Great read on how ILM made the shots. As a crew member on the USS Salt Lake City (SSN-716), we took many of the cast and crew out to sea for 24 hours before they made the movie to get a feel for what sub-life was like before they made the movie. All the cast and crew were great, and I think it made the movie better.
>Actor Scott Glenn, who plays the Captain of Dallas, modeled his character after our Captain, Tom Fargo.
Terrific character. I just love the competency and leadership. Hopefully your Cpt. Fargo was just as good.
My favorite exchange from the movie is when Jonesy brings his report to the captain. He's aware of how crazy this theory sounds, especially when his very serious and hard-to-read captain rephrases it back to him. Jonesy starts getting nervous and fumbling and Mancuso cuts him off -- "Relax, Jonesy. You sold me." Not quite sure why that simple line hits so hard.
Capt Tom Fargo was better. As you learn from that YouTube video, he went on to run 7th Fleet as an Admiral. The stuff we did while he was CO was important in the Cold War for the security of the US.
I use the "runs home to mama" line a lot when describing an unexpected result from a black box we've integrated into our workflows.
I love the "You sold me" line too, as it shows how Mancuso is willing to listen to his men even when they have such an out of the box idea. It also helps make Mancuso listening to Jack's port/starboard Crazy Ivan maneuver. He's kind of already bought into Jack's idea by that point anyways. Otherwise, he'd already had Jack into quarters somewhere
Google search is weirdly hallucinating saying "Theodore Scott Glenn is an American actor and Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University". As far as I can tell the actor and professor are two different people. Am I wrong? Can't tell what is true/false anymore.
I ran into a similar issue when researching Bill Paxton, a computer scientist who worked on the Mother of All Demos. Google's AI told me that he was also known for his roles in Aliens and Titanic, but that's a different person. I told Bill Paxton (the computer scientist) about this and he found it amusing.
yes, I read the book before I got to the boat when I was at nuclear reactor prototype training in Idaho. Read it on the long bus rides back and forth to the site. Yes, it was good and pretty operationally accurate. All the sub lingo etc, is accurate. Some of the actors on the bridge of the Dallas were active duty sub sailors at the time.
Just a quick note that this film really holds up, like weirdly well given its subject and vintage. If you haven't watched it in a long time, add it to your list.
Similarly the Clancy book Red Storm Rising really holds up well, and weirdly may be one of the best primers on Russian military practices, culture, and capabilities as the force was constituted during the first year of their full scale invasion of Ukraine.
Arguably RSR vis a vis Ukraine in 2022 is a great primer on just how much the Russian military had decayed from their mid-80s Soviet peak. You can study histories and interviews from the late Cold War about just how much of a bloodbath the NATO militaries expected a Russian invasion of West Germany to be.
The USAF A-10 fleet was expected to have been wiped out in approximately 2-3 weeks of fighting based on expected loss rates, and nuclear escalation was not outside the realm of possibility.
What the Ukrainians managed to do in 2022 was impressive, full stop. But to understand what that reveals about the Russians, you also need to understand that the Ukrainians are essentially a JV military as opposed to the US, a NATO force, or someone like the Australians, Japanese, or South Koreans. The bravery is there, but they just don't have the same ability to integrate the details at scale such as fires, logistics, and large-scale joint operations, because they're still trying to shake off their Soviet past.
Whereas although the Soviets would have similar problems that come from being an authoritarian military, NATO would have been fighting them AND the entire Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland et al). The Soviets wouldn't have had 30+ years of Russian societal decay and would have had the advantage of sheer mass.
RSR is one of my favorite Clancy books, and I return to it quite often. It was the first book I read in my teens with such a descriptive telling of what an attack on an air base could be like. How the attack allowed for the runways still able to be used with "minor" repairs and then reused by the over taking forces. Mike's journey is probably my favorite plot line.
Brilliant novel. I was thinking about it recently. Many years after reading it, I can still remember many of
the battle/combat sequences as if I’d seen them on screen. Maybe someone could do a big Band of Brothers type adaptation, given how far along VFX have come.
It's so cool that John McTiernan did it again in The 13th Warrior. A worse movie (not as bad as people say), but I think that one scene is extraordinary.
Agreed. As for the Russian spoken by American actors, my friend, a Russian linguist, said Alec Baldwin’s Russian was fine, but Sean Connery’s was terrible.
I'm trying hard to think of a false or dated moment in the whole movie. If you made a 1984 period film about the same subject, in 2025, I'm not sure what would be different other than the actors. Even the SFX hold up.
One of the interesting things about the movie was how well they conveyed the mood and atmosphere on subs.
I don't know exactly how to describe it, but the sub force just has a different temperament than the surface fleet.
Of course, all of that went out the window when people in the movie started yelling at each other. From that point on it's a fictional scenario contrived to create a dramatic story.
Same with Apollo 13. Everything I see and hear about NASA personnel indicates that these people are consummate professionals who stay cool under extreme circumstances... but that wouldn't make for a good movie.
I should probably note that this is coming from the perspective of someone who grew up with a father who was an career enlisted man (CPO/EM-N) stationed mostly on boomers.
Right. The thing that bugs me about Apollo 13 is that they played up the drama unnecessarily, because the ground crew was so large, well-trained, and in sync. Like the scene where they dump a box of stuff and say "You have to make this go into here using just this?"- the actual story is that one of the engineers on the ground realized basically as soon as he heard about the accident (and the LM lifeboat) that they would need to use the CM scrubbers, and within five minutes of talking to another engineer they had figured it out in principle. The delay was that they wanted to walk through all the steps to make sure their documentation was correct, and the only CM scrubber available was at Kennedy, so they had to wait while it was put on a plane and flown to Houston to mate with the rest of the practice equipment.
Similarly, the "oh we forgot the moon rocks!" bit was actually the engineers realizing it ahead of time and changing the prep checklist to account for it, rather than a last second dash. This was only because there were so many engineers, and they had made themselves so immersed in the task, and they had such good lines of communication that someone identified the problem and was able to escalate the fix to the correct levels at the appropriate time. This didn't happen by accident, but was the result of years of working together, both training and the experience of actual flights that made these teams so good.
Separately, there were a few things the movie got wrong just as one-off moments. At launch the arms retracted simultaneously, rather than sequentially as shown in the movie (not quite as cool looking) and if you listen to the bit where Lovell says "Houston, check my math here" he is doing addition, which can't be done on a slide rule.
One of the crew members' memoir (Эдуард Овечкин "Акулы из стали") mentions that the pool was filled with freshwater. The crew rarely used the pool themselves, because they could find better use for that much water.
The author had an interesting story about this swimming pool. One day, a high-ranking officer came with inspection. He was very rude and the crew didn't like him in return, especially since he sat in the captain's chair (only the captain was supposed to sit there). Then this officer wanted to take a swim and he ordered the crew to prepare a pool. As the author was drawing water, he and other crew members decided to urinate in the pool. And then watched as this officer was swimming there, barely containing the laughter. When they finally told the captain about this in control room some time later, the submarine was sailing without control for several minutes, because everyone was laughing on the floor.
A normal ballistic missile submarine has one pressure hull, with a large section of ballistic missiles taking up the middle of it. This submarine has two pressure hulls, on either side containing no missiles, but sandwiching the missiles between them. In theory this means that you can torpedo the sub from a side, and the missiles are still okay. But it also means that the sub has ludicrous amounts of space available. No missiles taking up pressure hull space, and two, not one pressure hulls. So everything on this sub got to be more spacious and there was room for extras.
Yeah, the Typhoon sub was like two submarines side-by-side inside the external shell. The scene in the movie where Alec Baldwin fights the KGB agent between the missile silos ("Some things there don't react well to bullets") couldn't have happened as the missile tubes are between those internal hulls, though one could have argued this sub was built differently with it's "silent drive".
Submarine life is inherently miserable. Anything the military can do to make their life less miserable does wonders for morale which leads to a better functioning sub.
They military also spends a lot on making sure that they are very well fed - as much as they can be under the circumstances:
The tour guide in the galley of USS Blueback noted that if the ice cream machine didn't work the submarine was not considered operational and required immediate repair.
It only seems wild in light of how the US relates to its military. For all the hype about life in the russian navy, you are still much more likely to see sailors suntanning on a russian ship than any USN boat.
Look at this footage. Look at the guys on the helo deck. When russian sailors have time off, they take it seriously.
My ship celebrated July 4, 1994 off the coast of Mogadishu by holding a “steel beach picnic” on the flight deck. Everyone ran around under the noon equatorial sun in swimsuits while people grilled burgers, set up little inflatable pools to lounge in, played volleyball and soccer, and otherwise acted like we were at Ocean Beach on a hot day. At night we had fireworks (including rounds from the 5” guns) and the CIWS shot a stream of tracer bullets. It was glorious.
The US Navy spends long hours working hard, but I promise you it plays hard when possible.
A German film crew shot a documentary onboard a Typhoon class submarine (the TK-20 Severstal) in 2001, showing many aspects of daily life onboard, including the launch of a RSM-52 ICBM [1] (unfortunately awful video quality).
In hindsight, they catched a brief window in recent history where a western film crew would be allowed on board of a Russian ballistic missile submarine – remember that 2001 was the year when Putin gave a speech in the German parliament (in German language!) speculating about a new common safety architecture eventually succeeding NATO.
"Gregory D. Young was the first Westerner to investigate the mutiny as part of his 1982 master's thesis Mutiny on Storozhevoy: A Case Study of Dissent in the Soviet Navy. One of 37 copies of Young's thesis was placed in the Nimitz Library of the United States Naval Academy where it was read by Tom Clancy, then an insurance salesman, who used it as inspiration to write The Hunt for Red October."
It's interesting that ILM went with a smoke chamber to shoot the underwater scenes in this film. It was probably a lot easier than shooting underwater and less likely to screw up the models. Some of the time this method looks fantastic but, at other times, it looks like a model in a room full of smoke. I've always found the underwater model scenes shot for Das Boot[1] to be more convincing.
It's less about screwing up the models as much as not needing a pool, as well as not needing underwater capable cameras. Underwater rigging for cameras puts incredible limitations on what camera is used, the motion of the camera, etc. Keeping everything dry is always going to be preferred. The motion control equipment isn't meant for use underwater either. It just makes much more sense to shoot it dry. Especially considering this was before CGI and 3D rendering was in its infancy, maybe toddler stages.
Underwater scenes on "For your eyes only" (1981) were all filmed on land because Carole Bouquet couldn't go underwater. When you know it you can see it, but when I saw the film (one of the first time I ever went to the movies) I didn't notice it at all.
Adhesion and cohesion always fuck up scenes that combine scale models and water. Splashes always look very wrong, and in the case of a submersible bubbles could be a problem. Smoke chamber makes sense.
Although in the days since “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, when they added dust-yellow color to the entire movie in post, maybe there are other ways now, if you didn’t want to go entirely to CGI.
My wife and I (both 55) rewatch this probably once a year. It's a really solid film that holds up SUPER well -- so many great elements came together here. Obviously, the principal cast is outstanding; it's not just Baldwin and Connery.
Sam Neill we always love (Connery's XO; "I would like to have seen Montana"), and Scott Glenn (Mancuso, captain of the Dallas) rarely disappoints. We also get a late appearance by Richard Jordan (would would die only a few years later) and an early one by Courtney Vance as the Dallas' sonar tech. Stellan Skarsgard is Tupolev, the Soviet sub captain who pursues Connery. Jeffrey Jones, mostly of note to our generation as the principal in Ferris Bueller, has a small role as the former Navy intelligence man Skip Tyler. And there's a blink-and-you-miss-it role for Gates "Beverly Crusher" McFadden as Ryan's wife in the early moments of the film.
It was only on a relatively recent viewing that we noticed one of the Red October's minor officers was played by an actor we'd recently seen on TV. On THE AMERICANS one of the main Soviet characters is a man named Burov who eventually rotates back to the USSR to work in the same government ministry as his father. His father is played by Boris Krutonog, who 30 years before played Slavin -- his big moment is denouncing the political officer as a "pig" at the tense dinner scene early on.
I never know how film-nerdy people are, so I'll also note that Red October was directed by John McTiernan, who also directed the original Predator, Die Hard, The Last Action Hero, Die Hard with a Vengence, and the 1999 Thomas Crown remake. Unfortunately he did some deeply shady shit around one of his films and ended up in some significant legal trouble that basically blew up his career, but the films he made in the 20th century basically all hold up pretty dang well. The sense of momentum you get in October is present in Die Hard and in Crown as well.
The making of for "The Hunt for Red October" describes some of the other practical effects inside that movie, like the scenes on the surface with the Red October or the set for the interiors of the submarines: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2_epfA20dOY
I never had a mental image of Mancuso from reading the book, but Glenn is what was always pictured in my mind in any of the other books he appears. Similar for Jack, I never really got a mental image of Ford or Affleck, it was always closer to Baldwin if not quite Baldwin. Mancuso was just flat out Glenn.
Yah, yah, yah... [waves people away while walking through offices, before sitting down to a cup of tea and some correspondence]
That scene is how most Monday mornings feel as I start to process my inbox. Including dropping the cup of tea all over myself and immediately needing a meeting with my superiors.
Actor Scott Glenn, who plays the Captain of Dallas, modeled his character after our Captain, Tom Fargo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rjO_VrESNo
It is a great movie!
Terrific character. I just love the competency and leadership. Hopefully your Cpt. Fargo was just as good.
My favorite exchange from the movie is when Jonesy brings his report to the captain. He's aware of how crazy this theory sounds, especially when his very serious and hard-to-read captain rephrases it back to him. Jonesy starts getting nervous and fumbling and Mancuso cuts him off -- "Relax, Jonesy. You sold me." Not quite sure why that simple line hits so hard.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7g6dKncO-I
I love the "You sold me" line too, as it shows how Mancuso is willing to listen to his men even when they have such an out of the box idea. It also helps make Mancuso listening to Jack's port/starboard Crazy Ivan maneuver. He's kind of already bought into Jack's idea by that point anyways. Otherwise, he'd already had Jack into quarters somewhere
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The USAF A-10 fleet was expected to have been wiped out in approximately 2-3 weeks of fighting based on expected loss rates, and nuclear escalation was not outside the realm of possibility.
What the Ukrainians managed to do in 2022 was impressive, full stop. But to understand what that reveals about the Russians, you also need to understand that the Ukrainians are essentially a JV military as opposed to the US, a NATO force, or someone like the Australians, Japanese, or South Koreans. The bravery is there, but they just don't have the same ability to integrate the details at scale such as fires, logistics, and large-scale joint operations, because they're still trying to shake off their Soviet past.
Whereas although the Soviets would have similar problems that come from being an authoritarian military, NATO would have been fighting them AND the entire Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland et al). The Soviets wouldn't have had 30+ years of Russian societal decay and would have had the advantage of sheer mass.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVVURiaVgG8
I've done a submarine day with Red October, Crimson Tide, and U-571
I don't know exactly how to describe it, but the sub force just has a different temperament than the surface fleet.
Of course, all of that went out the window when people in the movie started yelling at each other. From that point on it's a fictional scenario contrived to create a dramatic story.
Same with Apollo 13. Everything I see and hear about NASA personnel indicates that these people are consummate professionals who stay cool under extreme circumstances... but that wouldn't make for a good movie.
I should probably note that this is coming from the perspective of someone who grew up with a father who was an career enlisted man (CPO/EM-N) stationed mostly on boomers.
Similarly, the "oh we forgot the moon rocks!" bit was actually the engineers realizing it ahead of time and changing the prep checklist to account for it, rather than a last second dash. This was only because there were so many engineers, and they had made themselves so immersed in the task, and they had such good lines of communication that someone identified the problem and was able to escalate the fix to the correct levels at the appropriate time. This didn't happen by accident, but was the result of years of working together, both training and the experience of actual flights that made these teams so good.
Separately, there were a few things the movie got wrong just as one-off moments. At launch the arms retracted simultaneously, rather than sequentially as shown in the movie (not quite as cool looking) and if you listen to the bit where Lovell says "Houston, check my math here" he is doing addition, which can't be done on a slide rule.
On the whole, they were consummate professionals. And then there is the Apollo 10 turd incident.
https://youtu.be/JrULRXlAlMU?si=kvh64qy64E7aqXPY
One of the crew members' memoir (Эдуард Овечкин "Акулы из стали") mentions that the pool was filled with freshwater. The crew rarely used the pool themselves, because they could find better use for that much water. The author had an interesting story about this swimming pool. One day, a high-ranking officer came with inspection. He was very rude and the crew didn't like him in return, especially since he sat in the captain's chair (only the captain was supposed to sit there). Then this officer wanted to take a swim and he ordered the crew to prepare a pool. As the author was drawing water, he and other crew members decided to urinate in the pool. And then watched as this officer was swimming there, barely containing the laughter. When they finally told the captain about this in control room some time later, the submarine was sailing without control for several minutes, because everyone was laughing on the floor.
Still an amazing movie.
Diagram here: https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/5f40d7...
They military also spends a lot on making sure that they are very well fed - as much as they can be under the circumstances:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a147643...
Feeding the sailors lavishly is one of their few perks.
Look at this footage. Look at the guys on the helo deck. When russian sailors have time off, they take it seriously.
https://youtu.be/fVXxTS2f8CE
The US Navy spends long hours working hard, but I promise you it plays hard when possible.
In hindsight, they catched a brief window in recent history where a western film crew would be allowed on board of a Russian ballistic missile submarine – remember that 2001 was the year when Putin gave a speech in the German parliament (in German language!) speculating about a new common safety architecture eventually succeeding NATO.
[1] https://youtu.be/cVWBhpjwXxo?si=IQkR6Pbx4dh86y0F&t=1172
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_frigate_Storozhevoy
"Gregory D. Young was the first Westerner to investigate the mutiny as part of his 1982 master's thesis Mutiny on Storozhevoy: A Case Study of Dissent in the Soviet Navy. One of 37 copies of Young's thesis was placed in the Nimitz Library of the United States Naval Academy where it was read by Tom Clancy, then an insurance salesman, who used it as inspiration to write The Hunt for Red October."
When The Soviets Hunted Down Their Own Warship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkBQl7YRI3E
[1]https://theasc.com/articles/das-boot
Although in the days since “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, when they added dust-yellow color to the entire movie in post, maybe there are other ways now, if you didn’t want to go entirely to CGI.
Like the terrible model work in In Harm's Way.
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Sam Neill we always love (Connery's XO; "I would like to have seen Montana"), and Scott Glenn (Mancuso, captain of the Dallas) rarely disappoints. We also get a late appearance by Richard Jordan (would would die only a few years later) and an early one by Courtney Vance as the Dallas' sonar tech. Stellan Skarsgard is Tupolev, the Soviet sub captain who pursues Connery. Jeffrey Jones, mostly of note to our generation as the principal in Ferris Bueller, has a small role as the former Navy intelligence man Skip Tyler. And there's a blink-and-you-miss-it role for Gates "Beverly Crusher" McFadden as Ryan's wife in the early moments of the film.
It was only on a relatively recent viewing that we noticed one of the Red October's minor officers was played by an actor we'd recently seen on TV. On THE AMERICANS one of the main Soviet characters is a man named Burov who eventually rotates back to the USSR to work in the same government ministry as his father. His father is played by Boris Krutonog, who 30 years before played Slavin -- his big moment is denouncing the political officer as a "pig" at the tense dinner scene early on.
I never know how film-nerdy people are, so I'll also note that Red October was directed by John McTiernan, who also directed the original Predator, Die Hard, The Last Action Hero, Die Hard with a Vengence, and the 1999 Thomas Crown remake. Unfortunately he did some deeply shady shit around one of his films and ended up in some significant legal trouble that basically blew up his career, but the films he made in the 20th century basically all hold up pretty dang well. The sense of momentum you get in October is present in Die Hard and in Crown as well.
Overheard every few sprints…
That scene is how most Monday mornings feel as I start to process my inbox. Including dropping the cup of tea all over myself and immediately needing a meeting with my superiors.