There is scope for a great WWII acting fraternity ensemble movie. Stewart, obviously, and David Niven at the sharp end, but also Ronnie Reagan, John Wayne, Noel Coward and others in the propaganda side of things.
And it would have a particularly cheery Christmas ending!
I absolutely, positively have to see a film make of the life of Juan Pujol.
He was, quite possibly, the most successful double agent of all time. A Spaniard who hated fascists, he tried to spy for the British, but they blew him off three times. So he approached the Germans, they hired him to spy, then he went back to the Brits and they hired him as a double agent.
Eventually, he invented fictional sub-agents - all of whom were on the Nazi payroll, and they recruited contacts as well. The Nazis paid Pujol and the Brits more than $340,000, or $2.75 million in modern dollars, all of which went to British Intelligence! The Nazis were funding the entire British spy operation!
The Germans trusted him so much that he was able to convince them that Normandy was a diversion, that the real invasion was going to happen at Calais.
After the war, he was awarded an MBE. And one of his German contacts gave him the Iron Cross that Hitler awarded him!
None of this came out until 1999. He was still undercover until then, and moved to Argentina after the war - I suspect he may have had something to do with finding fugitive Nazis.
This is one of the most astounding WWII stories I’ve ever heard, and it has to be made as a movie. David Lean could have done a great job. The Coen Brothers could do this as they first bio-pic (with Javier Bardem as Pujol).
Jack Johnson. Yes, there was a quasi-bio made in 1970 but we could certainly use another one.
Niven had a great line when he was leading some men into battle, “Look, you chaps only have to do this once. But I’ll have to do it all over again in Hollywood with Errol Flynn!”
Nicholas Kazan wrote it and you can read it here.
Some time ago Antonio Banderas was rumored to play Cortes - 2006 article here.
As we know today Antonio went on to contribute to Shrek series. Let’s hope with Dali he reedems himself (which is another contribution to the thread).
Ever since The Prestige I’ve wanted Christopher Nolan to do a Tesla vs. Edison movie, starring David Bowie.
Maybe when Batman is finished.
An almost certainly gay-homersexicle as well. His probable lover was William Rufus Devane King, North Carolina born senator from Alabama and later VP under Pierce (the only VP not to set foot in the D.C. during his term- he died soon after Pierce was inaugurated). The King-Buchanan relationship was well known to all- Buchanan was called Mrs. King and King “Mrs. Buchanan” among other nicknames.
I’m going to go with Abraham Lincoln, who is long overdue for a really good miniseries. There’s no way a movie, even if it was 3.5 hours, could deal with anything more than one aspect of his life, but he could easily fuel a 20 hour miniseries on a premium channel without any fluff. If it was a hit, go back and do Mark Twain, who in addition to being one of the funniest Americans met EVERYBODY in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (from Tsars to Helen Keller to Brigham Young to Hawaiian royalty to Sholem Aleichem [had there been no Mark Twain it’s possible there’d have been no Fiddler on the Roof as he financially supported S.A.] to Tesla to you-name-'em).
The relationship between Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall, the beautiful English actress and notorious party girl. She was famous for having affairs with her co-stars and directors. And then this incredible story:
In 1955 she starred opposite Rex Harrison in the comedy The Constant Husband, and an affair soon followed. Harrison was married to actress Lilli Palmer at the time. However, when he learned from Kendall’s doctor that Kendall had been diagnosed with myeloid leukemia, he and Palmer agreed to divorce so he could marry Kendall and provide for her care. Kendall was never told of her illness and ended up believing she merely had an iron deficiency. As for the divorce, Palmer said she was not upset because she had a lover, too. Palmer and Harrison planned to remarry after Kendall’s death, but Palmer ended up falling in love with her companion, Carlos Thompson, and married him instead.
I love The Moon’s a Balloon. It seems likely that many of the anectodes were, well, anectodes, but that is fine. Niven himself made it up to serious rank during the war.
Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico - one of the greatest eccentrics in the history of the U.S.
I thought (when I saw the poster and saw the title) that Michael Douglas “King of California” was going to be about Norton.
Major General in the union army during the Civil War.
Governor of the New Mexico Territory during the Lincoln County War.
Author of Ben Hur.
I’ll suggest one of his exhibition opponents:
Victor McLaglen.
Seems like he had a life full of adventure and danger: a wrestler, a boxer, fought in 2 wars, then he became a successful actor, working extensively with two icons of American film and earning an Oscar. An odd, full life.
Moe Berg - catcher for the New York Yankees, lawyer, and spy for the OSS.
Not exactly a biopic but a snapshot series of America in a particular year: I’d love to see a movie made about Oscar Wilde’s American tour in 1882. I started writing a play about a June '82 event when Wilde spent a day and a night as the guest of Jefferson Davis (the man he said he most wanted to meet in the U.S. due to his own interest in Irish secession) but soon realized that there was no way to do a play about those two personalities [and Davis’s wife and homelife] and do either justice and so I switched to a play focusing on the Davis marriage, but the Wilde tour is also way more than enough for a long movie).
During his year touring America preaching about the of dos and don’ts of interior decoration and art (getting rave reviews in some places and trashed in others) he saw far more of the U.S. than 99% of its citizens and met a staggering array of people. He was hosted in garish gothic robber baron mansions where he charmed the 19th century equivalent of the jet set (the ‘private car set’ I suppose) and he was hosted 40 feet under the surface where he charmed illiterate minors. He played grand opera houses on both coasts and he played rickety Wild West saloons- one of which, per him anyway, had been the site of a hanging earlier in the day, he kissed Walt Whitman, imposed himself on Davis as mentioned (Jefferson didn’t like him at all, but his wife and teenaged daughter totally swooned and drew pictures of him that evening), promoted cocaine powder when it took away his toothache pain. In Salt Lake City he was voluntarily blindfolded and driven through backstreets to the hiding place of Mormon president John Taylor (Taylor was in hiding due to an arrest warrant for polygamy- Oscar in his usual fashion in a reminiscence made casual mention of a sofa full of very plain-to-ugly wives but much more mention of whoever decorated the exile place- he said they did a splendid job- and he and the 70-something English born former cabinet maker Taylor hit it off amazingly well). There were many other encounters worthy of note as well, plus he was fascinated by the ongoing trial of Charlie Guiteau (who shot Garfield the year before)- Wilde claimed to have interviewed him but was probably lying since if he did he neither mentioned or printed it at the time- and 1882 was a fascinating time when the U.S. was basically trying to reinvent itself after a huge Civil War people wanted to forget happened even as it defined them (I love his comment that you couldn’t compliment the moon in the south without hearing “you should have seen it before the war”) and as it was becoming a dragon on the world economic stage.
Anyway, the notion of this flamingly gay Anglo-Irishman (many English considered him too Irish and many Irish considered him too English) going in front of everyone from little old ladies to puzzled youth to war veterans to rowdy roughnecks to you-name-it dressed in black leather “Little Lord Fauntleroy” suit no less ridiculous then than it is now and holding a sunflower and talking about interior decoration and blue china and how one should and shouldn’t use wainscoting and the like and getting as often as not standing ovations and cheers (and more than a few "WTF was that?!"s- he wasn’t unanimously well received), being more delicate than most women in his audience and at the same time drinking hard living minors under the table and praising “the American Negro” as the most underused and yet most worthy of praise object of living beauty to southerners and trashing a new watertower to Chicagoans who were super fond of it (that got a more volatile reaction than the black-is-beautiful comments to former slaveowners) and-
Well anyway, you get the idea- it’s an interesting story. Also, this is Oscar when he was basically famous-for-being-famous: he wasn’t a great writer yet (a couple of poetry volumes, one self-published) and was best known for inspiring a Gilbert and Sullivan character in their comedy operetta Patience that lampooned him as a total fop AND was the reason for his being there (a cross promotion of the G&S show Patience) and with his whole climb to the pinnacle and Icarus fall not yet even dreamt of or seeming likely, against a backdrop of a nation that was going through an extended puberty and was at once eerily similar and completely unrecognizable from our own.
I’d watch it.
“Watch it”, Hell. You have it all written in your head & we know it.
Now for mine…
Joseph Smith
Aimee Semple MacPherson - the TV “Kidnapping of Sister Aimee” is not enough.
I have to admit- I think “The Passion of Ayn Rand” gave us an OK microcosm bio of Ayn but so much more could have been done with Barbara Branden’s book.
Smith has the Hollywood bonus of being about a guy who was very handsome (at least in his possibly embellished likenesses) and having lots of religion and weird sex. It would be easy to work in a cameo from a young Abe Lincoln as well since he was an Illinois legislator at a time when the Mormons were freaking out the Illinois legislature. (Lincoln wasn’t of any particular importance to the Nauvoo settlement but it’s one of those “If you’re in San Antonio anyway you might as well see the Alamo” opportunities.)
MacPherson allegedly had a fling with Milton Berle, who allegedly had the biggest schlong in show biz. It’d be interesting to work that one in.
Since it’s almost impossible to do a good biopic that’s at all faithful, in many ways I prefer to stick with interesting times and ‘snapshots’ of famous people.
A movie about the Napoleonic exiles who came to America might be interesting. They settled in some unlikely places- Alabama, Arkansas, St. Augustine Florida, and of course Louisiana. His nephew, Prince Achille Murat (here in childhoodwith his unc [far left- looks like a girl as was the fashion] and here in later life) was liked, ala Oliver Douglas in Hooterville, as just another farmer/planter/guy at the tavern by many of his neighbors in the Florida panhandle, and the generosity of his widow who received a pension from Napoleon III went a long way to helping her neighbors after the Civil War.
In my Varina (Mrs. Jefferson) Davis play I have a snapshot of the Pierces- a very interesting if sad first couple. Varina Davis took over the duties of First Lady at many state affairs because Jane (Appleton) Pierce just wasn’t up to it, preferring instead to stay in her rooms upstairs and writing letters to her three sons (which was very odd you see for they were all dead; she only consented to Franklin running for president because she thought it would be a good thing for their last surviving little boy who she absolutely doted on, then between the election and the inauguration he was killed in front of her eyes in a train accident- and yet, strangely, though she wore black the rest of her life and wrote letters to her dead sons [though she eschewed spiritualists] Varina remembered her as a shy but very cheerful and even funny person who accepted her lot with amazing grace- just didn’t want to play First Lady
Franklin was an extremely wonderful guy on the personal level- he’d get out of his presidential carriage to help get a farmer’s wagon unstuck from the mud, went door to door in a blizzard checking on various politicians and friends and their wives and taking supplies to them, etc., though he was also an alcoholic who killed a woman driving his buggy drunk while president and who later died of cirrhosis. Very mixed presidency- he appears on Best and on Worst lists. Extremely loyal to Davis, who became a good friend, writing to him even while he was president of the CSA and offering his wife and family his home while Davis was in prison after the war- had it not been for respect for the fact he was former president and for his personal tragedies and declining (due to alcoholism) health he very possibly would have been arrested during the Civil War (when the suspension of habeus corpus made that much easier) for his outspoken pro-Confederacy sympathies and his occasional visits to Montreal (a city that had more Confederates than any city north of D.C.).
Mary Surratt’s story is the subject of a new movie, The Conspirator, produced/directed by Robert Redford and starring Robin Wright Penn as the swinging widow, but my understanding is Mary isn’t the main character. Probably as well.
Little Richard is long overdue for some kind of movie treatment. He did after all invent rock and roll, music videos, the cross your heart bra, Diet Coke, KFC’s extra Krispy recipe and the cordless phone, at least all according to him. (While he overstates his case he really was a major factor in the early days.)
I mentioned in a previous thread on Birth of a Nation that I think a great movie could be made about that movie- the personalities (Griffith, the the book’s author, Gish, Woodrow Wilson, the NAACP figures, the silent film figures, etc.). Likewise, a movie about the Fatty Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe incident has lots of great personalities and true events to draw from and the topic of ‘sensational celebrity trials’ is nothing new (though Arbuckle was almost certainly innocent of the sinister charges and Maude Delmont is one of the most cartoonishly evil villains you could imagine).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill
Quotes from the page -
“The only known British soldier to have felled an enemy with a longbow in the course of the war”
“Churchill was unsure what Commando Duty entailed, but he signed up because it sounded dangerous”
“A mortar shell killed or wounded everyone but Churchill, who was playing “Will Ye No Come Back Again?” on his pipes as the Germans advanced”
“If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years”
Oh, and as an Edit. I’d love to see a good bio of Orde Chales Wingate, he may well have been actually nuts.