Broxton Avenue, Tuesday Night
November 5th, 2019. Westwood. Broxton Avenue was shut to traffic and hung with Midway banners from the curb to the Regency Village Theatre's tower, sponsor flags and all. A red carpet ran down the middle of the street, and on a premiere night everything on it has a mark and a minute.
In the middle of it, behind a row of big white letters spelling MIDWAY, sat a World War II Navy airplane with a white star on its side and the markings of the SBD Dauntless. That's the dive bomber whose crews put four Japanese carriers out of the fight in a single day in June 1942, which is a large part of why the film has the name it does.
The part called for a Dauntless. Lionsgate wanted the movie's airplane on the carpet, not a poster of it, and that's what the people walking up Broxton saw. Guests stopped beside it for photos, and the cameras followed them there.
It wasn't a Dauntless.
Casting the Airplane
When we told the Flight Risk story from the Rose Bowl, we said this one was coming. Here it is.
The call came straight from Lionsgate, and the part called for a Dauntless. So in the fall of 2019 we went looking for one that could be standing on Broxton Avenue on November 5th. There wasn't one. Not fully restored, and not on that date. Film people have a word for that situation. A stand-in.
The F4F Wildcat is a different airplane: a Grumman fighter, one seat, a few feet shorter than the Douglas it was standing in for. It also has its own credits from the battle. Wildcats flew combat air patrol over the American carriers and the atoll that June. So the Wildcat went to wardrobe and came out in Dauntless markings.
36 Hours
Midway opened in theaters on Friday, November 8th, Veterans Day weekend, and the premiere was three days ahead of it. The Wildcat's day started the night before.
It went onto a flatbed in San Diego that evening with its wings folded back, the way they fold on a carrier deck. Early the next morning it was on the highway north under police escort, an oversize load with a fighter on its back, and by 10:00 AM it was in Westwood for load-in. A crane set it down among the poster walls and barricades while the red carpet was still going down around it. It was, as far as I know, the only member of the cast who arrived on a flatbed. From the first strap in San Diego to the crane lifting it back onto the trailer after dark, the job ran thirty-six hours.
None of the rest of it landed on the studio's desk. The transport, the city sign-offs for an airplane on a closed street, the insurance everyone needed to see before a wheel touched the carpet, and the crew who stayed with the aircraft from the first strap to the last all came from our side of the table. That's what an aviation set piece is supposed to feel like from the studio's chair.
Premieres are a format I know from the production side. Twenty years in live event production, plenty of it beside film and broadcast producers, and premieres have their own grammar: arrival times, a press line, and a red carpet that opens when it does.
Curtain
Inside, before the lights went down, the screening opened by recognizing three men in the audience who had fought at Midway in June 1942. The part called for a Dauntless, and out on Broxton Avenue a stand-in played it. The three men inside were the real heroes.
Premiere Questions, Answered
What if the aircraft from our film isn't available?
Then we find the closest honest match and dress it for the part. On Midway, no restored SBD Dauntless was available on the date, so an F4F Wildcat, a type that flew in the same battle, appeared in Dauntless markings. The date held.
Can an aircraft be staged on a closed street outside a theater?
Yes. Midway's stood on Broxton Avenue in Westwood, in front of the Regency Village Theatre. Placement, transport, sign-offs and insurance are part of the job, and the studio's team never has to touch them.
Can cast and press photograph with the aircraft?
That's what it's there for. The aircraft is staged for people to get close, with crew alongside it the whole time.
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