Imagine your country is crumbling, enemy troops are advancing and you're on their death list. Your only hope is to escape the country on a commercial airline.
That's the situation hundreds of Vietnamese found themselves in during the final days before the fall of Saigon in 1975 - a desperate situation with little hope of survival, with all hoping to be on the Last Flight Out (Tuesday at 8 p.m., Ch. 2).This is not just another Vietnam movie. It doesn't show fighting and battles.
It's also not the more familiar stories of the last days of Saigon. It's not about the babylift or Americans being plucked off the roofs of buildings by helicopters.
It's a behind-the-lines story of Vietnamese citizens who aided the Americans and were in danger of being killed. And it's the story of Americans who risked their own lives to help them.
"When I was first reading the script, I thought, `The writer has gone bananas. This is such melodrama.' Then I found out that it was an accurate portrayal of what happened," said Richard Crenna, who plays Pan Am pilot Dan Hood - a man who returned on the last flight in to Vietnam to help as many people as possible escape.
"It was astonishing to me that something like this could have happened and did happen," he said in a telephone interview.
"Flight" tells a number of different stories, all tied together by the attempt to escape. It's the story of Hood, who's returned to assist a friend who's helping Vietnamese citizens escape. Hood ends up ferrying injured Vietnamese by ambulance to the airfield and working to bypass American and Vietnamese government officials.
It's the story of Pan Am's local manager, Al Topping (James Earl Jones), who must decide when to pull out of Saigon, knowing many who stay behind face certain death. It's the story of Pham Van Minh (Academy Award-winner Haing S. Ngor), Topping's assistant who's stuck in Vietnam because his wife refuses to leave.
It's the story of Dr. Timothy Brandon (Stephen Tobolowsky) of the American Hospital, who's told that many of his employees are on a death list. It's the story of Pan Am flight attendant Tra Duong (Rosalind Chao of "M.A.S.H."), a naturalized American who goes back to try to save her family.
"It's about all these people in the most incredible danger, just trying to save their lives and the lives of their families," Crenna said. "There's even more to the story than we told. It could have been two hours longer.
"We forget that behind the lines, commercial airlines were flying in and out of Saigon. We forget there's another civilian life behind the front. (The movie) shows us how the people were really affected by the final days of the war."
Hood had been involved in the babylift, which transported orphans from Saigon to the Philippines and on to the United States.
"That was one of the motivating factors that brought him back to Saigon," Crenna said. "He had been involved in the orphan lift for some time."
And although it wasn't in his plans, Hood ended up adopting a Vietnamese child he helped escape. In a particularly wrenching sequence in the movie, a Vietnamese mother begs Hood to take her young son _ whose father was a Korean soldier _ out of the country so he wouldn't face discrimination and life under the communists. Hood doesn't want to separate the child from his mother, and when he's finally convinced by the woman's begging, she breaks down in uncontrollable sobs.
"I talked to Dan Hood and he told me that was really the way that it was," Crenna said. "It was a terribly difficult parting for all of them.
"It was hard just for us to film. The boy we had doing the scene in the movie starting crying and crying and we had a hard time calming him down."
Most of the filming was done in Thailand, ironically at an airport where American B-52s were based during the war. Several of the members of the cast have themselves escaped from oppressive regimes in Southeast Asia. The most well-known is Ngor, who fled Cambodia's killing fields.
Kieu Chinh, a former South Vietnamese actress who plays a member of the Viet Cong, was actually on the "Last Flight Out."
"It was fascinating to talk to these people," Crenna said. "They lived through something we have difficulty even imagining."
The telemovie does stray from the facts in a few areas. For example, the character of Larry Rose (Eric Bogosian), a former U.S. Embassy staff member who returns to help in the escape, is fictional. And while Tra Duong did help several of her relatives escape, she didn't venture out of the airport to do it.
"Not everything is exactly as it was, but I think the film does a real good job of capturing the spirit of what happened," Crenna said. "They didn't have to make many changes. The story is pretty incredible as it is."