Trip to National Archives and New York, July 2013

Mark and I got back a week or so ago from a fantastic trip out East.  We stayed in College Park, MD for five days, researching at the National Archives.  We acquired many, many copies of Signal Corps videos from World War I.  These we will use to do the rough edit of the film and once we know what we want in the final film we will order high quality copies.  We also found many more wonderful Signal Corps photos while we were there.  Here are four:

Phosphorus bomb at night

Attack!

Stringing Barbed Wire

     

                  Elsie Janis and Mother

While we were at the Archives we met again with Mitchell Yockelson.  He was very helpful once more as we discussed our story and talked about the 27th Division and General John O'Ryan.  He is a fantastic source of history and analysis.  Thank you so much, Mitch, for all your help.


After our stay at the Archives, we headed up to New York City.  There we spent a wonderful afternoon with Lee Alan Morrow, the fount of all knowledge on Elsie Janis.  Lee obtained his Phd in theater studies and focused for his final thesis on the life of Elsie Janis.  He has an incredible amount of documentation and stories on her life and was kind to let us copy items in his collection.  We are so grateful to Lee for offering his help to get our documentary completed.  We will continue to be in contact with him has we move forward.

From New York City we headed to Albany, New York, the home of one of our heroes, John Joseph Brennan.  There we met Debbie Brennan Mahan, Joe's granddaughter, Jane Brennan, Joe's daughter in law and John Mahan, Debbie's husband.  We spent a terrific morning and lunch with them.  Debbie showed me the photos and diaries left by her grandfather.  We had a great time and made new, wonderful friends.  Here is the photo of me and Mark with Debbie and Jane.  Thank you so much to the whole family for your hospitality and fun conversation!!!  We'll see you again in the future, I'm certain.

Screenplay and opening edit

I've been working on the screenplay for "The Passing Show."  It is now about 90 pages long and this first draft of the screenplay will be over 100 pages.  I anticipate the final screenplay will be closer to 60 or 70 pages.  However, I like what I'm seeing at this point.

I have also begun to edit the opening segments of the documentary and it is very exciting to put visuals and audio effects together with the words spoken by the individuals.  We continue to search for more visuals to animate the documentary and we may take another trip to the National Archives during the next few months. I am very happy with the progress we are making on the film!

The Passing Show of 1918

This documentary follows the lives of seven Americans during the last eight months of World War I. All of them were connected, in one way or another, with the 27th and 30th American Divisions which fought under the British in Belgium and France in the final months of the war.  These divisions helped to break the supposedly impregnable Hindenburg Line. The documentary uses the actual words of the individuals taken from their letters, diaries, books and historical monographs.

The documentary will show the war from the personal points of view of those who encountered it first hand.  Our original intent in taking up this project was to tell the story of the war through one person -- our great uncle, Walter Lindahl.  But, in researching the path to his death, we came across wonderful accounts of other people who fought in the same battles and experienced many of the hardships and adventures that he did during the Great War.  We decided to tell a larger story of these American soldiers attached to the British -- a story that was never completely told when it happened and that has been almost forgotten during the past century.