I feel like I’m publishing a photo of Bigfoot or an interview with JD Salinger here. When I woke up this morning and saw that there was allegedly a trailer online for the new film “Red Tails,” I laughed at the mere idea of it. There can’t be a trailer for “Red Tails” because there’s no way George Lucas will finally wrap up work on “Red Tails” at any point in my lifetime. He’s been talking about making this film since sometime in the early 1900s, it seems like. Okay, maybe it was the ’80s when he first started talking about it, right around the same time he produced “Tucker: The Man And His Dream,” and the script was in development for about 20 years.
I’ll let you consider that for a moment. 20 years to develop a script.
In other words, “Red Tails” must be the greatest produced work of screenwriting of all time if they took that long nailing it down, right? Anthony Hemingway is the director who finally got picked to bring the film to life, and he’s a TV vet with a pretty impressive background. “Treme.” “Community.” “True Blood.” “Battlestar Galactica.” “The Wire.” He’s done his time, and he’s worked his way up from 2nd AD to AD to director, and “Red Tails” looks like his reward at the end of that trip.
I kid about how long it’s taken to get this made mainly because there are so few films with the name “George Lucas” attached that when something does come out and you see that Lucasfilm Ltd. logo at the start, it’s almost a shock to the system. It’s taken Spielberg longer to get “Tintin” up on the screen, but I don’t think he was quite as vocal over the years about it as Lucas was about this one. He’s always been in love with telling the story of the Tuskegee Airmen in WWII, and now he’s finally done it with this film that opens just after Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2012.
Here’s the trailer:
I’ve got a pretty good idea what to expect from that now, and I am really looking forward to see that aerial battle stuff on the biggest screen I can find when it opens. Great cast, one of the great WWII stories, and all the mayhem ILM can orchestrate in the skies?
“Red Tails,” glad to finally meet you.
The film opens January 20, 2012.