What I did on My Summer Vacation

Remember when you went back to school and you had to write a report on “What I did on my summer vacation”? I’m not sure they do that now. I hear that they don’t even teach writing with pencils anymore. Whatever, here’s mine. I had such a strange encounter on my week at the beach in Rhode Island that I have to tell you about it. And yes, it has an intelligence angle, however slight. Late on Saturday afternoon, Aug. 29, I pulled into the driveway of my rental house in Middletown, R.I., atop a hill overlooking Second Beach, just outside Newport, a place I’d frequented with with my Mom back in the late 1950s. She loved that short stretch of sand and blue water so much I’d scattered her ashes in the waves there on a cold, clear winter day in February 1991. I go back most summers to swim there. Anyway, I hadn’t taken much notice of the vintage yellow school bus parked in the driveway next door to my rental place when I arrived. But I was curious enough about it to walk over for a closer look the next morning. And there, in the glass-enclosed rectangle over the front windows, where you’d expect to find a destination, was this: “Whatever Happened to SEAN FLYNN?” What? I dare say that nobody on that block in Middletown, and probably most anywhere, would have a clue about who Sean Flynn was, much less was wondering whatever happened to him. Or why, of course, it was billboarded on the front of that refurbished, newly painted bus. But I did. Sean Flynn had been a daring war photographer in Vietnam. One day in April 1970 he motorcycled across the border into Cambodia, never to be seen again. It was suspected that Flynn, son of the swashbuckling 1930s and ‘40s movie idol, Errol Flynn, had been captured and executed by the Khmer Rouge, the Maoist guerrillas who would eventually topple the U.S.-backed military regime in Phnom Penh. Conspiracy theories swirled that the U.S. might’ve had a hand in his elimination to keep secret its clandestine intelligence operations in Cambodia, including the U.S. Air Force’s secret bombing of North Vietnamese units in Cambodia. No evidence ever surfaced of that, but his disappearance inspired a scene in Apocalypse Now. His remains were never found. But why was a question about Sean Flynn’s demise on a school bus parked in a Middletown, R.I., driveway? I knocked on the door of the house. It was opened by a friendly bearded man in his 60s who introduced himself as Russell Puerini. I told him I curious about the bus, especially the Sean Flynn bit. I said I was a Vietnam vet and journalist and damn well knew who he was. Big smile. “Come on in,” he said. “Would you like some coffee?” An hour or so later I knew the whole story, but I can’t honestly say I completely understood it. It turned out that Russ had written a screenplay about a father-and-son trip to Florida back in the 1960s in an old school bus packed full rambunctious kids that his dad was mentoring. He’s named his movie The Man Who Made Time Stand Still, a reference to his father’s eccentric inventions, such as a process to create energy by separating hydrogen from oxygen in water. As a kid, Russ thought of his dad, who owned a chain of gas stations around Providence, as a kind of magician. Somewhere along the way, in the script, his father buys a mothballed aircraft carrier in Philadelphia for $1 (something Russ insists actually happened). In any event, this is Russ’s first try at writing a screenplay—or writing anything, professionally speaking. By trade, he’s an auto mechanic with a specialty in advanced, sophisticated cars. Now he’s a writer with dreams. “I dropped out of college so I could work on cars, especially fast ones,” he says on the web page asking for donations. “I was building a race car when my father, who built and raced cars himself, talked me out of racing. I had written a few comedy sketches in my early years, but it wasn’t until 2008 that I started thinking about this story again. I then started the long process of writing it all down.” Ok, great. What about Sean Flynn? I ask. How’s he fit in? Russ’s eyes drift to the ceiling and back. He says there’s a scene where a kid comes on the bus wearing a “Whatever happened to Sean Flynn” tee shirt. That actually happened, too, he says, on the real bus trip to Florida that’s the spine of the screenplay. “That’s it?’ “Well, not completely,” he says. There’s a few more references to Flynn and the tee shirt down the road, he says. It’s hard to explain, he admits. I was starting to imagine this whole thing, not just the script, as something like Back to the Future. After I got home, I rang up Paul Lewis, a documentary filmmaker in Virginia who’s been helping Russ along—they’re distant relatives who’ve known each other forever— and confessed that I don’t really understand the film. “What’s the elevator pitch?” I ask in a joking reference to that legendary opening scene in Robert Altman’s The Player, where a movie idea is pitched as “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman.” “Yeah,” he chuckles. “It’s The Sandlot meets Back to the Future.” I hadn’t seen that. It’s another coming-of-age story, he explains. And Sean Flynn? I just can’t let that go. ”He comes up, but only in bits and pieces,” Lewis says. It’s hard to explain. Indeed. There’s something in there somewhere. I’d love to find it. So now I’m back home. And that’s what I did on my summer vacation. The water was great. We’ve got stuff coming on 9/11, including an interview with al-Qaeda expert Peter Bergen, whose latest book, All the Presidents’ Wars: 25 Years of America’s War on Terrorism, is out this week. A very Rhode Island story...things show up...then disappear. Well one thing's for sure: it got your attention. 😉 I'd be as focused on the same question you were . . . why that title on the bus? Why that question? What ever DID happen to Sean Flynn? And I didn't even know who Sean Flynn was! Fun summer vacation story. You're a journalist to the bone, Jeff.