Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

28 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 7 Behind the Screen Credits BY HELEN COLTON Hollywood Editor, "Film and Radio Guide" Hollywood is always in a hurry. To get rush jobs done, it has learned that the fastest errand boy in town is Paul Mantz, the noted flier, who operates his own airline out at the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank. Mr. Mantz is best known as the “Flying Cupid” who pilots eloping movie stars to Yuma or Las Vegas. Actually, though, most of his busy life is spent on less romantic business. A typical week in the schedule of the Paul Mantz Airline might include such varied jobs as these : aerial stunting for a movie; flying Clark Gable to South Dakota for duck hunting; a camera crew to Biloxi, Mississippi, to film scenes at Keesler Field for Seven Were Saved, Pine-Thomas picture about the A.A.F. Air Rescue Service; movie executives to Washington, D. C., for meetings to discuss the snarled labor situation in the industry ; a Technicolor camera crew high over the High Sierras to film cloud formations for a film library; a crew for an insurance company to take aerial pictures of a ship wrecked off the coast of Mexico, to determine if its cargo could be salvaged ; water, food, blankets, sleeping bags, medicine, and chemicals to marooned fire fighters for the U. S. Forestry Service. To handle all these j o b s, Mantz maintains a fleet of about fifty planes, including a C47, a C67, a Lockheed 12, a Spartan, a Stinson, and a Basic Trainer 1.3. Many of the fifty planes are what Mantz calls “eggbeaters” — old crates which are rented Paul Mantz out to movie companies for scenes set in the various periods in which the planes were flown. Besides himself, he employs five pilots. He gets several applications a day from people who want to pilot for him. But only those with long, tough experience under all sorts of flying conditions stand a chance. They must have had a minimum of 2,000 hours in the air, to ciualify for insurance. Every seat in a Mantz plane is insured for $2.5,000 ; Mantz himself for $50,000. A chartered ride in a plane is costlJ^ sometimes running into the thousands ; it has to be, to cover the plane, supplies, insurance, salaries, and stop-over expenses for the crew if it has to wait in any city for the return trip. Every flight on a large plane carries a i)ilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer. The smaller planes, used for short hops like the “Honeymoon Express” to Yuma or Las Vegas, are operated only by a pilot. Mantz’s first movie customer was the late Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who phoned him one day seventeen years ago and said : “How about flying me down to Mexico for some deep-sea fishing? It’s the only way of getting there without missing the ball game.” Fairbanks loved to listen to sports broadcasts, and whenever Mantz flew him, he’d sit immersed in radio reports of athletic events which Mantz would tune in on his radio and relay to Fairbanks via the earphones with which people listened to the radio in those days. Not long after that, Elsie -Janis, “Sweetheart of the American Expeditionary Forces” in World War I, hired Mantz to fly her around the country on a lecture tour. Cecil De Mille, the movie director, was the next show-business name to take to the air. By then, the idea began to get around in the movie colony that flying was a safe, sane, and quick way of getting things done in their busy lives, and Mantz was on his way as pilot to the movie colony. Mr. Mantz has frequently doubled for actors in flyingroles, sometimes with nearly catastrophic results. Once he had to fly through a barn, and he cleared the sides by inches ; another time, doubling for Cary Grant in 0)dij Angels Have Wings, he took a sheer drop off a cliff, smashing his plane and some bones. For Thunder Birds, he had to fly upside down and throw out a pair of overalls to Gene Tierney on the ground. The wind threw the overalls right back into his face, blinding him for a few moments as he skimmed dangerously low over a water tower. W^\ m 1 1 f 1 X