Dambusters remake

Acceptable in the 50s

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The sigh which Stephen Fry gave live on radio on Friday 3 June 2011 as he was interviewed by Simon Mayo was clearly audible. Mayo read out a question about the Dambusters remake, sent in by a listener: ‘Is the dog still with us and does it have a different name?’
Fry made the perfectly justifiable point that things have changed since the original film came out, and that the name was to be changed to ‘Digger’. He went on:

It’s no good saying that it is the Latin word for black or that it didn’t have the meaning that it does now – you just can’t go back, which is unfortunate.
You can go to RAF Scampton and see the dog’s grave and there he is with his name, and it’s an important part of the film.
The name of the dog was a code word to show that the dam had been successfully breached.
In the film, you’re constantly hearing ‘N-word, N-word, N-word, hurray’ and Barnes Wallis is punching the air. But obviously that’s not going to happen now.
So Digger seems OK, I reckon.

You would think that in these days of instant reaction, this comment would have been round the world by teatime. But, strangely, most of the interwebnet was silent on the subject. (Although not this blog. Thanks to a tipoff by a reader, I was able to download the podcast and wrote a piece last Saturday.)
A full week later on Friday 10 June, the BBC Lincolnshire webpage picked up the comments and later in the day so did, inevitably, the Daily Mail.
Cue furore. Every discussion board and forum has gone nuts over the story. As usual when a Dambusters story hits the headlines, there has been a huge spike in hits on this blog. And, as usual, there are a number of comments in my pending file as readers express their views.
That’s where they’ll stay. I’m not going to publish them on this website because, frankly, this is a tedious debate that has happened many times over.
Back in 2009, writer Steven Baxter put the point well in his Enemies of Reason blog: ‘I think there was a time when it was acceptable to use words like P— or n—– or s—- [offensive text now changed], but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t offensive, or hurtful, or wrong.’
I agree. The world has moved on, folks, even since 2009. The word is offensive and it simply can’t be used in the remake of the film, however historically accurate it might be. You can justify using a racist word in other places on the interwebnet, but you can’t on this blog. If you send me a comment about it, I won’t publish it. My blog, my rules.

Fry speaks: how Jackson took on The Dam Busters

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The nation’s most loved polymath, Stephen Fry, was this week’s guest on Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode’s film review sequence on Radio 5. You can download this as a podcast from the BBC website. For about 25 minutes he discussed a number of his film projects, including a couple of references to work on the Dambusters remake. He describes how David Frost, who had bought the rights to Paul Brickhill’s book, couldn’t find anyone for the remake. When he was told that Peter Jackson had a poster for the 1955 Michael Anderson film hanging in his office, he rang him immediately and did the deal there and then. (If you don’t want to listen to the whole thing scroll to about 18.30-22.00 minutes.)
At about 33.30, he also responds to the inevitable listener’s question about the dog’s name. I don’t normally mention this tedious debate, but in this case, I’m making an exception.
[Hat tip: Nigel Parkin]

Do keep up, dear

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Once upon a time the Hollywood magazine Variety was regarded as the voice of show business, regularly breaking dozens of stories in a famously sensationalist style which used a language all its own:

Now, it seems, it employs ‘reporters’ who are reduced to reading film directors’ Facebook pages and regurgitating material without any pre-existing knowledge. Last week, Dave McNary fearlessly exposed the brand new (to him) news that:

Peter Jackson has tapped British thesp Stephen Fry to play the Master of Laketown in “The Hobbit” and revealed on his Facebook page that he and Fry are collaborating on “Dambusters,” a WWII actioner that has been in development since 2006.

“I’ve known Stephen for several years, and we’re developing a ‘Dambusters’ movie together,” Jackson said in his Facebook post. “In addition to his writing skills, he’s a terrific actor and will create a very memorable Master for us.”

Fry’s involvement with “Dambusters,” produced through Jackson’s WingNut Films, hadn’t been announced previously. Project is centered on the 1943 Allied air raid on three German dams essential to the Nazi steel industry. [Emphasis added]

If Mr McNary had bothered to check on Google (it’s called a “search engine”, old boy) he would have come across a few thousand references to this ‘actioner’ project, going back several years:

Modesty forbids me mentioning the name of the blog which ranks third and fourth in these search results.

Suffice it to say that Mr Fry’s involvement with the film has been around so long that he even wrote about it in the latest instalment of his autobiography. And that came out in September last year.

Hello, good evening and welcome

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If this is your first visit to the only Dambusters blog on the interwebnet, you are very welcome. You may well have arrived here after watching the Channel 4 documentary on Monday 2 May, in which modern engineers rebuilt a working ‘bouncing bomb’. This was previewed in various articles, one of which you can see here from the Daily Telegraph.
This blog tries to keep people up to date with Dambusters news from around the world. And because WordPress tells me the search questions which people have asked to arrive at the blog I know that there are two subjects which are likely to be uppermost in your mind.

1. What is happening to the remake of The Dam Busters?
Back in 2006 the producer Peter Jackson announced that he was to remake the classic 1955 film, The Dam Busters. A director, Christian Rivers, was assigned to the project, and a script was commissioned from British national treasure Stephen Fry. Jackson and several other sources have said several times that the project is still ongoing. The script is finished, at least one full size model Lancaster has been built, and test filming has been undertaken. But the Jackson team, based in his native New Zealand, are currently preoccupied with several other projects, notably The Hobbit, and it is now quite obvious that The Dam Busters is lower down the schedule than they have let on.

Lancaster full size model, shown to the press in July 2009

2. How many of the original Dam Busters are still alive?
I am happy to report that four of the aircrew who took part in the raid in May 1943 are alive and well. One, Grant MacDonald, who lives in Vancouver, Canada, visited the Windfall Films/Channel 4 team while they were making the documentary last October. He was the rear gunner in Ken Brown’s crew in AJ-F. Also living in Canada is Fred Sutherland, front gunner in the crew which dropped the bomb which broke the Eder Dam, Les Knight’s AJ-N. The only pilot still with us is Les Munro, who captained AJ-W on the raid. He lives in his native New Zealand, and has been reported as being involved in the Jackson remake project as a technical advisor. And finally, of course, there is George (“Johnny”) Johnson, bomb aimer in Joe McCarthy’s AJ-T, who lives in Devon and who was interviewed for the C4 documentary..

My own involvement in the Dambusters story is that my uncle, David Maltby, was the pilot of AJ-J on the raid, and dropped the fifth ‘bouncing bomb’ which made the final breach in the Möhne Dam. He and his entire crew were killed four months later, returning from an aborted attack on the Dortmund Ems Canal. David is buried in St Andrew’s Church in Wickhambreaux, Kent. You can read more about David and his crew on my other website, or in my book, Breaking the Dams, which was published in May 2008.

NZ film industry saved! (No news on Dambusters!)

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Believe me, I’ve tried. On your behalf, I have scoured the news sites who have covered the recent travails of the New Zealand film industry in depth – and found precisely No News about the remake of The Dam Busters. The country’s Prime Minister, no less, held a news conference about the fact that The Hobbit will now be made at Peter Jackson’s studio in Wellington. Jackson himself did a series of media interviews the week before. But at no time did they mention any other film projects.
However, the feeling amongst locals is that if The Hobbit had been lost to another country, this would have ‘put the kibosh’ on the remake of the Dambusters (the words of aviation forum moderator Dave Homewood.)
Just to reiterate, the deal about The Hobbit is between Jackson and film distributors Warner Brothers. The proposed Dambusters film is a joint project of Jackson and United Artists. That’s probably why it has never been mentioned!

Wow! Good morning and welcome!

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I can only attribute it to the Dambusters double header shown on BBC2 last night, but I have just seen the biggest ever single “spike” in views of this blog. Nearly 1300 people found their way here yesterday, and a further huge number this morning, so if you are amongst them, then welcome. This is, as far as I know, the only regularly updated Dambusters blog or website anywhere on the whole interwebnet. I like to think that it’s a good source for information about 617 Squadron’s wartime exploits, and all the things that have flowed from the fact that the Squadron was responsible for the RAF’s single most famous bombing operation of the Second World War.
In the 30 months I have been running this blog, I can tell you that the most searched-for information has always been “Dambusters remake”. Thousands of people want to know when this will come out. (For the benefit of people new to this, a remake of Michael Anderson’s 1955 classic has been on the cards since 2006 – it is being produced by Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame, from a script by Stephen Fry, the well known National Treasure. The film was to be directed by Christian Rivers, though there are some reports that he has now left his native New Zealand to work on other projects in the USA.)
The answer as to when the remake will come out, as I write in October 2010, is that we simply don’t know. Jackson’s outfit, Wingnut Films, has a code of secrecy akin to that of the Vatican’s College of Cardinals, and all we can say is that he will tell us in his own good time.
Finally, you might ask what are my credentials for writing this stuff. I’ve spent all my working life as a writer, editor and designer, but I have a family interest in the Dambusters. My uncle was David Maltby, pilot of the fifth aircraft to attack the Möhne Dam on 17 May 1943, dropping the bomb which caused its final breach. (He is played in the 1955 film by none other than George Baker, then an unknown young actor.) Sadly, David was killed four months after the Dams Raid, along with all his crew, when their aircraft crashed after being recalled from an aborted attack on the Dortmund Ems canal. In 2008, I wrote a book about David, his life, and the lives of his crew and the effect that their deaths had on all their families which is, as they say, available in all good bookshops – or online here.
I’d welcome your comments, news and any other information you want to share.
You can get in touch with me here.

Cold wind of Wellywood may blow over Dambusters remake

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There were whispers a few weeks ago that all was not well in Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films studio, but no formal statement ever emerged from the famously secretive setup. However, it now seems that at least some of these rumours were true. In a long piece in today’s Dominion Post, which is mainly concerned with how the film industry in Wellington appears to be losing business to its rival, Auckland, a couple of hundred miles further north, journalist Kimberley Rothwell confirms that Christian Rivers, although still contracted to direct the remake of The Dam Busters, has sold his Wellington house and headed off to the USA.
A dozen or so years ago, Wellington was booming, says Rothwell:
In 1999, production started on The Lord of the Rings, and the label “Wellywood” was born.
The massive two-year production drew Hollywood right to Wellington’s door and brought hundreds of millions of dollars – some put the estimate at $1 billion – into the local economy.
But at the same time, advertising agencies moved a lot of their TV work to Auckland, and production houses such as Silverscreen and Flying Fish, powerhouse producers of TV commercials, closed their Wellington offices.
The slump hasn’t all been caused by Jackson or Wingnut, or their well-documented problems getting The Hobbit into production. A massive project about the life of Christ, called Kingdom Come, has been put on hold for the moment as its production company South Vineyard tries to avoid collapse. All this means that local freelances are struggling, although they are hoping that things will look up in the future. Jackson himself gets kudos for being incredibly ‘loyal and dedicated’ to his crew members but the simple fact is that there doesn’t seem to be the work there at the moment.
The irony is that Wellington’s biggest film model building and digital company, Weta, is ‘humming’, but with post-production work. The Dominion Post couldn’t find a single shoot currently going on in the Wellington area.
To those of us outside New Zealand, this might seem a parochial matter. The country’s total population, after all, is under four million, less than a third of that of greater Los Angeles, the most important city in the English language film industry. If work on the Dambusters remake was transferred to Auckland it would hardly cause a flicker on the radar of the average enthusiast.
But to those on the ground – the technicians, scene painters, caterers, drivers and all the rest of the cast of thousands whose names scroll down the screen as you rush out of the cinema to get to the bar more quickly – it means a lot. These are their jobs after all, daily work which pays their mortgages and supermarket bills. If the cold wind of recession bites further into the Wellington economy there will be fewer presents round the Christmas tree this year. Even if the temperature is a comfy 20 degrees.

Bomb dropped. Wizard!*

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This great model is the work of 7-year-old Reece Baker, who is apparently a big Dambusters fan. So, a big ‘Hi Reece’ from all the readers of this blog. It looks as though you will have a terrific future career in model making. (At the rate at which the remake of A Certain Movie is currently proceeding, it could be that a move to New Zealand and a job in the Weta Workshops will be yours for the taking when you are 18!)
* This is what navigator Vivian Nicholson wrote in his log after AJ-J, piloted by my uncle David Maltby, released the spinning mine which caused the final breach in the Möhne Dam.

Something he forgot to mention?

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NZ film mogul Peter Jackson gave an interview to local newspaper The Dominion Post last week, talking about his favourite First World War movies. He told the interviewer about his long term plans to make a film about the Gallipoli campaign, a subject which is close to the hearts of both Kiwis and Aussies, and also mentioned that progress was being made ‘untangling’ the situation with The Hobbitt, which is bogged down in the financial turmoil surrounding MGM. Even the new Tintin movie got a namecheck.
Any news on The Dam Busters, you might ask? Nope, not even an item under Any Other Business.
Sometimes reading the runes at Wingnut Studios is like trying to work out what is going on in the North Korean Communist Party. At the moment nobody outside really has a clue.
You heard it here first!

Dambusters not affected by MGM woes

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The news that Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro is no longer to direct The Hobbit, which was to be produced by Peter Jackson, does not at first glance have any repercussions on Jackson’s projected Dambusters film. However, it is obviously a distraction for the great man, when the last we heard was that he was working on revisions to Stephen Fry’s script.
The fate of The Hobbit is closely bound up with the current state of flux with mega-production company MGM, which is up for sale. This is having a severe knock on effect further down the food chain — even to the extent that box office biggies like the new James Bond film are now on hold.
The Dambusters remake, however, will be distributed by Universal and Studio Canal so, in theory, MGM’s woes are irrelevant. And it is to be directed by Christian Rivers, who doesn’t appear to have any other projects on the go at the moment.
Jackson has said that if necessary he will direct The Hobbit himself. That, obviously, would eat into the time he has available for other work. But if he can delegate his work on the Dambusters to his co-producers then this could be minimised.
Whatever happens, we can expect very few public announcements until there is real news to report. Wingnut Films is a secretive outfit (it doesn’t even have a website) tucked away in a small country thousands of miles from anywhere. Even though its films since the Lord of the Rings saga have had mixed responses, it is still a wealthy company which can put substantial resources into movie-making. There is no reason at present to be worried about the Dambusters project.
However, our speculation eighteen months ago that 2011 would be the earliest it would appear now seems less likely to be true. It surely won’t hit the screens until 2012.