Maybe it’s too soon, but along the lines of The Queen, what about Aung San Suu Kyy? I mean, I suppose we need to wait for the current drama to play out, but in a year or so, we have a drama that focuses on that, with lots of flashbacks to her past, including her childhood, but especially on the ordeal that won her the Nobel Peace Prize.
I’s also like to see a really good one on Helen Keller’s later life, one that focuses on her Socialist activism (she asked the US government to support the fledgling Soviet Union at a time when no one knew how later history would play out), and her time as a Suffragist. Right now, as far as I know, the only thing on her later life is a kinda lame TV movie with Mare Winningham that focuses on her college years. Plus a throwaway line in the movie Iron-Jawed Angels that HK supports the younger, more militant Suffrigists, not the older, staid ones.
Ferdinand Verbiest, Jesuit missionary to China, participant in VERY high-stakes astronomy competitions, and inventor of the first steam-powered vehicle in history.
Similarly (with less anthropology and more corpses) Bass Reeves. There was a movie but not big and Morgan Freeman supposedly wants to make a miniseries.
Though if it doesn’t contain Blazing Saddles in jokes I’ll be disappointed.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh. In addition to being Charle’s wife, she led an amazing life and left behind a slew of diaries and letters about it. I would highly recommend her works, and those of her daughter Reeve Lindbergh.
I’d love to see warts-and-all biopics of Walt Disney, Gene Roddenberry and Stan Lee.
A couple of Janis Joplin movies have been tied up by lawsuits for upwards of 40 years. Janis Joplin:Get It While You Can, the most promising of them, is apparently dead in the water.
I’ve mentioned this in another thread: the history of MAD. From Bill Gaines creating its first issue to Antonio Prohías working in (and subsequently fleeing from) Cuba to the purchase by Time Warner and the old guys adjusting to their new work environment.
I want to see one of Jim Henson. From the early days, where he really wanted to be on television (story is he went to the local station and asked, was told they needed a puppeteer, so he checked a book on puppetry out of the library, went back, and said, “okay, now I’m a puppeteer”), finding success in commercials and then on Sesame Street, making his name with The Muppet Show and its cast of characters, on to the more sophisticated projects he craved to do like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, to his all-too-soon, all-too-preventable death and one-of-a-kind funeral.
Of course, it’ll probably never happen, because licensing all of those characters from the various sources that own them is a massive undertaking.
Real people: Daniel Lewin. Wealthy (on paper) IT genius and MIT student who served in an Israeli counterterrorism military unit. He was on flight 11 on 9/11 and was killed by the hijackers while trying to stop the hijacking. I read his biography, but he deserves a movie too. Maybe he’d be one of Silicon valley’s wealthy elite had he not died.
Another person who deserves a movie. Adam Brown. Overcame a crack cocaine addiction and became a member of DEVGRU, died in combat.
I’ve mentioned Tom Molineaux before, but his life was pure cinema: born a slave in Virgina, fought his way out by winning his freedom as a bare-knuckle boxer, travelled to Regency England, boxed his way up through the ranks to challenge Tom Cribb, the world champion, in what was perhaps the first ever Anglo-US sporting clash, lost a close fight in a disputed verdict in front of a partisan crowd, then succumbed to drink and gambling and died penniless at the age of 34.
Magneto has had extensive flashback scenes though.
Similarly, Rick Rescorla. Cornish, joined the British army, then volunteered for the US army in Vietnam. Became a security officer in the World Trade Center and died a Hollywood appropriate heroic death. He was important in a book that became the film We Were Soldiers,but he counts because they wrote him out of the film.
Read James B. Stewart’s Heart of a Soldier, and the New Yorker article that it expanded upon, The Real Heroes Are Dead.
As his friend Dan Hill said: You see, for Rick Rescorla, this was a natural death. People like Rick, they don’t die old men. They aren’t destined for that and it isn’t right for them to do so. It just isn’t right, by God, for them to become feeble, old, and helpless sons of bitches. There are certain men born in this world, and they’re supposed to die setting an example for the rest of the weak bastards we’re surrounded with.
Last week a woman told me about her grandmother, Frances Dean Smith, who published poetry under the name FranceEyE. She was Charles Bukowski’s girlfriend for a while and had a child with him. She worked at a World War II codebreaking unit in Washington, D.C.: