Just as a follow-up to the above hijack, here is a modern reproduction of a ~1.5 meter two-handed sword. The type of steel used, while modern, is considered to be a pretty reasonable equivalent to that used in the originals. Note the weight = <5lbs. Combined with careful balancing, they were rather more agile than they looked.
There were also those Che Guevara movies that came out last year or the year before. The first one was mostly about the Cuban Revolution, although it focused mostly on Che, of course.
But maybe a problem from a show-biz standpoint. He may have been a lion, but he was no matinee idol..
Plus, not exactly a Hollywood ending
And what to say at the end credits? “Sweden became a true empire, at least until Peter the Great kicked the crap out of them…but that was a good thing, since they stayed home and minded their own business after that. I mean, did you see what eventually happened to Russia? Really dodged a bullet on that one.”
Sampiro, that stuff you posted sounds awesome and I would totally pay to see that. Honest, I just eat this historical stuff up, everything mentioned so far sounds just fascinating…I will offer up a bio of Heliogabalus, a doozy of a short lived Roman emperor who, if not gay, may well have been transgendered. This is the one who supposedly smothered some dinner guests by dumping a ton of roses onto them. One of my favorite trashy novels is “Child of the Sun” by Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner, and it ever so delicately describes a wonderland of the depraved homo-erotics of a randy teenage Roman emperor…I think it would be a swell mini-series on HBO as I can’t see it smashing any box office records in the theaters.
With all this talk of swords, let me add that I think SUNSHINE closely missed the hook for a movie I’d like to see: the life of Endre Kabos rather than Attila Petschauer. Don’t give me the Jewish athlete who earned his medals in Amsterdam and Los Angeles before dying in the camps during WWII; give me his *** teammate,*** the Jewish athlete who earned gold at the frickin’ Berlin Olympics – he’s the one seen fencing in Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA – and got out of the camps to fight and die for the underground.
It would also be interesting to see a movie (not a documentary) about the Holodomor.
I’d like to see a film about the flight of the Pacific Clipper. It was as Pan Am flying boat that flew regular passenger service between California and New Zealand in the early 1940’s. They were airborne, en route to Auckland when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Cut off from the US by the war in the Pacific, the captain and crew were ordered to return home by flying the long way around the world by any means they could manage. They then embarked on a pretty amazing adventure on their way back to New York.
I think an American version of UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS would be great. I’d set it in the family of (or at least a fictional family modeled on) Alma Vanderbilt (a Bama gal whose family was made destitute by the Civil War and who when she emerged as wife of one of the Commodore’s grandsons, William Kissam, a man who inherited the equivalent of many Billions of dollars from his own father, she went absolutely wild- and crazy. So determined that her family would be legitimized as more than nouveau riche (even though that was riche in Hollywood sign sized letters) she first went to war with The Mrs. Astor (that’s how she was referred to) in giving ridiculously Roman-court style extravagant parties, building palaces on 5th Avenue and in Newport and various other places, and finally forcing- literally locking up and making insane threats of suicide and murder and disinheritance and all else- her only daughter, Consuelo, to marry Charles “Sonny” Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, a penniless British aristocrat with an excellent pedigree and heir of the crumbling Blenheim Palace. The marriage cost her millions- she agreed to restore Blenheim (where the Duke’s nephew, Winston Churchill, himself the child of a penniless lord and rich American mother, was born during a party) and to provide a house in London and millions in dowry, but it was worth every penny to her.
Then, in one of the weirdest twists for a woman so obsessed with keeping up appearances, soon after her daughter’s wedding she divorced her own husband, married August Belmont, divided time between two palaces in Newport and devoted her (many) remaining years to women’s suffrage! Alva did eventually express (“I ruined my daughter’s life for a title, what was I thinking? Oh well, no point beating myself up over it”) regret on forcing her daughter to become a duchess; the marriage to Churchill was dreadfully unhappy; the Duke and his nouveau riche [as he constantly reminded her] Duchess loathed each other, cheated on each other constantly [there’s doubt about the paternity of one of their kids] and eventually divorced and went their own ways.)
The Wars of the Roses (which I know was not a term used until centuries later) would be a good miniseries so long as they had a good website to remind people of who’s who, because in English history class I remember that sending me to genealogical tables 400 times. What’s surprising considering how many thousands of novels of wildly varied quality and accuracy have been written about Henry VIII’s wives and mistresses and daughters is how few have been written about his paternal grandmother, whose life was extremely interesting and would give Scarlett O’Hara a run for her money on the roller-coaster and “when in doubt marry” areas.
She was born Margaret Beaufort, legitimate descendant of an illegitimate son of John of Gaunt (son of Edward III). When she was a baby her father committed suicide to avoid arrest by Henry V for treason. She was married and divorced by the time she was 11 (the marriage was not consummated) then she was basically given by Henry VI to his half-brother, Edmund Tudor, an illegitimate son of Henry V’s wife Queen Katherine of Valois. (Illegitimacy is a sticky word here- after her husband’s death, the French born Queen Katherine was miserable and lonely in England and entered a long time relationship with a Welsh servant, Owen Tudor, with whom she had many children; technically they married, but the marriage wasn’t legal since as the widow of one king and mother of another she had to have dispensation and she kept the relationship and the children secret for years; eventually they were retro-legitimized but there was always a question mark.)
The marriage to Edmund was consummated, if not on the wedding night then soon after, because at 13 she was pregnant. While she was pregnant he fought in one of the early battles of the War of the Roses (on the side of his brother the Lancastrian King Henry VI- who, like his mother’s father, was already very obviously mentally ill) and he was injured and captured. He died in prison awaiting ransoming a few months before Margaret gave birth to their son Henry (the only child she would ever have- probably a very difficult delivery as she was, at most, 14 at the time). Henry Tudor succeeded his father as Earl of Richmond immediately.
Anyway, her life doesn’t slow down from this time on. Her fortunes rose and fell and rose and fell again as the Lancastrians and Yorkists seesawed for the next generation. She married at least twice more and probably had a couple of affairs. She was involved in conspiracy against Edward IV, then after his death she and his widow the [deposed] Queen Elizabeth became allies against Richard III. Her son meanwhile had entered exile and her fourth husband’s loyalties were questionable.
There was no real reason her son Henry should have any right to the throne- his descent from Edward III was marred by illegitimacy, as was his [unimportant] descent from the French royalty, but the lack of other candidates willing to fight and kill or be killed for it on the Lancastrian side made him default choice and of course at Bosworth Field he won, his stepfather ultimately betraying Richard to fight alongside him. Margaret became Queen Mother, and a very influential one. Also a very young one considering Henry’s conquest- she was only 42.
A good novelist could work in her involvement with whatever became of the princes in the Tower- either as villain or heroine or impartial or partial onlooker. She’s a good character to use to explain (from a novelist/moviemaker perspective) a lot of the undertakings of this time that we’re not especially clear about. She was also active in the lives of her grandchildren, even serving as the hostess/guardian of her grandson’s widow Katherine of Aragon, whose marriage to Prince Henry she was a champion of (Henry VII went back and forth on the issue- there were many other candidates for his younger son to marry). She outlived Henry VII by a few months and died two weeks after the wedding of Katherine to her second grandson, so she never knew that Henry VIII and Queen Katherine lived happily ever after.
There was one: Beacon Hill. It didn’t last.
King Philip’s War, especially if it showed the conflicts between the Puritans and the Mass Bay Colony as well as the intertribal Indian conflicts (the converted “praying Indians” need some screen time, especially). Metacom would have to be shown as a villain (well, he was), but one not without some real grievances on the part of the Indians he got destroyed for his troubles. Old Massasoit would make a fine tragic figure. And the Angel of Hadley has to appear whether he really existed or not.
There are some really great ideas in this thread for original movies. So why are we subjected to Shrek 14 or whatever this summer?
Because not many people go see the original, interesting movies, and they die at the box office. True, a lot of theaters in most parts of the country don’t book the original, interesting movies, but that’s strictly because not enough people go see them. The kinds of people who bitch about how they “don’t make movies like they used to” and “there’s nothing but crap playing” are generally the types of people who wouldn’t go see an interesting, original movie anyway, especially if it were an indie or foreign film.
I would pay to see just about all these movies in the theater, especially Sampiro’s, but I’m one of the few.
And I too want to see an updated serious and interesting Pompeii film, not made by Michael Bay.
The recent film Che: Part I (The Argentine), starring Benicio Del Toro, is about the Cuban Revolution. Well, about Che Guevara, but also the Cuban Revolution. Avoid Che Part II, though.
Thanks for that… it’s on my “To See” list if I can track a copy down somewhere!
Because there’s a lot more of “them” than there are of “us”? 
Because, as Tim Robbins said in The Player, “I can only say ‘Yes’ 12 times a year.” Because a movie costs so much to make, any might fail at the box office, and the studios are averse to gambling their money. So the safest bet is something like what has succeeded before.
I’ve never seen a movie about the Spanish conquest of Peru. Nor any movie giving a window into the Inca Empire before the conquest. Fascinating topic – it was quite an amazing empire, bigger than any in the world at the time, spread over territory divided by innumerable mountain ravines, conquered as much by negotiation as by war; the economy a sort of benevolent-despotic socialism where all produce was collected and distributed by state accountants, and it seems to have actually worked; a capital full of huge masonry temples and palaces faces with gold and silver plates; and they did it all with stone age technology. And Pizarro’s conquest was even more amazing and audacious than Cortez’ in Mexico, considering he had no disaffected subject nations with whom to ally.
The only thing I wish had been included in Oliver Stone’s ‘Alexander’ movie is a dramatization of his Siege of Tyre.
Alexander took 7 months out of conquering to single out Tyre (who had snubbed him) and do everything possible to get to and make a lesson out of them. The problem was that they were on an island that had walls all the way around it.
He had his army build and rebuild a mole to the island out of the ruins of Old Tyre (thereby actually altering the geography of the place). He used battering rams on ships. He skipped naptime (heh), all to get to these people.
It is really illustrative of his tenacity to get what he wanted and his inventiveness in getting things done.
Came in here to say this. Have you ever read The Reckoning by Sharon Kay Penman? Would make an excellent miniseries.
That role cemented Stone’s reputation as one of the most brilliant men in film, because only somebody who is truly great at his craft can possibly manage to make the life of Alexander the Great boring. That took complete concentration. (I remember at the time he said the movie bombing was evidence of homophobia, which is odd since gays didn’t like it either as it was too cowardly in dealing with Alex’s relationship with Hepheastion.)
Does anybody know if there have been any movies dealing with the Vietnam war from the Vietnamese perspective or the perspective of a north Vietnamese family?
Ho Chi Minh’s life has some elements that would be good for a movie or a novel, especially his ‘missing years’ when he traveled through the U.S. and Europe. He was, ironically, a great admirer of George Washington and other figures from U.S. history and had hoped for the U.S. to be for Vietnam what France had been to the colonies in throwing off the yoke of China (especially after helping them fight the Japanese occupation during WW2). Ho Chi Minh’s Executive Mansion, which he didn’t like because he felt it was too lavish.
