Trailer
Plot summary
In 1938 Los Angeles, gangsters working for Eddie Valentine steal a prototype rocket pack from Howard Hughes. During their getaway they hide it in a biplane at an airfield, where the stunt pilot Cliff Secord and his mechanic Peevy find it and begin testing the device, which can carry a man through the air. Cliff's girlfriend, the aspiring actress Jenny Blake, has a small part in a film starring Neville Sinclair, the actor behind the theft, who sends his henchman Lothar to hunt the pack down. When Cliff uses it at an air show to rescue his friend Malcolm, he becomes a public sensation, and the FBI and Sinclair both set out after him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Rocketeer (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Casting Cliff Secord was a long search: Kevin Costner and Matthew Modine were considered first, then Dennis Quaid, Kurt Russell, Bill Paxton and Emilio Estevez auditioned, Johnny Depp was Disney's top choice, and Vincent D'Onofrio turned the part down before Billy Campbell got it.
- Several supporting roles nearly went elsewhere: Dave Stevens wanted Lloyd Bridges for Peevy before Alan Arkin was cast, Jeremy Irons and Charles Dance were offered Neville Sinclair before Timothy Dalton took it, and Eddie Valentine was written for Joe Pesci, who declined, sending the part to Paul Sorvino.
- Villain Neville Sinclair, a swashbuckling movie star secretly working as a Nazi spy, was modeled on real-life actor Errol Flynn, drawing on a biography of Flynn that was not disputed until the late 1980s.
- Over five years of script development, Disney fired and rehired writers Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo three separate times, throwing out and later restoring the same dialogue and scenes.
- To make the flying rocketman look real, ILM built a lifelike model of Cliff Secord that was filmed in stop-motion and combined it with an 18-inch figurine manipulated by hand in go motion to produce realistic motion blur.
- Filming at the Griffith Observatory and elsewhere ran 50 days behind schedule because of weather and mechanical problems.
- Director Joe Johnston's work on The Rocketeer led to him being hired two decades later to direct another period superhero film, Captain America: The First Avenger.
