The Great Santini
Encyclopedia
The Great Santini is a 1979 film which tells the story of a Marine
United States Marine Corps
The United States Marine Corps is a branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for providing power projection from the sea, using the mobility of the United States Navy to deliver combined-arms task forces rapidly. It is one of seven uniformed services of the United States...

 officer whose success as a military aviator contrasts with his shortcomings as a husband and father. The film explores the high price of heroism
Tragic hero
A tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy. Tragic heroes appear in the dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Marston, Corneille, Racine, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Strindberg, and many other writers.-Aristotle's tragic hero:Aristotle...

 and self-sacrifice. It stars Robert Duvall
Robert Duvall
Robert Selden Duvall is an American actor and director. He has won an Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and a BAFTA over the course of his career....

, Blythe Danner
Blythe Danner
Blythe Katherine Danner is an American actress. She is the mother of actress Gwyneth Paltrow and director Jake Paltrow.-Early life:...

, Michael O'Keefe
Michael O'Keefe
Michael Raymond O'Keefe is an American film and television actor.- Early life :O'Keefe was born Raymond Peter O'Keefe, Jr. in Mount Vernon, New York, the oldest of seven children in a devoutly Roman Catholic Irish American family. His father was a law professor at Fordham University, as well as...

, Lisa Jane Persky
Lisa Jane Persky
Lisa Jane Persky is an American actress.Persky was born in New York City, New York, the daughter of Jane Holley and Mort Persky...

, Julie Anne Haddock
Julie Anne Haddock
Julie Anne Haddock is a former American actress best known for her role in the television series The Facts of Life as tomboy "Cindy Webster." Though she has had other roles in both film and television, her acting career effectively ended after the first season of The Facts of Life, when her...

, Brian Andrews
Brian Andrews (actor)
Brian Andrews is an American actor who has starred in movies and on television. He is best known for his role as Tommy Doyle in the classic John Carpenter horror movie Halloween, and reprised this role in Halloween II in a small appearance...

, Stan Shaw
Stan Shaw
Stan Shaw is an American actor.Born in Chicago, Illinois, he is the son of Bertha Shaw and saxophonist Eddie Shaw, and cousin of the late soul singers Sam Cooke and Tyrone Davis Brother of Vaan Shaw...

 and David Keith
David Keith
David Lemuel Keith is an American actor and director. He received Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actor and New Star of the Year – Actor for his performance in An Officer and a Gentleman.-Career:...

.

Much of the film was shot on location in Beaufort, South Carolina
Beaufort, South Carolina
Beaufort is a city in and the county seat of Beaufort County, South Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1711, it is the second-oldest city in South Carolina, behind Charleston. The city's population was 12,361 in the 2010 census. It is located in the Hilton Head Island-Beaufort Micropolitan...

. The setting of the Meechum house was later used in The Big Chill
The Big Chill (film)
The Big Chill is a 1983 American comedy-drama film directed by Lawrence Kasdan, starring Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly, and JoBeth Williams. It is about a group of baby boomer college friends who reunite briefly after 15 years due to...

.

The film is set in 1962 before widespread American involvement in the Vietnam War. Conroy makes the point that Santini is a warrior without a war, and in turn is at war alternately with the service that he loves and his family.

Production

The script was adapted by Lewis John Carlino from the novel of the same name
The Great Santini (novel)
The Great Santini is a novel written by Pat Conroy and published in 1976.-Plot summary:The Great Santini tells the story of hard-nosed Marine fighter pilot Lt. Col. Wilbur "Bull" Meecham, who calls himself "The Great Santini," and the family he runs with a strict hand. It follows the Meecham family...

 by Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy , is a New York Times bestselling author who has written several acclaimed novels and memoirs. Two of his novels, The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, were made into Oscar-nominated films.-Early life:...

, with assistance from an un-credited Herman Raucher
Herman Raucher
Herman Raucher is an American author who has written several screenplays, among them the popular Summer of '42 and The Great Santini and several novels and plays...

. Carlino directed the film. The title character, Lt. Col. Wilbur "Bull" Meechum, aka "The Great Santini", was based on Conroy's father.

The story, for the most part, follows the book. The movie's major divergence is the absence of Sammy, Ben Meecham's Jewish best friend. The spelling of the family's name was also changed from Meecham to Meechum.

Warner Bros. initially released the film in 1979 under the title, The Ace.

The film was shot in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio
Aspect ratio (image)
The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of the width of the image to its height, expressed as two numbers separated by a colon. That is, for an x:y aspect ratio, no matter how big or small the image is, if the width is divided into x units of equal length and the height is measured using this...

, but was only produced in that ratio in the LaserDisc
Laserdisc
LaserDisc was a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium. Initially licensed, sold, and marketed as MCA DiscoVision in North America in 1978, the technology was previously referred to interally as Optical Videodisc System, Reflective Optical Videodisc, Laser Optical...

 format. Both the VHS
VHS
The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....

 & DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 releases are in 1.33:1 also known as full screen
Full screen
A fullscreen image or video occupies the screen entirely.* A video display having an aspect ratio of 4:3 * In film, the use of pan and scan, image cropping, or windowboxing to fit widescreen content into a display with aspect ratio of 4:3...

 or pan & scan. To date the film has not gotten a release on the Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...

 format.

Awards

The Great Santini received two Academy Award nominations: Best Actor in a Leading Role
Academy Award for Best Actor
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...

 (Duvall) and Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry. Since its inception, however, the...

(O'Keefe).
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