"Amelia" struggled to get airborne

By Frank Swertlow

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - A hijacking nearly brought "Amelia" crashing to the ground.

It was July 15, 2008, three days before shooting was scheduled to get under way on the $40 million film about pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart, and a 10-passenger Lockheed L-12A (known in the aviation industry as an Electra Junior) was being flown across the globe to Cape Town, where the movie was to shoot. The 70-year-old plane was a crucial element in the depiction of Earhart's ill-fated 1937 attempt to fly around the world.

But getting it there wasn't easy. For one thing, Junior needed frequent refueling along the way; for another, it was so old it used a special fuel, Avgas, to power its twin engines. That fuel was running low when an airport on Malabo Island, the capital of Guinea, signaled it had the fuel and cleared Junior to land -- at which point it was surrounded by 15 armed soldiers.

"Without the Electra, we could not make the movie," director Mira Nair says.

After three days of haggling, with the French and South African governments taking part, Nair managed to come up with the cash -- a relatively modest $12,000 "fine." Doing so was just one of the stomach-churning episodes in the making of her movie, which already had undergone a year in development and seen two directors and two writers tackle the project before it finally got made.

That it was made at all was thanks to Ted Waitt, co-founder of computer company Gateway and a longtime follower of the aviatrix. Retired from Gateway, he decided to enter the movie biz and set up a production company, Avalon Pictures, hiring former Focus Features executive Kevin Hyman as president.

Waitt was convinced a new theatrical film would reveal fresh elements of Earhart's life. In 2007, he bought rights to two recent biographies -- Susan Butler's "East to the Dawn" and Mary Lovell's "The Sound of Wings" -- then quickly brought in Oscar-winning screenwriter Ron Bass ("Rain Man") to pen the script. Hilary Swank signed and suggested Phillip Noyce ("Patriot Games") to direct.

From July-December 2007, Noyce and Bass worked on a half-dozen drafts of the script until the Hollywood writers strike late that year put the project on hold.

With "Amelia" suspended, Noyce left to pursue another film, a biopic of Mary Queen of Scots, at which point Hyman approached Nair to take over the film. Nair joined the project in January 2008.

Although Nair might seem an unusual choice -- she had, after all, come to fame with such Bollywood movies as "Monsoon Wedding" and "Salaam Bombay!" -- Hyman had worked with her on other period projects, most notably "Vanity Fair," the Reese Witherspoon vehicle Nair made for Focus. Indeed, she had been his first choice to make "Amelia" but was too busy on another picture, the Mumbai-based thriller "Shantaram," in development with Johnny Depp.

Now, with Nair, Bass continued to work on the screenplay. But Nair's vision for the film was very different from his.

Bass saw the picture as a story about an iconic woman whose life was defined by her father's alcoholism, but Nair was more interested in the tale of a modern woman coming of age just before the outbreak of World War II.

"I had issues with Ron's script," the director says. "For me, one of the great hooks to her story was that she was very worldly, even though she came from a small town in Kansas. Her dreams were really the key to that final flight."

Says Bass: "I wanted something about Amelia that was more interesting than just her flying; I wanted something deeper. Everything Mira showed was true: Amelia was heroic, and she was brave and a feminist and a leader and a political leader. I was looking for something that changes her, the journey. Where is the vulnerability? What frightened her? Because she was fearless."

Bass and Nair parted ways in February 2008. Nair quickly brought in veteran scribe Anna Hamilton Phelan ("Gorillas in the Mist"). She shared Nair's (and Swank's) vision.