By James Heinz
Readers of this blog may recall my article from November 2023 about how I starred in the production of a World War II movie onboard the USS COBIA World War II submarine docked at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc WI.
Finally, after months of post-production work, the film made its debut at the Maritime Museum on July 4, 2024, during the Museum’s annual Sub Fest. I know just how eager my fans are to see my performance. And so, I reviewed the movie I myself starred in. And all I have to say is:
Steven Spielberg is not threatened by this movie.
Which is about what you would expect for a movie with a production budget of approximately zero filmed on a cell phone and starring a bunch of guys who had never acted before, many of whom are long past any chance of passing the Navy fitness exam.
On the other hand, the movie was free. You get what you pay for.
The movie is entitled BLINDLY WE FOUGHT. It is made by Dyna Productions, the brainchild of producer/director/cameraman/screen writer/film editor/special effects person Andreas Forrer.
It was introduced by Lizzy Farrey-Luerssen, the community engagement person for the Museum, who helped in the filming of the movie by refusing to provide us with live ammunition for the deck guns.
At 12:03 into the movie, the COBIA attacks and is then driven down to the bottom and depth charged. The XO informs the captain that the sub is damaged.
At 12:11 I briefly appear. The sub is then bombed by a Japanese airplane. It then surfaces to sink enemy fishing boats.
At 12:17 I appear again in a scene in the control room gripping a large red wheel.
The action shifts to the torpedo room, where torpedoes are fired. The sub sinks an escort ship and a tanker. The scene turns to the engine room. Notorious Japanese radio propagandist Tokyo Rose tells the crew that they are doomed to die, which turned out to be overly optimistic on her part.
During the trip home, the crew drinks beer in the crew’s mess. The captain leaves the boat and thanks the crew for their efforts. The final shot shows the sub tied to the dock at night, with Wisconsin sleet standing in for Pacific rain.
The End.
Andreas revealed some of his filmmaking secrets. The title is, appropriately enough, the name that the CO of the COBIA always said he would have chosen as the title for a book about the COBIA that he never got to write.
In an effort to be realistic, the filmmaker based the script on the fifth war patrol of the COBIA herself, and some of the dialogue was taken directly from a book written about the COBIA.
The opening scene where a Japanese soldier bayonets an American GI was filmed in a park in Lockport, Ill., during a WW II reenactment. It stars the only Japanese WW II reenactor in the country. The Japanese re-enactor later did double duty in the film as a Japanese minelayer captain.
The GI re-enactor had trouble with his character’s motivation, since the Americans are always supposed to win in WW II movies and re-enactments, like we did in real life.
The lighthouse at Conneaut, Ohio impersonates Freemantle, Australia, where the COBIA and other Allied subs were based. Freemantle named a number of its streets after the subs that were stationed there. Ten thousand miles from Manitowoc, there is a Cobia Circle in the Land Down Under. Lake Michigan impersonated the Gulf of Thailand.
The Japanese Tokyo Rose was played by a Chinese friend of Andreas’ wife.
Most of the scenes that take place outside the sub, including the scene where a sunken Japanese battleship rises from the deep and morphs into Godzilla (so much for an effort to be realistic) were made with Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), which took Andreas 6 months to compose and edit. The CGI moves at 29 pictures per second, and 1 second of the footage takes the computer 1 hour to process.
When the film was shown to the re-enactors, they were full of nit-picking comments, which is tough talk from a bunch of guys many of whom are elderly, balding, overweight men like me who in real life would be laughed out of a Navy recruiting office.
They pointed out that at the speed at which the sub moves on the screen, in real life it would be moving at 90 miles an hour instead of its real life maximum speed of 24 mph surfaced and 10 mph submerged.
Andreas explained: “Because of the lengthy computer processing time, I shoot all the CGI ships passing by with a limit of 4 seconds (equaling 4 hours of processing time) and then I slow the footage down, but you cannot slow it too much otherwise the waves of the ocean look like they are made of honey as they move too slow, so you find a compromise between slow waves and fast ships.”
Andreas said that he will re do the CGI in ten years or so as the technology evolves.
The re-enactors also pointed out that the diving alarm was sounded three times in the movie, when in reality it would have sounded twice to signal a dive.
The most poignant comment came from the re-enactor who played the captain. “Can’t you make me thinner?” he complained. Sorry captain, there are some miracles even Hollywood magic can’t perform.
The best performance was by the re-enactor who played the XO. In the ultimate example of method acting, he had actually served on a US Navy submarine. That experience gave his performance an authenticity everyone else lacked. In an example of Tinseltown nepotism, he was also the real son of the fake captain.
This epic of American filmmaking will soon be showing on the WMHS You Tube channel and in theaters nationwide. I made up that last part.
And so, with this blockbuster, my movie career is just starting. For those of you who say to me that if I think that I am going to rise to Hollywood stardom, “Surely you can’t be serious”, I have only one thing to say:
I am serious. And stop calling me Shirley.
All right, Mister DeMille, I’m ready for my close up.
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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
Photo Credits: Lizzy Farrey- Luerssen courtesy of Wisconsin Maritime Museum. All others courtesy of Andreas Forrer.
