I happen to have an aquaintance who won a very prestigious screenwriting award based on his (and a partner’s) script on WWI fighter pilots. It was an excellent script, but studios just saw massive dollar signs in all the period fight scenes. Huge insurance premiums, massive casts and difficult to source period planes, costumes, etc.
Not to say that someone like Michael Bay couldn’t convince them to sink $800 million into a movie, but the budgets for a movie like this would be enormous and therefore unlikely to see the light of day.
I would love to see the Will Turner flight logs series by Chris Davey made into films.
If no one has read them, books 1 and 2 were fantastic. I started book 3, but didn’t finish it due to things going on. I really need to find it and read it.
I remember getting Red Baron for my Dad’s laptop the night before Thanksgiving way back in 1994. The game came with 3 booklets that went into the history of WWI aviation. I remember reading those booklets over and over (and playing that game over and over and over).
Then in 1999, my Dad got me a copy of the game Curse You Red Baron! Again, I played it endlessly, then bought Red Baron 3D a few months later and started reading every WWI book I could get my hands on.
To this day, WWI fascinates me. I’d love, love, love to see more films made on WWI aviation, and WWI in general.
I know it wasn’t WWI, but I sure would like to see a film along the lines of *The Memphis Belle * done from a WWI aspect. Corect me if I am wrong, y’all, but IMO, we know so little about the young men in WWI and their training from all sides.
If this hasn’t been written before, how did Von Richthofen choose the guys who made up the Circus, and what kind of background did they have? This is assuming that HE chose his flight, of course, and I bow to those of you have more knowledge in this area.
Good ideas all. But I’m still waiting for a big budget WWI trench film…the 30 seconds of WWI in Twelve Monkeys whet my appetite for one back in the 90s and I’m still waiting.
Something needs to be made of their youth. Albert Ball was 20 when he died, Manfred von Richthofen was 25, but they are too often portrayed by much older actors.
There’s a factoid about WW1 flyboys that would crack me right up on the big screen. In the early period of the war, aeroplanes were not designed or even thought of as combat machines at all, simply observation platforms. As such, they were completely unarmed. Then pilots got the notion that, since they were already up there above enemy trenches and all, why not bring party gifts ? So they’d chuck grenades or drop small artillery shells by hand, from the cockpit down onto the poor shmucks below.
While this was extremely clever and fair, it turned out not to be very funny at all when the flyboys from the other side started doing it as well, and so there came to be a need to prevent them from doing that. But remember: unarmed planes. So what did they do ? Brought a rifle along, and took potshots at each other, along the sides of course because they didn’t want to shoot their own props off. Presumably while driving their planes with their knees or something.
It’s only later than someone got the brilliant idea of mounting some forward-facing machine guns on the planes and the dogfight was born.
Still, the hilariously low-tech early solutions have something surreal about them. Like a 1920s style drive-by.
There have been two very good films since then that I’ve seen; much worse than watch Joyeux Noel and A Very Long Engagement. Of course they’re not in English though.
For older films in English try Gallipoli, Paths of Gloryor either the 1930or 1979 versions of All Quiet on the Western Front.
I would love to see a film about the WWI German bombing raids over London.
My memory isn’t working at the moment, but I recall a book about it (Fire in the Sky?) that was very, very interesting. The crews used liquid oxygen to breath, flying enormous wood and fabric bi-planes.
It was pretty fascinating. I’ll see about finding the title and author.
