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Seized
at Sea: Situation Critical Creative Team
Brian Kelly The Mayaguez story is one of those terrific opportunities that come along for a filmmaker to tell a powerful and thought-provoking tale filled with fascinating people, real life drama, moving experiences, tragic ironies, and never before seen visuals. It truly encompasses everything I look for in a story and strikes at the very essence of what I love about filmmaking. The making of Seized At Sea was filled with many challenges the biggest of which was telling this story with only one-hour to work with. Following months of long hours and extremely hard work by our staff the biggest reward came for me in a note we received from the family of one of the Marine MIA's following the programs broadcast: "You did a wonderful job. You have given grace to boys who were lost and forgotten and I thank you for that. God Bless You".
Bill Howard The concept for this film began to take shape over three years ago when Brian Kelly (Executive Producer/Writer) and I came across classified footage of the Mayaguez Rescue while researching another film. We immediately put in a request for declassification. After two years of red tape we finally got a glimpse of some of the most fascinating real-time surveillance footage we had ever seen. We knew right away that we had the makings of a great film. As it turned out, the surveillance footage was just the beginning. The door opened to a truly amazing story, a story that would take us to a small island off the coast of Cambodia and into the offices of some of the most powerful people in the world in 1975. One of the most memorable experiences I had during the making of this film was our trip to Cambodia. There, we interviewed two ex-Khmer Rouge soldiers and shot on location at Koh Tang, the island thirty miles off the Cambodian coast where the major events of the Mayaguez Incident took place. On the island we met friendly Cambodian soldiers who greeted us with fresh coconuts from which to drink. As we began shooting film on the beaches, we came across remnants of the battle that took place 25 years ago. The trees had bullet holes in them and pieces of downed American helicopters could still be found in the debris on the beach. As the temperature neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity remained very high, just trying to capture images in those conditions became physically exhausting. I think it became a little clearer to us what it must have been like for the Marines who were trapped there, under fire, for the entire day of May 15th, 1975 with just a canteen of water. The island itself became a major character in this film, as it was during those tense days 25 years ago -- a paradox of what appears to be a tropical paradise playing host to such profound suffering and destruction.
John Warren As soon as I heard about this project and the surveillance footage we had found, I knew we had something incredible in the works. The historian in me was aroused by the very nature of the Mayaguez Crisis, a little remembered but important moment in American involvement in South East Asia. In a sense, the Mayaguez Incident seemed to be a microcosm of the whole Vietnam War. Probably the most incredible moments in making the film came for me as I spoke with the Marines and Air Force personnel involved in the conflict. Hearing their stories first hand brought the experience alive and enhanced our shoot on Koh Tang, giving resonance to the heat, humidity and the remains of the battle that surrounded us. I spent weeks and weeks locating survivors, finding photos and footage that hadn't been look at in 25 years. The sheer number of different groups that were involved in the story resulted in an incredible number of conversations with survivors of and participants in the event. Men like Jim Davis, the marine Company Commander on Koh Tang, Bob Undorf, an OV-10 pilot who flew overhead, and Don O'Hare from SeaLand (the company who owned the Mayaguez at the time) were fascinating resources. Captain Paul Nielson, an old friend of Mayaguez Captain Charlie Miller, put me in touch with a wealth of merchant marine contacts. Wayne Stewart, a former Navy sailor, took rolls and rolls of amazing photographs of the event as it unfolded while his photographic counterpart on the Mayaguez itself, Ray Freidler, was doing the same thing - even while being held captive by the Khmer Rouge. The former Air Force H- 53 pilots and crewmen, the former Air Force Security Police, and Herb Mason and John Drabowski, Air Force historians who found footage and then helped to declassify it in record time, contributed amazing additional materials- all at the last minute. And then of course the people of Cambodia, the POW/MIA specialist Bill Bell, and writers Roy Rowan, John Hamrin, and Ralph Wetterhahn proved invaluable. The Mayaguez Incident has touched so many lives, from President Ford to the six Cambodian men who are stationed today on Koh Tang - it's safe to say that now it has touched mine as well.
Rob Fritts
Sound designing and mixing "Seized at Sea: Situation Critical" was a challenging and rewarding experience. One scene that I'm particularly fond of is the helicopter start-up sequence. This moment in the show was designed to jump start the audience's blood pressure for the upcoming battle scenes. My first objective was to create the sound of a helicopter blade so realistic that it would cut through the heart of the audience. This one sound was comprised of more than 15 audio tracks and three different effects-processing components. Once I was happy with the overall "thwop" sound of the blade, I had to condense all those tracks and effects devices down to a manageable stereo pair. Since that freed up more than 15 tracks, and it was then time to fill them back up with more sound effects to create the overall ambiance in and around the helicopter. The next challenge was to change the "thwop" sound to reflect an increase in the velocity of the blade as it turned. I had our music composer, Michael Wolpe, record the "thwop" effect into his sampler and play it as fast as he could possibly play it. Once that sound had been created, I combined it with my edited version and 24 other sound effects tracks to create the helicopter start-up sequence. For the amount of detail and attention this project required, this show had one of the shortest schedules I've ever worked with. It seems that sometimes a pressing deadline brings out the best.
Mike Wolpe The Challenge: The visuals of a film and the rhythm of the editing drive film music. The editing job of Henry Anglin and Bill Howard created an inspirational cadence and feel for the music to interact with. The arrangement of the score consisted mostly of traditional orchestral strings, brass, and percussion, but in an effort to musically convey the story's sense of irony and tragedy, these traditional orchestral instruments were combined with several old, analog keyboard sounds. This immediately brought to mind the eeriness and irony of the "Apocalypse Now" soundtrack. The score essentially consists of four individual themes that interact sparsely and separately throughout the show until the last ten minutes, at which point they are combined simultaneously to create one final theme. This final theme is comprised of dissonant progressions without any real sense of resolution, much like the unknown demise of the three missing Marines. Ultimately, the most important objective of the music score with this particular project was to stay out of the way of the exciting and intense sound design provided by Rob Fritts. Sometimes the most effective skill a composer can have is knowing when NOT to write music.
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