Real life stories that ought to become movies

Cafe Society
41

Lou Diamond was one of those “love em or hate em” colorful Marines who served in the 20s-40s. A hardened combat veteran, cruel, yet loving, hardcore, yet he raised chickens behind the barracks, by the book, yet he wore an unregulation goatee, etc. Kind and gentlemanly to women, yet he referred to female Marines as BAMs (Big-Assed Marines).

Chesty Puller was the USMC’s most famous Commandant.

The “Edmund Fitzgerald” was a ship that sank in Superior in November, 1975 (or was it '76?). Made famous by the Gordon Lightfoot dirge.

Sir Rhosis

42

IMDB did mention a TV movie about Wallenberg.

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0090285/

43

In the early 1990s in a tiny town (about 400 people) in the Panhandle of Texas, there is a story that begs to be told and the irony is there is (or was) a blueprint for the script.

A couple married and had two children (girls). The couple were very popular and religious, he was a good old boy, best friend with the local deputy sheriff and she worked at the local school and was truly loved by both the community in general and the tiny school community. Little by little he became abusive to his wife who eventually decided to call it quits and separated from him and sent him packing to his parents place on a nearby farm. He began harrassing her and the family.

She got a restraining order against him yet he would park just the other side of the restraining order distance and watch the house with binoculars. He would also follow her car whereever she went. The drinking buddy deputy would do nothing, not believing that his good friend would ever do any such thing. Afterall they had known each other since they were in kindergarten together.

Prom night rolled around about three or four months after the separation. And the oldest daughter was just old enough to go but not old enough to drive herself so her mother drove her and dropped her off at the school where the prom was. The mother had decided to take the other daughter a fourth grader to a neighboring community about 10 miles away for ice cream.

As she drove the two lane high way between the two communities, a car came up behind her and started ramming her from behind. It was her husband in his pickup. She sped up and so did he and he continued to ram her from behind. Speeds hit over 100 mph. When she got to the neighboring town (a community of about 2,200 people, she headed straight for the police station beeping her horn all the way. She got there with her husband right behind her. She jumped out of the car and went running towards the front door of the police station, but before she could get there her husband had pulled out his shotgun and shot her in the back, killing her.

The police chief was coming to the door when he heard the shot, he stepped outside saw the husband with the shotgun chambering another shell, drew his revolver called for the husband to drop the shotgun and when it was clear he had no intention to do so the chief shot the husband twice and killed him. The younger daughter saw it all.

An hour later, the other daughter, wearing her first ever formal gown, was called out of prom and told that she was in the space of seconds, an orphan.

I say there is a blueprint for the script because the wife kept a diary of the activities that were happening to her from the beginning of the abuse to roughly an hour before her death.

The diary was given to a sister of the murdered woman who raised the girls and I imagine that it was later given to the oldest daughter. I do not know what she did with it.

44

Or how about the whole incredible, shameful story of the Bonus Marchers of '32. It’s got everything: Hoovervilles, both Hoovers (J. Edgar’s files on the march can be found here), MacArthur, Ike, mass panic in the streets, and comically quaint-looking tanks. I think Gen. Butler played a role as well.

One RLS that might actually get filmed soon is the life of TV pioneer Philo Farnsworth. Aaron (West Wing) Sorkin had a treatment going around the studios a year ago, but nothing’s been heard since.

45

…okay, I have to find out more about this lady…what an amazing life! Hollywood, make this movie!

46

A biopic of WEB DuBois would be fascinating.

The Scopes Monkey Trial.

Great Chicago Race riots of 1919.

A biopic hip-hop scene, beginning with the Jamaican father of Hip-Hop, Kool Herc, and his influence on the early rap hip-hop scene in NYC, say, the first ten or twelves year, ending whenever it was Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons start Def Jam and sign a 16-year old LL Cool J. I want to wallow in nostalgia: the soundtrack better be bumpin.

L. Ron Hubbard’s founding of Dianetics, particularly how he secured its first Hollywood adherents.

47

It would be cool if there was a serious movie about Erik the Red and Leif Eriksson.

48

“Why do they call you Erik the Red?”

“You attend one lousy little Party meeting as a kid…”

49

Inherit the Wind

50

Inherit the Wind was a very inaccurate account of the Scopes trial. For that matter, it didn’t even pretend to be accurate. That’s why all the names were changed.

51

Victory

52

How about a Sam Clemens biopic?

And I’m not a huge football fan, but I think the story of the 1925 Pottsville Maroons and their “lost” championship would make a great period sports movie.

53

Speaking of race riots, one of the worst in U.S. history was in Tulsa and it’s almost totally forgotten.

A stage project I’ve sometimes worked on but since I’ve been working on it for years and it’s never gotten any closer to fruition I’ll share it: a biographical play based on the life of Joel Chandler Harris (author of the “Uncle Remus” tales). The play would feature puppetry (for the Uncle Remus tales), biographical tidbits (Harris was the illegitimate child of an Irish day laborer and a “fallen angel” and hardly the silver spoon plantation heir some assume he was) and a black actor who portrays the “real” Uncle Remus (a composite character) in the first act and W.E.B. Dubois in the second (Dubois and Harris had a correspondence- Dubois was his first outspoken critic).

A movie about the making of BIRTH OF A NATION would be interesting as well, or a biopic of Hattie McDaniel (who at the height of her career lived in a 30 room mansion that she paid for by shuffling along saying yas’m on camera).

54

There are several incidents that I found fascinating, and, when I was an undergrad, wrote plays about (only one of which ever got produced). Somtimes someone else would eventually make a movie about it. After I read about the life of Joseph Merrick (sic), The Elephant Man, I thought that would make a great play. But almost immediately afterwards, Bernard Pomerance’s play came out, followed a couple of years later by the David Lynch movie. Both were good in their own ways, but they deviated pretty far from reality, and something closer to what we now know to be the truth would be interesting.

I thought that the story of Lady Jane Grey was fascinating, and wrote Jana Non Regina about her. Years later a film was made (with a pre - ST:HG Patrick Stewart as her father and with a very young Cary Elwes as Guilford Dudley), which was very good, but which I think was historically inaccurate (I think Guilford Dudley was not at all as Elwes portrayed him).

As far as I know, no one has dramatized The Peasant’s REvolt of 1381, in which the peasants of England rose up and virtually drove out the King and his court, then rather naively hopede to set up the King without all the Barons. Leader Wat TYler was killed when he rode in to negotiate. I wrote The Fortnight about this one.
Finally, an event that partially took place in my hometown in New Jersey was the trial of Weequehela, the Lenape sachem in Perth Amboy 1727, accused of murdering his neighbor, Captain John Leonard, over the sale of a parcel of land. Fascinating stuff, but it had never been properly reported in histories of New Jersey. I finally wrote a lengthy article for New Jersey History setting it straight (See this page for a little bit about his, almost at the bottom of the page: http://lenapenation.org/index/index2/history/lenapehistory.htm ) Weequehela got put on and taped for a course I was in.

55

Cal, you’ll appreciate this:

Q: Who was the leader of the Pedant’s Revolt?

A: Which Tyler.

56

Danny Casolaro and the Octopus would make JFK look like Pearl Harbor.

Casolaro was a freelance investigative jouralist who started out investigating a bit of garden-variety fraud involving Meese’s Justice Department and a software company called Inslaw. But the case just kept getting weirder and weirder until he started writing a book called The Octopus about a wide-ranging conspiracy bent on world domination that grew from the World War II-era OSS and included all the great classic conspiracy bugaboos like Majestic 12, the Grassy Knoll Shooter, the CIA, Wackenhut Security, Area 51, and COINTELPRO. He told his family he was going to West Virginia to meet with a witness that would blow the whole case wide open. Then he was found dead in his hotel room in rural West Virginia–an apparent “suicide”. The movie would either be about The Big Con or One Man’s Descent Into Madness, depending on your point of view.

57

AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggghhhhhhhhh!!!
The Pain!

It Burns!

58

I would have to second Sampiro’s friends life story. That sounds utterly fascinating!

Faces of Hope This woman who took these pictures for a beautiful, captivating, thought provoking book nearly didn’t get it published as somewhere in Asia, she was in a horrific bus accident, had her arm severed off and fly out the window;reattached by some teenager, driven with her broken back by a British relief worker to a decent hospital 8 hours away, and spent several weeks before she could be shipped back to the states. She spent the next year undergoing many operations and was told she would never walk again, etc.

59

King Norton The First, Emperor of America.
In May 1945 Hans Van Meegeren was arrested, charged with collaborating with the enemy and imprisoned. His name had been traced to the sale made during the second world war of what was then believed to be an authentic Vermeer to Nazi Field-Marshal Hermann Goering. Shortly after, to general disbelief, Van Meegeren came up with a very original defense against the accusation of collaboration, then punishable by death. He claimed that the painting, The Woman Taken in Adultery, was not a Vermeer but rather a forgery by his own hand. Moreover, since he had traded the false Vermeer for 200 original Dutch paintings seized by Goering in the beginning of he war, Van Meegeren believed that he was in fact a national hero rather than a Nazi collaborator.

60

How about that of Centralia? It was, at one point, a small coal-mining town in central PA. It’s now a ghost-town, deserted. In the early 1960’s, there was a fire (the link says it was a trash fire, but I for some reason was thinking it was a machinery accident) which ignited one of the veins of coal under the ground. There are, however, still a few hold-outs living there, who’ve refused to leave.