Fred Smith, the founder of Memphis-based FedEx, financed the film about Brown because he thought Brown deserved wider recognition, a feeling his surviving relatives share, and lobbied the Trump administration to support the search efforts after consulting with Brown’s daughter, Pamela.

“I’m still determined to try to get Jesse Brown home and put him where he ought to be in Arlington (National Cemetery),” Smith said. “Among the other heroes of the republic next to his wingman, Tom Hudner.”

Smith’s daughters, Rachel and Molly, who produced the film, met members of Brown’s family at the 2018 funeral of Hudner, who received the Medal of Honor after attempting to rescue Brown. Hudner returned to North Korea in 2013 in an attempt to locate Brown’s remains, but was unsuccessful.

Jessica Knight Henry, Brown’s granddaughter, said attending Hudner’s funeral at Arlington solidified her grandmother’s desire to have her husband’s remains interred in Arlington.

“He’s never had a full sort of burial with that with the pomp and circumstance that that we think is worthy of what his contribution is to this country” Knight Henry said, speaking from Washington.

Brown grew up in Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers, and succeeded in qualifying to be a pilot in the Navy, despite his training officer refusing to pin on his wings — just one of many racist insults and hurdles he overcame.

Smith has donated “Devotion”’s proceeds, in part, to endow a new scholarship fund, the Brown Hudner Navy Scholarship Foundation, for the children of Navy service members pursuing studies in STEM.

“Mr. Smith spent an incredible amount of money imaging the area where we think that my grandfather’s remains are,” said Knight Henry, adding that her family has worked with different agencies and groups to maximize any potential opportunity to get answers.

More than 7,500 American military personnel remain unaccounted for in the Korean War, according to the government agency that tracks prisoners of war and those missing in action.

Watch more: Film helps renew search for 1st Black Navy pilot’s remains | AP News

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The 78-year-old Marine Corps veteran stepped down as FedEx’s CEO last year, but remains its executive chairman. The billionaire rarely publicizes his and his family’s philanthropic donations, but agreed to speak about a recently announced gift to the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation that he and the foundation estimate could grow in value to $65 million over time.

“The thing that’s interested me are the institutions and the causes not the naming or the recognition,” Smith told The Associated Press.

The structure of the gift is unusual. Smith, who says he’s “the biggest movie mogul nobody’s ever heard of,” financed the production of the film “ Devotion,” which tells the story of two Navy pilots in the Korean War. Jesse Brown, the first Black man to be a pilot in the Navy, and another naval aviator, Tom Hudner, flew together in a mission near the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea in 1950.

Brown died after landing his damaged plane, despite Hudner’s efforts to rescue him. Hudner returned to North Korea in 2013 in an attempt to locate Brown’s remains and Smith and Brown’s family continues the search. The film is based on research conducted for a book of the same name.

In December, the foundation announced Smith donated the film’s proceeds, in part, to endow a new scholarship fund, the Brown Hudner Navy Scholarship Foundation, for the children of Navy service members pursuing studies in STEM.

Shannon Razsadin, who leads the advocacy organization Military Family Advisory Network, said scholarships help change the future of a whole family. “When you’re struggling with things like food insecurity or figuring out a good place to live, when you’re moving on average every two and a half years, the idea of saving for college can seem really far off,” she said.

Smith’s family has long supported MCSF, giving $1.6 million before this latest gift. While “Devotion” likely hasn’t turned a profit from its theatrical release in November, Smith is confident that as it streams, currently on Paramount+, and airs on television, the proceeds will add up.

___

Q: How did this donation come about?

A: Everything that I did running FedEx came from my experience in the Marine Corps, not what I learned at Yale. So I always wanted to do something out of a sense of gratitude or a recognition of my shipmates in the Marine Corps.

I’ve been in the film business for a long time and this story of Brown and Hunter just struck a note with me, that these two men, particularly Brown, had never received the recognition that they should have received. And I came up with this idea: That a way to pay my dues to the Marine Corps and do something I thought that was important for the nation was to produce this movie. I was confident that my daughters, Molly and Rachel, who are very accomplished film producers, and in particular (the director) JD Dillard, whose father was a naval aviator, could tell the story.

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Q: What do you hope people take away from “Devotion”?

A: No. 1: That Brown in particular was one of the great heroes of the republic and has been largely overlooked. He was to naval aviation and to the military what Jackie Robinson was for baseball.

I just thought it was a story that was so powerful for today’s America, which is so divided and has all of these, I think in most cases, exaggerated racial tropes out there. That this was a story about two men in a very tough business who came together completely by chance. And they judged each other at the end — although they went through some tense periods that the movie doesn’t overlook — as Dr. Martin Luther King famously said, by the content of their character, not ethnicity.

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Q: What impact do you hope these scholarships will have?

A: I hope it produces a lot of engineers, and scientists, and mathematicians and people that are doctors and researchers. Our country has a great need for all of those skill sets. We’re deficient in producing them. We’re falling behind other parts of the world in those degrees. So somehow we’ve got to make STEM education and health care education more of a choice for American youngsters, whether they’re born here or not.

——

Q: Many service members and their families struggle to pay for basics and save for college. Would you support a change in how members of the armed forces are compensated or housed or supported?

A: Being in the military has it’s good points and it has it’s bad points. Of all of the things that these folks have to deal with, providing for their children’s education is among the most stressful and difficult.

Hopefully, the story of the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation and the Brown Hudner fund might inspire other people in other branches of military to deal exactly with the issue you just asked me about: how can you help the military community the most? Well, it would be to provide for college education for their children.

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Q: You’ve been a leader in many fields: in business, in sports. You’ve advised politicians and presidents for 50 years. What do you think it means to contribute to the public good and how philanthropy might play into that?

A: America is the most generous country in the world. It’s amazing the charitable contributions that Americans make every year. Everything from the smallest things to these massive health care initiatives and the Gates Foundation and everything in between. I think if you’ve done well in this country, it’s pretty churlish for you not to at least be willing to give a pretty good portion of that back to the public interest. And all this is in the great tradition of American philanthropy.

Watch more: Q&A: FedEx founder, veteran Fred Smith offers unusual gift | AP News

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When did you feel it in your bones that you needed to play Jesse?

I was reading [the script] on a plane of all places, and the moment that struck me first was probably the landing test where he has to land the Corsair. And just the way it was articulated in the script — the try and the fail, and the try again — it got me on the page. I was like, “Come on, man!” My blood started pumping, and I was like, “You can do this!” So I felt the odds against him. I felt that he was a man going upstream, but I knew that he could do it. And I knew he knew he could do it. That type of self-possession and that type of drive and grit really inspired me. I went, “Okay, I want to feel that. I want to give that to people.” So just in reading that moment, I was inspired, but there were many moments.

The bathroom mirror scene is a showstopper as Jesse, in order to ready himself for flight, repeats all of the appalling things that have been said to him over the years. Can you even begin to describe that day for you? 

It was quiet. Something happens when you are in it. I woke up that morning, and of course, I knew it was coming. I saw the schedule weeks before in prep. It wasn’t much dialogue, so it’s not like you’re running lines. You’re not doing text work. And so it was very quiet that morning. I remember I got up and walked my dogs. I was in Savannah, and then I got in my car and drove to set. And I just kept listening to this song over and over again, and I just tried to keep my body as relaxed as possible.

I also thought about my grandfather a great deal, because he was a Black man in the Korean War. I thought about Jesse, and I thought about everything the book [Adam Makos’ Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice] said that he had experienced. I thought about where he came from, and ultimately, I just felt my body become so active. I was trying to be quiet and calm and cool; relaxation is key. So I just tried to see what he wanted to say and what this felt like for him. It’s something he’d done since he was a boy, and I thought, “Man, what a brain, what a heart, to come up with this ritual.” 

And when we got there on the day, the set was still and quiet, and so that energy followed me. I was just pacing, breathing, pacing, breathing. J.D. [Dillard] then very gently walked up to me and said, “Okay, you ready?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s go.” So it was a very quiet set, and this was after the rehearsal, so I know how the camera and everything is going to work. And J.D. said action very gently, thank God. So I walked out of the stall, and what comes out of my mouth, first take, is a completely improvised version of what the text was. And then I felt my body get hot. It was happening. That thing that actors really want to happen and pray will happen was happening. And from that moment on, it didn’t turn off between action and cut. It didn’t turn off.

So we’d finish, and then I would go back into the stall or to the other side of the room. And I would just kind of hold myself and rock back and forth, because I knew I didn’t want to fuck it up at that point. Because whatever was happening, was happening, and I just needed to stay out of the way and let Jesse’s story come out. I needed to let my ancestors’ story come out and anybody else who felt marginalized and put down to that degree. J.D. and [DP] Erik Messerschmidt and the rest of the crew really made room for that, and so we did it. We did it four times, and that was that.

And when it was done, when we cut, I went to the back room, and as I said, it wasn’t shutting off. So I got down on all fours and I just let the rest of it come out. At the end of the scene, he cleans himself up and goes, but I didn’t have anything to go off to and put that energy into. And so I did have to purge it at the end. I don’t know how it happened, really, but I’m very grateful to Jesse that he came through in that way.

Read the entire interview here: Devotion: Jonathan Majors on Most Emotional Scene, Creed III – The Hollywood Reporter

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“When Jesse died, Tom and the squadron put together a scholarship fund to put his wife Daisy and daughter Pam through school,” Dillard explains. Brown’s fellow sailors raised today’s equivalent of $24,000 for the family, with Daisy Brown going on to become an educator.

In honor of what began then, the Brown Hudner Navy Scholarship Foundation was formally established using funds from “Devotion” and will award its first scholarships in 2023. The fund is being managed by the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation, which has awarded more than $155 million in scholarships to military children over the past 60 years, with the film supporting both organizations.

“We started working on the scholarship fund from the time we greenlit the film in the spring of 2020,” Black Label Media’s Molly Smith tells Variety via email. “Black Label has had a long relationship with Tom Rothman [Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman and CEO] and Sony, who agreed to distribute the film and have been amazing supporters if this story. We are all honored to tell this story and honor the sacrifices of these men.”

Read the full story here: ‘Devotion’ Box Office to Fund Scholarship for Navy Veterans’ Families – Variety

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Majors stars as real-life U.S. Navy aviator Jesse L. Brown in the 2022 TIFF-selected film “Devotion,” directed by JD Dillard (“Sleight”) and based on true events. The film centers on the friendship between Brown (Majors) and fellow pilot Tom Hudner (Glen Powell) before entering the Korean War together…

Read the full story:

https://www.indiewire.com/2022/08/devotion-trailer-jonathan-majors-glen-powell-1234746961/

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The Culver City studio previously planned an October rollout that included going limited on Oct. 14, an Oct. 21 expansion and wide break on Oct. 28.

On its new date, Devotion joins Disney’s animated Strange World, Universal/Amblin’s Steven Spielberg autobio pic The Fabelmans, an untitled movie from Neon and Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All from United Artists Releasing. The weekend before, starting Nov. 18, brings Universal’s newsroom drama She Said and Searchlight’s The Menu…

Read the full story:

https://deadline.com/2022/07/devotion-jonathan-majors-glen-powell-release-date-change-box-office-1235059087/

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Read the full story:

https://www.sonypictures.com/movies/devotion

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Read the full story:

https://www.military.com/off-duty/television/2022/08/04/korean-war-drama-devotion-used-real-vintage-aircraft-tell-true-story.html

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