One of the most bizarre—and fascinating—true crime sagas in 1970s St. Louis is now a feature film, headed soon to a theater near you. Unusually for a film aiming for a theatrical release, American Skyjacker is positioned as a documentary. It is not just inspired by the real-life events but actually features the real-life ex-con who put it in motion.
That man, Martin “Mac” McNally, was the subject of a memorable 2017 Riverfront Times cover story by Danny Wicentowski, then a staff writer at the alt-weekly. Wicentowski told the story of how, inspired by the notorious D.B. Cooper case, 28-year-old McNally hijacked a plane out of St. Louis Lambert International Airport in 1972. He very nearly got away with it, too, parachuting out of the plan with a half a million dollars in his arms. To learn what happened next, you’ll have to read the whole yarn, or, better yet, see the movie.
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A native of suburban Detroit, McNally chose St. Louis almost at random. (It had weaker security than the other Midwestern airports he surveyed, he said.) But when Wicentowski met him, 42 years after the hijacking, McNally had to live here while he was on parole. He’d taken up residence in South City, subsisting on disability benefits linked to an injury he’d sustained in the U.S. Navy. Wicentowski’s story—and the podcast he later hosted about the case, also called American Skyjacker—brought new attention to a story, and a man, St. Louis had largely forgotten.
Now a producer at St. Louis Public Radio, Wicentowski has spent more than a decade digging into McNally’s life story, which includes a prison escape, a second hijacking, and a remarkable cast of characters, including the legendary local traffic reporter Alan Barklage, who nearly lost his life to one of McNally’s schemes. He’s somewhat amazed to realize how the story that has defined his journalism career began on a whim, a random detail he noticed and couldn’t let go.
As he tells it, he was looking for material for the RFT’s blog one day in 2014 when he stumbled on a memorial to Barklage, who had died in a helicopter accident in 1998, years after his interaction with McNally. McNally had left an all-caps note on Barklage’s online memorial that caught his eye.
“Alan was a great guy,” Wicentowski recalls reading. “Sorry for what happened to him. We had a great plan to take a plane in Perryville had he not intervened. And I know it because I was there, XOXO, Martin McNally.”
Says Wicentowski, laughing, “Now, he didn’t do kisses and hugs, but he had his full email address there.” The young reporter used that to reach out, and a conversation began. “It was my complete going down a rabbit hole of something that just interested me, that was potentially useless information and was never going to be used.” Instead, it led to numerous conversations with McNally, a long-sought agreement for McNally to go on the record, and then ultimately not just Wicentowski’s initial RFT cover story, but a second focused on a different facet of the story, a 10-part podcast, and now the feature film aiming for a fall release. (The company has previously sold projects to Sony Pictures Television, USA Network, Sundance Channel, NBC International, MTV, and others, but it’s not clear what distribution they have in mind for American Skyjacker.)
The film is directed and produced by Eli Kooris and Joshua Schaffer, who are the co-founders of Pegalo Pictures. The L.A.–based team also procured the podcast after securing the rights from Wicentowski and hiring him as co-producer and host.
“The interesting thing is that the podcast and the movie were birthed at the same time,” Wicentowski says. “Every podcast interview was filmed, and you’re actually seeing their actual interview in the movie. And you would think this might be repetitive, but there’s so much material in seeing someone actually saying these lines and sharing their own recollection, and the way that it’s integrated into this incredible narrative reenactment.” That includes former St. Louis on the Air host Don Marsh, who is featured in the trailer.
Wicentowski was not officially involved with the film beyond his participation in the podcast. When SLM spoke to him earlier this month, he had just been able to screen it for the first time—and was audibly moved by the experience of seeing the story that has obsessed him for so long reenacted and discussed on camera.
“It was a very surreal experience, but there’s also something really beautiful about seeing these people expressing this story themselves, in their full character, with their faces, with their voices,” he says. “I think each stage of this story, I feel like I’ve been bringing people closer to what I love about it, which is that I’ve gotten to talk with these people and see their tension and the conflict and their regret.
“I think this is just the peak way of experiencing this story, but one that also builds on the ones in the past,” he adds. “This is not going to be boring to anyone who’s read or listened to this story before. It will feel familiar, but you will also just be sinking deeper into this. And I think that is something really remarkable. I just think that this story is—it’s a wild thing to say, but I think this is the best American crime story.”
