BEATING THE GRIM REAPER IN HOLLYWOOD

     “It's a good thing you called today because I’ll probably be dead tomorrow.” How does a person respond tosuch news? If you are doing oral history interviews for a study of the relationship between the film industry and the military and the person co-directed The Green Berets, you pick up your tape recorder and run out the door.
     Ray Kellogg proved to be perfectly reconciled to his fate, providing graphic detail of his recent lung cancer operation and the doctor's prognostication that he had only weeks to live. He also gave me a fine interview about his work with John Wayne in making the first movie about the Vietnam War and about his involvement withTora! Tora! Tora! On my part, being practical, I had Kellogg sign my standard permission form for use of the interview before I left rather than following my usual procedure of including it with the completed transcript. In fact, Kellogg lived another three months rather than days, which he undoubtedly would have attributed to his use of laetrile.
     Actually, I had learned to deal with impending death in Hollywood long before Kellogg’s candid introduction to his condition. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo had been one of the first war movies I had seen as a little boy and when I began studying the cooperation between the film industry and the military, Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter of the movie about Doolittle's raid on Japan, was one of the people to whom I initially wrote.
     My first two letters brought no response and so the week before wrapping up my initial research trip to Los Angeles, I wrote one more time. Two days before I was leaving, Trumbo called to explain that he had been recovering from a heart attack and an operation to remove a cancerous lung. I could only agree that those were pretty good reasons.,.
     Fortunately, the recovery had progressed far enough and Trumbo asked me to come over the next day. While his family did limit the interview to about an hour, the screenwriter provided me the information that served as the basis for my discussion in Guts & Glory of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, including a story which illustrated the impact which the movie had. Trumbo recalled that when he went to the Pacific as a correspondent after the film was released, squadron commanders told him that their pilots were ruining engines on their bombers trying to imitate the carrier take-offs portrayed in the film. To use the interview, however, I had to submit the transcript and approval form to Trumbo’s family since the writer’s ailments caught up with him before I had transcribed his recollections.
     Such were the risks of interviewing older filmmakers as well as the military people who provided me with information that made my books so valuable. Sometimes, of course, my requests to speak to a person were met with a brief silence and then the news that he had died only a few weeks before. Fortunately, I was able to meet with people like William Wellman and George Seaton in time to collect information on such films as The Story of G.I. Joe, Battleground, and Bridges at Toko Ri while they were still alive. To some, it might sound ghoulish to approach interviewing as a race against death. On my part, however, I saw my research as a chance to capture a significant part of American culture before the opportunity was lost forever.

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