Document text
`Parahawks' vs. James Bond Photo from Jack McCornack Four Parahawks -- parachute-equipped ultralight vehicles -- land in the French Alps during filming of the new James Bond movie, "The World Is Not Enough." Jack McCornack of the Illinois Valley and Sharon Westcott of Selma went to the Alps to work on the vehicles. Assignment: French Alps Illinois Valley experts make movie vehicles run in winter By BILL VARBLE When Jack McCornack showed up at Chamonix in the French Alps on the shoot of "The World Is Not Enough," he grabbed a red Santa Claus hat to ward off a howling blizzard. Hardened film-crew guys eyed him warily. Jack McCornack and Sharon Westcott show off one of the modified snowmobiles they worked on near Mont Blanc in the French Alps. "They were making a James Bond film and I looked like `Miracle on 34th Street,"' he says. McCornack, who lives in the Illinois Valley, had been called in by EON, the London-based production company with the Ian Fleming-esque name that makes James Bond pictures for MGM. His assignment: Make the "Parahawks" -- ultralight, parachute-equipped attack machines flown by bad guys -- work under the conditions at Mont Blanc in January. His partner in the caper: Sharon Westcott, an ultralight aircraft expert and the operator of Wild 'Air, a flight school in Selma. McCornack's company, Kinetic Research, designs and does applications engineering for light aircraft and the movie industry. The Santa hat goes back to a nickname he picked up with his bushy white beard when he worked as a river guide. Now 51, he happens to be an expert on the engine used in the Parahawks, a high-output, two-stroke job called the 2si, which is made by Two-Stroke International, a North Carolina firm. McCornack is well-known to 2si engineers. He once tested one of their engines by mounting it with a huge propeller on the back of a Toyota pickup in an experiment that frustrated traffic cops who figured he had to be breaking some law but couldn't figure out what it was. It's a long way from tinkering with engines in Selma to hanging out with Pierce Brosnan and company on Mont Blanc and, well, tinkering with engines. McCornack had worked on movies before but describes "The World is Not Enough" as his "first big-deal movie." He says he was called because EON was having no end of troubles with the 2sis. "They'd had a lot of unscheduled landings," he says -- including one that left a Parahawk dangling from a tree. He says Westcott was the best-qualified person he could ask for, a longtime ultralight ace who had custom-mounted a 2si engine on her own two-seat training craft. The two arrived about the time a deadly avalanche buried a nearby town. The crew was plagued by sub-zero weather and 50 mph winds. The water/anti-freeze mix in the Parahawk engines was freezing and causing overheating. The props were all at the wrong pitches, skewing tuneup specs. Nobody on the set had experience with powered parachutes. An engineer the manufacturer sent was experienced in warm-weather, sea-level operations. "They just needed some finishing touches," McCornack says. In a chase sequence, bad guys in Parahawks hector Bond in the air and on the slopes. In real life they're different machines -- powered parachutes in the air and snowmobiles on ground, each with sinister-looking black bodies courtesy of the art department. The script calls for Bond, played by a Brosnan stand-in, to ski off a 120-foot cliff, stab a parachute with a ski, land and flee the crashing 'hawk as it explodes into a fireball. Not the sort of work in which you want to be worrying about the machinery. "It was pretty intense," Westcott says. "They pride themselves on not having everything (be) computerized special effects." The two soon had the weird flying things in the air every day at sunup, ready for the director. They'd be hauled to location high above the last parking lot by a Swiss troop transport, then a tracked vehicle, and finally snowmobiles. They describe working conditions as "something like setting choker cables before OSHA." When he met Pierce Brosnan, McCornack took the star over to Westcott, a major fan, who was head down in a Parahawk cockpit working on the brakes. "I want you to meet somebody," McCornack said. Westcott looked up at her hero, blurted out a question about whether the gray at his temples was real, then snatched off a cap to show her own gray hair as Brosnan cracked up. "I'm not usually starstruck," McCornack says. "But it was like talking to James Bond, but he's a fictional character. It's like, `DOES NOT COMPUTE."' The two gained huge respect for Brosnan, the EON crew and stunt people. The explosions are real. The 360-degree roll of a boat in an opening shot is real. Sequences that play out in a minute take weeks of dangerous work to film. The stakes are high. "They're in an awkward position of having to try to outdo themselves," McCornack says. "Nineteen Bond films is a lot to outdo.'' Near the end of the picture a sound man asked McCornack if he could make the Parahawks sound "more evil." He wound up going to a two-blade prop, making a few engine modifications and revving the thing like crazy to nail that evil sound. Before the two left to go back to the States, they heard that if the Bond people call you back it means they like you. A few weeks later McCornack's phone rang in Selma. The Parahawk footage was great. Could they come back and work on the snowmobiles? Does Bond take his cue from Q? Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA