The Spirit of St. Louis & Screenwriting

“What kind of man would live where there is no danger? I don’t believe in taking foolish chances. But nothing can be accomplished by not taking a chance at all.”
                         Charles Lindbergh 
                         As quoted in Lindbergh: Flight’s Enigmatic Hero by Von Hardesty

Last night I watched for the first time the old Billy Wilder film The Spirit of St. Louis which starred Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh. I’m not sure why I hadn’t connected it to this blog earlier. After all Screenwriting from Iowa is all about the fly-over states. About great stories coming from unusual places. (The kind of places Lindbergh used to fly-over and deliver mail to in the early days of flight.) 

It’s worth noting that the Orville and Wilbur Wright Wright lived for a time in Cedar Rapids, Iowa during their childhood before their 1903 historic flight in North Carolina. Just a year prior to that Lindbergh was born in Detroit and raised on a farm in Little Falls, Minnesota where he would graduate from high school in 1918 (though he also spent time in Washington, D.C. because his father was a congressman from Minnesota). He studied for a time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before dropping out of the engineering program and heading to Lincoln, Nebraska to learn how to fly and become a barnstorming performer.

He didn’t fly solo until 1923 and it was just four years later that he accomplished the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927.

The film The Spirit of St. Louis didn’t do well in the box office back in 1957, but it did launch the feature film writing career of Wendell Mayes. Mayes was an actor turned writer when Billy Wilder liked an episode he wrote for Kraft Television Theatre and hired him to co-write the Lindbergh picture with him. 

Mayes was born in the small town of Hayti, Missouri and would go on to have a career as a screenwriter until he died in 1992. He was nominated for an Oscar in 1959 for his script Anatomy of a Murder. 

Mayes and Lindbergh once again prove that great things can be accomplished even if you come from a small town in fly-over county. 

 

Scott W. Smith