Dayton Daily News from Dayton, Ohio • 33

y-y if 4 'i rl'f t' 1" lrf 1' I11 if'7) 990 'lyion Daily News 1-C vu if CROSSWORD: Word has ityou'll be challenged 6C BGOEiS: 'Awakeninfl VLJS iotsH i Richard Crenna, as Pan Am pilot Dan Hood, prepares to board aircraft for an evacuation flight from Saigon in 1975, carrying a young boy who portrays the youngster given to Hood by a Vietnamese woman ft I dr. As we taxied out, all I could think of is all those little kids we left behind, who didn't have a chance half-American, half-Vietnamese, who are shunned by their own society. I wish I could have done Dan Hood, pilot of evacuation flight 1 I I 1 Ja si Sf A i i It aFUl EST Film recreates soaring emotions of the 'Last Flight Out' of Saigon JAMES EARL JONES INTERVIEW2C OS ANGELES When Dan Hood re TOM HOPKINS calls the scene, tears well up in his eyes. It was 1975, and the Pan Am pilot was on a self-styled rescue mis-sion. He had taken a furlough Stanislawski 'ready to go with project if funds become available' Channel 14 may air own programming Identity apart from Channel 16 a future possibility, officials say By Bob Batz RADIOS TV WRITER WPTO-TV's days of dwelling in the shadow of its sister station WPTD-TV may be numbered.

The Oxford-based WPTO (Channel 14), which has its studios on the Miami University campus in airs the same programs as WPTD (Channel 16), which operates out of studios in downtown Dayton. Both are Public Broadcasting System stations. WPTD, which boasts a tower is much more powerful than WPTO, which has a 300-foot tower. But officials of Greater Dayton Public Television owner of both stations, have a plan that would give Channel 14 its own identity and its own programming. That programming would be educational, including telecourse-type material that would enable viewers to receive college credits at home, according to Mark Stanislawski, director of marketing and development.

The corporation has no plan for raising money to beef up Channel 14, Stanislawski said. "If a generous donor came forward tomorrow and volunteered to give us money for a project, we'd probably choose to improve Channel 14 and make it a separate station," he said. Stanislawski said it would cost $750,000 to $1.5 million. "Even though we don't have that kind of money right now, we'll be ready to go with the project if funds ever become available," he added. Most of the money would be used to extend Channel 14's tower and install new transmitting equipment, he said.

Because they present commercial free programming, Channels 16 and 14 rely almost entirely on viewer donations, grants and money makers such as The Great TV Auction, which is set for April 21-27. When the company began 29 years ago, Channel 14 in Oxford was its only station, Stanislawski recalled. Channel 16 was added later, and until five years ago, when improvements were made to the Dayton station, both operations generated the same power. "Before the improvements, Channel 16 didn't have a strong enough signal to reach Oxford and Channel 14, while it served Oxford, wasn't powerful enough to reach Dayton with its signal," he said. Now Channel 16 is powerful enough to serve the entire area.

"It's been a dream of ours for some time to take advantage of the fact that we have two separate studios and transmitters and present different programming on each station," Stanislawski said. He said there's no sense in going to separate programming until Channel 14's tower is extended. SEE CHANNEL2C TELEVISION EDITOR airline personnel. Also present were actors Richard Crenna, who plays Hood; James Earl Jones, who plays Topping; and Dr. Haing S.

Ngor. as Topping's Saigon aide. When an eight-minute scene from the film was shown during the interview, Hood and Topping cried. that Pam Am was pulling out in a few days, the trick was keeping it a secret. He knew the Vietnamese would resent being abandoned.

Then a new problem arose: The Federal Aviation Administration declared the Saigon airport a risk and pulled Pan Am's operating certificate. Pan Am Chairman William T. Seawell had to get President Ford's permission for a final evacuation flight. And the plane would hold only 375 seats. Besides those hospital workers who wanted out.

Pan Am had 61 Vietnamese employees to save. "When we decided that we were going to evacuate all of our employees and their immediate families," Topping said, "I didn't realize that in Vietnam, an immediate family means everyone that was related, closely related, almost related. We had 61 employees, and the first list of names for evacuation had over 700 people." There's a tense scene in the movie in which a Vietnamese nurse tells the Americans that she is Viet Cong and most of the hospital employees are on a VC death list. "If you don't get them out, they will die," she says. Hood said the story is not just a figment of the screenwriter's imagination the death list actually existed.

He later learned that the threat to kill the workers was not carried out, but many of the Vietnamese who weren't evacuated before the SEE LAST2C and had flown to Vietnam at the request of an old college buddy who was working as a doctor at the American hospital in Saigon. Would Hood come and help them fly wounded children to safety before the Viet Cong overrun the city? As they worked frantically to load children aboard Medivac planes, a Vietnamese scrub woman shyly walked up to Hood. Her face was horribly scarred by napalm, and she held her 4-year-old son in her arms. She got down on her knees and begged Hood to take her son to safety in America. No way.

Hood told her. The last thing he needed was a refugee son. Now. Dan Hood is talking with television critics at the Los Angeles Registry Hotel. He is dressed in a black Pan Am uniform with gold braid on the sleeves.

And his voice is cracking. "That child is my son." Hood said. be 20 years old." As you may have guessed. Hood brought the boy to America and adopted him. The dramatic story of the evacuation and the role Hood played in Pan Am's last flight out of Saigon is told in NBC's Tuesday movie.

Last Flight Out. and it packs an emotional wallop. Sitting alongside Hood during our interview was another real-life hero. Al Topping. The Jamaica native was Pan Am's manager in Saigon and directed the evacuation of "We had 61 employees, and the first list of names for evacuation had over 7(X) people" ill Now based at Kennedy in New York, Hood calls the sacrifice made by that Vietnamese mother "the greatest expression of love I've ever seen in my life." The woman later managed to smuggle two letters to Hood, asking whether her son is OK.

"I sent a picture back and told her that he was doing just fine," he said. "He's now in college." The drama was filmed at the U-Tapao air base in Thailand, which stands in for Tan Son Nhut in Saigon. Topping recalls that when he got word Fate of Hollywood's political thrillers often rests in reality Thawing of Cold War, crumbling communism take toll at box office "iini'i'liM i I I i f-' KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS As in high-wire acts and formation flying, timing is everything when Hollywood embarks upon another of its big-budget political thrillers. Misjudge the political mood of the country or the world, for that matter by as little as a week, and you can kiss goodbye all hopes of a run on the box office. Ask the filmmakers behind The Package with Gene Hackman and The Fourth War with Roy Scheider.

Both are old-fashioned Cold War thrillers released just as the Cold War had begun to thaw, thanks to glasnost and the democratization of Eastern Europe. Had either film arrived when relations with the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc were still piano-wire taut, it might have stood a chance, becoming another paranoid crowd-pleaser on the order of Red Dawn and the TV miniseries Amerika. were no more defectors. There was no more Cold War. All within six months." And yet another once-timely political thriller was stamped: DATED YESTERDAY'S NEWS.

"It (Fourth War) became an historical movie (with a hastily added "November 1988" prologue)," says Frankenheimer, an old hand at risky political thrillers, with The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May and Black Sunday to his credit. "And we just went down the tubes." That's putting it mildly. The Fourth War, budgeted at $12 million and the recipient of respectful reviews based on Frankenheimer's participation, moved from first-run theaters to discount houses after a week. Opening-weekend gross: $776,000, or $24.5 million less than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles earned in the equivalent time. SEE P0UT1CAL2C Arriving in late 1989 and early 1990, their chances were marginally better than Custer's at Little Big Horn.

"Everything we talked about no longer existed," John Frankenheimer says of his ill-timed The Fourth War, which considers a private battle of wits between a NATO officer in West Germany and his Soviet counterpart in Czechoslovakia. The film opens with the quaint sight of a defector fleeing across the Czechoslovakia West German border. Says Frankenheimer "The borders just went. There ORION PICTURES Tommy Lee Jones (L), Gene Hackman talk over tough times in The Package'.