Oh, and I forgot the “Raising the Titanic” stories, which have thankfully been killed off by the discovery that the Titanic isn’t raisable – it really did break in half, as reported. And the supposed cold, cold Atlantic doesn’t really retard decay, as everyone seemed to think (Noody imagined those “rusticles” that festoon the outside)
But before this died, it gave us *Imperial Earth, The Ghost from the Grand Banks, * and, of course, Raise the Titanic, which got made into the first Dirk pitt movie b(although, unfortunately, not the last)
I was going to reply with exactly this after reading your initial post.
I don’t know if there are the same sort of detailed oral histories recorded for the US Civil War that were used as the basis for Band of Brothers or The Pacific but I’m sure there is a lot of period material available: there was a US Civil War series done a while ago that had actors reading excerpts from letters written at the time against slide shows of period photos which in itself was very effective, but a Band of Brothers style series sounds like an excellent idea.
I agree, but follow characters from both sides. I’ll further suggest that one of the characters followed by a nurse (surely at least one Civil War nurse wrote her memoirs). Either that or one of those women who disguised themselves as a man and joined the army.
Exactly. I’d spend all miniseries developing sympathetic characters from both sides and then let both sides go at it at Bentonville or one of the other last major battles of the war- ideally have the most sympathetic character from each side fight hand to hand.
That’d be interesting. Some- possibly most- you can tell from the pictures were butch lesbians or transgenders (that’s Albert Cashier, who survived the war and continued to live as a man until his death in 1915) so there’s also that as an interest factor (ain’t nothing new about gender confusion but it’s a part of history not often addressed). Not all were- one famous case was the doctor’s wife who disguised herself as a man so she could follow her husband into Andersonville and kept up her secret identity until she gave birth. (The baby was evidently healthy- leastwise it was born alive- which makes you wonder how with the ‘worse than third world slums’ hygiene and malnutrition.)
Many nurses were of course male- in fact there were female doctors in the U.S. before there were professionally trained female nurses. Walt Whitman was famously a nurse (a natural choice since he already had the uniform and experience telling young men to roll over); the hygiene committees were largely female and much more interesting than they sound. Harriet Tubman was a nurse and laundress (and also led troops into battle) but only got a pension because of a post-war marriage to a veteran.
Well, for the Canadian perspective, there was Passchendale.
I’m a patriot, but that was a pretty silly movie. The dramatic ending just about killed me.
Wow, I’ve never seen a list like this where I agreed so much with the elected number one. From the very beginning I was thinking they’d better mention Jesus, but I never really expected it to be on the list. Kudos!
Her life is pretty interesting, if not a sweeping epic. Raised among the Hippie Transcendentalists, her “adult” writings are still quite readable & have made some pretty-good TV movies. Then she had even greater success with Little Women, based on her childhood, & spent the rest of her brief life churning out YA books she regarded as a bit saccharine.
Never married, there may have been a real “Laurie” in her life…
Almost. I’ve lamented this for years, and was very happy when Amistad came out. There have been sporadic attempts at it, though – stories of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone (including the various versions of The Alamo story), The Buccaneer, about the War of 1812, and so on. But that period of American History is woefully underrepresented in pop culture.
I didn’t agree with any of them. I thought maybe World War II is getting old, but that’s about it.
And I can’t think of more than a handful of pop culture films about Jesus. Movies seemed to be the point of all the rest of them. If there were discussing actual popular culture, there’s a lot more things that have been done to death, since that’s how something becomes a part of the culture.
The problem I have with that list is that most of these events are tiresome because they’re so often portrayed as romantic. They’d be more tolerable (and probably more interesting) if there were a different spin on them.
I’d think there would be some drama in the Lewis and Clark expedition, and certainly enough scenery to make a decent epic out of it. If Kevin Costner could do Dances with Wolves, someone can do Lewis and Clark.
I sort of disagree with the notion that WWII has been done to death. The European war, certainly. But there hasn’t been a good movie about the home front, and with the exception of Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima, very little about the war in Asia.
I’d also like to see a little more about the Robber Barons and the labor movement of the 1880s and 90s. Homestead or the Pullman Strike would be fascinating, and certainly relevant to modern times.
