Ex-Pittsburgher Cronauer

gives film a thumbs-up

By Ed Blank - The Pittsburgh Press

"Good Morning, Vietnam" doesn't even mention Western Pennsylvania, but the character played by Robin Williams is named for the Wilkinsburg native he's based on: Adrian Cronauer.

Local files of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists indicate only that Cronauer was a free-lance announcer here in 1959-60 and that his membership was trans-ferred at his request to the Washington, D. C., branch.

Cronauer, tracked down at his Philadelphia apartment, confirmed his Wilkinsburg roots.

"I was born 9-8-38 and grew up in Homewood, and in my pre-teens we moved to Penn Hills, which was then called Penn Township, and went to Penn High and then went to Pitt for a couple of years and founded the radio station there, which was WPGH at the time (now WPTS). I was. a volunteer announcer and cameraman at WQED and, eventually worked up to director. And I DJ-ed at WCMG in Canonsburg .

"After two years, I dropped out and went to work for Goldman and Shoop advertising agency (Ohringer Furniture's "Three rooms $398"; 'Serta perfect sleeper'; 'Please, mommy, please, can I have-some Regent Pop?'). And then in 1960 I went back to school at American University in Washington.

"Went into the Air Force and got into Armed Forces Network, was sent to Greece ... and eventually volunteered for Vietnam. After my paperwork was in and couldn't be retracted, the :Viet Cong blew up the radio station. I got there 'when Saigon was just a sleepy little French colonial town, and by the time I left it was a nightmare."

The film fictionalizes his experiences in Saigon from May 1965 through April 1966.

"I patterned my show after the old 'Rege Cordic Show' (from Cronauer's boyhood here).

Since then, Cronauer has worked in several U.S. cities in broadcasting and advertising. He's attending law school at the University of Pennsylvania.

He's married and has "several grown children."

The film, which opens here Friday, germinated in Cronauer's 1979 reunion with fellow Vietnam veteran Ben Moses. The then-current popularity of "M*A*S*H" and "WKRP in Cincinnati" led them to believe their reminiscences might be fodder for a sitcom. They couldn't sell their treatment even when they proposed it as a TV movie.

But Robin Williams' personal manager, Larry Brezner, took it to the comedian-actor.

"They bought it and renewed the option. Then they threw out what we wrote and said they wanted to do it themselves. Eventually they hired (final screenwriter) Mitch Markowitz. I'd add and amend and delete from his rough drafts, and we went through about eight generations before we finally had a shooting script. It was all: over a period of four to five years.

"In one of the drafts I was going to marry a Vietnamese. girl, and in another I was captured by the VC. It got a little Looney Tunes at times.

"The movie is not autobiographical. Most of the incidents directly or indirectly have their genesis in things that happened to me. The characters are syntheses of people I met in my military career. There is no one point-to-point correspondence.

I was a DJ and yes I did teach English at the Vietnamese American Association, and yes, I did make a great effort to try to improve the sound of the station to make it more like a stateside station And yes, I did have a problem trying to get news items on the air that had been censored by the U.S. military, and yes, I did have experiences like the explosion at a restaurant I'd just left. There are lots of parallels, but it is not the story of what happened to me from the time I arrived in Vietnam until the time I left.

"Robin is playing a fictional character called Adrian Cronauer. Robin purposely did not meet me until after the movie had been made.

"One thing I must caution you about: He goes a lot further than I ever could have gone on a military station without being court-martialed. Also, a lot is made of him trying to put rock 'n' roll on the air and the military insisting he play polkas. That's the script; that's not reality.

"My concern was the overall sound of the station. I did try to expand Top 40 on the air, but, unlike stations in the States that specialize in jazz or country-western or Top 40, we had to be all things to all people."

Cronauer has seen "Good Morning, Vietnam" twice.

"The first time was in October - a rough cut at Disney (it's a Touchstone release) - when my wife and I flew out to California And then the opening in New York in the middle of December. I was astounded by the amount of fine tuning they had done in the editing process in the interim. I was delighted with it both times. I'm not saying this is going to be the definitive movie on Vietnam or anything of that stature. But I think it's a good film and I think Robin gives a beautiful performance.

"He's not me. It took me five or ten minutes to get that idea through my head because he was being called me. There's a big difference between us because he's a comedian; and I was just a disc jockey. It certainly would have been a totally different film depending on who played me."