“The Hunt for Red October” is a timeless adventure movie whose appeal is never ending but the real hunt for the real Red October ended last week. Daniel Catone, a Wyoming financial advisor, took delivery of the actual submarine model used in the 1990 spy thriller after buying it in an online auction.
“Growing up, I’d watch this movie over and over. Never in my wildest dreams did that little boy think he’d own the submarine itself,” Catone tweeted last weekend when the ship arrived. “Life is wild like that.”
Now filling his office in Powell, Wyoming, is the 11-foot model of a Russian Typhoon-class submarine, the same model filmed for the extensive underwater special effects in the Cold War naval flick, directed by John McTiernan. The sub — replete with doors on the bow and stern for the silent “caterpillar” drive — had been at a Planet Hollywood restaurant until it hit an online auction house earlier this year when the restaurant closed.
Catone, with the help of his 17-year-old son, Thomas, plans to hang the massive model from the ceiling of a conference room, mounted in a slight right turn. To the right, of course, because — as all fans of the movie and the Tom Clancy thriller know — Capt. Marco Ramius always turns to starboard in the bottom half of the hour.
“Like it’s turning in a ‘Crazy Ivan!’” Catone says, referencing two key scenes in the movie.
Completing the recreation will be a second sub behind Red October which Catone picked up in the same auction, the Alfa-class V.K. Konovalov, the Russian attack sub that hunted Red October throughout the movie.
In all, Catone says he spent about $15,000 to buy the two subs and a third prop, a clear plotting board that Red October sailors used to chart their course. The chance to grab the oversized piece of both Hollywood and Cold War history, Catone told Task & Purpose, was a “boyhood dream come true.”
Now 45, Catone said that as a teenager in the 1990s he devoured Clancy books.
“Tom Clancy’s books, and especially ‘The Hunt for Red October’ and ‘Red Storm Rising,’ were formative experiences for me,” Catone said. And the movie, full of punchy dialogue and Cold War hardware, has been his favorite all his life. “Who could be cooler than Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery?”
While Connery played the Red October’s captain, Marco Ramius, Baldwin played Clancy’s long-time hero, Jack Ryan.
“He’s a traditional heroic man, but he was an intellectual one,” Catone said of Clancy’s recurring protagonist. “And growing up, you know, I wasn’t the super athletic kid, I was kind of in my head a lot. And here was the hero that was an intellectual first and then also engaged in the world and I’m like, ‘I want to be like that.’”
In fact, Catone was such a dedicated Clancy fan that it cost him at school.
“I would read his books during class,” Catone said. “I ended up failing algebra because of my love for submarines and all things naval.”
As a kid in Fullerton, California, Catone said, he built models of the hardware that fills Clancy novels.
“I didn’t grow up with a lot of money, and I would go to this model shop and they had this display case,” Catone said. “It had these little tiny submarines in it and I thought they were so flipping cool. I would save up my money for two or three months and I’d buy one.”
He even once got a boyhood glimpse of the Red October.
“I remember I was 12 or 13 years old,” he said. “My parents took me to Planet Hollywood, and the Red October was there on display. And we used to sit by it and I thought, ‘oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing on the planet.’”
In college, Catone studied Cold War history, a subject he traces directly to his love of Clancy novels and movies.
“His books literally shaped my life,” Catone said.
After college, Catone worked at the United Nations, writing speeches in the office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, leaving just after 9/11. With a new baby, the agency wanted him and his wife to move to Kazakstan. Instead, he changed course and now manages investments for Catholic organizations from his office in Powell, a tiny town on Wyoming’s northern border (where on a clear day, fittingly for a Red October fan, he can see Montana).
Today, Catone probably says he has close to 50 models of various 1/700-scale warships, which he continues to build as a hobby — skills he plans to use to clean up a few dents and dings in the Red October.
“It’s got a little bit of wear and tear,” he said. “Some damage on the screws but I’m a model builder by hobby. I can fix it up. No problem.”
Model subs used in the movie were built by Boss Films, a studio that worked on scores of films and TV shows in the 80s and 90s, the golden age of Hollywood model-based special effects.
But if the model comes from a peak of movie special effects, Catone says the Red October story was also the top of an era of Cold War story-telling now gone, and for which many now feel nostalgia
“It was a simpler era,” said Catone. “I think we’re on to great things now and probably even greater things over time, but when you look back, here was a clear enemy — the Soviets — and here were the clear good guys — the Americans and the British and all that kind of thing.
“You have this traditional hero in Jack Ryan who’s really attractive as a character. And then you had Ramius. He was a hero in a new way, and like this different way, who kind of comes to the realization that he’s living in and working for something deeply evil. And he wants freedom.”
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