Mark Arnett did not exactly set out to
become an award-winning documentary filmmaker. The Arizona lawyer
didn't even plan on being a filmmaker. All he knew was that he had a
compelling story that he thought needed to be told.Arnett had always known his father served in World War II, "but he never talked about it. None of them did."
In May 1994 he accompanied his father to a reunion in the
Netherlands.As he stood in the field where his father's plane, the
Boomerang, was shot down by the Germans 50 years ago to the day, he
thought, "I have to document this story. I hired a local news crew to
come and take video. Then I got home with all this tape, and wondered
what to do. That's when I started learning," Arnett says.
The first thing he realized was "that I wanted to make a documentary for people like myself who don't like documentaries."
The second thing was that "as a member of the spoiled, pretentious
and ungrateful baby boomer generation" he did not appreciate his
father's story for what it was. "So, I started the film in a way that
baby boomers can relate to, I made it about myself."
What he didn't know was that he was about to embark on a 14-year
journey that would not only take him away from that "self-centered
vision" but also resulted in a DVD that has resonated with audiences
all over.
"Baby Boomerang" won the Silver Ace Award at the 2009 Las Vegas
International Film Festival, won Best Documentary at the 2009 "Gone
With the Wind Festival" in Hollywood, was an official selection at both
the 2009 Phoenix Film Festival and the 2009 LDS Film Festival and at an
independent film festival in Tampa and, most recently, was named "Best
Documentary USA" at the International Christian Film Festival in Wales.
At its heart is the story of his father, Charles Arnett, a Mormon
boy from Arizona who as a young man did not want to go to war. When it
became inevitable, not only did he join up but he went to flight school
to become a pilot and ended up flying B-24 bombing missions over
Germany.
__IMAGE2__Charles' faith and fortitude came into play on one fateful morning
when he realized, as he was giving the pre-flight prayer his crew asked
him to give, that they would not be coming back.The plane was, indeed,
shot down over Holland; one crew member was killed and the rest spent
the next 11 months as POWs, moved from one prison to another as the
Germans scrambled in the waning days of the war.
In the end, the POWs were freed, Charles came home to marry the girl
who had pinned his wings on him in pilot training and, as did the other
members of his generation, settled down to build a better world for his
children.
Mark Arnett filmed interviews with both his parents — "I really
tortured them; I made them sit down for three days and tell their
stories over and over."
He also made three trips to the National Archives in Washington,
D.C., and was able to get some amazing footage of the Boomerang, as
well as some still shots that were taken by the Germans after the plane
was shot down.
He ended up with more than 40 hours of footage. But what he couldn't
get was for it all to come together. He'd do a little bit here and
there, "but I couldn't finish it."
And then his father died. "I didn't think I would ever finish it
then. But that night, I woke up at about 2 or 3 a.m., and I'd had a
dream where I was singing the song 'That's Life' as a present for Dad.
It was the old Sinatra song that I had not heard in years. The next
morning I got an iTunes song, and then I found a David Lee Roth version
of it, and at that moment, I knew what I needed to do to finish the
documentary. By then it was only half edited. I did nothing else for
the next nine days straight."
Arnett finished the documentary by the time of his father's funeral.
"I rented a theater in Arizona and showed it after the internment. That
was the highlight of my life. If nothing else happened with the
documentary, that would have been enough."
He doesn't know why he started submitting it to film festivals, "but when it far exceeded my expectations, I just kept going."
He thinks part of the appeal is because "most people have a
connection with World War II. Even though they don't know my father,
they find their own ancestors in the film."
But he also hopes that people of his generation can also understand
and share his journey. "My whole goal was to compare how different baby
boomers are from my dad's generation." In looking at what that "young,
scared generation did, maybe we can lose some of our selfishness,
develop more gratitude, have that same transformation."
Those pilots were something else, he says. While working on the
project, Mark was able to fly on a B-24. "I think there's only about
one left flying. There was another, but it crashed. What a bucket of
bolts they were."
It's hard to imagine flying it in combat, he says. "I wanted to
communicate the awe I felt when I learned his story in a war that I
really knew very little about. I was born in 1961; World War II was
ancient history by then. It wasn't in the forefront of anyone's mind."
But we need to hear these stories, he says, of ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
Although not what he would consider an "LDS film," the documentary
has "a Mormon angle. I debated about leaving it in, but I decided that
was who my dad was; you cannot separate him from his religion." And, he
adds, "it has played well outside the LDS arena. I think people accept
it because faith and war go hand in hand."
Mark took copies of the DVD to the little town in the Netherlands
where the plane was shot down. There is a little memorial there to it,
and the people there were excited to see the film. They were all very
gracious, he says.
Working on his documentary has been "the second most spiritual
experience of my life — the first was when I married my wife," he says.
The show, he says, is "essentially a home movie, a journal. I'm overwhelmed that it has touched so many lives."
E-mail: carma@desnews.com