I’d like to see the reign of Lady Jane Grey done. I wrote a play about it, way back when. They did turn out a movie, but they whitewashed Guilford Dudley (nice guy Cary Elwes he wasn’t) and didn’t give his father enough screen time.
I thought that the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 would be pretty good fodder for a historical epic. Wrote a play about that one, too.
How about The Bone Wars --Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh stealing dinosaurs from each other. Bone Wars - Wikipedia
I don’t know how true the stories are, but even if they’re not, the shootout hoaxes of Palisade Nevada sound like they could form ythe basis for a great comedy:
There’s a L-O-N-G answer, but a short version: Vanderbilt had Greeley by the short hairs financially- Vanderbilt’s younger son, Jeremiah, a total ne’er do well, had essentially bankrupted Greeley by taking loans that Greeley had evidently assumed the Commodore would make good. The Commodore confronted Greeley and told him “anybody who loans my son Jeremiah $40,000 is an idiot and I sure as hell hope you don’t think I’m going to back it up”; in Greeley’s version he said “Who the hell asked you to?” and threw the Commodore out of his office, but looking at Greeley’s financial situation at the time you can be sure he wasn’t that non-chalant. It was around this time that Greeley, who COULD NOT afford to lose money on Davis’s bail, began writing “release Davis” editorials and signed his bond, which I’m thinking the Commodore had a lot to do with.
The Commodore never did make good on his son’s bad debts and was under no legal obligation to do so. Greeley went insane (possibly what we’d call "early onset Alzheimer’s) and died a few years later with an estate valued around $5000 after his debts were paid- a lot more money then than now of course but certainly not wealthy. His greatest asset were his IOUs from Jeremiah Vanderbilt, which when the Commodore died in 1877 with an estate valued at $100 million+ (conservatively in the billions and by some accounts [when compared with things like GDP of America at the time] in the tens of billions] he left almost everything to his oldest son with a few million for his daughters; Jeremiah only had the interest from a trust fund which meant he still could not pay back Greeley’s estate.
After the big sensational front-page-story-for-weeks lawsuit over the estate, the out-of-court settlement involved, among many other things, William Henry Vanderbilt paying about $60,000 to the daughters of Horace Greeley to make good his brother Jeremiah’s debts- this was the vast majority of their inheritance from their father’s estate and would be over $1 million in today’s money.
Anyway, there’s a lot that doesn’t meet the eye about the Greeley-Vanderbilt connections and their mutual involvements with “a certain somebody” I’ve uncovered and I don’t think it’s been researched.
Has anybody seen the People v. Leo Frankmovie that came out last year? I think it was only aired on PBS (it wasn’t a PBS production but received funding through them) and it’s not available through Netflix as apparently it’s only available for sale through the production company and Netflix usually buys through wholesalers. I want to see it but not bad enough to buy the DVD; the book it’s based onis incredible and begs to be made into a big budget miniseries. There was a miniseries many years ago starring Jack Lemmon as Governor Slaton- The Murder of Mary Phagan- but it’s never been released on DVD and I haven’t caught it on TV.
Almost a century later it’s still controversial- there were several heated editorials in the Atlanta Constitution a few years ago when an editorialist referred to Frank as railroaded and innocent and assumed the guilt of Jim Conley; family members of Frank, Conley and Phagan (none of whom met the people and were born long after the murder) all chimed in defending their relative.
More English Civil War stuff: John Cooke, the lawyer who prosecuted King Charles I and was hanged, drawn and quartered for it after the Restoration, deserves a biopic. Among lawyers, at least, he’s a hero.
I saw this on the History Channel some years ago. What was really cool about their airing was that during the commercial breaks, [some person I don’t recall] would chat with Prof. Leo Dinnerstein about the events being told. I ended up snagging a copy off one of the movie channels on VHS or DVD, but I wish I had copied the History Channel airing.
One other side note: When I was a kid in the late 60s, one of the common notebook paper brands was Blue Horse", which was manufactured by the Montag Brothers, the same company that owned the pencil factory that Frank managed.
The Montag Brothers were great-uncles of Albert Uhry who wrote Driving Miss Daisy and also the book for Parade, a critically acclaimed but not very successful musical based on the case. (I probably haven’t thought of the brand name Blue Horse in 30 years but the second I read it I instantly saw the horse from the logoin my mind.)
I remember reading Maurice Shadbolt’s Season of the Jew years ago & thinking what a good movie series or movie it would make. Season of the Jew - Wikipedia
Its a fictionalised account of Te Kooti & the Maori (Land) Wars in the 19th century
It’s probably too esoteric for a popular treatment, but I’d love to see a good movie about the Ironclad Board and the design competition that resulted in the Board’s Report on Ironclad Vessels in the US Civil War. Especially if the movie followed the careers of the three vessels that resulted from the competition: The USS Galena, the USS New Ironsides, and the USS Monitor. Each design represented a radically different technical approach to the problem of the rumored Confederate ironclad monster, the CSS Virginia.
The Monitor is the famous one, of course, and aside form its many revolutionary technological innovations, was the first military project subcontracted and shipped in pieces to be assembled at a finishing site. But the other two vessels were unique in design and had unique roles to play in the war as well – the Galena’s novel lighter-weight armor scheme was an abject failure, and she was stripped of her armor and served out the war as a wooden ship, an as-far-as-I-know unique humiliation. The New Ironsides, by contrast, took too long being built to win the competition, and was too late to stop the Virginia, but was the strongest vessel in the world for a few years, served in numerous engagements, and has the distinction of being hit more times by enemy fire than any other ship in US Navy history – including attacks by novel weapons like a mine, a torpedo boat and a submarine – with only one casualty during the war.
The movie could be presented as an “engineering thriller,” like something from the Modern Marvels TV show – can these things be built? Will they work? What problems will the competitors face? – in a race against time and the encroaching threat of Confederate ironclads, then morph into a war movie following the fates of the vessels.
Sampiro and I might be the only ticket buyers, though.
For decades the evil of Nazi Germany has been standard Hollywood fare. But little has been mentioned except in passing of the nightmare that was the Soviet Union under Stalin. And some claim that this is no accident- that Hollywood leftists banded together to make sure that the Soviet Union wasn’t criticized. For example, AFAIK there has never been a movie of Darkness at Noon. Unlike the Nazis there’s no moral lesson about good triumphing over evil, because in the case of Stalin it didn’t. Now that they’re making a movie of Child 44, maybe this will finally be rectified.
Well, there was Enemy at the Gates. The Commies are the good guys, but the dreariness, stupidity and brutality of their regime are not glossed over.
The history of the Holodomor would be interesting film material, but how to play it would be a delicate question. Unlike the Holocaust, historians are still debating why and how it happened, and whether it was an intentional genocide aimed at Ukrainian nationalism or just a result of incompetent, short-sighted planning.
Yes, some do. Some are dumb. The Soviets were Hollywood’s default stock villains throughout the Cold War, especially in spy thrillers.
I have no idea why ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill doesn’t at least have an HBO miniseries. I like Brendan Gleeson for the casting.
I read a book in college about the Crusades from the Arab perspective and always thought that would make a great movie as well.
I’ll second the idea for an L. Ron Hubbard biopic. If you read Bare Faced Messiah, it is one heck of a story. His real life is much more interesting than the lies Scientology has built up around him.
Isn’t it about time Nikola Tesla got a movie with a decent budget? There was a cheapie made years ago, with Orson Welles in the cast, but I understand that was a pretty bad film.
For that matter, Edison would make a good subject as well.
See Young Tom Edison and Edison, the Man. Both from 1940 – maybe it’s about time for a new one, perhaps a more warts-and-all treatment that shows how astonishingly scientifically ignorant Edison was, and how he drove his employees like slaves and took all the credit for their work.
Come to think of, the War of Currents (Westinghouse implementing Tesla’s alternating current, Edison holding fast to direct current, and the whole thing getting a whole lot uglier than you would expect an industry-standards war to be, at least until MacIntosh-v.-Microsoft) would make quite a movie all by itself. Though it would be something of a challenge, drawing an audience other than technogeeks.
The invention of television is long overdue for a TV movie- several interesting characters:
-Philo Farnsworth- a Mormon farmboy and natural genius who had greatly surpassed his teachers by the time he was an adolescent. He first got the idea for electronic signals by looking at rows of freshly plowed farmland around the same time he was researching energy waves, this when he was in his early teens.
-Pem- Mrs. Farnsworth and the first person ever to be seen on television when she was ‘broadcast’ from one side of a San Franciso lab to another.
-David Sarnoff- Russian emigrant who wanted to be a rabbi and Talmud scholar but had to go to work as a boy to support his fatherless family. He greatly spun the real story until he was practically the only radio operator in America handling the story (there were in fact many), but it is true that he got the idea for radio when he noticed the crowds outside of his Marconi station wanting instant news of the Titanic disaster, and he really did get one of the most famous memos ever written dismissing his idea of home radio as idiotic. After becoming a radio pioneer and founding RCA and NBC he decided to add pictures.
-Vladimir Zworykin- from a wealthy bourgeois Russian family he patented a televised image device as early as 1907 but left it and his other research behind when he refugeed to the U.S. during the Russian Revolution and hooked up with Sarnoff.
The fighting between Team Sarnoff and Team Farnsworth is corporate intrigue and warfare that even the layman can get into. Also there are great “chaos theory” moments of history- example: when Philo’s prick of a boss at Westinghouse wouldn’t let him take off a week from work so that he could go with Pem to bury their infant in Salt Lake City it changed history because Philo wouldn’t renew his contract which set back his work which meant that by the time he had a marketable television so did Sarnoff and the patent wars began. As a result it delayed the marketing of television until after WW2; can you imagine the differences if TV had been available in 1940?
Anyway, it’s a cool story with lots of odd and interesting characters. While Farnsworth made a good living from his other inventions the only thing he got for inventing television was a carton of cigarettes on a game show- the perfect gift for a Mormon. (Actually it was: he had taken up smoking on doctor’s advice to relieve stress, and of course died of smoking related causes; his widow lived until 2006.)
Ned Buntline - the man who made Will Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday famous had a life to rival his subjects.
He ran away to sea when he was ten, at 13 he rescued a number of people whose boat had been run down by a ferry. For that heroism he was personally granted a naval commission by President Martin Van Buren. While in the navy, he fought seven duals.
After five years in the Navy he resigned and joined the army and fought in the Seminole wars. When the Civil War broke out, he was still in his teens, yet he was named the chief of scouts for an army unit and rose to the rank of colonel. Buntline was wounded a number of times during his Civil War service.
After the Civil War he went to New York City and became a newspaper man. Eventually he started a number of firey newspapers with strong political stands. He was one of the instigators of the Astor Place Riots in New York in which 23 people died and of the Nativism riots in St. Louis.
He was also a heavy drinker yet made good money as a temperance lecturer. In fact it was on one of his temperance lectures in Nebraska, he met Bill Hickock. Both were drunk in a saloon when Buntline brought up the idea of writing a book about Hickock. Hickock did not take kindly to the idea and told Buntline that if he was not out of town in 24 hours he would be shot. Buntline left town and wrote about Hickock’s friend William (Wild Bill) Cody instead. When the book became an incredible success, Buntline, Cody and one other went into the Wild West Show business. Buntline got into other enterprises wrote about other western characters and eventually died (of course) broke.
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For a more low key subject I might recommend the reaction of a midwest Jewish community inside a medium-sized Midwestern city, say Kansas City, to the birth of Isreal in 1948.
Many people don’t realize there was a great deal of disturbance within the Jewish community over the subject. It tore apart synagogues, friendships and even families. Some didn’t feel Isreal should become a state. Others felt it was their duty to go to Isreal to fight while others were willing to raise money and even buy guns for the struggle. Lecturers toured representing both sides. Fights broke out. People were arrested. I could see this as a background of a charming love story.
If you want to make this film, it just so happens my masters thesis was: The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle and Its Reaction to the Birth of Isreal: 1947-48
