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San Fernando Valley 99s Aviation Films |
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Aviation Films, Most with Women Pilots Gathered from 99s emails; includes notations by various posters. 1. "Always" with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfuss. It's a flying movie with a love story. 2. "One Six Right." There are a lot of 99s in this movie and some great flying stories. 3. "Pancho Barnes," starring Valerie Bertinelli (!!!) made in 1988. It's not a great movie by any means, but at least it's about a female pilot. 4. "Skyward" was 1980 made-for-TV. Bette Davis played an old CFI who teaches a wheelchair-bound young woman how to fly. 5. "Sky King" TV show. Watch Uncle Sky's niece, Penny, fly. Sky and Penny and the Cessna! It was a twin Cessna, wasn't it? Penny was the one that her uncle trusted to fly his planes and was multi-rated. They flew Bamboo Bombers at first and then Cessna 310s. 6. "Night Witches." Was that movie was ever finished? I read an Internet post that Paramount never put the film into production and someone else wanted to pick it up and call it "Liliia," after Liliia Litviak, Soviet fighter pilot. They said, "Most of our research has dispensed with Bruce Myles' "Night Witches," a psuedo-journalistic account of the history of the women's flying regiments. To date, the finest text to read on the subject is Reina Pennington's exhaustively documented "Wings, Women and War" and we'll be sticking much closer to her account as well as several recently declassified Russian documentations of the events surrounding Liliia's flights." But it doesn't appear this film was ever finished either. Sure is great material for a potentially great movie! 7. "Speed and Angels." 8. "Sky King." You can find all 64 episodes of the Sky King videos at AmericanFlyers.net; then click on Entertainment. 9. "Always" or "Flight for Freedom." Flight for Freedom was a 1940s release starring Rosalind Russell as a woman pilot flying around the world who gets lost in the South Pacific who happens to be cooperating with the U.S. government on some mission. Interestingly, one of the movers and shakers with the project was none other than George Palmer Putnam, Amelia Earhart's husband! 10. Pancho Barnes: A Documentary Film made in affiliation with KOCE-TV (PBS). 11. "When Glendale Ruled the Skies," 1999, 30 min. When Grand Central Air Terminal opened in 1923 it was considered California's premier airport. It was the first major airport in the Los Angeles area, and boasted the first paved runway west of the Rocky Mountains. Thom Eberhardt's entertaining documentary tells the story of Glendale's role in modern aviation and it's short life as Hollywood's playground. Borrowable through Glendale Public Library.
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