Where Is World War II? IF IT HAD BEEN ACAPULCO, Joe would have beaten the film crew there. But the location scouts had staked out a patch of desert twenty miles northwest of Guaymas, in the Mexican state of Sonora. According to Catch-22’s screenwriter Buck Henry, the area offered a “breathtaking panorama of poverty, dust, [and] unidentified plant life”—not the ideal setting in which to ring out the old decade and, along with the roar of over half a dozen B-25s, ring in the new. Originally, the film crew had hoped to shoot where Joe had fought the war. John Calley, the movie’s producer, and Richard Sylbert, the production designer, flew to Corsica. Up and down the coast, they asked (“in our failing Italian,” Sylbert said), “Where is World War II?” Joe could have told them. Nowhere. Oil refineries and highways had replaced the old American air base. Besides a desire for accuracy, Mike Nichols, the film’s director, wanted a setting that conveyed Yossarian’s “how-do-I get-outta-here feeling.”
