I’ve always thought the story of the Marquis de Mores, a French nobleman and war hero who came to the US in the 1880s to set up a cattle empire and wound up embroiled in a range war would be a great movie. He was in several gunfights, including one where his life was saved by the receiver of his rifle taking a bullet that would have killed him. In the end, he wound up divesting himself of his cattle ranch and wound up going into the Lybian desert as a self-appointed goodwill embassador for the French to the Muslims. He was the only European in his caravan and the Taureg tribesmen that were accompanying him betrayed and attacked him. Armed with only a pistol, he held them off for several hours before inevitably dying just days short of his 38th birthday.
Did they ever make a movie about Corrie ten Boom? She was a devout Christian living in Holland during WWII, and she and her sister and their elderly father turned their house into a hiding place for Jews. She wrote the book The Hiding Place, which I thought was quite moving.
There was a movie made out of The Hiding Place. I saw it in the theaters, if you check on IMDB you should find it. The real Corrie appeared briefly at the end of the movie. It was the first time I’d ever heard of her story.
For The Hiding Place
Anabasis, also known as the March of Ten Thousand.
They did one of those crappy, retelling in modern tones movie version of it, but I would love to see the real story of it.
In 401 BC 10,700 Greek Hoplite soldiders - mercenaries from all over the Greek-speaking world - marched to Babylon to fight for Cyprus of Persia. Cyrus was defeated and the Greeks were stranded thousands of miles from safety. They fought their way back to Greek and made it with 5 out of every 6th man. They lost more in the bitter cold of Armenia than they did in battle. Along the way they encoutered all sorts of hardships along with a bewildering variety of peoples and cultures.
I’d only want a very skilled person to take up this story there. There is so much potenial for it to be made into an amazing movie. Unfortunately, I am afraid it will be ruined by Hollywood like so many other Greek classics.
ava, that tale must be a byword for “difficult movies to make” I once heard a movie reviewer speaking of a director who was hot at the time. The reviewer said “he could probably get the go-ahead for doing Xenophon and the Ten Thousand if he wanted to.”
My brother has talked occasionally for years about writing a screenplay based on the Anabasis.
I’ve always thought you could make a good movie about Helen Keller’s adult life, as a prominent radical labor activist.
Other good subjects:
Christine de Pisan.
Roger Bacon.
Petrarch.
Cyrano de Bergerac (I mean a real biography, not another filmed version of the well-known play).
Alexandre Dumas (there’s an excellent book about him, The King of Paris).
Baldwin writes:
> Christine de Pisan.
> Roger Bacon.
> Petrarch.
> Cyrano de Bergerac (I mean a real biography, not another filmed version of the
> well-known play).
> Alexandre Dumas (there’s an excellent book about him, The King of Paris).
Tell us why these people’s lives would make a good story.
It’s interesting that nearly all the stories people have suggested in this thread have been about heroism. Two of my three suggested stories were about people who screwed up their lives (and other people’s lives), while the third was about disappointment in youth followed by eventual accomplishment in late middle age. Doesn’t anyone have any depressing stories to tell?
Searching on imdb.co, I didn’t find a movie already made from The Long Walk about Slavomir Rawicz , the Polish soldier sent to Siberia by the Soviets, who escaped with several other Poles and walked out of Siberia, across the Gobi desert, over the Himalayas (where they encountered yetis), and down into India. Until she died in the Gobi, there was a woman with them. Which is good, because we must accept that the lack of both strong male and female characters can limit a story’s ability to be made into a movie.
There used to be a great website about the 1894 fire in Hinckley, MN, but it’s gone now; sorry about the lack of links.
After an extraordinarily dry summer a logging company tried some backburning whch failed spectacularly. The fire got out of control, of course, and the fire raced its way towards town. One telegraph operator someplace along the rail line started warning other telegraph operators what was going on, stayed too long, and ended up dying, but his actions saved the lives of many people up the line - except for the ones who jumped into a slough to save themselves; they boiled to death. A train engineer stayed in Hinckley as long as possible to load as many people as he could. He left at the last moment possible and the next trestle was already on fire when the train crossed it, collapsing as soon as they reached the other side. Lots of little personal survivor-type stories.
The movie itself would probably end up really crappy, but in the right hands it would be a nifty little disaster flick about someone no one outside of Minnesota really knows.
Secret Soldiers: The Story of WWII’s Heroic Army of Deception
It’s hard to read this book and not imagine what it would be like as a movie, especially with the extraordinary mix of characters that made up the U.S. Army 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. This secret unit was comprised of actors, artists, engineers, sound technicians and camofleurs, whose job was to create the illusion of a significant military force in areas where actual troops could not be spared. This was accomplished through the use of false radio communications, sound effects and pyrotechnic displays to simulate artillery fire and vehicle movement, and full-scale props such as inflatable tanks and artillery pieces (which were “concealed” with intentionally inadequate camouflage for enemy planes to photograph). The Special Troops would also wear the insignia of whatever division they were impersonating in order to further confuse enemy intelligence.
(I think it was designer Bill Blass, one of the more notable members, who mentions in an interview that, setting everything else aside, the 23rd Special Troops was probably unique in the fact that since it was made up largely of artistic types, it was probably the only American unit during WWII in which it was acceptable to be flamboyantly gay.)
Shifting gears a bit, I also offer for your consideration Jay J. Armes: World’s Most Successful Private Eye. Published back in the '70’s, this book is a wonderfully self-aggrandizing and unintentionally surrealistic account of the career of Julian Armas, who managed to rise above a a crippling childhood accident that left him without hands, to become the greatest private dick in the universe. (Some may remember him as the “Hook-handed Villain” from Hawaii Five-0). His exploits range from rescuing of Marlon Brando’s son Christian to recieving a pair of solid-gold limb prosthetics from a thinly disguised Howard Hughes.
I did a quick search on what Mr. Armes might be up to these days, and to my surprise I turned up at least one internet rumor stating that Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame is ostensibly working to package the great detective’s escapades as a movie. Stan seems especially jazzed about Armes’ trademark prosthetic limbs, which he describes as imbuing the guy with superhuman powers and abilities, although based on the photo of Armes in the article I’m more curious about what sort of strange Bond-style gadgets his hairpiece conceals.
I’d like to see Velma Demerson’s autobiography, Incorrigible, adapted for film.
It’s unlikely, because the story is somewhat similar to The Magdalene Sisters, but I’d like to see happen it anyway. Partly because it happened here in Canada, but also because there are a few extra dimensions to the story. I think it’s important to acknowledge that that sort of abuse can and did happen here.
(I’d also like to see a dramatization of Leilani Muir’s story. (She was one of thousands of women who were forcibly sterilized under Canada’s eugenics laws.
Gee, I guess I like kind of downer movies.
For another depressing movie, how about a Lawrence of Arabia sequel? How Lawrence tried to find peace under assumed names in the military, failed, retired into seclusion, and died?
Nah, nobody would want to see it, I suspect.
Has there been a film about Raoul Wallenberg? IMDB suggests that there hasn’t been a Major Motion Picture.
I would love to watch a movie about all the people in Afghanistan, such as Dr. Yousof Asefi who, at great risk to their lives, hid and disguised art and cultural treasures to prevent their destruction at the hands of the Taliban.
I always like finding out the “second most famous event in famous pople’s lives,” and sometimes think that those would make interesting films.
In the mid-1890s, his lawman days behind him, Wyatt Earp wound up in San Diego (or maybe San Fran, I forget), living pretty much as a sportsman, and in one instance refereed a professional boxing match which ended in him declaring victory (I forget all the details) for an unpopular boxer. His life was threatened, etc., the newspapers had a field day with him, and for a time this actually seemed to overshadow that gunfight outside Fly’s Photographic Studio (which was down the street from some corral, I forget the name).
–How about a movie about Leland “Lou” Diamond, famous Marine. Yes, the actor got his name from there.
–Or Chesty Puller, wherever he may be.
–The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald.
–The search for the identity of Little Miss 1565.
Sir Rhosis
Sir Rhosis writes:
> --How about a movie about Leland “Lou” Diamond, famous Marine. Yes, the
> actor got his name from there.
>
> --Or Chesty Puller, wherever he may be.
>
> --The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald.
>
> --The search for the identity of Little Miss 1565.
Could you tell us a little about each of these stories?
Basically: a terrible fire destroyed a circus in 1944 and one little girl is still unidentified.
I used to work with an English born lady named Eve Gordon in Montgomery, AL. She died recently. She was one of the pioneers of the Hospice program and there was a reason. Her life would be an incredible story- a shame she’s dead and can’t be an advisor.
This is just an abstract treatment:
Dr. Gordon was a cross-country skier in her youth (1930s) who competed on the British Olympic team (unsuccessfully). She later became a nurse. One of her patients was the son of a German diplomat in London who was brought in with severe head injuries after a major car accident; he was essentially given up for dead. Attending doctors told her that he had no chance whatever if he lost consciousness as he would fall into a coma and die (I’ve no idea what the logic of this was, but I heard it from her own mouth and she was a completely reliable person). She talked to him through daybreak and was running out of things to say and exhausted herself and, struggling for something, she remembered the church down the street and told him “Oh, you have got to hear the bells? Have you ever been in London on a Sunday morning? The bells all over the city… they ring and they ring and it’s deafening but it’s glorious… there’s nothing like the Sabbath morning in London! It’s wonderful… it is something that you must hear! You cannot go to sleep until it is Sabbath morning and the bells are ringing!” and he stayed awake and he lived.
After World War 2 broke out she became increasingly active in the British secret service due to her medical knowledge and her skiing abilities. She was dropped behind enemy lines to perform medical rescue and later flat-out acts of espionage. She describes receiving a Dutch Jewish newborn so young that his navel was still bleeding and hearing his parents say Kaddish as she took him away (the baby lived). She told an incredible story about how she met her husband (I’ll spare you because it’s really long, but at one point they were hiding in the hollow altar of a church while Nazi PA systems offered food and money for anybody who would turn them in dead or alive). She told an incredible story about a man she stripped naked in the snow so that his many bullet wounds would kill him quickly and how for the rest of her life she began each morning by saying his name (and then later had her children and grandchildren do the same)- he had lost his entire family and even his friends in the war and their saying of his name was to commemorate the fact that he had lived.
As the war moved into Europe she became increasingly active as a battlefield nurse. Among her duties was a morbid form of triage: she actually assigned precedence to wounded soldiers awaiting surgeons based not on the extent of their injuries but on such factors as who would take the least amount of time. For example: soldier A is seriously wounded and will die without surgery, but surgery could probably save him- however, it would take two surgeons several hours to operate on him during which time Soldiers B and C would possibly die, Soldier D (who requires a two hour procedure) would almost certainly die, Soldiers E & F would lose limbs, and Soldiers G, H, I and J who arent’ that seriously injured can be quickly patched up and sent back to the front in a few days where they can help their desperately outnumbered comrades. She literally sent men to their death who could have been saved in interest of “the greater good” and she felt tremendous guilt over it. This was why she vowed that when the war ended she would do all in her power to help everybody have as painless and peaceful a death as possible, and she founded hospices all over the world to achieve this purpose.
But her most incredible story:
She was in a village in Eastern Europe ruled by a Nazi official notorious even among other Nazis for his bararity. In the town square there were literally crosses on which resistance members had literally been crucified. Dr. Gordon was being sought for by the Nazis and she had equipment for a radio for the resistance on her person (that alone was punishable by death) when Nazi tanks sealed off each end of the street she was on. She took refuge in a house with a terrified family she didn’t know. The gestapo officer in charge ordered the death of every man in every odd numbered house for starters and then the searching of the others.
She sat holding a screaming child from the family whose house she was in- there was no real hiding place. She heard shots, doors being kicked in, people screaming, the wailing of a mother whose children had been killed in front of her a few doors down, breaking dishes and wanton destruction and cruelty and cursing in German, more gunshots, and finally the inevitable- the door of the house she was in being broken down. The family was taken away and she was held by German soldiers who found the radio equipment and began beating her, calling her every kind of b!tch and cnt and whre as they did so and she knew that she was going to be tortured to death.
Her eyes were filled with blood and tears when the gestapo official who had ordered the killings and the crucifixions came into the house. He grabbed her face, looked at her, and reached for his gunbelt and she was relieved: he’s going to shoot me in the head- I’m going to die fast.
He didn’t reach for his gun but rather a kerchief which he used to wipe the blood and tears from her face. He examined her, pulled her to her feet, barked some orders to his men, and tossed her out the door saying “Get out of here! I’m giving you back your London Sunday morning bells.” Needless to say, it was the German diplomat’s son who she had saved and who had become a brutal bastard who saved her life.
Anyway, if I were a Spielberg or a Howard or a Scorcese, I would fly Eve’s children first class to whereever I was and ask for any stories like these, and of course if the movie was a smash success I’d endow hospices with part of the profits.
The William Desmond Taylor murder needs to be a movie.
There has yet to be a great film treatment of Sarah Bernhardt’s life (Glenda Jackson was in a very lackluster telling in the 70s, but the Divine Sarah deserves better).
Alexander the Great as the subject of a miniseries would work far better than as a movie.
Monica-gate would make a great film.