The Millionaires' Unit | |
---|---|
Directed by | Darroch Greer, Ron King |
Written by | Darroch Greer |
Release date |
|
Running time | 120 minutes |
Countries | United States, New Zealand |
Language | English |
The Millionaires' Unit is a 2015 American documentary film by Darroch Greer and Ron King about the First Yale Unit, a group of Yale college students who took the initiative to learn to fly in preparation for America's entry into the Great War. [1] Based on a book by author Marc Wortman, the film is narrated by Academy Award-nominated actor Bruce Dern. It was filmed in the U.S., England, France, Belgium and New Zealand over the course of seven years. [2] The documentary charts the romantic, little-known story of the origins of American airpower and features sequences filmed air-to-air with original WW1 planes.
The film won the Best Documentary Feature honor at the 2015 G.I. Film Festival and the Garden State Film Festival. It also screened at the Kansas City Film Festival, the Newport Beach Film Festival and the Julien Dubuque Film Festival, as well as at numerous museums and the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture event.
Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson was an English actress and singer. She was a major star at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer popularized during the Second World War for her portrayal of strong women on the homefront; listed by the Motion Picture Herald as one of America's top-ten box office draws from 1942 to 1946. She is the fourth most nominated woman for the Best Actress Oscar.
The Happiest Millionaire is a 1967 musical film starring Fred MacMurray, based upon the true story of Philadelphia millionaire Anthony J. Drexel Biddle. The film, featuring music by the Sherman Brothers, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design by Bill Thomas. The screenplay is by A. J. Carothers and based on the play that was based on the book My Philadelphia Father by Cordelia Drexel Biddle, the daughter of Anthony Biddle. Walt Disney acquired the rights to the play in the early 1960s. The film was the last live-action musical that he produced, as he died during its production.
Frederick Trubee Davison was an American World War I aviator, Assistant United States Secretary of War, Director of Personnel for the Central Intelligence Agency, and President of the American Museum of Natural History.
Philip Davis Guggenheim is an American writer, director and producer. His credits include NYPD Blue, ER, 24, Alias, The Shield, Deadwood, and the documentaries An Inconvenient Truth, The Road We've Traveled, Waiting for "Superman", Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates and He Named Me Malala. Since 2006, Guggenheim is the only filmmaker to release three different documentaries that were ranked within the top 100 highest-grossing documentaries of all time.
Andrew Jarecki is an American filmmaker, musician, and entrepreneur. He is best known for the Emmy-winning 2015 documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, which led to the arrest and imprisonment of Durst. He is also known for the documentary film Capturing the Friedmans, which won eighteen international prizes including the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the New York Film Critics Circle award, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He also co-founded Moviefone and created the KnowMe iOS platform.
Steven Macon Greer is an American ufologist who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) and the Disclosure Project, which seeks the disclosure of allegedly classified secret UFO information.
Judith Therese Evans, known professionally as Judy Greer, is an American actress and director. She is primarily known as a character actress, who has appeared in a wide variety of films. She first rose to prominence in the early 2000s, appearing in the romantic comedies What Women Want (2000), 13 Going on 30 (2004), 27 Dresses (2008), and Love & Other Drugs (2010).
Philip Alexander Gibney is an American documentary film director and producer. In 2010, Esquire magazine said Gibney "is becoming the most important documentarian of our time".
Jon Mikl Thor, better known as Thor, is a bodybuilding champion, actor, songwriter, screenwriter, historian, vocalist and musician.
Ondi Timoner is an American filmmaker and the founder and CEO of Interloper Films, a full-service production company located in Pasadena, California. Timoner has built a reputation in the documentary world, becoming the only two-time recipient of the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize for her documentaries Dig! (2004) and We Live in Public (2009). These two works were acquired for the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art.
The First Yale Unit was started by then Yale sophomore F. Trubee Davison in 1915. The First Yale Unit is considered to be the first naval air reserve unit. Davison and 11 other Yale students were fascinated with the possibilities of aviation in general and of naval aviation specifically. After meeting with Admiral Robert Peary to gain authorization for the unit, Trubee Davison acquired a Curtiss Model F flying boat and members of the First Yale Unit were trained as pilots during the summer of 1916. They were used as the first aerial coastal patrol unit.
Kamala Lopez is an American filmmaker, actress, writer, director, and political activist. She has had starring roles in Black Jesus, Medium, 24, Alias, NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, and 21 Jump Street. She has been a featured actress in films including Born in East L.A., Deep Cover, The Burning Season, Clear and Present Danger, Lightning Jack, and I Heart Huckabees.
Willie Ruff is an American jazz musician, specializing in the French horn and double bass, and a music scholar and educator, primarily as a Yale professor from 1971 to 2017.
The Secret Millionaire is a reality television show which originated in the UK, in which millionaires go incognito into impoverished communities and agree to give away tens of thousands of pounds. Members of the community are told the cameras are present to film a documentary. The UK version is produced by production company RDF Media. It first aired in 2006 on Channel 4, with further series in subsequent years.
Freida Selena Pinto is an Indian actress who has appeared mainly in American and British films. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, she resolved, at a young age, to become an actress. As a student at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, she took part in amateur plays. After graduation, she briefly worked as a model and then as a television presenter.
The GI Film Festival (GIFF), a 501c3 non-profit organization founded in 2006 by Army veteran Laura Law-Millett and her husband Brandon Millett, is "dedicated to preserving the stories of American veterans past and present through film, television and live special events."
Amy J. Berg is an American filmmaker. Her 2006 documentary Deliver Us from Evil (2006), about sex abuse cases in the Roman Catholic Church, was nominated for an Academy Award and won Berg the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay.
Charles John Musser is a film historian and documentary film maker. Since 1992 he has taught at Yale University, where he is currently a professor of Film and Media Studies as well as American Studies and Theater Studies. His research has focused on such topics as Edwin S. Porter and early cinema, Oscar Micheaux and race cinema of the silent era, Paul Robeson and film performance as well as a variety of issues and individuals in documentary. His films include An American Potter (1976), Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982) and Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch (2014).
Lisa F. Jackson is an American documentary filmmaker, known most recently for her films, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (2007) and Sex Crimes Unit (2011), which aired on HBO in 2008 and 2011. Her work has earned awards including two Emmy awards and a Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival. She has screened her work and lectured at the Columbia University School of Journalism, Brandeis, Purdue, NYU, Yale, Notre Dame and Harvard University and was a visiting professor of documentary film at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
CNN Films is a motion picture division of CNN, originally launched in 2012. Its first film, Girl Rising premiered in spring 2013 in the United States.