This year’s annual Naval Submarine League History Seminar on 31 October 2017 will discuss the declassified trail of an ECHO-II SSGN by USS Guardfish (SSN612) from Vladivostok down to,
and partially back from its patrol station in the South China Sea during the summer of 1972. The ECHO had been deployed there to be a covert threat to US Naval Forces off Vietnam. In parallel to that discussion, similarities to the theme of the movie The Hunt for Red October will be addressed. The discussion panel will include Mr. Scott Glenn who played the role of CDR Mancusso – the CO of USS Dallas (SSN700) in the movie.
Having spent three years as the Technical Advisor to Paramount Stu- dios during the writing of the script for, and during production of the movie, CAPT Tim Oliver, the Executive Director of the NSL, asked me if I would write this article to provide a little background for those who plan to attend the seminar. I was honored to have been asked.
I was fortunate to have served as Executive Office for then CDR Bruce DeMars on the USS Cavalla (SSN684) – a most rewarding expe- rience. Years later, now VADM and the Pentagon’s top submariner as OP-02, he invited me to dinner at his quarters in the Navy Yard. It was 1986, and I had been retired about a year – foolishly, in retrospect, since I was about to have three kids in college at the same time, having decided to be an independent consultant.
At the dinner, in addition to my wife Mary and me, were COMSUB- PAC, RADM Jack Darby and his wife and COMSUBLANT, VADM Bud Kauderer and his wife. Admiral Kauderer was about to retire. During the dinner, Admiral DeMars looked at Admiral Kauderer and me and asked, “Either of you interested in being the Technical Advisor to Para- mount for The Hunt for Red October movie?”. Admiral Kauderer enthu- siastically replied “Sure!”, and I just mumbled “Me too!” – figuring there was no chance. Some weeks later Admiral DeMars called to ask if I was still interested. When I later thanked him for getting me the job, he said “I didn’t do that because I like you – it’s because you offer us ‘credible denial’”. In other words, if the movie was really a dog, the Submarine Force could totally disavow a retired four-striper, but hard to do if the Technical Advisor was a retired Vice Admiral.
Going back a bit, when a lawyer representing Paramount showed up in VADM DeMars office looking for a Technical Advisor, Admiral DeMars’ first impulse was to say “…go get Tom Clancy, he knows every- thing about submarines!” But then he reflected on the fact that Top Gunhad literally wrecked our acquiring top-notch grads from the USNA and other engineering schools. First Class Midshipmen had gone home on Christmas leave all signed up for Nuclear Power School, saw the mov- ie, then came back to change over to flight school. “This movie…”, he thought, “…could help us get even!”. As I was heading out to Hollywood to work with the first (of three!) screenwriters, Admiral DeMars gave me four “marching orders
• Try to help them make it entertaining, but don’t get in their way
– they’re better at that than you are.
• Make submarines and submariners look good, but make US submarines and submariners look better than the Soviets.
• Don’t get hung up on classification. It’s a fictional movie based on a fictional book.
• Don’t let them violate Laws of Physics!
The first screenwriter was a gentleman named Don Stewart, who had won an Oscar for Missing, with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. He was a great mentor about the idiosyncrasies of Hollywood, including a very profound caution that …”Every profession has its own vernacular, but in Hollywood there is no exact translation of the word ‘sincere.'”
He turned in the script (some 120 pages double-spaced. You can read a movie script in an hour) and took his $400,000 or so and ordered a black Ferrari Testarosa. The script that Paramount now owned was good, but they judged it not exciting enough, and hired a second guy (can’t remember his name) to “spice it up”. It was getting to be an underwater Rambo, and I called Tom Clancy to warn him it would make both him and us (submariners) look bad. (Incidentally, Tom had nothing to do with the movie, since he had sold everything, movie rights included, to the Naval Institute). By now Tom was quite famous, having had several books published, and I don’t know whether it was because of him or nor, but suddenly there was a third screen writer – a ex-college wrestler named Larry Ferguson. Larry asked if I had seen Beverly Hills Part Two. I said “No.”, and he replied, “Don’t bother – it’s a lousy movie – I wrote it – but my royalties so far have been fifteen million dollars!” Writers get 5% of the gross!
During this time in Hollywood I met Alec Baldwin, who wasn’t well known at the time. He was living in New York City, and I convinced him to come up to New London to tour the SubBase and have lunch on one of the boats. He was a quick study – asked great questions and under- stood the answers. We went to the ‘wet trainer’, where an SSBN crew was about to undergo training. After it was explained to him what it was all about, he said “Sounds like fun – can I do it?”. A set of dungarees were found and he was sent in with the crew. When a flange let go and sprayed him with 50 degree water, he had a “deer in the headlights” look until a Chief Petty Officer grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and said, “Hey dummy, get a wrench and tighten those bolts!” After the training, wet, bedraggled but grinning, he was introduced to the crew who were told what he was about to do.
The Submarine Force pulled out all the stops to help the movie go right. The Producer, Director and major actors were invited to go to sea on scheduled submarine ops. For instance, Scott Glenn went to sea with Skipper Tom Fargo on the Salt Lake City (SSN716), where he literally attached himself to the CO to watch and participate in everything the Captain did. Any knowledgeable submariner will admit that Scott nailed the part of a submarine CO.
The movie came very close to being cancelled. Larry Ferguson had not gotten many “pages” (the metric for progress) submitted when the screen writer’s union went on strike. Karl Marx would have rolled over in his grave if he saw a Maserati pull up in front of the Paramount stu- dios, the driver get out to picket with a sign “Management Unfair” for a while, then get back in his car and drive off. I was back in Connecticut when Larry called and asked, if he snuck out his computer and secretary, could I come to his apartment over a weekend and help him get some pages done. I did, and in a day and a half we finished 40 pages – the middle 1/3 of the movie – all the “submarine 101” stuff about enabling runs, countermeasures and the like. Larry said the best he had ever done in the past was 2 or 3 pages a day, and I told him (with a smile) that was because he came to work late, took a long lunch, and went home early. Larry played in the movie as the Chief of the Boat of Dallas
It had taken two years, but when the project was “green lighted” by the studio, things really started happening quickly. In a week or so, two gimbaled platforms were built upon which were to be built the Dallas and Red October Control Room sets (the ALFA Control Room was built on the Dallas platform after Dallas shooting was completed). These platforms could be hydraulically pitched and rolled 25-30 degrees using off-hull joysticks. All the sonar and fire control displays were “serviced” by scripted displays from off-hull computers, and all the indicators on the Ballast Control Panel and the Diving Stand were also functional, and driven from off-hull sources. A three-quarters full scale fiberglass shell of a TYPHOON, from the waterline up, was made. When, in the movie, you see the Red October going to sea escorted by two other ships, these two ships are towing the barge upon which this shell was placed.
I was asked if I could get a periscope, and I called a friend at Koll- morgen who sent an empty E&E Adapter for a Type 18 periscope. This was too heavy for the platform, so a vacuum-formed replica was made, fitted to the tiniest detail such as name-plate data. It truly appeared au- thentic until you touched it, and realized it wasn’t metal. It also raised and lowered hydraulically from off-hull, but I don’t think that feature was ever used in the movie. The periscope barrel was a cardboard tube covered in aluminum foil that was “scored”, and misted between shots to simulate condensation. Boats decommissioning at Bremerton were a ready source of Mark 19 plotters, collision, diving etc. alarm switches and the like – even plastisol coffee cup holders.
During “rehearsals” prior to beginning filming, it was apparent that the supporting actors playing the roles of submarine sailors and officers just didn’t convey a realistic appearance, and I suggested that we get some real submarine troops and officers. Again, the Submarine Force re- sponded, and a number of personnel from San Diego came up on “basket leave”, joined the Screen Actors Guild, and began earning some $500/ day. I had called the CO of the Dallas, in overhaul in Portsmouth, NH,
since this was about his boat, and recommended he send someone over. He did, and his Second Class Quartermaster actually got a “speaking part” (Mancusso: How long to get from here to there at such and such a speed? QM2: 30 minutes Captain), which got him his own dressing trailer and a higher pay scale. First name Keith, last time I saw him he was a Senior Chief working at Sub Group TWO.
Shooting started about 0600, and continued as long as it took to get done what had been planned that day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were catered “on the fly”, and in a nominal 12-hour day, some 45 minutes of film would be gotten, of which only about 2 minutes would make it to the big screen. Between multiple takes of the same 30-40 second scene, while cameras and other stuff was being repositioned, everyone knew not to bother the actors, who had their own methods of maintaining fo- cus. Scott Glenn would go off in a corner and do Tai Chi, while Alec Baldwin would go somewhere alone and jump rope.
Periodically Don Stewart’s warning about “sincerity” in Hollywood was apparent. Although the actors and senior management like Produc- ers (Mace Neufeld) and Directors (John McTiernan) were great, some of the middle management types bore watching. At one point early on, an Assistant Director told me that John (McTiernan) didn’t want me up on the set, but to stay down on the floor and he’d call me if he needed me. This didn’t make much sense, so after a while I went on up, and the Director asked, “Where’ve you been?”.
The hydraulic system that pitched and rolled the platform had an instability that caused the platform to vibrate noticeably when the joy- sticks were put in a certain position. I told John McTiernan that could be exploited on the next day’s schedule where Mancuso tries to get Red Oc- tober’s attention by ordering “Back Full” from an ahead bell – something that in addition to making a lot of noise, would vibrate the submarine sig- nificantly. He was enthusiastic about that visual effect, but overnight the maintenance people had fixed the “problem”. Still, he said, “Get a bunch of people back on the corner of the platform and jump up and down to wiggle it.” We did, but I’m not sure there was much effect.
Since the “real” sailors and officers worked out so well on Dallas, Paramount ran nationwide ads for people who had served on Soviet sub- marines, and got a massive response. They asked if I would help sort out the real ones from the phonies. One gentleman said he had been the Electrical Officer on a FOXTROT class diesel electric submarine. I asked him what type of battery the boat had “120 Volt AC” was his an- swer. Next! Another said he had been a Reactor Operator on an ECHO class SSGN. I asked some reactor theory questions, and he got enough right and had forgotten enough to make him credible. Finally, I asked him to tell me a little about the missiles the ECHO carried. “Wait!” he said, “I was a Reactor Operator, and was not encouraged – even allowed
– to know much about anything but my job!” – this guy was real. No cross-rate training in the Soviet Submarine Force, like we do in the US, and this restriction has directly contributed to nearly all of their nuclear submarine losses.
After two years to get a script, shooting finished up in 5-6 weeks – the sense of urgency driven by the fact that the “money valve” was all the way open. It would take another year or so to edit all the film down to 2 hours or so.
When the Dallas shooting was finished, Larry Ferguson was gra- cious enough to rent a room at a downtown Los Angeles pub and invite all of the submarine sailors and officers to enjoy all they could eat or drink, on him.
