Trivia / Wings (1927)

• Backed by the Pentagon: One of the earlier examples; the Air Corps supplied both planes and pilots for the film. The rest of the Army, meanwhile, coughed up $16 million (a huge amount at the time) to help with budget problems, and supplied soldiers and tanks for the battlefield scenes.
• Billing Displacement: Even though Clara Bow has top billing, her character, Mary, only appears sporadically. She didn't even exist in the original draft, and was added mainly because Sex Sells.
• California Doubling: Set mostly in wartime France, the film was shot in San Antonio in order to take advantage of Kelly Field for the flying sequences.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Due to the poor conditions of the surviving elements, this movie took longer than every Best Picture Oscar winner from Sunrise to The King's Speech to come to DVD. In fact, Wings was considered a lost film until a print was found in 1992.
• On-Set Injury: While filming the aerial combat scenes, stunt pilot Dick Grace was required to deliberately crash-land a Fokker D-VII, specially modified to "crumple" on impact. When the Fokker struck the ground, the landing gear failed to crumple, making the impact a heavier one than planned. This caused Grace's safety straps to break, sending his head through the instrument panel, leaving him with four crushed vertebrae and a broken neck. Amazingly, he spent only six weeks in the hospital and was again performing stunt work within a year.
• Playing Against Type: Clara Bow was the epitome of jazz-age glamor with a sexy and sassy screen image. Here, she's cast as a ragtime-era Girl Next Door. That bit where Mary has to put on a cocktail dress and act flirty was presumably written in just so that Bow could get to do her usual schtick at least once.

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