Movie stars tend to get what they want, so when comic actor Adam Sandler asked to borrow Sikorsky’s S-92 helicopter for a cameo appearance in his new film Mr. Deeds, Sikorsky said yes.
A modern remake of the 1936 Gary Cooper classic Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the new Sandler movie, which soared to the number-one box office slot following its mid-June release, is the story of Longfellow Deeds, the unsuspecting heir to a multibillion-dollar media empire who finds himself a most reluctant tycoon. As a symbol of the corporate power at Deeds’ fingertips, the producers of Mr. Deeds rented one of the four flying S-92 prototypes for four scenes filmed in northwest Connecticut, upstate New York and air-to-air in the skies around Manhattan. At one point in the film, a hungry Deeds orders the S-92 to land in a Wendy’s parking lot so he can pick up a burger. As can be seen in the accompanying photo, the S-92 was painted with Sikorsky Aircraft’s trademark winged “S” on its empennage, the company name on the engine nacelles and the logo of the fictional “Blake Media” on the pilot’s door and forward fuselage.
The appearance of an S-92 in a feature film continues a tradition of Sikorsky aircraft appearing as key players in Hollywood epics that dates back to a 1930 flyboy epic–Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels–in which an S-42 flying boat, the first airplane Igor Sikorsky built in the U.S. following his exile from the Soviet Union, is deliberately crashed as the climax of a stirring air-combat scene that still excites 72 years after it was filmed.