Correcting the Film Version of a Sensational Story ‘Riding the Midnight Express With Billy Hayes,’ at St. Luke’s
Andy WebsterFebruary 5, 2014: There is intrinsic power in escape stories; consider films like Papillon or Escape From Alcatraz. With Riding the Midnight Express With Billy Hayes, the writer Billy Hayes tells his own. It’s been presented before: in Midnight Express, his 1976 memoir about five years he spent imprisoned in Turkey for trying to smuggle hashish, and in the 1978 movie adaptation. But as he makes clear in this one-man show, the movie omits much of his ordeal, and what it does present has, shall we say, a high degree of historical revisionism.
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