Netflix has released the first trailer and poster for the documentary series, Five Came Back, premiering on March 31, 2017. The three-part docuseries is based on Mark Harris’ Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War and features interviews with Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo Del Toro, Paul Greengrass and Lawrence Kasdan. Laurent Bouzereau directed and Oscar winner Meryl Streep narrated the series which focuses on five filmmakers – John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens – who risked their lives to document World War II.
“Film was an intoxicant from the early days of the silent movies,” said Spielberg. “And early on, Hollywood realized that it had a tremendous tool or weapon for change, through cinema.”
“Cinema in its purest form could be put in the service of propaganda. Hitler and his minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels understood the power of the cinema to move large populations toward your way of thinking,” explained Coppola.
“These filmmakers, at that time, had a responsibility in that what they were putting into the world would be taken as truth,” said director Bouzereau. “You can see a lot of echoes in what is happening today. It became clear as we were doing this series that the past was re-emerging in some ways, including the line we see that separates cinema that exists for entertainment and cinema that carries a message. And politics is more than ever a part of entertainment. I find it courageous of filmmakers then, as with artists today, to speak up for those who don’t have a platform.”
Author Harris added, “It’s the hardest thing to convey to young, contemporary audiences – even if you understand it intellectually, you don’t understand viscerally that you had to wait a really, really long time for news. We’re in a context now where we have five different ways of knowing what is making news this morning. But you’re truly in another universe when you’re talking about the 1940s. There were newspapers and radio, but visually, the movies were the only way people could see the war.”
The Plot: Tracing the ways patriotism and industry existed side by side, and the role Hollywood played in mobilizing and shaping the consciousness of a divided America, Bouzereau and his team gathered over 100 hours of archival and newsreel footage; watched over 40 documentaries and training films directed and produced by the five directors during the war; and studied 50 studio films and over 30 hours of outtakes and raw footage from their war films.
The stories in Five Came Back reverberate with meaning. We are still living through their coda.
Watch the Five Came Back trailer:
