The Rocketeer (film)
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| The Rocketeer | |
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 The Rocketeer theatrical poster |
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| Directed by | Joe Johnston |
| Produced by | Charles Gordon Lawrence Gordon Lloyd Levin |
| Written by | Dave Stevens (graphic novel) Danny Bilson (sceenplay) Paul De Meo (sceenplay) |
| Starring | Bill Campbell Alan Arkin Jennifer Connelly Timothy Dalton Ed Lauter Jon Polito Terry O'Quinn |
| Music by | James Horner |
| Cinematography | Hiro Narita |
| Editing by | Peter Lonsdale Arthur Schmidt |
| Distributed by | Buena Vista Pictures |
| Release date(s) | 23 June 1991 |
| Running time | 108 min. |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $40,000,000 (estimated) |
| Gross profits | $46,704,056 (USA) |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
The Rocketeer is a 1991 Superhero adventure film produced by Walt Disney Pictures/Touchstone Pictures[1] and directed by Joe Johnston. It is based on the comic book The Rocketeer by Dave Stevens about a young stunt pilot who discovers a mysterious jet pack that allows him to fly.
Music for the movie was written by James Horner. The film won a Saturn Award for Best Costume in 1991. It was the third movie directed by Joe Johnston, who later went on to direct movies such as Jumanji and Hidalgo.
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[edit] Plot summary
The movie is set in Los Angeles in 1938, the time just before World War II as Nazi Germany was preparing to go to war. Numerous other topical elements from the time period are combined, including the Golden Age of Hollywood, mobsters and G-men, and the enigmatic Howard Hughes (played by Terry O'Quinn). The film involves the escapades of Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) after he and his friend A. "Peevy" Peabody (Alan Arkin) discover a jet pack. Secord also has to defend his relationship with Jenny Blake (Jennifer Connelly) from being broken up by movie star Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton).
[edit] The story
The movie opens with Cliff flying a Gee Bee airplane in which he and Peevy have invested a lot of time and money ("Building that plane took three years and every damn cent we had!"), in preparation for an upcoming race. Nearby, a pair of mobsters are fleeing a police car and a pair of FBI agents. One of the mobsters, armed with a Tommy gun, spots the Gee Bee and shoots at it, puncturing the fuel tank. The mobster's car arrives at the airfield and the driver gets out, only to discover that his partner has suffered a fatal gunshot wound. Taking a mysterious bundle from a suitcase in the back of the car, the mobster hides it under the seat of an old biplane and drives back out onto the runway. Meanwhile, Cliff has managed to fly the Gee Bee back to the airfield and is now on a collision course with the mobster's car. The car rips the landing gear off the plane and the driver bails out just before the car crashes into a fuel truck and explodes. Cliff manages to survive the crash landing but the Gee Bee is completely ruined. Even worse, the owner of the airfield, Bigelow (Jon Polito) demands that Cliff and Peevy pay for the loss of the fuel truck, bankrupting the both of them.
Desperate for money, Cliff volunteers for the dangerous job of flying stunts in an old junker of a biplane during an airshow. While inspecting the plane, Peevy and Cliff discover the mysterious bundle hidden by the mobster earlier that day. The bundle turns out to be a prototype jetpack stolen by the mobsters from Howard Hughes.
After a somewhat problematic test flight, Peevy makes Cliff promise not to use the jetpack again until Peevy can get a better handle on the design and build a custom helmet to go with it. The next day, Cliff is on his way to the air show but arrives late. To save Cliff's job, his friend Malcolm takes the biplane out and attempts to perform Cliff's act. Unfortunately, Malcolm hasn't flown a plane in years and is badly out of practice. To stop him from killing himself or someone else, Cliff dons the jetpack and Peevy's helmet and takes off. In the process of saving Malcolm, Cliff flies dramatically over the crowd, getting caught on camera. Dubbed the Rocketeer, Cliff becomes a media sensation.
Meanwhile, Cliff's girlfriend Jenny has been given a chance to appear in a Hollywood film starring actor Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton, in an homage to '30s movie star Errol Flynn). She is almost kicked off the set when Cliff shows up and bungles a shot, but she attracts Sinclair's attention. What is not publicly known is that Sinclair is in fact a Nazi spy (as was rumored about Flynn) who is secretly working to get Cliff's jet pack for the Germans. Having heard part of a conversation between Cliff and Jenny in which Cliff tries to tell her about the rocket pack, he decides to target Cliff via his girl.
Also in the play are Eddie Valentine (Paul Sorvino) and his gang (to which the two mobsters from the beginning had belonged), as the hired muscle to broaden the search pattern. Valentine is increasingly frustrated about why he has to steal the rocket pack, especially since that got him tangled with the FBI, but he does not suspect Sinclair's true agenda. Another factor is Sinclair's Frankensteinish goon Lothar (Tiny Ron, in makeup to make him resemble character actor Rondo Hatton), who has a habit of killing people by literally folding them in half.
Soon everyone is hot on Cliff's tail. During a shoot-out with Valentine's goons, the rocket-pack is slightly damaged by a ricocheting bullet, puncturing a fuel line. A piece of Cliff's gum seals the rupture. Cliff is arrested shortly thereafter by the FBI and brought into a covert meeting with Howard Hughes (Terry O'Quinn), who reveals that he designed the rocket-pack, racing against Nazi Germany to perfect a single-man flying machine. It is the prototype and only working model. Mass-produced, it would be invaluable in the coming war. He demands the return of the rocket, but Cliff "isn't finished with it yet", since in the meantime Sinclair has kidnapped Jenny and blackmails Cliff into surrendering the rocket pack.
At the meeting spot (the Griffith Park Observatory), Sinclair, Lothar and Eddie's gang wait for him. When all attempts to have Sinclair release Jenny first fail, Cliff plays out his last ace and reveals Sinclair's secret - which he had guessed when Hughes had mentioned a Nazi spy in the Hollywood scene -, at which point Valentine and his gang, like any red-blooded Americans, switch sides. Along with the FBI, who had tracked Cliff to the scene, a firefight breaks out with the Nazi commandos Sinclair has brought along, but Sinclair, Lothar and Jenny are taken away by a German zeppelin, the Luxembourg, which was touring America in a 'gesture of friendship'. Cliff immediately follows the vessel with the rocket pack.
The last major scene in the movie is a fight on the Luxembourg, which eventually ends in the ship's fiery destruction (an obvious reference to the Hindenburg disaster). Aboard the zeppelin, Sinclair demands the rocket-pack in exchange for Jenny. Cliff reluctantly slides it over, but not before dislodging the gum. Sinclair exits the zeppelin in mid-air, but the dripping fuel soon catches fire, causing to rocket-pack to careen out of control and explode, taking Sinclair and the last four letters of the famous "Hollywoodland" sign with it. Cliff and Jenny are rescued by Hughes and Peevy in a gyrocopter.
In the epilogue, Howard Hughes makes a gift of a brand new Gee Bee plane to Cliff and Peevy, to replace the one they lost at the start. At the same time, Jenny has a reward of her own — the detailed schematics of the rocket-pack which enable Peevy to contemplate rebuilding the device with improvements, possibly the setup for a sequel.
[edit] Production
Steve Miner was the first filmmaker to option the movie rights to Stevens’ comic book but he strayed too far from the original concept. Screenwriters Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo originally approached Stevens to work on the film Zone Troopers but he had to pass due to other commitments. They were given an option on The Rocketeer’s screen rights in 1985 because Stevens liked that “their ideas for The Rocketeer were heartfelt and affectionate tributes to the 1930’s with all the right dialogue and atmosphere. Most people would approach my character contemporarily, but Danny and Paul saw them as pre-war mugs.”[2] Their script kept the comic book’s basic plot intact but fleshed it out to include a Hollywood setting and a climatic battle against a Nazi zeppelin. They also tweaked Cliff’s girlfriend to avoid comparisons/legal hassles to Bettie Page (Stevens’ original inspiration), changing her name from Betty to Jenny and her profession from nude model to Hollywood extra.
Bilson and DeMeo submitted their seven-page outline to Disney in 1986. The studio put their script through an endless series of revisions and, at one point, the screenwriters talked to Stevens about doing The Rocketeer as a smaller film shot in black and white. However, the involvement of Disney resulted in a significant increase in budget as DeMeo said, “You can imagine the commitment Disney was making to develop a series of movies around a character. They even called it their Raiders of the Lost Ark.”[3] With Stevens input, Bilson and DeMeo developed their screenplay with director William Dear who proceeded to change the zeppelin to a submarine.
Over five years, Disney fired and rehired Bilson and DeMeo three times. DeMeo explained that “Disney felt that they needed a different approach to the script, which meant bringing in someone else. But those scripts were thrown out and we were always brought back on.”[4] They found the studio’s constant tinkering with the screenplay to be a frustrating process as executives would like “excised dialogue three months later. Scenes that had been thrown out two years ago were put back in. What was the point?” DeMeo said.[5] Disney’s biggest problems were with all of the period slang peppered throughout the script. Executive were worried that audiences wouldn’t understand what characters were saying.
One of Bilson and DeMeo’s significant revisions to the script over the years was to make Cliff and Jenny’s “attraction more believable...how do we bring Jenny into the story and revolve it around her, and not just create someone who’s kidnapped and has to be saved?” DeMeo remembers.[6] The numerous project delays forced Dear to leave the production and Joe Johnston signed on. Johnston was a fan of the comic book and when he inquired about its movie rights was told that Disney already had it in development. He approached the studio and was quickly hired to direct. The filmmaker said in an interview, “One of the great appeals of Stevens’ work was his attention to detail, which really placed the reader in the period. I’ve tried to do the same thing cinematically.”[7]
In 1990s, Bilson and DeMeo’s third major rewrite finally got the greenlight from the studio. However, Disney also acquired the rights to the Dick Tracy film from Universal and this worried DeMeo who was afraid that the studio would dump The Rocketeer in favor of a much more high-profile project. However, when Dick Tracy failed to perform as well at the box office as Disney had hoped, his fears subsided. Pre-production started in early 1990 with producer Larry Franco in charge of securing locations for the film. He found an abandoned World War II landing strip in Santa Maria which they used to build the mythical Chaplin Air Field. The Rocketeer’s attack on the Nazi zeppelin was filmed near the Magic Mountain amusement park in the Indian Dunes.
Bill Campbell wasn’t familiar with the comic book when he got the part but quickly read it in addition to books on aviation and listened to period music. The actor had a fear of flying but overcame it with the help of the film’s aerial coordinator Craig Hosking. To ensure his safety, Campbell was doubled for almost all of the Rocketeer’s flying sequences.
Bilson and DeMeo approved of everything that was put in the movie and enlisted Stevens’ help designing the Central City Police badges and initial revisions to the Rocketeer suit. For the Air Circus scene at Chaplin Air Field, 700 extras and 25 vintage planes were employed. Hosking remarked in an interview, “What makes The Rocketeer so unique was having several one-of-a-kind planes that hadn’t flown in years,”[8] including a 1916 standard bi-wing and a round-nosed and small-winged Gee Bee. The film ended up going 50 days over schedule due to weather and mechanical problems. Production wrapped on January 10, 1991 after five months of filming.
[edit] Reactions
Released on June 21, 1991, The Rocketeer grossed $46,704,056 in US domestic returns.[9] The website Rotten Tomatoes (launched in 1998) lists the film with a 72% "fresh" rating based on all polled critical reviews.[10] It also has a 5.9 rating at the Internet Movie Database with 8,375 votes.[11]
[edit] Trivia
In the UK, the film's music is published by Campbell-Connelly (it is published by Wonderland Music in the U.S.). This is not a reference to the film's stars, but to songwriters Jimmy Campbell and Reginald Connelly.
A reference to The Rocketeer was made on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 by http://www.penny-Arcade.com in the following comic as a play on the word "racketeering. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/23
[edit] References
- ^ This film was in the European market released under the Touchstone Pictures label, which is according to the U.S. Copyright Office an accepted alternative designation of The Walt Disney Company.
- ^ Schweiger, Daniel. "Rocketeer: Comic Book Origins", Cinefantastique, August 1991.
- ^ Schweiger, Daniel. "Rocketeer", Cinefantastique, August 1991.
- ^ Schweiger, Daniel. "Rocketeer", Cinefantastique, August 1991.
- ^ Schweiger, Daniel. "Rocketeer", Cinefantastique, August 1991.
- ^ Schweiger, Daniel. "Rocketeer", Cinefantastique, August 1991.
- ^ Schweiger, Daniel. "Rocketeer", Cinefantastique, August 1991.
- ^ Schweiger, Daniel. "Rocketeer", Cinefantastique, August 1991.
- ^ boxofficemojo.com: The Rocketeer
- ^ rottentomatoes.com: The Rocketeer
- ^ imdb.com: The Rocketeer
