TAKING FLIGHT

By Jeff Gremillion

Thanks to Pavan Grover, a Houston spinal surgeon who’s also a filmmaker, Alec Baldwin is back in the movies for the first time since the infamous tragedy on the New Mexico set of Rust.

Grover’s 97 Minutes, which had a theatrical run earlier this summer, will hit Hulu in September. The flick was written and produced by the doc and stars Baldwin as the NSA head trying to get a hijacked jet safely to the ground. Jonathan Rhys Meyer of The Tudors costars as an Interpol agent undercover with the terrorist group taking over the plane.

As criminal charges were under consideration for Baldwin in the 2021 accidental shooting death of a cinematographer, a dozen movie projects dumped him. But not Grover, who sees sticking by Baldwin — whom he met at the Sundance film fest when the two squabbled good-naturedly over a table at a sushi restaurant — as a point of pride. “The financial backers … wanted me to pull him out,” recalls Grover. “But I don’t believe in abandoning your friends at their lowest moment.” Baldwin was eventually cleared in the matter.

Although the 97 shoot was “chaotic,” with paparazzi breaking onto the London set to snap pics of Baldwin, Grover says it was a great experience, especially the embattled star. “It was therapeutic for him,” says Grover, who also acts in the movie, portraying the head hijacker. “After you’ve gone through a trauma, getting back into a regular routine is helpful.”

He hopes his movie — which had a $7 million budget but looks like much more thanks to judicious use of pricey sets and CGI — will do for air travel what Jaws did for swimming in the sea: “make you terrified to fly.” The surgeon says that, during post-production, he hooked members of test audiences up to medical monitors to make sure their heart rate spiked at the appropriate times!

Grover has had a passion for medicine since he was a child in India, losing his brother at a young age and becoming inspired to help save lives. He also fell in love with film. “When I was six, I told my mom I wanted to be a Bollywood actor and dance around trees,” he laughs. His first movie experience was writing the screenplay for 2002’s Unspeakable , in which he also appeared as an actor opposite Dennis Hopper.

Next, Grover is “shopping around” a sci-fi TV series with a new spin on The Wizard of Oz 