters.

00:33:50:28 – 00:34:08:05
Dan LeFebvre
Well, that leads you to another question I want to ask about at this point in the movie, because at this point, we’ve seen a few one on one fights, right? And the movie starts with Agamemnon calling on Achilles to fight the Thessalonians champion a guy named boy Grace. Then later, there’s that one and one fight between Paris and Menelaus that we already talked about.

00:34:08:11 – 00:34:17:21
Dan LeFebvre
And now there’s this one on one fight between Achilles and Hector. Historically speaking, were these one on one fights that we see sprinkled throughout the movie? What they common.

00:34:17:23 – 00:34:40:19
Neil Laird
Historically know was certainly in ancient literature. They’re a trait. They were much a trope, like any book you read today. Like any rom romantic comedy, whatever has their own tropes, an ancient ancient story had their troubles and one on one because it’s mano a mano. The first one in the film doesn’t happen at all. Where, Achilles fights whoever that character is, I think it’s only fictional.

00:34:40:22 – 00:35:01:11
Neil Laird
And then you think about it, probably the most famous 1 or 1 fight and all literature, certainly if you read your Bible growing up is David and Goliath. So you have that one that’s already then that’s probably what that was based on. They probably would steal it from that. But then you also have, even in the very obscure Egyptian text called The Tale of Sin, you’re about a guy who leaves Egypt and tries to come back to die.

00:35:01:18 – 00:35:26:18
Neil Laird
He has a one on one battle with an Egyptian, warrior to get in Romulus in the in the Roman legend fights, this warrior name Akron to to bring supremacy, to bring the tribes of Rome together is a trope. And it’s all about kind of like it shows the prowess of one man up against the best and winning.

00:35:26:20 – 00:35:41:27
Neil Laird
So certainly. And you have two of them in the Iliad. And the first one, of course, goes against Hector, and he kind of becomes a, a slobbering dweeb. But the other one is a very emotional crux of the entire, story arc, where you take the two biggest characters and bring them together.

00:35:42:00 – 00:36:08:11
Dan LeFebvre
I could see that, and we even see that in movies, too. If you think about it, you know, you think of these movies with the huge epic battles of thousands and thousands on either side. It’s really hard to honestly care about these huge, just numbers of people on either side. And so you focus in on just a few people on either side, whether it’s ensemble or, you know, composite characters or just these one on ones.

00:36:08:12 – 00:36:13:10
Dan LeFebvre
And so I could see if that’s the case in movies, that would be the same thing in writing two.

00:36:13:13 – 00:36:30:01
Neil Laird
You read The Iliad and, and I recommend everybody. Sure. Because there’s some beautiful stuff in there and it can be very dramatic. There’s a slog to where they go on and on and talk about somebody killing somebody, killing somebody from a small town in eastern Turkey. You don’t know who they are. And it’s boring because yet no emotional connection with them.

00:36:30:03 – 00:36:53:14
Neil Laird
Like any Marvel movie, it’s when the hero fights the villain is that when you think of the classic end of good, the bad and the ugly, where the good, the bad and the ugly have a Mexican standoff and a bunch of close ups and all their eyeballs back and forth. That’s what you want at the end. You want all the noise to go away, and you would have come down on the most primal, which is it’s mano a mano fight to the finish.

00:36:53:17 – 00:37:03:04
Neil Laird
Look me in the eye. And that’s certainly something that goes all the way back to again, David and Goliath and these ancient texts that still resonate today.

00:37:03:07 – 00:37:26:10
Dan LeFebvre
Well, back in the movies storyline, after Hector is killed, the Trojan king Priam sneaks into the Greek camp to ask Achilles for Hector’s body. They remain enemies. The movie makes it clear, but Achilles seems to have respect for both Hector and Priam, so he grants the request. He turns over the body and offers a 12 day peace because, according to the movie, the Funeral Games lasts for 12 days.

00:37:26:10 – 00:37:38:15
Dan LeFebvre
That’s both an Achilles country as well as Priam’s, and so there’s a peace for 12 days. Was there really a 12 day piece during the Trojan War for the funeral of Hector, like we see in the movie?

00:37:38:17 – 00:37:57:17
Neil Laird
What’s interesting is that’s also how the book ends. The book ends right there. That is the last scene of the Iliad, and I think it’s probably the best scene of the movie, too. It helps the a Peter O’Toole in there who can act up a storm. Right. And everybody else have these veterans in there that just by walking in the room, you’re interested in them because they have such presence.

00:37:57:19 – 00:38:03:26
Neil Laird
You know, I wish there was a more prime and maybe less of of, who’s the cipher of the played pairs.

00:38:03:28 – 00:38:08:07
Dan LeFebvre
Orlando Bloom, Legolas from Lord of the rings. Yeah.

00:38:08:10 – 00:38:26:23
Neil Laird
Let’s move forward more. O’Toole would have been my review. That’s very much how it ends. And is also, it finally shows Achilles breaking down because he’s brooding and angry. The entire he can’t get over Patrick Bliss’s death. So, you know, find. And then that’s why he kills Hector. But this man comes to him and I think it’s the best line in the film.

00:38:26:23 – 00:38:45:27
Neil Laird
I forget how it is. It’s kind of I’m paraphrasing again, but it’s something like, Achilles says, if I do this for you, you’re still my enemy tomorrow. And O’Toole’s character, Prime says, you’re still my enemy tonight, but we can still be human or something like that. It’s what so wonderful scene. And I wish there was more of that emotion in the film.

00:38:45:27 – 00:39:09:16
Neil Laird
I think that reminds you of the Achilles. Could have been a real character, as opposed to this sort of pin up, you know, greased up muscle boy. So I think that that suggests to what the film could have been. But yes, there’s very much how the book ends. And in terms of the 12 days, whether that was a whether that was, typical in Bronze Age culture, I don’t know, but that is what they say in the Iliad.

00:39:09:16 – 00:39:26:22
Neil Laird
It is 12 days. And the book ends with Prime getting up, thanking him, taking his boy’s body. And then there’s a paragraph after. Then what? You you hear them burning, you watch them burning Hector’s body and people watching it. And that’s how the book ends.

00:39:26:24 – 00:39:54:27
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, okay. Well, the movie keeps going, so we’ll keep going to, It’s not too much of a surprise at this point in the movie that Agamemnon is just furious when he finds out that Achilles agreed to a 12 day piece without his approval. But then again, the movie also points out that Troy was built to withstand a ten year siege, so it’s not like they can do a lot to get past the city walls anyway, at that point is the movie’s claim of Troy’s city walls being built to withstand a ten year siege.

00:39:54:27 – 00:39:56:27
Dan LeFebvre
Historically accurate.

00:39:57:00 – 00:40:15:11
Neil Laird
I mean, ten years seems outrageous for any kind of war, certainly any war that took place back then. Again, it’s kind of like, you know, 40 days and 40 nights and all these kind of cliches. You Alexander’s 40 thieves. There are some numbers that just fit. And ten year, it’d be a nice long chunk of time where people get a bit miffed.

00:40:15:13 – 00:40:43:19
Neil Laird
So there was no true. I mean, certainly some cities can withstand with withstand sieges forever. Others will fall straight away depending on duplicity or or a crack in the in the wall. So it’s hard to know what the Troy, prime was like. Now, you know, they have found, you know, as we were talking earlier, Troy, we do know Troy exists because, archeology just named Schliemann, found in the 1880s, is some turkey, and you can go there.

00:40:43:19 – 00:41:03:09
Neil Laird
Today is a very disappointing site because it’s all denuded and ripped apart. There’s nothing except for really cheesy, wooden horse in the car park, which is 1970s y, like some Turkish filmmaker making a TV movie. It’s even got a little window. It looks like something out laugh. You know, it’s so cheesy. Got big knobs on it, the stairs going up.

00:41:03:11 – 00:41:28:02
Neil Laird
It is not is not the authentic thing. But Troy stood for a thousand years at some point of Troy up 8000 years now. What level was the Trojan War at? Was probably somewhere in the lower third, maybe like the fourth or fifth layer. They have different strata and I forget right now which one it is. So Troy itself lasted a very long time and Troy was rebuilt after, prime time.

00:41:28:05 – 00:41:51:26
Neil Laird
So it’s, it’s we don’t know how strong it was then. There’s there’s actually Roman ruins there too. So it’s still around in Roman times, so to say that it can withstand a siege X years long, I think is impossible to say. And of course, they saw that. Anyways, with the Trojan horse through duplicity, by getting those doors open, which is one of the most, it’s hard to believe anybody falling for that ever happened in ancient times.

00:41:51:26 – 00:42:01:27
Neil Laird
It’s like, oh, he’s a enormous, enormous wooden horse outside my door. Let’s bring it inside the gates that we’d kept closed for a decade.

00:42:01:29 – 00:42:20:17
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, we still have people filing for Trojan horses today with computer viruses. But that leads right into my next question. Because if we head back to the movie, we’re at the point where we see perhaps the most famous part of the war, the Trojan Horse. The movie shows this idea coming to Odysseus as he’s watching one of his soldiers carve a wooden horse for his son back home.

00:42:20:23 – 00:42:40:20
Dan LeFebvre
And then after the 12 day funeral for Hector, the Trojans come out and they find the Greeks are no longer on the beaches. Instead, they just find some dead bodies with what they think is the plague. That’s something that the Trojan priest there says is retribution from Apollo for the way the Greeks desecrated the temple, alluding to the attack on the beach that Achilles did.

00:42:40:20 – 00:43:00:09
Dan LeFebvre
We talked about earlier when they first landed, when the Greeks first landed. And then they also find this huge wooden horse which they think was built by the Greeks as an offering for Poseidon to grant the Greeks a safe return home. That same priest convinces King Priam to take the horse to their own temple of Poseidon, and that brings the horse within the city walls.

00:43:00:09 – 00:43:14:19
Dan LeFebvre
And then that night, Odysseus, Achilles, and maybe a dozen or so Greeks sneak out of the horse, kill the sleeping guards, and open the city gates for the waiting Greek army. Does the movie accurately portray what we know of the Trojan horse now?

00:43:14:19 – 00:43:35:13
Neil Laird
I mean, again, we don’t even know if the Trojan War happened. And and so you’re asking, asking my reporting on a thesis that’s already flawed. It’s hard to imagine a Trojan War happening, isn’t it? Something torn from met. And it was quite interesting. Otho is definitely the most famous thing from the Trojan War. That and maybe the heel.

00:43:35:15 – 00:44:03:08
Neil Laird
It only gets about 3 or 4 lines. Not in the Iliad, but in the Odyssey, which is asking Odysseus and one of his islands where he’s stuck. How did you get away? And he chose them over like a, like a lamb or whatever. What happened? It’s like a paragraph long. It is a cliff note. So it’s very interesting that, it becomes the most famous name for it because it’s so dramatic and so cinematic and it’s it’s a great ending.

00:44:03:08 – 00:44:22:08
Neil Laird
It’s a great ending on no matter how ridiculous it is. And as you described it, is as how it’s described in the Odyssey. That pretty much is how they do it. I don’t know if it’s a plague. They say they leave, but they wake up and the Greeks all hide behind a, a, promontory out in the bay.

00:44:22:08 – 00:44:39:25
Neil Laird
All the ships, and they act like they’ve left. And they left. They’ve left this, wooden horse behind. Not for the Greek for for Apollo to say, you know, sorry. We’ve been mucking up the earth and mucking about with things. And when we’re out of here and Prime thinks that it’s for them, and he takes it in and they sneak out.

00:44:39:27 – 00:45:06:11
Neil Laird
So yes, that happens as described, in the Odyssey. Did it happen in real life? I think I could hazard or no. We know we don’t know any of these people existed. You know, Neeleman also claimed he found a, the city of Agamemnon. He calls it Agamemnon’s mask in central, Greece. My senior. But we don’t know if it’s Agamemnon.

00:45:06:11 – 00:45:19:16
Neil Laird
He very much wanted to be Agamemnon. These are mythological characters that might have been based on fact. But they were heroes. They were. They were, you know, touched by gods. So they could be as real as Apollo and Athena and all the others.

00:45:19:18 – 00:45:35:00
Dan LeFebvre
Sounds a lot like to, you know, characters like King Arthur and Robin Hood. You know, these stories that there might be fragments of truth here and there, but they’re just built upon for thousands of years that it’s really hard to separate fact from fiction, or how much of it is actually fact at all.

00:45:35:03 – 00:45:54:13
Neil Laird
It could have been an amalgamation of several different people, and they could have been totally invented again, the Trojan War. So, I mean, if you look at the ruins of Troy, it was destroyed many times and burnt, and they think they found the or when Troy of Priam’s Priam’s Troy collapsed. But we don’t know how or why and all those kind of things.

00:45:54:13 – 00:46:04:15
Neil Laird
So it’s impossible to say it happened because of a ten year war of the Greeks. Or it was just spurred by because someone had a space heater out overnight.

00:46:04:17 – 00:46:11:05
Dan LeFebvre
It was the Trojan horse you’re talking about with the window. You know, the sun going through the glass and everything, causing the fire to ignite.

00:46:11:07 – 00:46:14:18
Neil Laird
Anything could have,

00:46:14:21 – 00:46:37:06
Dan LeFebvre
Well, at the very end of the movie, we see the Greek soldiers within the city walls. And once they’re inside, it’s all over for Troy. The city is burning. When Achilles searches for Perseus, she ends up killing Agamemnon when he tries to take her captive. But then Achilles kills the Greek guards to rescue her. And then Paris shows up and he hits Achilles in his heel with an arrow.

00:46:37:08 – 00:46:57:02
Dan LeFebvre
Achilles gets up and Paris ends up hitting Achilles with four more arrows in the chest, but Achilles isn’t quite dead yet. He manages to pull the arrows out of himself, and then Paris and Perseus follow the path that Hector, his wife in drama, shows them out of the city into the island deeper in the island where the Greeks won’t follow.

00:46:57:04 – 00:47:12:09
Dan LeFebvre
And then once they leave, we see a bunch of Greek soldiers showing up to find Achilles die, and the only arrow left because he pulled the others out of his chest. The only one left is the one stuck in his heel. How much of the way the movie ends holds up to historical scrutiny?

00:47:12:16 – 00:47:38:18
Neil Laird
None of that happens except for Paris does kill Achilles with an arrow to the. And I think it is off. It is off camera as well, or off the page. And again, this is from the Odyssey, not from the Iliad, I think. I think maybe when he does, I think when Odysseus goes to Hades and he’s talking to his dead friends, that’s when Achilles tells them, oh, I was I was duped by that little snot, and he killed me.

00:47:38:21 – 00:47:52:08
Neil Laird
But everything else it was didn’t happen. And then, particularly Agamemnon does not die there. Agamemnon is killed, I think, by brass who who kills him in the film.

00:47:52:10 – 00:48:02:16
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah. It’s Perseus. Yeah. Because Agamemnon was going to take her as his own prize. And then she had, like a dagger head, and she ends up pulling it out and stabbing him. Yeah.

00:48:02:19 – 00:48:24:04
Neil Laird
Yeah. And that when he lives and he goes back to, Mycenae. And of course, it’s a very famous great play about that, where he’s killed by his wife and her lover. She’s with someone else for the last ten years. So when he comes back, he’s coldness tub, I believe, by his own wife and. And his wife’s new lover.

00:48:24:04 – 00:48:28:27
Neil Laird
So he goes all the way back to his homeland, only to die that ignoble death.

00:48:28:29 – 00:48:44:28
Dan LeFebvre
I guess I shouldn’t laugh at somebody dying, but, you know, we think of this guy is responsible for how many thousands of deaths because of his own ego. And just the way all the deaths caused. And then he goes back and dies that way, kind of gets what’s coming to you.

00:48:45:00 – 00:49:04:07
Neil Laird
And it is like it happened that way. APT. We’re just kind of like, you know, slipping on a banana. Pause. You’ve taken on the whole world. But all those characters go on to have sort of sequels. Again, as I mentioned, a lot of them show up in The Odyssey, but but other plays are mentioned about some of the survivors after the fact.

00:49:04:07 – 00:49:26:02
Neil Laird
Now Helen disappears from history. Perseus disappears from this. You all the women, women tend to do that. Achilles is dead. Except for his cameo in Hades. Odysseus goes back and becomes a hero, but Priam and even now Prime dies. We assume Priam dies. I think in the book he’s killed by Agamemnon. Doesn’t happen in the book.

00:49:26:09 – 00:49:29:04
Neil Laird
So we can only imagine if a city falls. So does the King.

00:49:29:06 – 00:49:34:29
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, he kind of got the idea of, you know, the captain going down with the ship was the impression I got from the film.

00:49:35:02 – 00:50:02:26
Neil Laird
And the reasoning that you have on. There’s people leaving at the end sneaking out. Paris wasn’t among them. We don’t know if he left, but there was a very famous, Roman play by Virgil called The Animate. And that is basically trying to connect themselves to the Greeks and saying they are the descendants of the famous Greeks. But one could be the one comes to us and starts the Romans, you know, so a hero from Troy.

00:50:03:01 – 00:50:18:13
Neil Laird
So basically when them leaving, that’s pretty much how the army begins. It begins. It begins with them, with with them leaving and picking up the story from the fall of Troy. So that’s sort of setting up for if there was a sequel would have been that the Roman version of what happens next?

00:50:18:16 – 00:50:26:06
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, maybe that’s where King Arthur comes into it, because I know there’s, thought that he might have actually been a Roman centurion. Then led to the the myths that we know now.

00:50:26:08 – 00:50:31:09
Neil Laird
Yeah. If anybody wants to be Roman because they were the top dog for so long.

00:50:31:11 – 00:50:47:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, the movie does talk about it being like 30, 200 years ago. And you talked a little bit here and there about the Trojan ruins and then talked about some other ruins that obviously you’ve been to as well. Do you think the movie does a good job transporting us back in time 30, 200 years?

00:50:47:22 – 00:51:10:24
Neil Laird
You know, it’s funny, because I’m writing a book about Troy. I talked to some archeologist who’ve dug there, and they put me on to a book. I think it was by Michael Woods, who is an archeologist. An old book back in the 80s. Did a bunch of BBC docs you might have seen back in the day, British Guy, and they said, we all, kind of look at him as being the perfect example.

00:51:11:00 – 00:51:32:02
Neil Laird
He created mock ups of what Troy might have looked like, and the filmmakers must have got that same book because it looked a lot like that. So I think the sets are quite nice, I think, except for mixing up the gods. As I mentioned the first scene, and anytime you see ancient history, those of us who were snobs with that and I’m no archeologist story and I’m a filmmaker and a novelist, do spend a lot of time with those people.

00:51:32:05 – 00:51:50:00
Neil Laird
You see a bit of a Hittite, a bit of Egyptian, a bit of a Phoenician, whatever is cool looking, winged, all the Syrian winged bulls, you know, next, next up ball and all this stuff it all makes are exotically ancient. But I thought in terms of how the walls looked and how the city looked, it captured it quite a nicely.

00:51:50:00 – 00:51:54:21
Neil Laird
It transported me. I wasn’t sort of like sniffing my nose at it.

00:51:54:23 – 00:51:57:10
Dan LeFebvre
It’s whatever looks good on camera, right?

00:51:57:12 – 00:52:03:20
Neil Laird
Yeah, it has epic. It has to look epic. And I think they did that. Yeah.

00:52:03:22 – 00:52:21:04
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you mentioned you’re writing a book and this is just been a lot of fun to dig into the myths, legends and history behind Troy. Now, before I let you go, I think anyone who is a fan of historical stories that we talked about today would love to read your historical novels. So can you share a little bit more about those?

00:52:21:09 – 00:52:29:24
Dan LeFebvre
For anyone watching the video version of this, I am holding up Prime Time Pompeii. But you also have prime time travelers. And could there be a prime time Troy on the way?

00:52:30:00 – 00:52:33:14
Neil Laird
Maybe.

00:52:33:17 – 00:52:59:06
Neil Laird
Yeah, it’s a series and it’s not hard. You know, I have a TV producer by trade. I’ve been to the last 30 years making historical documentaries for BBC, National Geographic right now, working for the History Channel. So I work for all of them. And my bailiwick has always been history archeology. And I’ve been to some 70 countries and, you know, after traveling and all, doing all these footnoted scripts, that it were all the, all the facts had to be exact, like we’re talking about right now.

00:52:59:09 – 00:53:14:26
Neil Laird
I’m doing exactly the same thing the filmmakers are trying to do, and I’m making shit up. And I wanted to have some fun with what I know. So Prime Time Travelers is about a TV crew, kind of, you know, fairly cheesy, ancient aliens, like TV crew who find order to the past and it allows them to tour the ancient past.

00:53:14:26 – 00:53:33:22
Neil Laird
Hopefully to win an Emmy, and they get sucked into the great events of ancient times. The first book is them going back to ancient Egypt during the times of Ramses the Great, and they have to find a mummy in the Duat, which is the 12 hours of hell, before the sun rises. So I get all the mythology of Egypt.

00:53:33:22 – 00:53:57:01
Neil Laird
I was able to bring in there and recreate ancient Egypt in that the New Kingdom under Ramses the second book, they time travel back to Pompeii and the eve of Pompeii. With that, with a snooty, TV host, you know, along with that, you just can’t wait to die. And I won’t do it anyway. Yeah, well, let say let’s just say, you know, things happen.

00:53:57:03 – 00:54:19:21
Neil Laird
And when I mean, in the third book, which I’m writing right now, prime time Troy, they go back to ancient Troy, with the invite of Achilles, and they set up there is exactly what I’m talking about before Achilles realizes, oh, you people can change history. You can make documentaries, make people live for forever without being in a without being in an epic poem.

00:54:19:28 – 00:54:26:13
Neil Laird
I don’t want to die. And I will give you a ringside seat to Troy if you figure out how to let me live.

00:54:26:15 – 00:54:34:06
Dan LeFebvre
Okay? And that’s like living forever. Like, literally living forever or like living forever throughout legend.

00:54:34:08 – 00:54:50:25
Neil Laird
So he wants. He wants it. He wants to become a human being used to go for Patrick and live a life of happy the Patrick list. So. But but he’s also, you know, a hero of the book and he basically wants them see if you if anyone can change the past the time travel TV producers can because you’ve done it twice now so that the hope and see it.

00:54:50:25 – 00:55:14:14
Neil Laird
Of course he’s got a few tricks up his sleeve, but you can’t quite trust him. So basically all these books are in a way to kind of have fun with the past, with mythology, with history, don’t screw with time and all that stuff. But I also it’s I just want to be able to take all this stuff I know about the ancient world around Greece and Egypt and just get people excited about it was not a heavy treatise on,

00:55:14:16 – 00:55:31:07
Neil Laird
And, you know, you don’t have to read Homer. My book is you get a reading, Homer, let’s just say. And it’s fun, it’s comedic. So obviously it’s if you skewers television as much as anything else. So it definitely is a lighthearted way of time traveling to, very violent, distant times.

00:55:31:09 – 00:55:43:28
Dan LeFebvre
I imagine maybe thousands thousand years from now, you know, people will take just a few lines from your book and make another movie similar to what they did with Troy and with Homer’s writings from thousands of years ago.

00:55:44:01 – 00:55:51:27
Neil Laird
Or, oh, this is the only thing he survived. And I assume that time travel was real and that the gods are really a bunch of TV producers. The cameras.

00:55:51:27 – 00:55:54:07
Dan LeFebvre
Yes, yes.

00:55:54:09 – 00:56:09:12
Neil Laird
Yes, the incidents of history are amazing. It’s I love like what survives and what doesn’t. And that’s all sometimes we know about entire culture because one papyri, you know, was, was, was, you know, saved underneath a falling pillar. So that’s all we know about an entire culture.

00:56:09:14 – 00:56:25:18
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. I sometimes it’s just luck. Right. Well, I make sure to add a link to all your books in the show notes. So that we can increase the chances of it living forever. Thank you again so much for your time, Neal.