Every December, The Crude Life looks back at some of the year’s best highlights, personality profiles and news nuggets of note. This year, the Year In Review enters it’s 10th year. Here is today’s feature is Oscar Awarding Winning Gray Frederickson.
The Crude Life had the privileged to be invited on to the production studio and set of Sherwood Forest, a docufilm about a historic time in American Oil and Gas’s impact on global independence and empowerment.
By the summer of 1942, the future of Great Britain and the outcome of World War II depended on petroleum supplies. At the end of that year, demand for 100-octane fuel would grow to more than 150,000 barrels of oil every day and German U-boats ruled the Atlantic.
In August 1942, British Secretary of Petroleum, Geoffrey Lloyd called an emergency meeting of the Oil Control Board to assess the “impending crisis in oil.”
Thus began the story of the “little-known, or at least seldom recognized, all-important role oil and oilmen played in the prosecution of the war,” according to two historians who extensively researched archives in Great Britain and the United States. Short story is they drilled in Sherwood Forest.
The longer story is being told by Oscar Winner Gray Frederickson.
Gray Frederickson is spearheading the docufilm on Sherwood Forest and how Lloyd Noble along with 44 roughnecks played a critical role during World War II.
Frederickson is best known for being a long-time producer for Francis Ford Coppola and winning an Oscar as one of the co-producers of The Godfather Part II at the 47th Academy Awards. In addition he was also nominated for Apocalypse Now.
“All of activities you see in the newsreels and media about D-day is from fuel that came from these group of Oklahoma oil guys drilling 100 wells in Sherwood Forest to power that invasion of D-Day.”
During that time, German submarines were sinking all of the American oil tankers being sent to England and they lacked proper drilling equipment to drill themselves.
The OK crew ended up sending over two million barrels of oil to British refineries, which powered D-Day and the end of World War II.
“It’s just important for the world to see history like this,” said Frederickson.
Sherwood Forest is scheduled for release in the Spring of 2022.
Gray Frederickson, who was part of the Oscar-winning production team for Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and “The Godfather Part II,” died Nov. 20 of prostate cancer in Oklahoma City, Okla. He was 85.
Frederickson had been called as “the Godfather of Oklahoma film” for his efforts to boost filmmaking in his home state.
“Gray is one of the most accomplished people to have ever come from our city,” Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt told The Oklahoman.
Frederickson left Oklahoma to attend the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, then started his career in Rome as producer of “Natika” in 1963. He joined Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” as production manager, where he met Clint Eastwood, who would become a longtime friend.
He met producer Albert S. Ruddy on the Robert Redford film “Little Fauss and Big Halsy,” which led to him coming aboard “The Godfather” as associate producer.
Among the films he produced were Coppola’s “The Godfather Part III,” “One From the Heart” and “The Outsiders,” which shot in Oklahoma, Weird Al Yankovic’s “UHF,” “South of Heaven, West of Hell” and “Dream No Little Dream: The Life and Legacy of Robert S. Kerr.”
He moved back to Oklahoma in the 1990s, and later helped launch the digital cinema production program at Oklahoma City Community College. Gray also played a key role in getting Oklahoma’s film production incentive passed.
Most recently, Frederickson was working on “Sherwood Forest,” a documentary about Oklahoma and Texas roughnecks who shipped to England in 1943.
Coppola traveled to Oklahoma to induct his friend in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 2018.
“Oscar is an award for Best Picture. Oklahoma Hall of Fame is an award for me, so that’s why this is the best,” Frederickson told the Oklahoman at the time. “It’s special because of Oklahoma. I’m Oklahoma. I mean, it’s like another appendage for me. It’s part of me; it’s who I am. And to be accepted by Oklahoma is really the pinnacle of everything for me.”
He is survived by his wife, Karen, and two children.
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