07-12-2016, 07:36 AM
Once again, I have dragooned the Queen into playing the part of HK, also known as the question spitting monkey.
His name is Frank Iszak and his claim to fame is he is the man that committed the first airline hijacking. He and six other people took control of a plane flying in Hungary and made it fly to Germany. You can read the exciting kind of poorly told story in Iszak's book 'Free for all For Freedom', which I have read . Which was good, because the first question I was asked when I met Frank and his wife was "How far along in the book are you?" They seemed a bit surprised that I had finished it.
HK got Iszak's name through his wife, who was also one of the hijackers. We got Iszak's first wife's name from Elvira Orley, who was one of our first interviews. The first Mrs. Iszak told HK in about 5 minutes all she knew about Piller but she did say call Mr. Iszak since they played a lot of cards together.
So, I did and I set up the interview. Iszak seemed very excited about the interview, particularly since he is in the middle of development on his film about his exploits.
Which was why it was odd when I called to confirm the interview, he didn't know who I was. Granted, he is 84 and suffering from Parkinson's. But I eventually straightened everything out.
Iszak lives in Rancho Sante Fe about 100 miles of south of me towards San Diego. When you get to the Del Mar racetrack, hang a left. With my impeccable timing and planning, I once again got us to the meet at the Rhythm and Dance Yoga Studio far ahead of schedule. It gave the Queen and I time to have a cup of tea and a cookie before we started. Iszak and his wife run the Yoga studio. Yoga is how Iszak deals with his Parkinsons
Iszak wanted to ask a few questions about the project so we did that for about twenty minutes before I started setting up the equipment. The first fly in the ointment was Mrs. Iszak, Serpil, saying they had a client coming in at 10:30. Um, what? I haven't finished an interview before 11:30 yet. Well, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
The interview started with Iszak giving a recount of his early years in Hungary. It was about at hour 6 of the story, that I realized that probably wasn't the best question to start with. Then he told us a long story about the hijacking, which was interesting but again long. It is hard to sum up one of the most important days of your life.
Iszak did tells us a few good bits about Piller. He confirmed or stated that Piller was the Captain of Regent Horthy's bodyguards. Piller played poker poorly. And he dropped the bombshell that Piller was friends with Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Clark Gable, and Jimmy Durante. You can hear my very loud and disbelieving 'No' on the audio track. I tried to shake this stance of Iszak's but he held firm in his belief of Piller's Hollywood connections.
As an aside, as I go through the audio track, I noticed one distinct voice on the audio that always comes through louder and clearer than any of the other voices. He always seems to peg the top of the decibel meter no matter how far he is from the microphone. It's uncanny really.
I have my suspicions about Iszak for a couple of discrepancies, which could just be old age. One, I noticed during the interview and the other later when I was checking up on his story. When we did the pre-interview in Iszak's office, I mentioned that we had interviewed Nikolas Molnar. Iszak said he knew Molnar and wondered what Molnar was doing. I told him Molnar owned some wineries up in Napa and owned the company that grew the most Wild Rice in Hungary. During the interview proper, I had the Queen ask Iszak what he knew about Molnar. Iszak said Molnar had wineries in Napa and grew rice in Hungary.
The other one is a timeframe conundrum. While Piller was coming to the US in 1957, Iszak was still helping the OSS with tales about the Russians in Hungary. According to Iszak, he didn't meet Piller until 1959. Fine. No problem. Iszak says the last time he saw Piller was at the same time Kruschev was in San Francisco. Iszak led a demonstration in Union Square against Premier Kruschev's visit and that evening had a dinner with Piller. According to the papers, that dinner was September 20 or 21st in 1959. So, Iszak arrives in 1959 and lasts sees Piller in 1959. Which means that Iszak knew Piller for several months almost sixty years ago. It was no wonder, he didn't have any long stories about Piller.
But Iszak did cough up one tidbit that adds another tragic layer to the Piller story. Piller was diagnosed with Cancer in 1960, I believe. But as a highly paid fencing coach, he didn't have the money to go to Germany for the treatments. According to Iszak, his daughter who worked as a chorus girl at Bimbo's 365 club in San Francisco, had the money and paid for her father's treatment, which proved ultimately to be unsuccessful. Piller's daughter, after Piller's death, was tragically killed by her husband.
So, tragedy.
I think Iszak really just wanted to tell us about him. He was distressed that he couldn't offer more about Piller, but he did offer us some and did me give avenues of further investigation. And he told us how he woke up dead in the morgue.
It took us 90 minutes to drive to Iszak's place. It took us 2 and a half hours to drive back. I'm glad that is all the driving I have to do for this movie. Oh, wait.
Sunday, I promised myself I would take the day off. That didn't quite work out as I spent a lot of time ingesting video and doing research about what Iszak told us. I also started looking at Cohen's book 'By the Sword' for my upcoming interview with him.
The Queen has volunteered to help in her capacity as Lord of the Stenograph domains. One of the things that would be really good to have are transcripts of all the interviews. It would be much faster just to read the text rather than have to wade through multiple layers of video. It costs about $100 an hour for a transcription service. The Queen has come up with a way to do it for considerably less. She knows a bunch of students who are looking for audio files from which they can practice their craft. What could be better than thick accented Hungarians talking about field they nothing about it. Sounds like a win to me. TheQueen has already gotten 8 people showing interest and two people have already taken the audio files. Kneel before the Queen's power.
In the course of putting together the audio files, I came to a sad realization. Over the course of three weeks work and six interviews, I have about 7 hours of audio. In the planning stages, I was thinking I would have about 30 hours of great stories to cull from by this point. My Hard drives would be bursting with video goodness. 7 hours. That doesn't seem a lot.
On Friday, I head out on the road for more. I have another additional 7 interviews to film. I'm hoping the next group is more chatty. Although, our first interview has told us he knows nothing about Piller.
Oy vey.
His name is Frank Iszak and his claim to fame is he is the man that committed the first airline hijacking. He and six other people took control of a plane flying in Hungary and made it fly to Germany. You can read the exciting kind of poorly told story in Iszak's book 'Free for all For Freedom', which I have read . Which was good, because the first question I was asked when I met Frank and his wife was "How far along in the book are you?" They seemed a bit surprised that I had finished it.
HK got Iszak's name through his wife, who was also one of the hijackers. We got Iszak's first wife's name from Elvira Orley, who was one of our first interviews. The first Mrs. Iszak told HK in about 5 minutes all she knew about Piller but she did say call Mr. Iszak since they played a lot of cards together.
So, I did and I set up the interview. Iszak seemed very excited about the interview, particularly since he is in the middle of development on his film about his exploits.
Which was why it was odd when I called to confirm the interview, he didn't know who I was. Granted, he is 84 and suffering from Parkinson's. But I eventually straightened everything out.
Iszak lives in Rancho Sante Fe about 100 miles of south of me towards San Diego. When you get to the Del Mar racetrack, hang a left. With my impeccable timing and planning, I once again got us to the meet at the Rhythm and Dance Yoga Studio far ahead of schedule. It gave the Queen and I time to have a cup of tea and a cookie before we started. Iszak and his wife run the Yoga studio. Yoga is how Iszak deals with his Parkinsons
Iszak wanted to ask a few questions about the project so we did that for about twenty minutes before I started setting up the equipment. The first fly in the ointment was Mrs. Iszak, Serpil, saying they had a client coming in at 10:30. Um, what? I haven't finished an interview before 11:30 yet. Well, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
The interview started with Iszak giving a recount of his early years in Hungary. It was about at hour 6 of the story, that I realized that probably wasn't the best question to start with. Then he told us a long story about the hijacking, which was interesting but again long. It is hard to sum up one of the most important days of your life.
Iszak did tells us a few good bits about Piller. He confirmed or stated that Piller was the Captain of Regent Horthy's bodyguards. Piller played poker poorly. And he dropped the bombshell that Piller was friends with Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Clark Gable, and Jimmy Durante. You can hear my very loud and disbelieving 'No' on the audio track. I tried to shake this stance of Iszak's but he held firm in his belief of Piller's Hollywood connections.
As an aside, as I go through the audio track, I noticed one distinct voice on the audio that always comes through louder and clearer than any of the other voices. He always seems to peg the top of the decibel meter no matter how far he is from the microphone. It's uncanny really.
I have my suspicions about Iszak for a couple of discrepancies, which could just be old age. One, I noticed during the interview and the other later when I was checking up on his story. When we did the pre-interview in Iszak's office, I mentioned that we had interviewed Nikolas Molnar. Iszak said he knew Molnar and wondered what Molnar was doing. I told him Molnar owned some wineries up in Napa and owned the company that grew the most Wild Rice in Hungary. During the interview proper, I had the Queen ask Iszak what he knew about Molnar. Iszak said Molnar had wineries in Napa and grew rice in Hungary.
The other one is a timeframe conundrum. While Piller was coming to the US in 1957, Iszak was still helping the OSS with tales about the Russians in Hungary. According to Iszak, he didn't meet Piller until 1959. Fine. No problem. Iszak says the last time he saw Piller was at the same time Kruschev was in San Francisco. Iszak led a demonstration in Union Square against Premier Kruschev's visit and that evening had a dinner with Piller. According to the papers, that dinner was September 20 or 21st in 1959. So, Iszak arrives in 1959 and lasts sees Piller in 1959. Which means that Iszak knew Piller for several months almost sixty years ago. It was no wonder, he didn't have any long stories about Piller.
But Iszak did cough up one tidbit that adds another tragic layer to the Piller story. Piller was diagnosed with Cancer in 1960, I believe. But as a highly paid fencing coach, he didn't have the money to go to Germany for the treatments. According to Iszak, his daughter who worked as a chorus girl at Bimbo's 365 club in San Francisco, had the money and paid for her father's treatment, which proved ultimately to be unsuccessful. Piller's daughter, after Piller's death, was tragically killed by her husband.
So, tragedy.
I think Iszak really just wanted to tell us about him. He was distressed that he couldn't offer more about Piller, but he did offer us some and did me give avenues of further investigation. And he told us how he woke up dead in the morgue.
It took us 90 minutes to drive to Iszak's place. It took us 2 and a half hours to drive back. I'm glad that is all the driving I have to do for this movie. Oh, wait.
Sunday, I promised myself I would take the day off. That didn't quite work out as I spent a lot of time ingesting video and doing research about what Iszak told us. I also started looking at Cohen's book 'By the Sword' for my upcoming interview with him.
The Queen has volunteered to help in her capacity as Lord of the Stenograph domains. One of the things that would be really good to have are transcripts of all the interviews. It would be much faster just to read the text rather than have to wade through multiple layers of video. It costs about $100 an hour for a transcription service. The Queen has come up with a way to do it for considerably less. She knows a bunch of students who are looking for audio files from which they can practice their craft. What could be better than thick accented Hungarians talking about field they nothing about it. Sounds like a win to me. TheQueen has already gotten 8 people showing interest and two people have already taken the audio files. Kneel before the Queen's power.
In the course of putting together the audio files, I came to a sad realization. Over the course of three weeks work and six interviews, I have about 7 hours of audio. In the planning stages, I was thinking I would have about 30 hours of great stories to cull from by this point. My Hard drives would be bursting with video goodness. 7 hours. That doesn't seem a lot.
On Friday, I head out on the road for more. I have another additional 7 interviews to film. I'm hoping the next group is more chatty. Although, our first interview has told us he knows nothing about Piller.
Oy vey.
As a matter of fact, my anger does keep me warm