Recalling her flying career in the late 20's and early 30's, Florence "Pancho" Barnes used to say, "I flew high in the skies during the day and high in the bars at night."  She had a lot of fun, that's for sure, and quite a bit of it was with a group of Hollywood stunt pilots.  Pancho was the only woman flier accepted into their midst, in part because she was a social whirlwind and party organizer.  She created a group called the "Short Snorters".  Their membership card -- also called a "short snorther" -- was a dollar bill that was signed by everyone in the group.  The "card" was actually an excuse for all sorts of fun.  A member caught without his dollar bill would be forced to pay for the bar tab.  If everyone had their membership cards with them, then the person with the fewest signatures would be forced to pay.  According to Lauren Kessler's book The Happy Bottom Riding Club, there were other antics as well.  Pancho might approach a young, wet-behind-the-ears pilot with an inflated view of himself, and offer to let him join the group in exchange for a large membership fee.  After the fee was paid Pancho would say, "that's all there is.  Now go out and try it on someone yourself"!

Turns out, the practice of using a signed dollar bill as a membership card or memento probably preceeds Pancho's club.  According to the website shortsnorter.org the idea started with Alaskan bush pilots.  The History Detectives TV show claims it all started in 1925, thanks to an air circus pilot named Jack Ashcroft, who allegedly wrote a humorous note on a dollar bill given to his boss.  Whatever version of its creation you want to believe, the "snorter" became widely popularized by WWII.  In fact, there are examples of dollar bills signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, General George Patton, and many other famous people.  The term even appeared in that most American of things, a Coca-Cola ad.

At first blush the term "short snorter" might seem quite nefarious -- people who do not know any better often assume it has something to do with rolled up bills, snorting noses, and cocaine.  The real story is that a "snort" is an old slang word for a drink or shot.  A dollar might buy a not-quite-full glass or "short" drink or drinks.  So the term is actually the kind of affectionate name for a dollar bill that could have been coined by an alcoholic or a comedian like W.C. Fields.

The Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive contains a beautiful example of a "short snorter".  It's signed not only by Pancho, but by one of her best friends and frequent flying companions, Nels Griffith.  It's also signed by a couple of pilots, including Hell's Angels stunt pilot Roy Minor.

This past Halloween, Amanda Pope and I flew up to Seattle on an exciting mission: to record narration for The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club.  Ever since Kathy Bates had performed the voice of Pancho for our film, we'd known that we couldn't have just anyone as our narrator.  Kathy's roaring, distinctive pipes were amazing, but they also presented a challenge.  Who could have their voice paired with hers, and not be blown off the soundtrack? 

We did a lot of thinking on that subject, and received a great deal of advice from friends and fans, some of it solicited and most of it not.  In the end though, the choice was an easy one for us.  We agreed that there was only one man for the job -- a handsome, veteran movie actor with enormous presence, who starred in one of the greatest military aviation movies of all time, "Top Gun".  A man named Tom . . . think about that for a moment ... guess who?

Well, if you said "Tom Cruise!" you'd be wrong.  Tom Skerritt, who played Commander Mike 'Viper' Metcalf in TG, is who we were after.  And thanks to some patience, some assistance from agent Brian Mann at ICM, and a small hole in Tom Skerritt's awfully busy schedule, it actually happened.  So we found ourselves at the famed Bad Animals recording studio in downtown Seattle (their website identifies it, by the way, as exactly latitude 47.615067 and longitude -122.343053 degrees).  It was a typical Seattle sunny day, which means that it only rained a little bit!  Fortunately, we were very dry indoors, and the humidity turned out to be good for Tom's throat.  He showed up looking every inch the man I remembered from Picket Fences, although minus the police uniform.  Under one arm was our script, neatly marked up with cadence and pronunciation reminders, and in the other hand a dog leash.   Maggie the wonder dog was there to keep us company -- and to listen to her master's voice and watch through the double paned glass as he did his magic in the isolation booth.

Throughout post-production, we'd used an amateur's voice -- well, mine! -- as the narrator.  It wasn't so bad actually, and some people had told us to keep it.  But sitting in the session, and hearing Tom read the lines, there was no doubt we were in the hands of a master.  It was every bit as much of a revelation as our time with Kathy Bates had been.  Words took on new shades of meaning and depth coming from his gravelly, amber-tinted throat, and our movie became richer, funnier, and stronger as a result.  To top it all off, Tom even made a suggestion about something he didn't like in the script, and hit a chord.  We ended up making a last-minute change, that wound up in the film.  Good going, Sherriff Brock!

When it was all over, we had a moment to sit and relax, and that's when Tom saw fit to compliment us on the film, and share a bit about his life.  I'd never realized, that his first job was in a movie shot in Topanga Canyon, called War Hunt.  It featured another actor by the name of Sydney Pollack, you may have heard of.  But what really changed his life, Tom explained, was a bit part on Combat! with Vic Morrow.  Back then the show was being directed by a real up-and-coming talent named Robert Altman.  He gave Skerritt a major role in the movie MASH and a new understanding of what it meant to be an actor.  After that experience, Skerritt explained, he was hooked.

As were we.  We could have stayed and listened to more stories all day, but Tom had many things to attend to, including a film school that he's helped set up in Seattle, and stacks of scripts awaiting his review.  So, we thanked him for his effort, and said goodbye. Later, on the plane coming back to Los Angeles, we celebrated the fact that we'd overcome a major hurdle, and one of the last.  It was now certain that by Thanksgiving, the movie would be essentially finished.

Back in October of last year, Amanda Pope and I pronounced “The Legend of Pancho Barnes” to be picture locked.  That meant, after almost a year of solid work, we were finished with the visual portion of the film.  What a great relief it was to finally put all the seemingly endless editorial work -- writing and re-writing the script, doing research, tracking down and then trolling through stock footage and photographs to illustrate our story – to bed.  Our editor Monique had done a terrific job bringing everything together, and was a pleasure to work with, but now we would part company and move on to doing sound work.  We worked on the score with Nathan Wang and Knox Summerour,  and then spent solid months with sound designer Adam King, adding sound effects to the picture.   And never for a moment during the sound post, did Amanda or I ever consider revisiting the picture.  That was something we’d only ever do under extraordinary circumstances.  But recently, that’s exactly what we did!

Here's what happened.  In early January, I received an email from a Glendale-based attorney named Paul Ayers.  Mr. Ayers’ grandfather Farel Hart Ayers, was quite active in the community of Santa Paula in the 1920s.  He was married to the daughter of a prominent farmer, G.W. Faulkner, whose historic home and farm are preserved today as part of a University of California land trust.  That was all very interesting, but hardly prepared me for the next bit of news in the email.  “My grandfather was an avid camera buff,” Paul wrote, “and I have transferred some 16mm film my grandfather shot from 1929 to 1934 to DVD.”  He continued, “One of the reels is depicts the dedication of the Santa Paula Airport on August 10, 1930. There is one shot featuring Pancho and other aviators that competed in the Tom Thumb Derby that day.”

Now, please understand, it’s been very difficult for us to make a film about Pancho for a lot of reasons -- but one of the biggest hurdles, was that film footage featuring her has been very hard to find.  The Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive, for instance, which was the source of many of the photos used in the film, does not contain any motion picture film footage of Pancho from her flying days.  So, you can imagine how excited we were to hear about this material!

Some historic context...  Back in 1928, a Santa Paula rancher named Paul Dickenson raised the money to build a small airport – the first in Ventura County and one that is still in operation to this day.  When it opened on August 9-10 of 1930,  there was a big celebration that included a lot of aviation notables including Art Goebel, Hawley Bowlus, and Roscoe Turner.  Pancho was also present, competing in a “Tom Thumb” Derby which included a jaunt from Santa Paula to Long Beach.  She was supposed to be flying against a field of what was supposed to be fourteen women aviators or "aviatrixes" as the newspaper liked to say.   Only, a heavy fog that day made flying very dangerous, and only four women -- Pancho, Selma Granger, Gladys O’Donnell and Gertrude Meyer -- had the courage to take off and head south over the Santa Monica Mountains.

The day's events were covered in the Los Angeles Times, and Paul Dickenson actually had the dedication ceremony filmed.  He cut together a movie for promotional purposes and for posterity, and it was a great thing for us that he did.   His film is now part of the collection of the Aviation Museum of Santa Paula and, wiith the permission of the Museum, we were generously given access to it.  That's how it came to be that a wonderful, informal shot of Pancho – wearing flying leathers, a beret and smoking a cigarette -- ended up in the film.  

Paul Ayers’ film, if it was as he described, sounded like a wonderful complement to the Paul Dickenson film.  But beyond that, it made my pulse race to think we might have found a new shot of Pancho.  Well, after speaking about it on the phone,  Paul Ayers must have sensed how eager I was to see the shot in question.  He agreed to come right over for a visit, 16mm film in hand.  Good thing because otherwise I probably couldn't sleep otherwise!

Wow was it exciting to watch the film!  There was the opening of the airport, including glider flights by Hawley Bowlus, a trimotor landing, and a grandstand review featuring the Mayor of Santa Paula, M.L. Steckel.  And there was Pancho!  She appears in the film posing in front of a plane with her fellow competitors, just prior to taking off for Long Beach.  

The film was a little hard to make out, so after agreeing to let us use it, Paul also consented to have it re-transferred.  The results are a great deal better than what you see here; and now that we’ve added a couple of shots from Paul’s footage to the film, it’s a funny thing, but they seem like they were always there.

 Oh and one more thing: the "Tom Thumb Derby".  It was won by, who else, Pancho Barnes.  She finished with a time of about one hour, forty minutes, beating Gladys O'Donnell by a mere twenty-eight seconds. 

On Saturday, February 21st, we’ll be presenting a portion of “The Legend of Pancho Barnes” at the Western Museum of Flight, as part of the Museum's on-going Celebrity Lecture Series. Not that we're celebrities, mind you, but Pancho certainly is!

Located at historic Zamperini Field in Torrance, the Western Museum of Flight is operated by the Southern California Historical Aviation Foundation. It has a terrific collection of warbirds, an F-14 Tomcat and even a Northrop JB-1 Flying Wing. Our presentation provides a great excuse to come out, and see the reconstituted museum, which was formerly located out in Perris. For directions and details, visit the museum’s website link

Those of you who have been tracking our production through the course of the many months it has taken, know that our film never really had a title. We originally referred to it as the “Pancho Barnes Documentary Project” or the “Pancho Barnes Film”. In fact, our original web address, www.PanchoBarnesFilm.com, reflected the fact that we really didn’t know what we wanted to call our film! Suggested titles ranged from “A Woman Called Pancho” (too blah) to “The Happy Bottom Riding Club” (already the name of a book – and besides, our story is about Pancho’s whole life, not just her time as a hotelier) to “Pancho Barnes!” (nice, but not that intriguing).

In the end, after a long debate, Amanda Pope and I agreed that there could be no better title than one our friend, musician Russ McDaniel suggested: “The Legend of Pancho Barnes." We've expanded it slightly for effect, to "The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club”. It’s a title that, as we’ve lived with it for a little while, seems more and more appropriate. Because not only is Pancho a legendary figure, but she did everything she could during her lifetime to position herself that way.

We've learned that, if Pancho saw a way to garner publicity, or help spread a shocking rumor about herself, she generally took it! We’ve grown accustomed to hearing some crazy stories as we meet people at presentations, about how Pancho did this, did that, said this, and said that. Some of these stories are true, but many of them are – how shall we put it? -- a little hard to believe. One aspect of our film, is that early on we realized it was going to be hard to distinguish fact from fiction when it came to Pancho. So, we embraced that aspect of her character. As Jimmy Stewart’s character says in that wonderful John Ford movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, sometimes you have to “print the legend”. (Of course, it is our responsibility as documentarians not to mislead anyone ... so we tried to make it fairly obvious where we scratched the historical record.)

For a film about a legend, we sought out the artistic talents of Joe Jones. Joe, who is well known in the aviation community for his stellar renderings of classic airplanes, seemed to be the perfect choice as art director for our film. Little did we realize how much enthusiasm Joe had for Pancho! Within just a few weeks of contacting him, Joe had a rough sketch of a poster ready for review. When Amanda and I opened the PDF file on our computers, we were blown away. Clearly, Joe understood the heart of our film and the spirit of Pancho. The poster, which had an appropriate vintage look, clearly exuded Pancho’s toughness and swagger. Front and center in the image is Pancho and her famous Mystery Ship, in which she set a women’s air speed record. Above the title graphic, zooms Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1. The poster thus neatly evokes Pancho’s role in two important eras of aviation: the Golden Age of Flight in the 20’s and 30’s, and the early jet and rocket plane era of the 40’s and 50’s.

The finished piece, which took Joe several weeks of painstaking work, has finally been delivered. It is something to behold, an eye-catching reverie that has been getting rave reviews. Joe’s design for our main titles and text graphics have also been warmly received. Well done Joe, and don’t let Hollywood go to your head! Joe’s poster art and our new title inspired us to make a big change, on that you’ll be seeing very soon as our newly redesigned website debuts. Look for it, along with a new promotional trailer, soon! For more information about Joe and see some of his amazing creations, visit his website, click here