Flight continues

Gary Powers fights to maintain father’s honor in ‘Bridge of Spies’

Having devoted much of his adult life to “setting the record straight” about his late spy-pilot father, Gary Powers isn’t willing to risk that somebody might use outdated information to cast his namesake in a negative light. Even if that “somebody” is Steven Spielberg.

So when the Oscar-winning director announced last year that he had decided to make a film about the historic prisoner swap that brought Francis Gary Powers Sr. home from the Soviet Union in 1962, the younger Powers knew immediately that he needed to contact Spielberg and express his family’s concerns about the project.

There was only one problem. “You can’t just pick up the phone and say, ‘I want to talk to Steven Spielberg,’” Powers, who lives in Midlothian with his wife and teenage son, acknowledged with a chuckle during an interview last week.