What Just Happened? by Art Linson

Author:Art Linson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2008-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

Pushing Tin Downhill

The expression pushing tin is not an inside joke coined by a traveling tuna can salesman. In the dimly lit operations room of the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control, air traffic controllers say they are ‘pushing tin’ when referring to the daily grind of carefully guiding airplanes through the sky so they don’t crash into each other. The allowable margin of error for this job is zero.

When I first read the article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, written by Darcy Frey, documenting the horrors and the pressures of this occupation, my producer’s heart started beating. The arena was a large room filled with radar scopes occupied by savagely bug-eyed air traffic controllers twitching and cursing as they tried to keep themselves from ‘going down the pipes’ – words used for the high anxiety of dealing with the possible near-miss or the midair collision that was always one bad mistake away. As the multitude of dots on their respective radar screens randomly run amok, reaching their peak on holiday weekends, the controller, to retain his sanity, has to convince himself that these little dots are not metal death ships filled with real people, they are just dots.

The maddening pressures inherent in the job are so extreme that all of these guys are emotionally kicked in the ass one way or another. They either drink, adopt weird physical tics, cheat on their wife, acquire peculiar superstitions, or just go categorically nuts. One guy, according to the article, while guiding ten jets in a great curving arc toward Newark, New Jersey, suddenly lost his communication system as he turned his pilots onto final approach. He rose from his chair shrieking and started tearing off his clothes. By the time someone stepped in to land the planes, he was quivering on the floor naked before being taken away. He was discharged on a medical leave until he could regain his wits. He tried a few times to visit his buddies at the TRACON station, but he never had the cojenes to return to the scopes again. When he did come in, his buddies looked the other way, superstitiously hoping that his bad juju wouldn’t rub off on them.

What an arena! M.A.S.H. on wheels. The fallout of all this stress would be where the drama, the dark humor, and the morality tale would come together. There it was: The perfect setting for a movie. I figured it was so good, the geniuses at Fox would never get it.

I called Bill Mechanic and explained.

‘Bill, we gotta buy this.’

‘I agree.’

‘But, Bill—’

‘I agree.’

‘Bill, it might be expensive.’

‘I like it. Run it by Ziskin.’

I called Laura Ziskin, who was running Fox 2000.

‘Laura, I just spoke to Bill.’

‘I read the article.’

‘Laura, we gotta get this.’

‘I agree.’

Huh? This was eating ice cream for breakfast. Too easy. Within a week we were the proud owners of the article for the princely sum of $200,000, which included the right to use real moments from some of the controllers’ lives.

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