![]() ![]() ![]() “I never had that opportunity and probably am glad I didn’t. “Most guys want to forget prison,” Hayes, 72, says over coffee and a muffin. He spent the next five years in a variety of prisons around Turkey before escaping, flying home to see his family and chronicling his ordeal in the book that inspired the landmark film. 6, 1970, the current Summerlin resident tried to board a flight from Istanbul to his native New York with two kilos of hashish taped to his torso. No one knows those horrors, though, better than Billy Hayes. Then, in 1978, came “Midnight Express,” a movie so harrowing that the words “Turkish prison” still have the power to terrify. Billy Hayes, the young American who escaped from a Turkish jail where he had spent five years for hashish smuggling, is pictured in 1978. They’d already weathered nightmares involving sharks, Linda Blair’s spinning head and Ned Beatty’s misadventures in the Georgia woods. ![]() Moviegoers in the 1970s were a hardy bunch. ![]() Brad Davis, right, portrays Billy Hayes in “Midnight Express,” opposite John Hurt, who earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a fellow prisoner named Max. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |