The famed movie ‘USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage’ is centered upon the USS Indianapolis Navy ship and is set in July, 1945. The movie was first announced by Hannibal Classics in 2011, but it took several more years to hit screens.
Towards the end of World War 2, the USS Indianapolis was returning home from Tinian, where it had been delivering vital components for an atomic bomb. On this journey homewards a Japanese submarine appeared and fired torpedos at it. A total of 317 crew survived this attack, out of the 1,197 crew aboard. Approximately 300 of these crewmen went down with the ship, and the rest died from exposure, dehydration, poisoning from saltwater and even shark attacks.
The script writers of this movie were Richard Rionda Del Castro and Cam Cannon and Castro was also a producer. The movie’s focus is aimed towards the bravery and courage of the crewmen aboard the Indianapolis. Mario Van Peebles was the director, a job given to him by Hannibal Classics on December 17th, 2013. Patriot Pictures agreed to finance the movie, and Michael Mendelsohn produced alongside Castro.
Hannibal Classics had spent five years developing this movie and had spent a lot of this time speaking with survivors from this original disaster, including the United States Coast Guard and the United States Navy. The Navy kindly helped go through the script in order to finalize the last draft of it.
It’s reported that the movie managed to secure two fully working World War 2 era aircraft so they could better portray the craft used from the real-life rescue operations following the original disaster. It was also agreed to use the USS Drum and the USS Alabama, as well as the Battleship Memorial Park to use as their versions of the USS Indianapolis and the Japanese sub that sunk her.
The movie finally released in fall 2016.