December 5, 2025 • 28 mins
Mike talks with Eli Kooris and Martin “Mac” McNally about American Skyjacker (2025). The conversation covers the film’s examination of McNally’s 1972 airplane hijacking, his motivations, and the events that followed. Kooris discusses the project’s development and the process of working with archival material, law-enforcement records, and McNally’s own accounts. McNally reflects on the choices he made, the consequences he faced, and how revisiting the story for the documentary differs from living through it. The discussion also addresses the film’s structure, its approach to historical context, and the broader landscape of hijacking cases from the era.
Find out more at https://www.americanskyjacker.com/
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Find out more at https://www.americanskyjacker.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh bot, it's show tied. People say, good money to
see this movie.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
When they go out to a theater, they want clod sodas,
hot popcorn, and no monsters.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
In the Protection Booth.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 4 (00:20):
Cut it off. It was an ordinary flight turned extraordinary
(00:43):
when a man in black registered as DBE Cooper made
a bomb.
Speaker 5 (00:47):
Right, can you hear me on the headphone? Oh yeah,
okay good. It was the dB Cooper case that changed
(01:09):
my life. I thought, that's the way to do a score.
If don't panic, do what I say and follow my instructions.
I don't know that they've got five sharpshooters by me.
I went through my mind, we can jump in. I
didn't feel the air going through my fingers, and I
(01:31):
was thinking, boy, this is balls. That car took off
for that airplane, and it was very very clear to
all of us there it's going to crash into that planet.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Martin McNally meets another skyjacker, Characrat.
Speaker 5 (01:54):
Nowos evil cut Let's get to hell out of here.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth.
I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking
with Eli Chorus. He is the co writer and co
director of the new documentary American Skyjacker, and we are
also joined by Martin mack McNally, who is the subject
of the film. Pretty interesting talking with the actual subject
of the documentary, and he's a hometown boy who grew
(02:34):
up in the same area of Michigan that I did
as well. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope
you enjoyed the interview. Eli, Can you tell me a
little bit about yourself and how you got into filmmaking.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. My father
was a director cinematographer base out of Austin originally, but
would come out to LA and work. He did mainly
commercials and music videos for Willie Nelson and Stevie ray
On in the seventies and eighties, but was also the
DP on Texas Chainsaw Mascer two with Toby Hooper and
(03:06):
worked on a number of other fun, little cult films
for about twenty or thirty years when he was doing that,
and so I grew up on set, so it was
always in my blood. I started writing pretty young age,
went to school in Boston for writing and publishing, but
always knowing how it was going to come out here
and do filmmaking, and then started in Los Angeles in
(03:29):
two thousand and four working at some studios Fox Television students,
originally learning how to pitch, and then it was friends
with Josh Schaeffer from college. He was my roommate and
we started writing together. Quickly moved out she can't write
together and live together. And sold our first script in
twenty ten, sold a script a year between twenty ten
and twenty sixteen, all television dramas. For the most part,
(03:50):
we're doing some rewrites on things, and then twenty seventeen
we'd sold a bunch of scripts, none of them been made,
and we decided that we wanted to start our own
production company and had some capital to do it. We
actually wanted to make some of these things as opposed
to just sell stacks of paper to about five thousand
industry professionals.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Started doing that.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
The first thing we made was a short version of
a feature that we'd written called Nothing Man, and we
cast a up and coming actor named Coleman Domingo in it,
and he starred in the short that set up the
whole film that we're hoping to get made in the
next few years, honestly, but that was a great sort
of first foray into filmmaking, the first thing we directed,
(04:29):
and then we produced a handful of other projects. And
then in twenty nineteen, while we were looking to adapt
articles into screenplays that we could sell and then make ourselves,
we came across Danny Wisontowski's Riverfront Times article the Final
Flight of Martin McNally, which began this very long and
amazing process. As we started to adapt that article into
(04:54):
a script, which is obviously a very long process that
sometimes doesn't even come to fruition, he said to us,
you should go talk to Mac. He is alive and
well in Saint Louis, And just for posterity's sake, I
was like, we shoul just go get this guy on tape.
We should shoot this, And we went there for four
days and shot much of the interview in the film
while we were there, and suddenly realized we had a documentary.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
On our hands.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Were trying to sell it as a documentary, and we
walked into the Imperative Entertainment offices and they said, we're
starting a podcast division. The idea being we make a podcast,
we build an audience and then we go out and
we do a version of that podcast. We've created our
own IP at that point, plus they were willing to
give us a budget and let us go, which was
music to our ears as a creator. There's not a
(05:40):
lot of hoops to jump through to go out and
tell a story. It was amazing. So we did that
in twenty nineteen into twenty twenty, pretty much finished it
about three days before the pandemic hit, and then suddenly
found out that we were making podcasts.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Now, when I say podcasts.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Too, it was more we lean more rate play than
conversational podcast that most podcasts are. So we're doing high
end sound design and production and archive and very fine
tuned editing everything about the visuals basically to put the
listener in the story itself. And so we've now done
four or five of those, and American Skyjackers our first feature,
(06:22):
and there's a lot more to come.
Speaker 4 (06:24):
You go all the way back to eBaum's World. Did
I read that right?
Speaker 1 (06:27):
You did read that right? You've done your research. I
like it e Bomb's World. So the story about Ebom's World.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
It was my first job was on a think tank
at Fox Television Studios, it's a really unique job. Where
After I did an internship, I met a executive who
worked at Foxtelligence Studies.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
So I'm putting a think tank together.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
I'm putting a bunch of young twenty year olds into
a room and give you five hundred bucks a week
or something like that, and you come in. You get
access to the lot, but we own all your ideas.
So everything you pitch us we own, unless we pass
on them then you get them back.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Sounds great, and so I.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Started doing that for a while, basically just mining young
minds for it was all unscripted content too. You go
into a room once a week and you would pitch
various ideas you'd come up with, and they would tell
you you were an idiot basically for the most part,
and it was great. It was like boot camp for pitching.
They'd be like, that's terrible, that would never work, and
they'll tell you why it wouldn't work. It completely shaped
(07:20):
my whole sort of way to tell a story and
to put everything together, not in a negative way either.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
It was very helpful.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I pitched an idea in two thousand and five where
I said, hey, listen, there's a site called Ebomb's World.
What if we did a show around this where we
featured short videos that people made on the internet. And
the response I got was nobody's gold be watching short
videos on the internet in the future. That's never gonna happen.
So they passed on it, and I'd called the guy's
to the e Bomb's World to like, say, can we
(07:47):
align on this?
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Go we partner up. Sure, if you get a studio
on board, we're good. Let's go.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
So I called him, I said, they weren't interested, but
I still love to work with you. A month later,
they called me back and I said, we're being in
all these calls from these other studios. Would you like
to still do this? Would you bring it back to
the studio?
Speaker 1 (08:01):
And I said yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
I walked back in. I said, listen, guys, I quit
un let's be going and buy this. They bought it
and we sold it to USA for one episode, and
that's a.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Whole other story of that time. Therefore, here.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
Now, miss mcdally, I am so excited to talk with
you because I grew up in Riverview, Michigan. So when
it flashed that you were from Trenton and that your
dad owns the shoe store. Where's Allen Park Ray. It
was amazing. I was so excited to just see hometown
boy made good as it.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
Were, Yes, thank you very much. I grew up in
Wyandott went to Saint Patrick's School, Catholic School. I was
there until the eleventh grade. First day of the eleventh grade.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
Well, how many times have you been approached to tell
your story? Was this the first time?
Speaker 5 (08:53):
Oh no, this wasn't the first time I've been approached.
In the nineties, in the twenties, I had a lot
of producers coming in wanting to get the rights to
my story. All of them, one hundred percent, were willing
to put cash on the table and I rejected all
(09:16):
of them, every one of them. I rejected them. And
it wasn't until I got out of prison in twenty ten.
And in twenty fourteen, Danny responded to something that happened
in Canada with the prison systems up there, and I
(09:38):
responded to his response that he gave those people and
I said, I know all about security in the United
States federal prison system, and he said, I'd like to
talk to you about this. He came to my apartment
and he was there for about a half an hour
forty five minutes. In the first fifteen minutes, I got
(10:01):
his credentials, education, what he was doing in Saint Louis,
and what he wanted to do with my story. I
told him that how much money can you put on
a table to get the rights to my story? He said, Mac,
I can't give you anything. I'm broke. And at that
(10:22):
point there I said, that's a decent answer. I think
I may be able to change that situation for you.
One thing that I have to have is nothing can
be published until I'm dead, a book or whatever movie.
You can do nothing until I'm dead. Do you agree?
(10:43):
You said yes. I said you got the rights with
no money up front and so forth. Well, that was
in twenty fourteen. In twenty sixteen, Gangland Warrior in Kansas
contacted me Jenkins runs It and he said he would
like to talk to me about my case. I said, okay.
(11:08):
So he came from Kansas to Saint Louis with his
partner that he worked with, and we talked for about
eight or nine hours from ten o'clock in the morning
until about six or seven o'clock at night. When he
first got there, he said, can I film this I'd
like to record it and everything. I said, sure, So
(11:29):
I went onto the car pulling all this equipment. He
had four cameras set up to record everything. I got
an agreement from him that he wouldn't do a movie
on this, he wouldn't write a book about this, but
he could post the verbal stuff on his site. He
agreed to that, so he did that. Then a couple
(11:54):
of weeks later, Danny came into my apartment he was living.
I could see he libt. He was mad, and he
got the wind of ganglen Wire and told him, right, Danny,
it's not like that. I'm not kicking you to the curb.
You got the rights to my story. Those guys that
are not going to do a bulk or a mobile
(12:16):
or any of that stuff there, so relax. So he relaxed.
But that's it. Producers wanted the story, nobody got it,
and Danny was broke. He said, that's okay. I'm not
taking any money from anything about my life story. I
had opportunities fifty grand, twenty five grand, one hundred grand. No,
(12:41):
I'm not taking anything. And I told Danny that anything
that arises from what he does through remunerations, he can
keep it all, He gets it all. He said, you
don't have to do that, Mac. I said, that's the
way I want it. And I'm taking nothing of the credibility.
(13:01):
I'm not doing my life story like this. And I
got on his to rehabilitate Barbara and her daughter, Barbara Rosser.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
So what was it like when Eli and Josh appartshoot.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
Danny approached me and he says, Mac, I would like
you to work with Eli in Los Angeles. Producers they
want to work on your story. And I says, Danny,
do you trust them? He said yes, I trust them.
I says, are you sure? He says, yes, I trust them.
(13:37):
This is a big deal, Danny. He says yes. I said, okay,
I'll work with him. So I've been working with Eli.
They got the story, they got everything. They can write,
do the story, TV series, they can do books, whatever
they want to do. That's it.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Eli. It's so fascinating that you do this as a
podcast for then a movie. How are you approaching the
podcast and the narrative storytelling of that versus transforming this
into a documentary?
Speaker 6 (14:09):
Fill what's really interesting about podcasts that we learned, at
least the way we were telling it was that you
can go off on these tangential storylines that are incredibly fascinating,
go down these verbial rabbit holes.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
And people will still stay engaged. Because when you're listening
to a storyteller, you're just you're locked into it. When
you're watching something you're cutting constantly, it's easy to become
disengaged for some reason. And I don't know the physical
reasons for that, but that's just something we all experience
and know. So the first thing we knew when we
were making the adaptation was we had to keep this
(14:46):
really tight because it's six and a half hours of
podcast over ten episodes, and I'm biased, but I personally
find it all engaging. I think a lot of other
people do too. That's obviously not going to fly as
a documentary. Our initial cut was over two hours, and
so we had to obviously pair all that down significantly
as well. So thing I left out was that when
we after we shot Max's initial interview and we shot
(15:07):
a few other interviews, when we sold the podcast project,
we continued to shoot interviews, so there was a lot
of interviews that were already shot and banked, so we're
just building things around that, and then it was taking
kind of the highlights of the story as we saw it,
the way that's really tell Max's story and keep the
film moving. That we focused on more than anything in
the recreations. We've been calling it and maybe we're making
(15:30):
this up here, maybe it's not really a thing, maybe
it doesn't stick, but we've been calling it an action documentary,
which is two genres that haven't ever been slapped together before.
And I can't really think of another one, but this
feels like one because of how much it moves and
because of how much happens in it. And unfortunately there's
little things that had to hit the cutting room floor
that kind of slowed down that pace. But the goal
(15:50):
was really just to tell Max's incredible story with all
the twists and turns, take the audience on a ride,
but focus on him and see it through his eyes,
and end up with him in the third act where
he was when we began telling the story and where
he is now.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
The use of the recreations I find fascinating And what
was kind of the thinking behind that, and how is
the casting of that as well?
Speaker 3 (16:15):
The casting took a long time, and a lot of
that had to do with the decision to break a rule.
There's a number of rules broken in this the first
one being Mac looking down the barrel of the camera,
which I was inspired by the film The Chameleon, which
was made in i think twenty twelve twenty thirteen, about
the guy who pretended to be the boy from San
Antonio who had been kidnapped and everything like that.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
But when they did that, they had him.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Look right down the barrel of the camera, and it
was really impactful, at least for me as a viewer,
because he was speaking directly to the audience, just speaking
directly to you, and so everything that is said means
a lot more to you. So that was the first
division we made with Mac. The next rule we broke
was we're going to show face this because you can
only do rack focus the hands and things so many times,
(16:59):
and we break that in the second shot of the
film where we see the recree actor playing Mac. So
we knew we had to make them, at least especially
with Mac, very similar.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
So casting took a long time.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
It took four or five months, went through a lot
of people on incredible casting agents.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Spark like stuck with.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Us, but just because their friends still they're still friends.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Shockingly after this, they were like, during let's do it again. Okay,
but I think it.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Was worth at the end of the day, because we
didn't want people to be taken out of the scene
by preactors who'd looked nothing like the people.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Mac, I'm curious for you, how was it for you
seeing yourself being portrayed by another person?
Speaker 5 (17:37):
When I met Logan who played my part in the movie, Yeah,
he looked a lot like me, so that was good.
He was a little taller than me, but that was okay.
But I enjoyed watching him do the work. I gave
him some pointers on what actually was said between me
(17:57):
and my partner Walter Helakowski, and he took that hard
and he played that dialogue when he did these scenes.
But he did very well. It was interesting to see
him with the other prisoners during the helicopter escape attempt
(18:21):
and Mary. That was nice. Yeah, watching that helicopter come
in and he was there going waving his hands. That's
what we did, waving our hands at the prison at Marion,
and nothing came in. The helicopter stopped in front of
the prison. Yeah we didn't get out.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
Yeah, that's quite a scene. Eli, How was that to shoot.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
That was a definitely unique one.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
We actually did the helicopter somewhere else, and then we
used archive for the helicopter above the prison. The actual
prison was a prison that had been it wasn't being used.
They gave us the whole prison for the day. Ironically,
the chief this location in the entire film was the
entire prison we had for the whole day, which I
was shocked by because I was like, how am I
gonna do this?
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Especially for the budget.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
There is a lot of structure in this where this
story is incredible, like there are things that happen in
it and they're like, this can't be real. I can't
believe this is actually happening, And we recognize that audience
members might tune out because of that. So there's a
structure here where we would go from the recrease storytelling
and MAC telling it, which is sort of the hybrid
(19:31):
recreate slash documentary, and then we would anchor it all
in actual archives. So when you see these ridiculous things
and then you see the picture of the ap of
the car that crashed into the plane, or you hear
Walter Cronkite talking about it, it suddenly weighted in reality,
and that's.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Something we sort of strove to do throughout the entire film.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
Air travel has changed so much, and I was so
glad Eli that you brought in the person to talk
about skyjacking, and just like where the airlines and especially
around the whole thing of security and where we were
with that. Things have changed so much, especially after nine
to eleven. But even just the idea of you Max
sitting on a plane and a flight attendant coming over
(20:15):
and saying, what's your final destination? That is so foreign
to me, such a strange thing to see. And it's
weird that it's probably such a minor footnote to your story,
but for me, it's just like they asked you where
you were going? You don't have that on your ticket.
Is there more than one destination that you can go to?
Is this like a bus?
Speaker 5 (20:37):
As the stewardess was coming down the aisle asking everybody,
she was two aisles up, two seats up, and I'm
telling you, my mind was a blank, an absolute blank.
Where am I going? Oh my god, I don't know
where I'm going. This is going to be embarrassing, and
this is not good because I had a case. They're
(20:58):
filled with weapons and everything else. And when she finally
got to my seat, I snapped on that, paulsa I'm
going to Tulsa. Yeah, but now with a blank for
just a minute and everything. As far as the security goes,
there wasn't any security back in those days. And when
(21:23):
I pulled my case in June, within sixty days, the
FAA ordered the airlines to install metal detectors. They flipped
out in Washington at that time. I'm getting on a plane.
They said it was a machine gun. I had a pistol,
(21:45):
I had a smoke bomb and a JK is a
wig and they just flipped out. And that was a
pivotal point for these metal detectors. You gotta install metal
detectors in all the airlines. So that's it. Mac.
Speaker 4 (22:04):
What is it like for you the first time that
you see this movie with an audience.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
I saw the movie at my house with the family
and I was shot. This is so surreal. It's actual
stuff that I was involved in. And I hate to
say this, but my sister was shot too. Claire, she's
(22:30):
in the movie. She's a star. But she got a
little drunk that day and I think she fell asleep.
But yeah, That was the first show, and then I
saw it again within a couple of hours and I
really enjoyed it then. And I saw it again up
(22:51):
north in the Indian River that's about two hundred miles
north of here, with a couple of friends, and I
enjoyed it every time. Everybody who saw this movie, the
family and up north, they loved it. I loved it,
and I'm going to watch this movie again and again.
(23:15):
It's a fantastic movie in it. I really like it.
I love the podcasts too. As a matter of fact,
on the podcast I like to listen to that quite frequently.
But one time I told Eli, I said, Eli, the
only thing I don't like about this is his damn advertisements.
(23:36):
Kill him.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
He said, I want to say one thing off of
that too.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Matt came to set for two days and we were
honestly nervous about it because this is his life being
remade in front of him, and he was just phenomenal.
I haven't seen so much joy on his face throughout
this process that he had while he was sitting there
watching the monitor walk it on set tell everybody that
(24:02):
they were doing a great job. The department heads were
all site, they were just like, this is great, redamn it.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
It was really wonderful.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
You know, what's the future for American Skyjacker. Where can
people see it?
Speaker 3 (24:15):
It's on Apple TV as of this week on November seventeenth,
and it's North America, South America, and Europe, and then
we're going to be on Amazon, We'll be on YouTube
TV and Fandango at home all to purchase. And then
you can also go to our own site and check
it out there. If you want to give money directly
(24:35):
to independent filmmakers, just watch do Americanskyjacker dot com. You
can rent or buy it. It's just through Vimeo, so
everything's safe. We're not taking your.
Speaker 4 (24:43):
Infl Thank you gentlemen so much. This was such a
pleasure talking with you today.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Thank you Mike. It was great.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
Thank you Mike. It was good talking to you too. Dude.
Take care of yourself. Okay, goodbye.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Dat joy were round robles.
Speaker 6 (26:13):
I know that as I have.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Shot not that back.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
My back.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Mother show. Yeah, I had a yes, some people
Oh bot, it's show tied. People say, good money to
see this movie.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
When they go out to a theater, they want clod sodas,
hot popcorn, and no monsters.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
In the Protection Booth.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 4 (00:20):
Cut it off. It was an ordinary flight turned extraordinary
(00:43):
when a man in black registered as DBE Cooper made
a bomb.
Speaker 5 (00:47):
Right, can you hear me on the headphone? Oh yeah,
okay good. It was the dB Cooper case that changed
(01:09):
my life. I thought, that's the way to do a score.
If don't panic, do what I say and follow my instructions.
I don't know that they've got five sharpshooters by me.
I went through my mind, we can jump in. I
didn't feel the air going through my fingers, and I
(01:31):
was thinking, boy, this is balls. That car took off
for that airplane, and it was very very clear to
all of us there it's going to crash into that planet.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Martin McNally meets another skyjacker, Characrat.
Speaker 5 (01:54):
Nowos evil cut Let's get to hell out of here.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth.
I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking
with Eli Chorus. He is the co writer and co
director of the new documentary American Skyjacker, and we are
also joined by Martin mack McNally, who is the subject
of the film. Pretty interesting talking with the actual subject
of the documentary, and he's a hometown boy who grew
(02:34):
up in the same area of Michigan that I did
as well. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope
you enjoyed the interview. Eli, Can you tell me a
little bit about yourself and how you got into filmmaking.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. My father
was a director cinematographer base out of Austin originally, but
would come out to LA and work. He did mainly
commercials and music videos for Willie Nelson and Stevie ray
On in the seventies and eighties, but was also the
DP on Texas Chainsaw Mascer two with Toby Hooper and
(03:06):
worked on a number of other fun, little cult films
for about twenty or thirty years when he was doing that,
and so I grew up on set, so it was
always in my blood. I started writing pretty young age,
went to school in Boston for writing and publishing, but
always knowing how it was going to come out here
and do filmmaking, and then started in Los Angeles in
(03:29):
two thousand and four working at some studios Fox Television students,
originally learning how to pitch, and then it was friends
with Josh Schaeffer from college. He was my roommate and
we started writing together. Quickly moved out she can't write
together and live together. And sold our first script in
twenty ten, sold a script a year between twenty ten
and twenty sixteen, all television dramas. For the most part,
(03:50):
we're doing some rewrites on things, and then twenty seventeen
we'd sold a bunch of scripts, none of them been made,
and we decided that we wanted to start our own
production company and had some capital to do it. We
actually wanted to make some of these things as opposed
to just sell stacks of paper to about five thousand
industry professionals.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Started doing that.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
The first thing we made was a short version of
a feature that we'd written called Nothing Man, and we
cast a up and coming actor named Coleman Domingo in it,
and he starred in the short that set up the
whole film that we're hoping to get made in the
next few years, honestly, but that was a great sort
of first foray into filmmaking, the first thing we directed,
(04:29):
and then we produced a handful of other projects. And
then in twenty nineteen, while we were looking to adapt
articles into screenplays that we could sell and then make ourselves,
we came across Danny Wisontowski's Riverfront Times article the Final
Flight of Martin McNally, which began this very long and
amazing process. As we started to adapt that article into
(04:54):
a script, which is obviously a very long process that
sometimes doesn't even come to fruition, he said to us,
you should go talk to Mac. He is alive and
well in Saint Louis, And just for posterity's sake, I
was like, we shoul just go get this guy on tape.
We should shoot this, And we went there for four
days and shot much of the interview in the film
while we were there, and suddenly realized we had a documentary.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
On our hands.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Were trying to sell it as a documentary, and we
walked into the Imperative Entertainment offices and they said, we're
starting a podcast division. The idea being we make a podcast,
we build an audience and then we go out and
we do a version of that podcast. We've created our
own IP at that point, plus they were willing to
give us a budget and let us go, which was
music to our ears as a creator. There's not a
(05:40):
lot of hoops to jump through to go out and
tell a story. It was amazing. So we did that
in twenty nineteen into twenty twenty, pretty much finished it
about three days before the pandemic hit, and then suddenly
found out that we were making podcasts.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Now, when I say podcasts.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Too, it was more we lean more rate play than
conversational podcast that most podcasts are. So we're doing high
end sound design and production and archive and very fine
tuned editing everything about the visuals basically to put the
listener in the story itself. And so we've now done
four or five of those, and American Skyjackers our first feature,
(06:22):
and there's a lot more to come.
Speaker 4 (06:24):
You go all the way back to eBaum's World. Did
I read that right?
Speaker 1 (06:27):
You did read that right? You've done your research. I
like it e Bomb's World. So the story about Ebom's World.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
It was my first job was on a think tank
at Fox Television Studios, it's a really unique job. Where
After I did an internship, I met a executive who
worked at Foxtelligence Studies.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
So I'm putting a think tank together.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
I'm putting a bunch of young twenty year olds into
a room and give you five hundred bucks a week
or something like that, and you come in. You get
access to the lot, but we own all your ideas.
So everything you pitch us we own, unless we pass
on them then you get them back.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Sounds great, and so I.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Started doing that for a while, basically just mining young
minds for it was all unscripted content too. You go
into a room once a week and you would pitch
various ideas you'd come up with, and they would tell
you you were an idiot basically for the most part,
and it was great. It was like boot camp for pitching.
They'd be like, that's terrible, that would never work, and
they'll tell you why it wouldn't work. It completely shaped
(07:20):
my whole sort of way to tell a story and
to put everything together, not in a negative way either.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
It was very helpful.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I pitched an idea in two thousand and five where
I said, hey, listen, there's a site called Ebomb's World.
What if we did a show around this where we
featured short videos that people made on the internet. And
the response I got was nobody's gold be watching short
videos on the internet in the future. That's never gonna happen.
So they passed on it, and I'd called the guy's
to the e Bomb's World to like, say, can we
(07:47):
align on this?
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Go we partner up. Sure, if you get a studio
on board, we're good. Let's go.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
So I called him, I said, they weren't interested, but
I still love to work with you. A month later,
they called me back and I said, we're being in
all these calls from these other studios. Would you like
to still do this? Would you bring it back to
the studio?
Speaker 1 (08:01):
And I said yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
I walked back in. I said, listen, guys, I quit
un let's be going and buy this. They bought it
and we sold it to USA for one episode, and
that's a.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Whole other story of that time. Therefore, here.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
Now, miss mcdally, I am so excited to talk with
you because I grew up in Riverview, Michigan. So when
it flashed that you were from Trenton and that your
dad owns the shoe store. Where's Allen Park Ray. It
was amazing. I was so excited to just see hometown
boy made good as it.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
Were, Yes, thank you very much. I grew up in
Wyandott went to Saint Patrick's School, Catholic School. I was
there until the eleventh grade. First day of the eleventh grade.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
Well, how many times have you been approached to tell
your story? Was this the first time?
Speaker 5 (08:53):
Oh no, this wasn't the first time I've been approached.
In the nineties, in the twenties, I had a lot
of producers coming in wanting to get the rights to
my story. All of them, one hundred percent, were willing
to put cash on the table and I rejected all
(09:16):
of them, every one of them. I rejected them. And
it wasn't until I got out of prison in twenty ten.
And in twenty fourteen, Danny responded to something that happened
in Canada with the prison systems up there, and I
(09:38):
responded to his response that he gave those people and
I said, I know all about security in the United
States federal prison system, and he said, I'd like to
talk to you about this. He came to my apartment
and he was there for about a half an hour
forty five minutes. In the first fifteen minutes, I got
(10:01):
his credentials, education, what he was doing in Saint Louis,
and what he wanted to do with my story. I
told him that how much money can you put on
a table to get the rights to my story? He said, Mac,
I can't give you anything. I'm broke. And at that
(10:22):
point there I said, that's a decent answer. I think
I may be able to change that situation for you.
One thing that I have to have is nothing can
be published until I'm dead, a book or whatever movie.
You can do nothing until I'm dead. Do you agree?
(10:43):
You said yes. I said you got the rights with
no money up front and so forth. Well, that was
in twenty fourteen. In twenty sixteen, Gangland Warrior in Kansas
contacted me Jenkins runs It and he said he would
like to talk to me about my case. I said, okay.
(11:08):
So he came from Kansas to Saint Louis with his
partner that he worked with, and we talked for about
eight or nine hours from ten o'clock in the morning
until about six or seven o'clock at night. When he
first got there, he said, can I film this I'd
like to record it and everything. I said, sure, So
(11:29):
I went onto the car pulling all this equipment. He
had four cameras set up to record everything. I got
an agreement from him that he wouldn't do a movie
on this, he wouldn't write a book about this, but
he could post the verbal stuff on his site. He
agreed to that, so he did that. Then a couple
(11:54):
of weeks later, Danny came into my apartment he was living.
I could see he libt. He was mad, and he
got the wind of ganglen Wire and told him, right, Danny,
it's not like that. I'm not kicking you to the curb.
You got the rights to my story. Those guys that
are not going to do a bulk or a mobile
(12:16):
or any of that stuff there, so relax. So he relaxed.
But that's it. Producers wanted the story, nobody got it,
and Danny was broke. He said, that's okay. I'm not
taking any money from anything about my life story. I
had opportunities fifty grand, twenty five grand, one hundred grand. No,
(12:41):
I'm not taking anything. And I told Danny that anything
that arises from what he does through remunerations, he can
keep it all, He gets it all. He said, you
don't have to do that, Mac. I said, that's the
way I want it. And I'm taking nothing of the credibility.
(13:01):
I'm not doing my life story like this. And I
got on his to rehabilitate Barbara and her daughter, Barbara Rosser.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
So what was it like when Eli and Josh appartshoot.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
Danny approached me and he says, Mac, I would like
you to work with Eli in Los Angeles. Producers they
want to work on your story. And I says, Danny,
do you trust them? He said yes, I trust them.
I says, are you sure? He says, yes, I trust them.
(13:37):
This is a big deal, Danny. He says yes. I said, okay,
I'll work with him. So I've been working with Eli.
They got the story, they got everything. They can write,
do the story, TV series, they can do books, whatever
they want to do. That's it.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Eli. It's so fascinating that you do this as a
podcast for then a movie. How are you approaching the
podcast and the narrative storytelling of that versus transforming this
into a documentary?
Speaker 6 (14:09):
Fill what's really interesting about podcasts that we learned, at
least the way we were telling it was that you
can go off on these tangential storylines that are incredibly fascinating,
go down these verbial rabbit holes.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
And people will still stay engaged. Because when you're listening
to a storyteller, you're just you're locked into it. When
you're watching something you're cutting constantly, it's easy to become
disengaged for some reason. And I don't know the physical
reasons for that, but that's just something we all experience
and know. So the first thing we knew when we
were making the adaptation was we had to keep this
(14:46):
really tight because it's six and a half hours of
podcast over ten episodes, and I'm biased, but I personally
find it all engaging. I think a lot of other
people do too. That's obviously not going to fly as
a documentary. Our initial cut was over two hours, and
so we had to obviously pair all that down significantly
as well. So thing I left out was that when
we after we shot Max's initial interview and we shot
(15:07):
a few other interviews, when we sold the podcast project,
we continued to shoot interviews, so there was a lot
of interviews that were already shot and banked, so we're
just building things around that, and then it was taking
kind of the highlights of the story as we saw it,
the way that's really tell Max's story and keep the
film moving. That we focused on more than anything in
the recreations. We've been calling it and maybe we're making
(15:30):
this up here, maybe it's not really a thing, maybe
it doesn't stick, but we've been calling it an action documentary,
which is two genres that haven't ever been slapped together before.
And I can't really think of another one, but this
feels like one because of how much it moves and
because of how much happens in it. And unfortunately there's
little things that had to hit the cutting room floor
that kind of slowed down that pace. But the goal
(15:50):
was really just to tell Max's incredible story with all
the twists and turns, take the audience on a ride,
but focus on him and see it through his eyes,
and end up with him in the third act where
he was when we began telling the story and where
he is now.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
The use of the recreations I find fascinating And what
was kind of the thinking behind that, and how is
the casting of that as well?
Speaker 3 (16:15):
The casting took a long time, and a lot of
that had to do with the decision to break a rule.
There's a number of rules broken in this the first
one being Mac looking down the barrel of the camera,
which I was inspired by the film The Chameleon, which
was made in i think twenty twelve twenty thirteen, about
the guy who pretended to be the boy from San
Antonio who had been kidnapped and everything like that.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
But when they did that, they had him.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Look right down the barrel of the camera, and it
was really impactful, at least for me as a viewer,
because he was speaking directly to the audience, just speaking
directly to you, and so everything that is said means
a lot more to you. So that was the first
division we made with Mac. The next rule we broke
was we're going to show face this because you can
only do rack focus the hands and things so many times,
(16:59):
and we break that in the second shot of the
film where we see the recree actor playing Mac. So
we knew we had to make them, at least especially
with Mac, very similar.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
So casting took a long time.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
It took four or five months, went through a lot
of people on incredible casting agents.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Spark like stuck with.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Us, but just because their friends still they're still friends.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Shockingly after this, they were like, during let's do it again. Okay,
but I think it.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Was worth at the end of the day, because we
didn't want people to be taken out of the scene
by preactors who'd looked nothing like the people.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Mac, I'm curious for you, how was it for you
seeing yourself being portrayed by another person?
Speaker 5 (17:37):
When I met Logan who played my part in the movie, Yeah,
he looked a lot like me, so that was good.
He was a little taller than me, but that was okay.
But I enjoyed watching him do the work. I gave
him some pointers on what actually was said between me
(17:57):
and my partner Walter Helakowski, and he took that hard
and he played that dialogue when he did these scenes.
But he did very well. It was interesting to see
him with the other prisoners during the helicopter escape attempt
(18:21):
and Mary. That was nice. Yeah, watching that helicopter come
in and he was there going waving his hands. That's
what we did, waving our hands at the prison at Marion,
and nothing came in. The helicopter stopped in front of
the prison. Yeah we didn't get out.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
Yeah, that's quite a scene. Eli, How was that to shoot.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
That was a definitely unique one.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
We actually did the helicopter somewhere else, and then we
used archive for the helicopter above the prison. The actual
prison was a prison that had been it wasn't being used.
They gave us the whole prison for the day. Ironically,
the chief this location in the entire film was the
entire prison we had for the whole day, which I
was shocked by because I was like, how am I
gonna do this?
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Especially for the budget.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
There is a lot of structure in this where this
story is incredible, like there are things that happen in
it and they're like, this can't be real. I can't
believe this is actually happening, And we recognize that audience
members might tune out because of that. So there's a
structure here where we would go from the recrease storytelling
and MAC telling it, which is sort of the hybrid
(19:31):
recreate slash documentary, and then we would anchor it all
in actual archives. So when you see these ridiculous things
and then you see the picture of the ap of
the car that crashed into the plane, or you hear
Walter Cronkite talking about it, it suddenly weighted in reality,
and that's.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Something we sort of strove to do throughout the entire film.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
Air travel has changed so much, and I was so
glad Eli that you brought in the person to talk
about skyjacking, and just like where the airlines and especially
around the whole thing of security and where we were
with that. Things have changed so much, especially after nine
to eleven. But even just the idea of you Max
sitting on a plane and a flight attendant coming over
(20:15):
and saying, what's your final destination? That is so foreign
to me, such a strange thing to see. And it's
weird that it's probably such a minor footnote to your story,
but for me, it's just like they asked you where
you were going? You don't have that on your ticket.
Is there more than one destination that you can go to?
Is this like a bus?
Speaker 5 (20:37):
As the stewardess was coming down the aisle asking everybody,
she was two aisles up, two seats up, and I'm
telling you, my mind was a blank, an absolute blank.
Where am I going? Oh my god, I don't know
where I'm going. This is going to be embarrassing, and
this is not good because I had a case. They're
(20:58):
filled with weapons and everything else. And when she finally
got to my seat, I snapped on that, paulsa I'm
going to Tulsa. Yeah, but now with a blank for
just a minute and everything. As far as the security goes,
there wasn't any security back in those days. And when
(21:23):
I pulled my case in June, within sixty days, the
FAA ordered the airlines to install metal detectors. They flipped
out in Washington at that time. I'm getting on a plane.
They said it was a machine gun. I had a pistol,
(21:45):
I had a smoke bomb and a JK is a
wig and they just flipped out. And that was a
pivotal point for these metal detectors. You gotta install metal
detectors in all the airlines. So that's it. Mac.
Speaker 4 (22:04):
What is it like for you the first time that
you see this movie with an audience.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
I saw the movie at my house with the family
and I was shot. This is so surreal. It's actual
stuff that I was involved in. And I hate to
say this, but my sister was shot too. Claire, she's
(22:30):
in the movie. She's a star. But she got a
little drunk that day and I think she fell asleep.
But yeah, That was the first show, and then I
saw it again within a couple of hours and I
really enjoyed it then. And I saw it again up
(22:51):
north in the Indian River that's about two hundred miles
north of here, with a couple of friends, and I
enjoyed it every time. Everybody who saw this movie, the
family and up north, they loved it. I loved it,
and I'm going to watch this movie again and again.
(23:15):
It's a fantastic movie in it. I really like it.
I love the podcasts too. As a matter of fact,
on the podcast I like to listen to that quite frequently.
But one time I told Eli, I said, Eli, the
only thing I don't like about this is his damn advertisements.
(23:36):
Kill him.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
He said, I want to say one thing off of
that too.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Matt came to set for two days and we were
honestly nervous about it because this is his life being
remade in front of him, and he was just phenomenal.
I haven't seen so much joy on his face throughout
this process that he had while he was sitting there
watching the monitor walk it on set tell everybody that
(24:02):
they were doing a great job. The department heads were
all site, they were just like, this is great, redamn it.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
It was really wonderful.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
You know, what's the future for American Skyjacker. Where can
people see it?
Speaker 3 (24:15):
It's on Apple TV as of this week on November seventeenth,
and it's North America, South America, and Europe, and then
we're going to be on Amazon, We'll be on YouTube
TV and Fandango at home all to purchase. And then
you can also go to our own site and check
it out there. If you want to give money directly
(24:35):
to independent filmmakers, just watch do Americanskyjacker dot com. You
can rent or buy it. It's just through Vimeo, so
everything's safe. We're not taking your.
Speaker 4 (24:43):
Infl Thank you gentlemen so much. This was such a
pleasure talking with you today.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Thank you Mike. It was great.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
Thank you Mike. It was good talking to you too. Dude.
Take care of yourself. Okay, goodbye.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Dat joy were round robles.
Speaker 6 (26:13):
I know that as I have.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Shot not that back.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
My back.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Mother show. Yeah, I had a yes, some people
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