Tom Hanks could not have had more fitting companions at Wednesday’s premiere of his HBO series Bands of Brothers.
Forty-seven of the surviving 51 veterans of Easy Company, 101st Airborne Division, joined Hanks at the premiere of the cable movie, which he executive-produced with Steven Spielberg.
The event took place on the 57th anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Utah Beach in France, where the first U.S. soldiers landed.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Hanks said the organizers for the event “wanted to have an appropriate premiere, in an appropriate place at an appropriate time.”
The 10-episode drama has been compared to another recent U.S. World War II epic,Pearl Harbor, which also revolves around the same theme. Chris Albrecht, HBO’s president of original programming, told the Hollywood
Reporter that Band of Brothers was not trying to show HBO’s version of World War II, but rather the real thing.
“This is not a story about how Americans won the war,” Albrecht said. “It’s about a group of men.”
“We know we have often forgotten details, modified history, altered geography…we have made history fit on the screen,” Hanks said during a memorial service held before the screening, Reuters reported.
Director Steven Spielberg, Oscar-winner for another war epic, Saving Private Ryan, was working on a forthcoming film in Los Angeles and was unable to attend the premiere.
Hollywood movie premieres can be glamorous, rich, and grandiose, as in the case of the Pearl Harbor event, for which thousands of people were flown to Hawaii. At times, premieres even can upstage the meaning of the
film entirely.
Such is the case of Peggy Wilson, whose husband, a civil service representative on the USS Stennis (where the Harbor premiere was held over Memorial Weekend), received an invite to Pearl Harbor premiere
festivities but was not invited to see the actual film.
Wilson explained that active duty members were dressed in white and were taken by a bus from a nearby stadium to the USS Stennis. Once aboard, they were used for the television shots of the VIP arrivals and then ushered off without getting to watch the movie.
“When my husband told me that he got asked to leave after the arrivals I asked, ‘You are kidding right?'” Wilson said. “He was assuming he’d be able to see the film since he got invited to the premiere. He was very disappointed.
“I can’t imagine that is the image that Disney was looking to create,” Wilson added. “To me, that is a slap in the face of the men and women who are active duty and had no choice of going on this trip.
“I didn’t think it was fair. It took us all by surprise, being this big event and Disney was like, ‘Thank you…see you later,'” she concluded.
Perhaps Band of Brothers more fully captured the essence of what a premiere of a film in this genre should be. The screening ended with emotional applause. Sources say Hanks‘s voice broke as he paid a last tribute to the veterans.
Filmed for eight months in Britain, Band of Brothers features 500 speaking parts, employed 10,000 extras and was put together by eight directors.
The series will begin in the US on September 9 and will play on European television in the following weeks.
