Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart is a 1976 American biographical drama television film directed by George Schaefer and written by Carol Sobieski. It stars Susan Clark as Amelia Earhart, and John Forsythe as her husband, George P. Putnam. Unlike more recent depictions of Earhart's life, this film makes an attempt to cover her entire life from her childhood on a Kansas farm, her nursing during World War I, an early boyfriend, employment at a Boston children's orphanage, her interest and exploits in aviation, her marriage to Putnam, and her famous disappearance in 1937. The film was the first dramatization of Earhart's life and co-starred a parade of well-known actors of the time and originally premiered on NBC Monday Night at the Movies on October 25, 1976. Plot In 1907, when Amelia Earhart was nine years old growing up on a Kansas farm, she was an intelligent, precocious child and builds a play aircraft with her sister "Pidge". Later, as America enters World War I in 1917, Amelia is a college student, working in a doctor's office. She decides to join the war effort and become a nurse. One night on the roof of her building, while on break with a coworker, she sees an aircraft which re-sparks her childhood interest in aviation. In 1921, young Earhart has her first training flight, with female flight instructor, Neta Snook. That same year she buys her first aircraft, a Kinner "Canary" with the blessing of her father who has become a chronic alcoholic. In 1924, she and her mother drive from coast to coast, Los Angeles to Boston, in an open roadster, arguing some of the way. In Boston Earhart has an off-and-on relationship with a young man and later goes to work in a children's orphanage. What little money she saves subsidizes her flying. In 1928, while in employ at the orphanage, Earhart is invited to become the first woman ever to fly the Atlantic in a fixed-wing aircraft, the Fokker "Friendship", albeit as a passenger, while pilot Wilmer Stultz and copilot Lou Gordon (Steve Kanaly) are at the controls. That same year she flies her Avro Avian biplane in a coast-to-coast, stop-and-go flight where some southern locals recognize her from the transatlantic Friendship flight. Her marriage to media tycoon George Palmer Putnam and a series of record-breaking flights, propel her to international fame as a long-distance flyer. Despite her open and frequently strained relationship with Putnam, she develops a close relationship with his son David.