AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2015 - 48

PILOT BRIEFING
FIRST LOOK

|

FILMMAKERS Henry Saine
(left) and Colin Ebeling
(right) want to make a fulllength film of Rinker Buck's
Flight of Passage. Buck
(center) told the story of how
he and his brother flew coast
to coast in a Piper PA-11 Cub
Special as teenagers.

Looking for a
wider audience
Filmmakers want to bring 'Flight of Passage' to the big screen
B Y J I L L W. TA L L M A N

TWO FILMMAKERS want to bring Rinker
Buck's iconic Flight of Passage to the silver
screen, and they have cleared the first hurdle by acquiring funding to make a short
film that will be shown to investors.
Colin Ebeling and Henry Saine and
their production company, Just Chorizo
Productions, used the crowdfunding site
Indiegogo to raise $36,370 to make a short
film that they'll pitch to investors, actors,
and studios.
Buck's memoir describes how he and his
older brother Kernahan flew a Piper PA-11
Cub Special from New Jersey to California
in 1966. At the time, they were 15 and 17
years old, respectively, and were the youngest pilots to make the cross-country trip.
Flight of Passage resonated with
Ebeling, who read it while learning to fly in
2007. "Flight of Passage just basically spoke
to everything I was experiencing in learning to how to fly. It was all of the adventure
and excitement and also the discipline, and
I just sparked to its message and everything
it said about flying and life in general," he

48 | AOPA PILOT November 2015

said. Ebeling earned his private pilot certificate and flies
out of Whiteman Airport in Los
Angeles, California.
Much loved in the aviation
community, Flight of Passage
needs to be brought to a wider
audience, Ebeling said. "Its
appeal is much more universal. It's a coming-of-age story
[with] family relationships,
brotherhood, adventure, and
coming to terms with yourself
and the hand you were dealt in
life. It's one of these wonderful pieces that
didn't quite break out...it deserves to. We
want a larger audience to be a part of it and
be able to experience [Buck's] work." Buck is
profiled in the September 2015 AOPA Pilot
("Pilots: Flight of Passage Author"). His 2015
book, The Oregon Trail: A New American
Journey, is on the New York Times bestseller
list for hardcover nonfiction.
The full-length film could inspire a new
generation "to see what flying's all about,

the adventure, the discipline,
the camaraderie of pilots,"
Ebeling said.
In the meantime, a
short film is being produced
because "pretty much the
only thing that gets greenlit these days is existing,
proven properties," Ebeling
said. That's why you're seeing mostly superhero films
and sequels at local cinemas.
"It's hard in Hollywood
to get an agent or a film executive to sit down and read
105 pages of a feature-length
script, but if you send them
a link to a short film they
instantly understand what
the project is about, and they
can see and hear and imagine how to market it," Ebeling
said. The short film will
showcase some of the book's
best moments, including a flying sequence
shot by Bill Richards, one of Hollywood's
aerial cinematographers. Filming was set
to begin in October.
Just Chorizo Productions produced the
2013 action science-fiction thriller Bounty
Killer in this fashion. "Within a week of putting [a short film] out, we had gotten the
green light," Eberling said.
EMAIL jill.tallman@aopa.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2015
