We’ve done these before, but the current Harriet Tubman thread has me thinking it might be time for another one as I’ve got some new suggestions and others might as well.
I’ve been reading/listening to the audiobook of Shelby Foote’s Shiloh (full text online) and I think it would make a good movie. In addition to being about one helluva battle that few people know that much about, his characterization is good: unlike The Killer Angels he has several p.o.v. characters who represent a cross section of enlisted and officer and both sides of the battle. They would need a bit of fleshing out and interconnectedness for it to work on screen, but that’s easily done (plus I’ve always wanted to see the revelation with Johnston’s bloody boot reenacted on screen).
Likewise, the women who disguised themselves as men and served in the Civil War are long overdue for a good movie treatment. There are several to choose from as the focus, and Hillary Swank is overdue for another Oscar. (They existed in other wars as well- Deborah Samson is a famous American Revolutionary War soldier- but the Civil War was more like modern warfare yet remote enough they didn’t have the same physicals that would have found them out before they were in uniform.)
I’m sure it won’t happen, but I’d love to see Daniel Day Lewis do another Lincoln movie, this one perhaps focusing on the 1860 election or even his problems in finding a commander for the Army of the Potomac. For that matter Lincoln’s entire life would be a great miniseries, and could be framed with Herndon interviewing people who knew him in his childhood/young days via flashback and by his secretaries compiling their memories; in fact a non-linear telling might work well. His extremely complicated relationship with Mary from its inception to the end and his relationship with Joshua Speed and his first exposure to slavery and to D.C. in the 1840s are all very ripe for the screen.
I watched Red Tails this weekend and, regrettably, it was so Lucased that it didn’t do justice to the Tuskegee Airmen. Maybe one day HBO will give them the miniseries they deserve.
Now that we know a bit more about Richard III and that he wasn’t a deformed and hunched but did have some physical problems) it might be cool to finally give him a good miniseries that gives him the Six Wives of Henry VIII or Elizabeth R relatively objective treatment.
Vikings is a success and I’ve always wanted to see a really good treatment of their English nemesis King Alfred the Great (first king of all England and one of the few to ever be called “the Great”). I’ve never seen the 1960s biopic- it gets called an epic wannabe that didn’t quite make it.
Oh, and if you want to make everyone really uncomfortable, a reasonably historically accurate movie about the Assassin cult would do the trick. Bonus points for telling it from the point of view of an assassin.
Russell Bank’s Cloudsplitter is about the life of John Brown. It’s one the biggest, best, meatiest modern novels ever written and it’s all about the central issue of America, race. You couldn’t capture a fraction of the book in a movie, but it would make a fantastic miniseries.
I’m still hoping for a good Chang & Eng biopic one day. They’ve been the basis of a stage musical and several books and they’ve been tossed around as a film project for years (at one time Leonard Nimoy had a project about them in development), but none have never come to fruition. I suppose finding Asian twin actors who can learn to move together in a special suit, and then filming locations that replicate 19th century Thailand (both peasant and palace [they were invited to the royal palace]), London, NYC, ships, and the North Carolina hills which could get expensive, and the actors couldn’t be modest as sex scenes would be mandatory since “How?” is something that everybody who reads about them goes straight to in their mind and that would take some inventive choreography (a threesome or even foursome in a 19th century rope bed).
Nevertheless, I really think it has major potential.
Like I said before, I’d love a story on the first interactions between the Khoe-khoen at the Cape of Good Hope and the British - I even did a script proposal once for the story of Xhore, who was kidnapped to England in 1613 to learn English and then returned to the Cape, and with his new knowledge of the value of a cow, promptly turned and raised the prices charged to ships for provisions, and his continued resistance to English attempts to settle convicts at the Cape, and eventual murder by the Dutch for refusing to trade with them.
To be perfectly honest, I haven’t the foggiest idea how you’d make a biopic out of his life story but I’m sure someone actually competent could pull it off.
George Washington is long overdue for a big-budget biopic. His youthful heroics during the French and Indian War; exploring the Ohio country; his courting of Martha; his becoming caught up in the patriot cause; his leadership of the Continental Army through eight hard years of war; his wish to peacefully retire but then agreeing to preside over the Constitutional Convention and then become first President of the United States.
There’s a lot of story there. John Adams got his due on HBO; Washington has an even better tale, I think.
His (posthumous) freeing of his slaves as well, which I’ve long thought was way under-reported considering how much effort it took on his part to achieve.
The Grants would make a great miniseries as well: rags to riches and back and around again, West Point, friendships with later bitter enemies (Longstreet was in Grant’s wedding party) and others (his “when one was drunk and the other was crazy” friendship with Sherman was interesting), Mexico, his drinking, Hardscrabble Farm, freeing his slave even though he was in dire straights financially, her Confederate sympathizer father (who looked on Grant- understandably- as a poor relation nowhere near good enough for his daughter), hocking his watch to buy Christmas gifts before the war and other low points, then the war (when one day he was beloved and the next he was called a butcher and the next he might be either one), Appomattox, the worldwide adulation and the presidency and the naivete/corruption then the world tour then the bankruptcy and the comeback, and has any miniseries ever had a better framing narrative than a dying man feverishly writing his memoirs for Mark Twain?
And the best part is that unlike Abraham and Mary Lincoln and so many other marriages of famous contemporaries, Ulys and Julia really were, like John and Abigail, an unqualified lovematch who delighted in each other’s company. They were deeply and unwaveringly in love with each other through it all. He was also a loving father; one of my favorite images of him is when this veteran of dozens of pitched battles was unable to attend his daughter’s wedding reception at the White House because he was upstairs sobbing like a baby.
I don’t think any film has yet to do justice to the Battle of Little Big Horn. It’s usually just tacked on as the coda to a Custer bio-pic. Arguably, Custer isn’t even the most interesting character in the story. His “last stand” wasn’t nearly as interesting or dramatic as the siege of Reno hill. I’m also fascinated by how the fastest communication available on a battlefront was by riverboat! And how about a straight forward exploration of what the Indians were actually trying to accomplish without all the mystical and moralistic baggage? Frame the story as an epic battle between two large groups of seasoned warriors from vastly different (yet, in some ways very similar) cultures instead of Custer’s ego versus Sitting Bull’s vision.
I can’t believe nobody has picked up Nellie Bly, pen name of Elizabeth Jane Cochran, for a biopic.
There’s got to be a big-name actress out there looking for a role like this who could make it happen. Bonus points for the real Nellie being a very attractive woman.
Among a lot of other things, she became an investigative journalist by age 21 in the 1880’s, did an expose on factory girls, conditions inside an insane asylum (a very chilling read and one that started leading to long-needed reforms), and beat Phileas Fogg by going round the world in 72 days. All this before she retired at 31 and married a septuagenarian millionaire. Tell me there isn’t at least a miniseries in that.
Victoria Woodhull, publisher and moralist and free-lover and feminist and spiritualist and con-artist and first woman to run for president and ultimately respectable English lady, screams for a biopic of some kind as well. I used to hope that it would be done while Gene Hackmancould still play Commodore Vanderbilt, but that ship has probably sailed.
James Michener’s The Source is long overdue for a treatment.
I read that it was once in talks but that Michener was so offended when an exec said something to the effect of “let’s cut the history crap and stick to modern day romances and the parts that have Bible movie audience” (i.e. take out the stuff about prehistoric and medeival and 19th century Israel that was foreign to most audiences and beef up the scene with King David and other biblical settings) that he refused to part with the rights.
