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The making of The Winds of War was almost as full of hazards as a real war, and there were infinite opportunities for things to go wrong. Wouk's script ran 962 pages, contained 1,785 scenes and called for 285 speaking parts, along with thousands of extras. It was shot in 267 locations, in six countries and on two continents, and it took 13 months to film and twelve more to edit. There were about 50,000 costumes, and Mitchum alone had 112 changes. When the cameras stopped, Curtis had 1 million ft., or 185 hrs. of film, which he cut down to 81,000 ft. That will translate, minus commercials, into about 15 hr. of air time.
Curtis, a burly, noisy workaholic, organized his war into five campaigns. There were three phases in Europe, each lasting from nine to eleven weeks, and two in the U.S. During the month's break between sections, he would nail down locations for future scenes. "In more than a year of shooting, we had to stop only twice," he says proudly. "I shoot in everything. Rain, snow, it doesn't make any difference to me. If I can roll that camera and move the people, I am going to."
Sometimes the people moved the wrong way, however. Much of the series was shot in Yugoslavia, including scenes of Polish refugees fleeing the invading Nazis. Hundreds of Yugoslav peasants were carefully assembled for the desperate flight, when rain sent them scurrying for home. "They were there with their animals," explains Associate Producer Barbara Steele, "and they weren't going to give their cows pneumonia for $20 a day."
In another scene, one of the best in the series, black-costumed Nazi "special-action squads" herd dozens of Russian Jews—played, of course, by the all-purpose Yugoslavs—into a mammoth grave, where they are to be shot. As the cameras started to roll, the peasants began to wail. "No one told them to," says Steele, "and you couldn't have dreamt of such a sound. It was just devastating, strange and keening, like the saddest tone in history. The Yugoslavs hate the Germans, and maybe something surfaced from a collective unconscious."
The bombing of Pearl Harbor was reproduced at a Navy base in Port Hueneme, Calif, and the Navy allowed only four days for filming. Rented Navy destroyers were wired with simulated explosives, set to go off in a chain reaction. By mistake a jittery technician fired them before the cameras were ready to role. It took 35 people to rig them up again. A similar delay occurred during filming at Aaron Jastrow's Tuscan villa, which had been chosen because of its faded golden hues, the result of years of weathering. The owner of the villa was so proud to have her house on TV, however, that before the production crew arrived she had it painted a bright, Day-Glo yellow. The first day of filming was upset while the art department hastily tried to restore the centuries-old patina.