The Big Picture - Prologue | Do We Get to Win This Time?

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

‘The Deer Hunter.’ ‘Apocalypse Now.’ ‘First Blood.’ ‘Platoon.’ They’re among the hit films dealing with the Vietnam War—a conflict that divided moviegoers and inspired filmmakers. For decades, Hollywood released countless films about the war and its fallout—from action flicks to combat tales to sweeping dramas.  Through exclusive new interviews, ‘Do We Get to Win This Time?’ chronicles the making of Hollywood’s most ambitious and controversial Vietnam movies. Along the way, we also learn how these films reflected and shaped moviegoers’ feelings toward the war—and toward each other. Host: Brian Raftery  Producers: Devon Manze, Mike Wargon, Amanda Dobbins, and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Bobby Wagner  Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, Big Picture listeners. For the next few weeks, Sean and I are handing the feed over to a narrative podcast about Vietnam movies. It's called Do We Get to Win This Time? And it's hosted by longtime Ringer contributor Brian Raftery, who you might remember from our other narrative podcast, Gene and Roger. I think you'll like it.

Sean and I will see you in a few weeks. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. What's the first image that comes to mind when you think about the Vietnam War. If you were old enough to watch the nightly news in the late 60s and early 70s,

as more and more U.S. troops were being pulled into the conflict between North and South Vietnam, your first image is maybe of the chaos playing out on TV, like this haunting battlefield scene from 1970. I looked up and spotted, it was an NVA, had a green uniform, AK, and it was like a quick-draw thing. I opened up in him, he opened up in me.

He's lying up there on the trail. The Vietnam War claimed the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and led to the deaths of millions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia combined. It was cruel and complicated, a war that engulfed multiple countries and stymied five U.S. presidents before ending on April 30, 1975. That's the day communist forces rolled into Saigon and Americans raced out. That infamous moment was captured in this CBS report and repeated in documentaries for decades to come.

Inside the building, the evacuees were broken into groups of 50. And then it was a mad dash out the door into the parking lot for the waiting helicopter. And then it was farewell to Vietnam. But if you were born after the war ended, as I was, and if you grew up watching way too many movies, as I did, your most vivid images of Vietnam come straight from Hollywood. Images like Robert Duvall, beaming with pride as he storms the beach in Apocalypse Now. I love the smell of my pump in the morning. Or R. Lee Ermey, viciously chewing out Marines in full metal jacket.

You are the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized, gravastic pieces of amphibian shit. Or Sylvester Stallone, returning to finish a war that traumatized his country in Rambo, First Blood Part II. Sir, do we get to win this time? This time it's up to you. No modern event has captured the hearts and minds of movie makers and moviegoers like Vietnam.

It began as a television war, the first of its kind to play out in real time, with network TV bringing the fighting to living rooms across the country. But Vietnam would loom larger, and longer, on the big screen, inspiring countless Hollywood films about the war, and about the people who fought in it. For the most part, these were movies written and directed by white American men, often with a distinctly Western perspective on the war. So as world history lessons go, these movies are pretty incomplete. Still, the range of Vietnam films made by Hollywood from the 60s through the 90s reflects

the power the war had over the American imagination. Some of these movies were gritty battle epics. Others were quiet dramas. And a few were low-budget, zero-prestige drive-in flicks. Looking for a sleazy caper about a bunch of Vietnam vet bikers? You got it. Here come the losers. Killers by instinct, mercenaries by profession. Revenge fantasies, romances, even horror movies. Vietnam would find its way into pretty much every genre you can think of, which makes sense when you consider that Hollywood has a long history of going to war.

In the 1940s, the major studios produced hundreds of films about World War II, a conflict with a clear purpose and a victorious outcome. But Vietnam? It was divisive, confusing, an open wound. Vietnam was the first 20th century war, excluding Korea, that didn't really have a conclusion. That's retired Marine Corps Captain Dale Dye, a Vietnam vet who later became an actor and military advisor, working on films like Born on the Fourth of July and Casualties of War. Americans were ambivalent about what the hell does this mean? Why did we lose 58,000 people over there for what?

And it's an unanswered question, an unscratched itch, if you will. And something like that is always great dramatic fodder. What did it all mean? It was a question that would animate American pop culture, especially in the 80s, when Vietnam was everywhere you looked. Not only in movies, Thursday on CBS, but also in primetime TV,

racial tension pits soldier against soldier, not in my book! tour of duty, as well as high-profile comic books. The giant in the industry, Marvel Comics, publishes everything from Care Bears to Spider-Man. Now they've added a new bestseller to the comic stands, The Nom. It's a series of stories that chronicle the war years between 1966...

If it seems odd that a brutal, long-running war found its way to the pages of a Marvel comic, keep in mind that these new Vietnam stories had an eager young audience, Gen X. To those of us who came of age in the 80s and early 90s, Vietnam often felt like a hand-me-down, a war we'd never experienced but were asked to relive. By the time I was 11, I was fascinated with Vietnam, or at least the pop culture version of Vietnam. I watched Tour of Duty on the dusty old TV in my parents' bedroom. I had a subscription to The Nom. It was one of the first comic books I'd read every month

along with a little something called Peter Porker and the Spectacular Spider-Ham. And of course, I begged my parents to let me see movies like Good Morning Vietnam and Platoon even though they were rated R and even though I was barely old enough to process them. I pitched it like this. These were educational films, and the best way to learn about a war was to watch it. And for years, I actually believed that was true. I hadn't been to Vietnam, but I'd been to a lot of Vietnam movies. Wasn't that the same thing? But films are not history lessons. And when you're making a movie about Vietnam, a painful conflict that's still being debated today, you're dealing with multiple perspectives,

multiple truths. Vietnam is a country. It's not just a battle zone. That's Lely Hayslip, whose tumultuous journey from Vietnam to America was depicted in Oliver Stone's 1993 film Heaven and Earth. We are human beings. We fight for our country, our motherland, our freedom. Hayslip watched the war unfold in front of her eyes. Yet she often struggles to recognize her place of birth, or her people, in the Hollywood version of Vietnam. My question keeps coming to my mind is,

what do these people know about our people? What do these American people know about our country, our culture, and our tradition, and who we are? In fact, when you talk to those who lived through the war, it's clear no movie truly represents what it was really like. This was a conflict that affected millions, all of whom experienced their own personal Vietnam. I mean, I've sat in a bar with another Vietnam veteran. That's Dale Dye again. And he'd tell me something and say, what? You did what?

And I was there, and he was too. And he can't believe what happened to me, and I can't believe what happened to him. So it was a long war. And it was full of such different experiences. Those experiences, both abroad and at home, prompted millions of Americans to reexamine how they felt about their country and themselves. And that uneasy evolution can be traced through decades worth of Vietnam movies. It's a genre that changed as America changed. There are tales of rah-rah jingoism, of loneliness and regret, of pained acceptance. The movies arrived at different times in our history and reflected a variety of moods.

Moods that evolved in the years ahead and that were often in conflict with each other. But they were always trying to answer the same questions. Why did we go to Vietnam? And what did it do to us? It's been nearly 50 years since the last American helicopters flew out of Saigon, and Hollywood has spent decades trying to answer those questions. The Vietnam movie boom started in the late 60s, peaked in the late 80s,

and was all but over by the late 90s, with a few stops and starts along the way. But even today, there are still films being made about the war. In fact, no world-changing event of the late 20th or early 21st century, from the JFK assassination to 9-11 to the numerous wars in the Middle East, has inspired as many films as Vietnam. Just think about that for a moment. About the fact that a complex, controversial, decades-old war, one that nearly tore this country apart, could inspire not just a few hit movies, but a whole genre.

That wouldn't happen today. Because even though we live in a time when divisive, momentous events seem to happen like every two hours, film studios don't want to make movies about them. Or maybe audiences just don't want to see movies about them. But for a long time, moviegoers were eager to confront Vietnam. And studios were willing to invest endless amounts of time and money to bring the war to them. Vietnam has inspired hundreds of films. And as a result, it's become a multi-generational

conflict. Baby boomers witnessed Vietnam first hand on TV. Then the war was recreated, and sometimes rewritten, for Generation X. And now, Vietnam is being rediscovered by younger movie watchers, who have five decades worth of films to draw from. Films that still have a hold over popular culture today. They were made by writers and directors trying to make sense of an incomprehensible war, and they required everyone involved to push themselves well past their

comfort zones. Oliver Stone sent a bunch of pampered young actors into the jungle for weeks to prepare for Platoon. Michael Cimino drove everyone crazy filming The Deer Hunter. And Francis Ford Coppola's years-long journey to Apocalypse Now was so torturous, it resulted in this infamous bit of boasting at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. My film

is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. A quick fact check here. Coppola didn't actually serve in the war, but his canned declaration proves how transformative these Vietnam movies could be for the people who make them, for the people who watch them, and in a weird way, for the war itself. Movies like Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and Full Metal Jacket blur together fact and fiction so effectively, they create a Vietnam that never actually existed, but which felt terrifyingly real.

That's how powerful movies are. They don't just depict history. They can also define it. But not everyone's definition of the Vietnam War is the same. And when you talk to people who actually experienced the war about the movies that tried to capture it, you get a wide range of responses. Like this one from retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Michael Lee Lanning, a veteran who wrote an entire book about Vietnam movies. The Western movies, when I was young, the saloon doors opened and in walked the guy with the guns and a black hat. You knew he was the bad guy right from the start.

Well, when Vietnam movies came along, the black hat was replaced by the Army field jacket. If a fellow walked in a bar with an Army field jacket, you knew he was a problem, he was crazy, or a criminal, or all three. It's just not true. But Hollywood's power to shape history isn't limited to what filmmakers put on the screen.

It also comes from what they don't. Just ask Q Chin, an acclaimed Vietnamese-American actor who witnessed the fall of Saigon firsthand. Every foreigner company coming to Vietnam making movie, of course the story is about the war. But to me, most of the movie from the point of view of the war. But to me, most of the movie, from the point of view of the outsider, they're making movie related to war, to soldiers, to barbed wire, blood and shooting, but not any movie talking about the people, about the culture, about the native. Five decades since the war ended, people are still arguing about why Americans were in Vietnam, about what we did there,

and about the movies the war inspired. These are films that impacted how millions of Americans perceived a conflict that, even today, is hard to make sense of. It's also hard to make sense of how these movies were pulled off in the first place. They're these big, swaggering historical dramas, the kind Hollywood barely even tries to make anymore. So why did we become so obsessed with Vietnam movies? How did Hollywood's depiction of the war evolve over time?

And how did these films shape the way we feel about the conflict? And about each other? Those are questions I've spent the last year trying to answer. To be clear, I am not a historian. I am someone who watches a lot of movies and spends way too much time thinking about them. So if you're looking for an expert account of the Vietnam War, this is not it. But if you're interested in movies, how they're made, and how they can rewrite history, stick around for the next eight episodes.

You'll hear from people who have been living with the Vietnam War for decades about how they watched these movies. The first time I saw it, it was almost like, are you crazy? Are you imagining this? And it was deeply perplexing and deeply, deeply disturbing. And at a certain point in the movie, I realized it was about people like me, that is, deeply disturbing. And at a certain point in the movie, I realized it was about people like me, that is Vietnamese people.

And you'll hear from filmmakers and actors about the hazards of bringing the war to the screen. This is a time when you could actually use tires to block out the sun. So they burned 10,000 tires and blocked out the sun. I always kept a loaded rifle next to me so that in case I needed to use the scene, I could fire a few rounds in the air loaded with blanks.

Everything was breaking down at some point. Cars, vehicles, getting into the jungle, rain. I said to Francis, Francis, when are you going to finish this film? And he said, never. This is Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War. Written and reported by me, Brian Raftery.

The executive producers are Bill Simmons, Juliet Littman, and Sean Fennessy. Our story editor is Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by Devin Manzi, Mike Wargon, and Bikram Patel. Fact-checking by Dan Comer. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Talent booking by Kat Spilling.

Sound design by Bobby Wagner. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music in this series comes from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Art direction and illustration by David Shoemaker. Thanks for listening.