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Louis Zamperini was honored with a new sign at the corner of Zamperini Way and Pacific Coast Highway; which leads to Zamperini Field airport. Zamperini was an Olympian broadway tickets cheap low price and later a bombadier on a B-24 Liberator that was shot down over the Pacific. March 23, 2010. ( Photo by Steve McCrank)
Encompassing the sweep of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, 47 days adrift in the Pacific broadway tickets cheap low price evading sharks and the jarring brutality of two years in a Japanese POW camp, it's a story that plumbs the depths of one man's courage, despair and rage, soaring ultimately broadway tickets cheap low price into a vision of good overcoming evil.
Ever since the life story of Torrance Olympic runner Louis Zamperini was so masterfully told in Laura Hillenbrand's 2010 runaway best-selling book "Unbroken," there's been a renewed push to get the story onto the big screen.
broadway tickets cheap low price "It's going to take a couple of geniuses to sort it all out," Zamperini said in a telephone interview from his home of 56 years in the Hollywood Hills. "I'm pretty old and I've had a life that's unbelievable."
In 1998, after a brief CBS documentary aired in conjunction with the Winter Olympic Games, Nicolas broadway tickets cheap low price Cage expressed broadway tickets cheap low price interest in playing Zamperini in a film version for Universal Pictures, which still owned Zamperini's story rights.
On the New York Times best-seller list now for 113 weeks, Hillenbrand's acclaimed literary masterpiece - which took seven years to research and write - has jump-started talk of a film that is already drawing strong interest among some big names.
In an interview with the Los Angeles News Group, Hillenbrand said the process seems to be moving along quickly - both she and Zamperini will serve as consultants. (She also was a consultant on "Seabiscuit," broadway tickets cheap low price the 2003 film made from her first book that was nominated for seven Academy Awards.)
"The family hopes that the movie will tell the story the way the book has told the story," he said, praising Baer for sticking with the project through the years. "These were my bedtime stories growing up and (yet) I couldn't put ("Unbroken") down. ... If they can make the movie like the book, it will be fantastic."
"Angelina read ("Unbroken") through once and when she finished the last page, she turned back to the first page and read through it a second time," Zamperini said. "She and (fiance) Brad Pitt came (to the house) and spent a couple hours. She's real sweet, she gave me a couple of hugs. She's really gung-ho on this."
There's plenty of action packed into Zamperini's story, which begins with his delinquent childhood (he was smoking, drinking and stealing by the time he was 7). But he also could run like the wind. It was his older brother, Pete, who encouraged Zamperini to enter some track competitions.
He was training hard and looking forward to the 1940 Olympics broadway tickets cheap low price when war clouds began to form. Drafted into the Army, Zamperini was shifted to the Army Air Corps after the attack broadway tickets cheap low price on Pearl Harbor during World War II.
Flying a mission as a bombardier on May 27, 1943, Zamperini crashed 800 miles south of Hawaii. After drifting 2,000 miles in a raft for 47 days and near death, he and one other survivor (a third had died on the raft) were taken captive by the Japanese and imprisoned on one of the Marshall Islands known as "Execution Island."
He returned from the war a haunted man, filled with bitterness and rage after the war, his once promising running career over. Suffering broadway tickets cheap low price from what today would be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, broadway tickets cheap low price Zamperini took to heavy drinking.
"The whole book is about change," Zamperini said. "I changed from a rotten kid into an athlete who went to the Olympics. From there I changed into a soldier in World War II. Then my life fell apart after the war.
"I had nightmares every night, for 2 years I had nightmares. I couldn't take it anymore, and my wife was going to divorce me. Then I accepted Christ as my savior and I was on my knees. My whole life changed in a matter of seconds... The change took place immediately."
Far from wanting to carry out his onetime broadway tickets cheap low price desire to hunt down and kill his former captor, Zamperini wrote a letter of forgiveness to "The Bird," Mutsuhiro Watanabe, the Imperial Japanese Army sergeant who took special interest in torturing the American track star in his POW camp and the central character in many of Zamperini's post-war nightmares.
After his conversion, Zamperini, who joined First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood, devoted the rest of his life to ministering to troubled youth (he founded an Outward broadway tickets cheap low price Bound-style Victory Boys Camp program) and sharing his story.
"After his Billy Graham conversion, he began to tell the story all the time, endlessly," said his son, Luke. "He's gone to universities all across the country. broadway tickets cheap low price He's been to military bases, he speaks to anybody who wants to hear his story."
"He never has seen himself as a victim and he's just as independent and strong- broadway tickets cheap low price willed now as he was then," said Naber, who accompanied Zamperini in 2011 for an hourlong private meeting with Graham. "The message that I get out of the book is not one of survival as much as it is one of forgiveness."
The man who took up skateboarding at 65 and was still jogging at 87 has been especially revered as a Torrance icon. His boyhood home at 2028 Gramercy broadway tickets cheap low price Ave. has been awarded landmark status. Both the Torrance broadway tickets cheap low price airport and the stadium at Torrance High School have been named after him, as has the brick plaza outside the USC track stadium.
The 45-year-old author, who works from her Bethesda, Md., home where she is often housebound due to severe chronic fatigue syndrome, first stumbled on Zamperini's story as she researched her first book, "Seabiscuit, An American Legend," published in 2001.
"They were both runners at the same time," broadway tickets cheap low price Hillenbrand said in a telephone interview, recalling how stories of Zamperini and the famous Depression-era racehorse kept popping up in tandem on front pages throughout her research.
What followed were more than 75 telephone broadway tickets cheap low price calls between the two - they didn't meet in person until after the book's release - as Hillenbrand, who in college aspired to become a history professor, meticulously began putting the story together.
Zamperini even presented her with one of his Purple Hearts, saying she'd suffered through her debilitating illness - which came on while she was in college - much longer than he'd ever had to suffer during the war.
One was from when Zamperini's Trojan ring caught onto the plane's shattered window frame in that 1943 ocean crash. The other was from the peck of an albatross Zamperini and his fellow survivors caught by hand from their inflatable raft.
"From the first day in 1998 when I started working broadway tickets cheap low price on the story of Lou Zamperini, the most repeated question has been `How are you going to tell this story? How much of it can you include in a film?"' Baer said.
Hillenbrand's book, Baer said, "is the most amazing rope of what is a beautiful story. It keeps pulling you along, there are no lulls. There's just spirit and adventure, pain and loss, love and life."
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