Thursday, July 3, 2014






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Many know Zamperini’s story because of the superb book by Seabiscuit author Hillenbrand, and the world will celebrate him at year’s end when Universal releases the film in Oscar season, with Jack O’Connell playing Zamperini. I have been obsessed with Zamperini since I saw a segment on his ordeal broadcast by CBS during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and have written about the movie at Variety and Deadline since then at the slightest provocation, because it seemed such a worth screen story. When CBS chronicled his story, Zamperini returned to Japan to run with the Olympic torch, covering ground not far from where he spent an unimaginably brutal stretch in a Japanese prison camp during WWII. That is only a small part of Zamperini’s legend.
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I spoke with Jolie when Deadline revealed that she had been chosen by Universal (Donna Langley loved her debut In The Land Of Blood And Honey), and my, was Jolie excited. She knew the Zamperini story inside and out, and when she met him, it was love at first sight. She described how hard she had prepared for her audition (several directors tried for the assignment), and how she and husband Brad Pitt waited anxiously for the phone call, with Pitt suggesting she call to find out what was happening. I imagine such a thing rarely happens with that couple, who most often have to tell a lot of people “no” for all of the movie offers they receive. At the time, Jolie called Zamperini “a true hero and a man of immense humanity, faith and courage.”
It is sad he didn’t get to be there at the film’s premiere–he succumbed after battling pneumonia for 40 days. Matt Baer often told me how important it was to the humble Zamperini that his story be told, and I can only hope he got to view a rough cut before he passed away at age 97. Here is the live link to view the Nagano segments on Zamperini, broken into four installments. If you have a little time, it will be technicolor clear why he was such an exceptional man.

Read the rest at deadline








Jolie showed Zamperini 'a lot of scenes' of 'Unbroken'


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His story was so epic, says Jolie, that she and Hillenbrand had a tough time condensing it for readers and viewers alike.

"I call Laura often," Jolie told USA TODAY in May, "and she herself said that the original book was so much longer." Jolie is still editing the final cut of Unbroken (due in theaters this Christmas), but said Zamperini, who lived near the actress in the Hollywood Hills, was a common fixture in her life.
"He has seen a lot of the scenes," she told USA TODAY. "I run things by him and show him stuff."
Zamperini gave Jolie a golden running shoe pendant, a prize from one of his earliest races, which she wore as she shot Unbroken in Australia. In November, he attended the Governors Awards as Jolie received her honorary Oscar for her humanitarian work.

Jolie researched the WWII tale heavily prior to shooting, and said she awaited Zamperini's feedback nervously.

"It's really sweet because I showed him (a scene) on the raft and he said, "You know, the raft looked just like that!" And I think, well thank god! Because to him, it's like he's really surprised it looks like it, and I'm thinking, 'Oh god, for all the research could you imagine if he said it didn't." So you do try to get him right."

The actress also expressed how warm of an experience it was to share pieces of the film with Zamperini, particularly watching him experience actors bringing his loved ones back to life. "It's really sweet to show him (footage), he's lost so many, most of his family members," she said.

In May, Zamperini was named grand marshal of the 2015 Rose Parade in Pasadena, and recalled that Hillenbrand, in researching the book, asked to interview his friends from college and the Army.
"And now after the book was finished all of my college buddies are dead, all of my war buddies are dead. It's sad to realize that you've lost all your friends," he said. "But I think I made up for it. I made a new friend - Angelina Jolie. And the gal really loves me, she hugs me and kisses me, so I can't complain."

On Thursday, the actress released a statement on the news of Zamperini's passing after a 40-day battle with pneumonia. "It is a loss impossible to describe," said Jolie. "We are all so grateful for how enriched our lives are for having known him. We will miss him terribly."







Contributing: Associated Press






By Josh Dickey



Lieutenant Lou Zamperini (right) receives silver bombardier wings on August 14, 1942.





Louis Zamperini, the U.S. Olympic track star and World War II hero whose remarkable survival story is the basis for the upcoming Angelina Jolie-directed movie Unbroken, has died at age 97.
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Zamperini will be played by Jack O’Connell (300: Rise of an Empire) in the film, which is likely to debut at the Toronto Film Festival this fall. By all accounts around Hollywood, it has the goods to be a major awards contender.

Zamperini had been set to be grand marshal at the Rose Bowl parade this Jan. 1. His wife, Cynthia Applewhite, died in 2001.






LATimes
Obituary



The government announcement of Louis Zamperini's death in World War II made headlines.
Zamperini was the "Torrance Tornado," the tough kid turned track star who set a national high school record for running the mile. In 1936, he was known as "The Zamp," the 18-year-old USC standout who ran at the Berlin Olympics, where his roommate was Jesse Owens. In 1943, he was Lt. Zamperini, a bombardier on a B-24 Liberator, who, along with 10 other crew members, fell off the map on a May 27 mission over the Pacific.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent his parents a formal condolence note in 1944, he had no idea that Zamperini was still alive and living a nightmare in a Japanese prison camp. For 47 days, Zamperini had drifted on a life raft, fighting off sharks and starvation with two other crew members, one of whom died. Picked up by a Japanese patrol boat, the two survivors were beaten, tortured and humiliated for more than two years.
After the war, Zamperini was told by an Army superior that his raft trip qualified him for $7.60 a day in reimbursement. But someone higher up in the command nixed it: "Request denied," the letter said. "Travel unauthorized."
Zamperini, who became an inspirational speaker and evangelical Christian youth worker after returning from the war emotionally battered, died Wednesday — 70 years after the mistaken government announcement. He was 97.
His death from pneumonia was confirmed by a spokesman for Universal Pictures, which is scheduled to release a film based on Zamperini's life in December.
An athlete who stayed trim his entire life, Zamperini gave up skateboarding at 81. Ten years later, he gave up skiing. At 97, he was fit enough to be picked as grand marshal of the 2015 Rose Parade. He often credited his years of rigorous training and competition with helping him to survive the ordeal of war.
"The only way I can put it that makes sense is that every athlete wants to win," he said on CBS' "The Early Show" in 2001.
It was unclear Thursday morning who would replace him in the Rose Parade.
Zamperini's remarkable life story is the subject of "Unbroken," the film based on Laura Hillenbrand's best-selling book of the same name.
The tale had been simmering on Hollywood's back burner for decades. In 1957, Universal Pictures bought the rights to Zamperini's memoir, "Devil at My Heels." Producers even pegged actor Tony Curtis for the leading role but then "Spartacus" came along and the project was dropped. Zamperini's saga languished.

"The story was as vast as the ocean waters in which Zamperini had floated for nearly two months," then-Times film reporter John Horn wrote in 2014. Producers and writers "simply had too much material, and no one could figure out precisely which parts of his story to tell and which to leave behind."
Intrigued by Hillenbrand's 2010 book, actress Angelina Jolie pushed the film into production. She directed it as well.
As it turned out, her home in the Hollywood hills was just a stroll away from the one Zamperini owned for more than 50 years.
"I imagine that for the last 10-something years, he's been sitting there having a coffee in the morning and wondering, 'Who's going to make this movie?'" Jolie said in a 2014 interview on NBC's "Today" show. "And I've been sitting in my room thinking, 'What am I supposed to be doing with my life?'"
Zamperini's life was the stuff movies are made of.

In the 1930s, he was an emerging track star, a two-time NCAA champion in the mile at USC and a likely candidate to break the four-minute mile. At the Berlin Olympics, he finished eighth in the 5,000-meter run and afterward shook hands with Adolf Hitler, who called him the "boy with the fast finish."
He was a sure thing for the 1940 Olympics, but they never materialized. Planned for Tokyo, the Games were canceled when war broke out.
As a flier in the Pacific, Zamperini was part of a crew trying to find a downed plane when his aircraft developed engine trouble and plunged into the Pacific hundreds of miles south of Hawaii.
"The plane exploded," he told the CBS program "48 Hours" in 1999. "I felt like someone hit me on the forehead with a sledgehammer. My head comes out of the water. It looks just like the world just stood still for a moment."
Only three of the 11 men onboard survived the crash and another died before Zamperini and 2nd Lt. Russell Phillips were captured by a Japanese patrol ship in the Marshall Islands.

"We were in constant, horrible fear," Zamperini told The Times in 2002. "Sometimes [a shark] would put its head right up on the raft and look at us. We'd whack them on the nose with the paddles."
Zamperini and Phillips survived on rain water and whatever fish they could catch. They endured strafing by Japanese planes. And they kept their wits with mental exercises that included Zamperini narrating the preparation of an elaborate meal, listing each ingredient. "When the imaginary meal was prepared, the men would devour every crumb, describing every mouthful," Hillenbrand recounted in "Unbroken."
"They conjured up the scene in such vivid detail that somehow their stomachs were fooled by it, if only briefly."
By the time of their capture, Zamperini had drifted 2,000 miles and weighed less than 100 pounds.
Zamperini was among prisoners who were given mysterious injections to test their reactions. He was particularly menaced by a soldier named Mutsuhiro Watanabe, whom the prisoners called The Bird and who "would dedicate himself to shattering" Zamperini, Hillenbrand wrote.
"I could take the beatings and the physical punishment, but it was the attempt to destroy your dignity, to make you a nonentity, that was the hardest thing to bear," Zamperini told the New York Times in 2003.
After Zamperini was declared dead in 1944, the airport in Torrance was named after him and a race in New York's Madison Square Garden was renamed the Louis Zamperini Memorial Mile. The Torrance High School stadium also bears his name. In 2013, the dining hall at an Army missile test site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands was renamed in his honor.
The first sign that the downed flier was alive came in November 1944, when Radio Tokyo broadcast a greeting to his parents. But Zamperini refused to cooperate for a second broadcast, when his captors wanted him to read a statement critical of the United States.
As a result, Zamperini, who was promoted to captain while in captivity, was sent to "punishment camp."
"My first thought was anything is better than going back to The Bird. If I get away from him, I don't care where I go," he told "48 Hours."
Unfortunately, the new camp's commander was The Bird, who continued to torment Zamperini until the war's end.
Louis Silvie Zamperini was born Jan. 26, 1917, in Olean, N.Y., the second of four children of Louise and Anthony Zamperini. His father, who was born in Italy and came to the United States as a teenager, started working in a coal mine, then in construction.

Read the rest at the LATimes




















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