A Flight of Fancy

Back in the days when “One-eyed Willie” referred to only one man, the great and often overlooked documentarian Boris Baktov began his most ambitious work ever on the elusive Wiley Post. Though left uncompleted when Boris was forced to flee the country under pressure of prosecution (word had traveled from Purcell, Oklahoma to the state capitol that Baktov was a Russian spy and was teaching art history at the University of Oklahoma), we have recently recovered some film previously thought destroyed. It is incriminating evidence for a man on the run, but also a tribute to a man who felt the American spirit like it was a seething, beating thing which could be surgically removed. Here now for the first time we present the lost footage of Boris Baktov's masterpiece in the making, "Wiley Post."

Wiley Post