Red Baron - zgberlin

Will Germans finally get war hero? Red Baron filmed

by Roy

The Germans didn't mind that a flirt with Hollywood to film the Red Baron failed, and that Val Kilmer won't play the lead _ after all, they really want to is tell their own stories anyhow.

Manfred von Richthofen was World War I's biggest pop idol and one of their own, a kid that was a tech freak, aerial punk and sometime rebel. He was a Berlin product too, finishing his military education in the Lichterfelde district before shooting down a record 80 planes during World War I.

The Germans, who are bringing the Red Baron to the screen, don't want to lose him because they think he might just be a perfect fit for today's Zeit Geist.

"At the end of the day, the film is an extremely modern film: these pilots were in love with the technology and slaves to the modern age," said writer-director Niki Muellerschoen.

"Their main goal was to master this age with skill, fun and technical know-how. The airplanes with their garish colors and logos are in some ways like the world of skateboarding and extreme sports."

It's easy to picture Manfred von Richthofen as the star of the X-Games if he lived today, a megastar in a blood red plane. The most admired pilot by friend and foe alike, his derring-do and style would have locked the camera on him like a magnet.

That was early Red Baron, fresh out of his teens _ not the man riddled with pain from being shot in the head, not the weary 25-year-old legend who balked at being the Prussians' main propaganda tool as millions of bodies piled up in trenches in the fields below his plane, wasted by mustard gas.

The Red Baron, expected in theaters next year, is one of the most expensive films ever made using only German money at euro$18 million, with another war film _ 1981's Das Boot _ often called the costliest.

A group of investors from the south German state of Baden-Wuerttenberg investors hopes to land an international hit _ saying the Red Baron's story has parallels to today. He lived in another age of technological breakthroughs, only he climbed into a Albatros D.II cockpit that opened up the heavens and didn't perch in front of a pc clicking into the virtual world.

Muellerschoen, who worked 13 years in Hollywood, said one reason to make a German film was to keep control, something unlikely with a budget of US$50 million and a U.S. cast.

He might have ended up with Top Gun or Terminator in a Tri-plane, a Fokker Dr. 1 Tridecker to be exact in Richthofen's case.

"We didn't want to show a Terminator, but a crazy and sensitive kid who changed," Muellerschoen said. "We went back to the original basic idea of thinking that it must be possible to produce big cinema out of Germany, to make a summer movie about our history in a form that is internationally marketable."

Or as producer Don Mag puts it: "We can't let Hollywood have German stories."

Their film's hero was born May 2, 1892 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) to a nobleman _ the name Richthofen means "court of judgment" and was bestowed by the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.

More athlete than scholar, he was trained to be a Calvary officer. The calling was made obsolete by the horrible new technology that killed record numbers in the war to end all wars from 1914-18. Machine guns forced soldiers to hole up in long trenches dug in the countryside, where they waited days and even months for a likely death through chemical warfare.

When war broke out in August, 1914, Von Richthofen turned to the Fliegertruppe just 11 years after the Wright Brothers first conquered the sky in a powered plane. After 24 hours of flight training from his friend, he crashed the first time he went solo.

But when his career began with his first squadron, Jagdstaffel 2, the kills and his legend grew. Historians say it wasn't due to his flying skills, but an uncannily accurate shot. At a time when 20 planes downed altogether made you famous, Von Richthofen shot down 21 in April of 1917 alone.

He was so famous British pilots, who respected him like no one else, paid him a chilling compliment _ some painted their plane noses red to announce they were hunting the war's superstar, the sky's alpha male if you will.

The squadron later built around him, "Jagdgeschwader Frieherr von Richthofen," was called the Flying Circus. They lived in extravagant tents, knowing their worth as stars, followed their blood-colored leader by painting their planes with hearts or tiger's teeth, and they did not salute other officers.

Muellerschoen will paint him as the rebel von Richthofen sometimes was and he plans to be historically accurate, but he is planning a summer popcorn movie.

That raises the question o how far will he go in portraying the man late in the war riddled with headaches from the head shot in July of 1917. The man who climbed into the cockpit with the doubts growing and the sense of invulnerability he once possessed gone?

"They were kids. And they were killers. I don't want to beautify it," Muellerschoen said.

Gone too were most of the men he flew with, killed as the British gained the edge in air technology. Von Richthofen fired off an angry letter to Berlin, and aircraft designer Anthony Fokker went to the trenches, where he observed the British Sopwith Triplane. Fokker then developed the Dr.I triplane, the first one the Red Baron painted in blood from nose to tail.

In his 1917 autobiography, "Der Rote Kampfflieger," Von Richthofen most resembles the laughing cocky Errol Flynn in "Robin Hood," having a blast matching wits and weapons with his merry men against the Allied pilots.

He describes the "utterly delightful" time when he was woken by the fire of allied pilots raking his barracks. He rolled out of bed, ran outside and tried to shoot the planes down. He trusted his legendary shot so much, that he was sure that if anyone could shoot down a pilot in mid-air with a handheld weapon, then it must be him.

Von Richthofen lived just one year after the book came out, dying with a shot from the back just before his 26th birthday and a few months before the war's end. He changed in that short time, describing his autobiography as "insolent."

I'm not that man anymore, he said.

"Richthofen was a young flipped-out freak, a rich sporty noble tech junkie that didn't know a thing about dying on this earth, but he came to his senses," Muellerschoen said.

So is the Red Baron a war movie or an anti-war movie? The director said he considers the ancient plays and tragedies to be more the source of inspiration.

"There are no outside enemies in this movie. The inner poles in the film are romantic and realism," Muellerschoen said.

If Muellerschoen's film brings back the concept of war hero, of battlefield bravery, it will break a German taboo since World War II. Faced with the horrific crimes done under the Nazis, the country has shunned anything that brings glory to militarism.

Von Richthofen, in his early graffiti plane, will at least be a far cry from previous Germans seen in war films _ heel-clicking fanatics, the Nazi dead ringers populating Star Wars' evil empire, or the claustrophobic submariners of "Das Boot" fighting for their lives, programmed to die a random senseless death because from the German experience there could be no other outcome.

The film will be shot in Prague to save costs and escape the sometimes stifling German bureaucracy, with the air battles filmed using 23 planes built for the film.

The special effects will be done by 60 people in Ludwigsberg, near Stuttgart.

"They are being recruited from all over the world and many have experience on big Hollywood films," Muellerschoen said. "I see this as contributing to the development of the film industry infrastructure in and around Stuttgart."

The stars include Joseph Fiennes, who plays the Canadian pilot alleged to have killed the Red Baron, relative unknown Matthias Schweighoefer as von Richthofen and Lena Headey, who might be the love interest essential to a summer popcorn movie.

The name "Red Baron" is known all across the world _ it's currently the name of a frozen piazza, playstation game, a Czech hard rock band, a barnstorming group of pilots, Snoopy's enemy in the Peanuts strip, oodles of enterprises seeking a daredevil image like skydiving or scuba diving, and even a roller coast in Mexico with a swastika smeared in it.

Von Richthofen is better known outside Germany, with its taboo on war heroes, than inside the country. He might well be the only name still wiidely recognized from World War I, but few know exactly why.

"Von Richthofen is a real legend outside of Germany, he's a superstar in places like China," Muellerschoen said. "It's a bit like the Titanic syndrome though _ most people know the Baron, but they don't know the details."