LONE RANGER'S FIGHT FOR LIFE, PLUS RON MAXWELL PT. 2!

SEE ‘LONE RANGER’ – OR ELSE!

I did – I saw it and I thoroughly enjoyed it, as Round-up regulars know from my review (HERE’s the link if you missed it). I knew the purists – whether devotees of Fran Stryker, Brace Beemer or Clayton Moore – would have some problems with it, as did I, but I thought overall it was so well done that I strongly recommended it. I was relieved to see, on various internet posts, that many (though not all) fellow traditionalists agreed with me.

J.R. Sanders, Western writer, and creator of the Read‘em Cowboy program that’s become a big part of the National Day Of The Cowboy, made the following post, which I’m quoting in its entirety:

“I, for one, have given this movie the horselaugh from the moment I first heard about it. A Disneyfied Lone Ranger? Johnny Depp as Tonto? Give me a break! Like many others, I reserved particular scorn for the goofy hats and Depp’s dead crow headpiece.

“Yesterday, I went to see the film, for a couple of reasons:
1. Henry Parke gave it a glowing review, and Henry’s usually spot on.
2. I figured I couldn’t legitimately criticize a film without actually seeing it for myself.

“Long story short, I had a hell of a good time. Yes, it’s campy, it’s inauthentic, and it’s cheesy in spots. In short, it’s a Disney film. But I’d maintain that for the most part, it’s not much more campy, cheesy, inauthentic or implausible than many of the classic Westerns we self-proclaimed hardcores cut our teeth on. Think back for a moment…Roy Rogers, riding the range in a sequined shirt, saving the umpteenth ranch from an evil banker/land baron, on behalf of the poor widow du jour. Realistic? Hardly. Entertaining? You bet. How about Gene Autry, in sometimes less/sometimes more gaudy duds, swapping horses for planes, trains and automobiles at the drop of a cowboy hat, often all in the same picture. What the hell year was it supposed to be, anyway? Did we ever know? Did we care? And you could be sure that if a guitar appeared, either of those fellows would abruptly pause in the midst of his heroic derring-do and burst into song. Historically accurate? Man, I hope not, or America’s a sillier place than Camelot.

“Now consider the standard against which most detractors are judging this film– the Clayton Moore/Jay Silverheels versions. There was Tonto, wearing a costume than looked like it came from a bad Thanksgiving pageant. There was the Masked Man himself, wearing a form-fitting, unicolor outfit that would be more at home on a figure skater than a Western icon, and strapped with a double buscadero gun rig so blingy and pimped-out it would be the envy of any modern-day rapper. Did that bother anyone?

“My point, of course, is that Western films and TV shows have always been escapist, and have always included the fanciful as well as the factual - some going for realism and historical fidelity and others made for pure entertainment. And as long as the filmmakers and producers are honest about which sort they’re making, I think that’s o.k. There’s room for both. There always has been.”

Also, press reports on the ‘failure’ of LONE RANGER at the box office are misleading. Stan Smith, manager of Big Sky Cinema in Dillon, Montana, explains it this way. “Just to give some insight on the release schedule, Disney released RANGER on Wednesday to limited screens as their other current film, MONSTER U, was ending its 2nd week. They went wide on Friday with RANGER on a weekend that is considered the busiest of the summer for outdoor activities. DESPICABLE ME 2 was released wide on Wednesday with many more screens than RANGER. Out of fairness RANGER opened well for the release it had. It was up against an animated family film. Also, film critics are notoriously hard on westerns. I, for one, never regard anything critics have to say as worthy of my attention. I run a first run movie theatre and we opened THE LONE RANGER to sold out shows, 3 shows a night. Everyone I talked to enjoyed it thoroughly! I thought it was a good direction to take the story. Much like was done with the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN films. I knew Clayton Moore in his last years. He was a gracious gentleman. I am certain he would have loved their take on this story.”

And I would like to add that this is the first theatre-released Western I can recall in decades that is making an active play to get kids in the seats – there are even two ten-ish boys with major roles. And many of the negative reviews are from critics who have no knowledge of or sympathy with the history of the American West, whether factual or fanciful. 

I’m not saying it’s perfect; I am saying it’s damned good, and great fun, and if people don’t buy tickets, then studios will conclude understandably that audiences don’t want Westerns, and this mini-boom of Western production, which has been growing since 3:10 TO YUMA (2007), with miss-steps like JONAH HEX and COWBOYS & ALIENS, but triumphs like APPALOOSA and TRUE GRIT and DJANGO UNCHAINED, will run out of track. Let’s not forget that LONE RANGER was initially cancelled by Disney, due to the disappointing box office of COWBOYS& ALIENS.The success of every Western helps our cause, and the failure of every Western hurts it. You know Disney, and you know Gore Verbinski and Jerry Bruckheimer: they want this to be a franchise; they want to make more, and it’s in our best interest to help them. 

And while we’re on the subject, if you haven’t caught Ron Maxwell’s COPPERHEAD yet, in theatres or on pay-per-view, I’d suggest you do it. It’s not a big war movie like his previous Civil War pictures, but the story of those at home deserves to be told as well. Besides, he wants his next picture to be about Belle Starr, and he wants to do the third movie in his Civil War trilogy from the books by Michael Shaara, and the success of one leads to the possibility of the next. Spend your money!

RON MAXWELL INTERVIEW – Part 2

As I detailed in the June 27^th Round-up, my interview with Ron Maxwell, the director of GETTYSBURG, GODS AND GENERALS, and the new Civil War-at-home drama THE COPPERHEAD (read part 1 of the interview, and my review, HERE http://www.henryswesternroundup.blogspot.com/2013/06/gettysburg-dir-maxwell-returns-to-civil.html) was cut short because we were having too much fun, and went over time – other interviewers were waiting in the wings.  Ron promised we’d find time to finish our talk and, good as his word – always a surprise in Hollywood – two mornings later the phone rang, and it was Ron, in Atlanta, en route from the airport to a meeting.  We completed the interview as he rode along.  My next question was about novelist Bill Kaufman, who scripted THE COPPERHEAD from the novel by Harold Frederic.

HENRY:  Bill Kaufman is a well-respected writer, but as far as I know, this is his first produced screenplay.

RON MAXWELL:  It’s his first produced screenplay, but it’s his second screenplay.  He and I worked on a project before this one.  The working title is ANTEBELLUM – it takes place in the 1830s and the 1840s.  It’s an original screenplay based on real events.  I think he’d be the first one to admit I am his tutor as far as screenplay writing, but he’s a quick learner and, as you know, a very accomplished writer.  I work very closely with writers when we start to work on a screenplay.  When I first met him at a conference, I was impressed with his wit, his intelligence, his sense of humor.  He’s a man who’s free of cant, and who’s free of political correctness.  He’s a free man.  And those are the kind of free-thinkers that I appreciate. 

HENRY:  Now Billy Campbell played General Pickett in GODS AND GENERALS, for you.  What was it like to work with him again?            

RON MAXWELL:  Well, we actually did three movies together, because he plays Lt. Pitzer in GETTYSBURG.  He has that one kind of ‘laugh-line’ in the picture, when Chamberlin asks where the 20^th Maine should be positioned on the third day, and he says the safest place in the battlefield,  right smack-dab in the middle.  He had just that one scene in GETTYSBURG, then he had the one scene playing Pickett during the Battle of Fredericksburg.  He’s a very accomplished actor, and so when I began this project I thought of him right away; he was just role of perfect casting for the role of Abner.

HENRY:  By the way, have you seen him playing Lincoln in the Bill O’Reilly KILLING LINCOLN? 

RON MAXWELL:  I did – that was actually filmed and aired while we were in post-production.  We filmed COPPERHEAD months before he filmed that; but being a big movie, we’ve got to take a lot of time in post-production.  So during the ten months of our post-production they filmed that and it aired, and I thought he did a good job.  And he got to play Abraham Lincoln, and an Abraham Lincoln critic, all in the same year.

HENRY:  (laughs) That’s range for you!  How’d you like working with Peter Fonda?

RON MAXWELL:  Oh, he’s a lot of fun; he’s an icon.  He comes from a dynastic family.  In the film, there’s one scene where he meets Abner, and they speak about the issues that are dividing the town.  And that first shot, when you first see him, is an exact replica, to every detail, to his father playing YOUNG MISTER LINCOLN in John Ford’s 1939 film.   The only difference is that film was in black and white, and ours is color.  After we finished filming that scene, Peter looked up in the sky and said, “Dad, I hope you’re proud of me.”

HENRY:  All of your Civil War films have been shot by Holland-born Kees Van Oostrum.  What special gifts does he bring?

RON MAXWELL:  This is our third picture together, so we don’t have to spend too much time talking about things anymore, because we share an aesthetic.  We have a style; all three movies have a certain style, I refer to it as the classical style.  We all have our own personalities, our own idiosyncrasies of course because we’re all individuals, but it’s the same style that Speilberg works in; that the Coen brothers work in; that Ang Lee works in.  The classical style which has been practiced for a hundred years of filmmaking.  It’s been refined and revised, and we make it our own, but it’s antithetical to what is the fashion today; moving the camera constantly, and fast cutting.  It’s a different way to make movies.  And Kees and I work in that tradition, that classical style, which is meticulous composition, meticulous lighting.  You just set up each shot one at a time, and design them.  So it’s a very deliberate, well-composed, well-lit filmmaking.  And within that style, Kees is a master.  He paints with the camera.  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say COPPERHEAD is like a Vermeer painting from beginning to end, come to life.

HENRY: You have a very talented cast, but aside from Billy Campbell and Peter Fonda, I wasn’t familiar with many of them.  How did you assemble them? 

RON MAXWELL:  Rene Haynes did our casting out of Los Angeles, which was international casting – we cast from the entire Anglophonic world of actors for the six or seven leads.  And then the remainder of the cast, the other twenty-five or so parts, we cast right out of the Maritimes where we knew we were going to be filming.  Sheila Lane was our casting director in Halifax, and she did a good job of bringing forward some of these regional actors; and what talent, what depth there was there.  We found some veteran actors like Hugh Thompson who plays Hurley, and total newcomers who’d never done film before, like Josh Cruddas who played Jimmy.  And then on the international casting out of Los Angeles, we found Casey Brown, who plays Jeff Beech, and he at the time was a junior at USC; this is his first film.  So we’ve got first-time actors alongside veterans like Angus McFadyen, Billy Campbell and Peter Fonda.  They all worked really well together; seamlessly, I would say.  I think it’s a wonderful ensemble of actors; I’m very pleased and very proud of their work.

HENRY:  Where in Canada did you shoot?

RON MAXWELL:  We shot it in New Brunswick, along the St. John River.  They have a historic settlement called King’s Landing, and that enabled us to make a movie that otherwise would have been off the charts; it would have been hugely expensive, and therefore probably not even producible to make an independent, serious-minded film.  So it just gave us the opportunity to shoot it with scope and breadth, depth, really create the nineteenth century. 

HENRY:  How a long a shoot was it?

RON MAXWELL:  Thirty-four days.  You can do that when you have enough pre-production; we had four solid months of pre-production.  Enough time to do your homework, and a couple of weeks with the actors on the set.  So you prepare a movie properly, you can shoot at a pretty fast clip.  

HENRY:  Speaking to the whole question of doing a serious-minded film, a historical film, does it bother you how difficult it is to get a historical film made, and yet it seems easy to make ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER, with a $69 million budget?

RON MAXWELL:  Well, as you know, our budget was ten.  Look, vampires and zombies, that’s all the rage now, so that’s what the studios are doing.  They’ll be doing something different a year from now.  I’m in a different game.  That’s the studio game, and they can find very accomplished filmmakers to deliver the goods.  I’m an independent filmmaker; I do what interests me, not what the factory wants to produce.  And what interests me is where I spend my time.  It’s a little more difficult to put things together, but I’m an entrepreneur as well as a filmmaker, and you’ve just got to figure these things out. 

HENRY:  In 1939, when my mother was in high school, her American History teacher fell behind, so she skipped teaching the Civil War, and assigned her classes to see GONE WITH THE WIND – which they were tested on.  I have a number of friends in their 20s and 30s that saw GETTYSBURG and GODS AND GENERALS in high school, as part of their study of the Civil War.  Are you surprised at the films’ longevity, and growing reputation, that they are taught?

RON MAXWELL:   Well, I’m delighted.  I was surprised initially, when I realized what was going on, not just in junior high schools and high schools, but in colleges, and in graduate programs.  There are people, executives, who get on a bus, to visit Gettysburg for leadership training, and going up and coming back, they’re watching GETTYSBURG on the bus!  It speaks to people of all ages, all kind of professional levels, and I’ve just been so profoundly pleased that the film has taken on this life.  And I’m not exaggerating, Henry; it’s more important to me than what the critics say, what the box office results are; because that stuff was important on the day.  But when the dust settles, it’s the life that the movie has afterwards.  And the fact that neither of those movies, GETTYSBURG or GODS AND GENERALS, has been forgotten.  On the contrary, they’re being rediscovered, reaching wider and wider audiences.  And I meet people all the time, and they can recite the script, they’ve seen these movies so many times, they know them better than I do.   I think they are respected because people realize we really tried to be honest to the time, honest to the people, honest to the history.  We knew we were never going to get it all right, I would never make that claim, but I think people understand that we made a best-faith effort to get to the truth of what made those people tick, and that’s why they like the movies; that’s why they connect with the movies.  Hopefully the same connection will be made with THE COPPERHEAD. 

HENRY: Your battle scenes, and the moments leading up to the battle, are unusual because, in some unspoken way, you communicate the terror of individual soldiers going into direct combat to a degree that other filmmakers don’t.  Do you know what you do differently, that it registers the way it does?

RON MAXWELL:   Well first of all, I write the scenes that you have to have.  And you’re quite right: very few movies, and I would never say ‘none’, but very few movies spend time anticipating the battle, building up to the battle.  And anybody who’s ever been in combat will tell you – and I’ve never been in combat, but my father was in World War II, and I have friends who were in Vietnam – and they’ll tell you.  The joke is, it’s weeks of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.  And it’s the anticipation of battle that’s so important to see.  Not just to set it up in terms of what’s going on logistically; so the audience knows who’s where, and what the stakes are, tactically.  But also, the character of the men, see the adrenaline building, the fear building.  All the energy that breaks through before they have contact.  Because until it happens, no one knows if they’ll survive it.  It’s so important to establish, before the clash occurs.  Otherwise, all you’re left with is that action, which can be visually interesting, but it won’t be emotionally interesting. 

And the other thing, from a camera point-of-view is you’ve got to get close.   It’s all well and good to have the big panoramic action scenes, but you have to get close, you have to have big close-ups, with your leading actors, and see what they’re going through, and I think that’s what really connects with the audience and makes it emotional.

HENRY:  While most war movies have traditionally focused on action, yours focus as much on tactics, especially with Gettysburg and Little Round Top.  Do you think most of your audience can follow it?

RON MAXWELL:  Yes; I think it’s very important to be specific.  What you know, having watched these movies as carefully as you have, is that no two battles – you can look at the three-days battle in GETTYSBURG, and the four battles that are in the director’s cut of GODS AND GENERALS – no two are the same.  Why?  Because the terrain was different.  Time of year was different.  The protagonists are different.  Rivers were involved in some; rivers were not involved in others.  You had to have pontoon bridges.  The time of day; whether the light was in the eyes of the soldiers, or not.  The tactic that a particular commander used.  Whether it was cavalry; whether it was infantry; whether it was artillery.  You have to take all these things into consideration.  And then, they’re different battles, so they’re going to be photographed differently.  I think that’s what these films have; they have a unique way of presenting mid-nineteenth century battles, and nothing is generic.  It’s the generic fighting, where the director takes the movie, and he treats the fighting of the Peloponnesian War as he would the Civil War as he would World War II…  There’s a sameness that is deadening, because the camera isn’t looking at specific things.  I think that one of the things that makes these movies work is they’re very specific, in terms of how people fought, the weapons they used, that kind of thing.  And another thing that we chose to do is just to limit the violence.  You could make these movies horrifically violent; blood and gore non-stop, and you know what?  It would be authentic.  But the problem with that is, first of all you move to an ‘R’ rating, which eliminates all the kids under seventeen years old – which is ridiculous, because these are movies about American history.  They should see them.  Secondly, I want to communicate with people’s hearts and souls.  I don’t want to make them feel sick.  What’s important to me is that Armistead dies.  That’s a man; that’s a human being.  It’s not about the particular wound, about how the bullet entered his abdomen, how the blood gushed out – that’s not what’s it’s about.  We know those graphic things happen.  What it’s about is that the man died; that the human being perished.  The man we’ve been with through the movie, and cared about.  My emphasis is on the people, not on the wound.  We show the wound, but we don’t show it graphically, and I think that is another thing that distinguishes me, distinguishes these movies from what other filmmakers do.  But I don’t criticize other filmmakers who do that – it’s just not my style. 

So you take all those things together, the feelings of the people, the feeling of the men in the battle, and the fact that you understand tactically what’s going on.  Another thing we try to do is to not confuse the audience.  It’s a thin line to walk, because war is confusing; there is chaos.  So you’ve got to capture the chaos, but at the same time, not confuse the audience.  If the audience is confused, then they tune out.  So the audience has to understand who is where, and understand at the same time that the characters are in a state of chaos.  So that’s why it’s story-boarded, thought through, and shot in a very deliberate manner. 

HENRY: Your first two Civil War movies were made with the legendary entrepreneur Ted Turner.  What was your working relationship like?

RON MAXWELL:  It couldn’t have been better.  I’m in Atlanta as we’re talking, and we’re going to screen the film tonight, for a charity of his choosing.  We’ve been doing benefit screenings for six weeks now, all across the country, and I called Ted and said we’d love to do a screening for one of your charities, so he selected the Atlanta History Center; that’s where we’re showing it tonight.  He’s a great guy.  I didn’t have contractual final cut on either one of those movies, but in reality I did have final cut, thanks to Ted Turner.  Because as we know, he’s a man with strong ideas; he lets you know his opinions, and they’re mostly really good, mostly really good ideas.  But every time he would say, “Ron, it’s your film.  Do it the way you want.”  So in fact, thanks to Ted Turner I was able to make the movies I wanted to make, without any pressure of any kind. 

HENRY: Your films brought a lot of overdue recognition to Jeff Daniel’s character, Col. Joshua Chamberlain.  His home in Brunswick, Maine, long split into apartments, is now the Chamberlain Museum.  With the 150^th Anniversary of Gettysburg a few weeks away, have you heard President Obama is being lobbied to award him a posthumous Medal of Honor?  Think he should? 

RON MAXWELL:  That shows you how ignorant I am – I didn’t know that Chamberlain didn’t have a Congressional Medal of Honor.  I thought he did.  Well he certainly deserves one! 

HENRY: I was curious; why did you leave Custer out of Gettysburg?

RON MAXWELL:  Well Custer was part of the cavalry battle on the third day, what we know as Cavalry Field, and it’s separated from the current National Park; it’s part of the National Park, but it’s separated by a mile of town.  The reason it’s not in the film is the reason a lot of stuff is not in the film.  A huge part of the Battle of Gettysburg is not in the movie GETTYSBURG because it’s based on Michael Shaara’s book, THE KILLER ANGELS, and it tells the story of those characters, which is a work of fiction.  It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, not for history.  So it’s the Battle of Gettysburg from the point of view of those characters who were in THE KILLER ANGELS.  There are parts of the battle that needs to be commemorated by other filmmakers. 

HENRY: If someone who had not seen your Civil War films, in what order would you suggest they be watched?

RON MAXWELL:  They probably should see the two previous ones on their own, because they are of a piece, they follow the same characters.  And I think the best order to see them in is chronologically, even though GODS AND GENERALS was made ten years after, I think you start with GODS AND GENERALS because it takes you from 1851 through the spring of 1853, it ends soon after the Battle of Chancellorsville, and GETTYSBURG picks up in June of 1853.  The director’s cut of GODS AND GENERALS is five hours; the director’s cut of GETTYSBURG is four and a half hours, so that’s nine and a half hours: that’s more than enough for a weekend!  COPPERHEAD stands on its own.  It can be seen before or after, because it’s a different story; a different time. 

HENRY: You directed two of our finest actors, Martin Sheen and Robert Duvall, in the role of Robert E. Lee.  Which performance was your favorite, or more historically accurate?

RON MAXWELL:  Again, if you look at the title of the book that GETTYSBURG was based on, it was THE KILLER ANGELS.  And there’s a scene in GETTYSBURG when Killrain and Chamberlain are talking about the rights of man, and he refers to the quote, ‘What a piece of work is man,’ etc.  The title comes from Shakespeare, and so if you look at those two actors, who are both terrific actors, they both brought things that are authentic to the role of Robert E. Lee, but they’re very different, in the same way that two actors can play Hamlet, and you’ll have the same text, but two different interpretations.  So if you think of the title of the book, Martin Sheen’s Robert E. Lee was more of the angel, and Robert Duvall’s tended to be more of the killer. 

COPPERHEAD is playing in theatres around the country, as well as on pay-per-view.  To find out more, visit their official website HERE. 

THE WRAP-UP

Well folks, that's about it for this Round-up!  Hope you have a great week!  If there are a lot of little boxes around words, and stuff highlighted in blue, I have no idea why, but I couldn't figure out how to get rid of it.

Hi-yo Silver!  Away!

All Original Contents Copyright July 2013 by Henry C. Parke - All Rights Reserved

 

‘GETTYSBURG’ DIR. MAXWELL RETURNS TO CIVIL WAR WITH ‘COPPERHEAD’

Ron Maxwell directing new recruits

‘COPPERHEAD’, the new Civil War film from ‘GETTYSBURG’ and ‘GODS AND GENERALS’ director Ron Maxwell, opens on Friday, June 28^th, at select theatres around the country.  It will open wider depending on its reception in its first week, so if you are interested in seeing it, and in seeing other serious historical dramas, I urge you to make a point to catch it right away.  You can learn more about COPPERHEAD HERE.

RON MAXWELL INTERVIEW – Part One

Henry Parke and Ron Maxwell

Moviegoers in general, and Round-up readers in particular, are likely most familiar with writer-director Ron Maxwell from his previous two Civil War masterpieces, GETTYSBURG and GODS AND GENERALS, both based on novels by Michael Shaara – the film GETTYSBURG is actually based on Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize Winning novel THE KILLER ANGELS.  But before he took on the War Between The States, Maxwell had directed a wide and varied group of films. SEA MARKS (1976) was a two-character TV movie based on a play by Gardner McKay.  VERNA:USO GIRL (1978), an episode of PBS GREAT PERFORMANCES, based on a Paul Gallico story, starring Sissy Spacek, won supporting actor Howard deSilva an Emmy, and a best director nomination for Maxwell.  Next came LITTLE DARLINGS (1980), featuring Tatum O’Neal and Kristy McNichol as summer-campers in a race to lose their virginity; THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT IN GEORGIA (1981), a drama based on the country hit of the same title; KIDCO (1984), a comedy about kids in the fertilizer business; PARENT TRAP 2 (1986), a reworking of the Disney hit, again with Haley Mills in two roles; and a documentary, IN THE LAND OF POETS (1987).  For some weeks, Maxwell has been traveling around the country previewing his new Civil War drama, COPPERHEAD.  He was kind enough to meet with me before his Santa Monica preview, to discuss his newest film, as well as GETTYSBURG and GODS AND GENERALS, and future plans that include a Western!

HENRY: Did you always intend your Civil War films to be a trilogy?

RON MAXWELL: Well, the third part of the trilogy is THE LAST FULL MEASURE, which we haven’t yet done, and perhaps will never do.  Like the first two, it’s another movie that is in the epic form, it’s going to be a long movie; it’s huge battle scenes.  It’s got all the other elements the other two have of the epic, and that is an entirely different kind of movie than COPPERHEAD.  COPPERHEAD is more in the realm of traditional story-telling, within two hours.  So in that sense it’s more like what most movies smell and feel like.  The other two are huge departures, and they have more to do with the epic form, where you have Abel Gance’s  film (NAPOLEON), D. W. Griffith, you think of the theatric form, it’s its own genre, and it predates cinema.  It’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (a series of four heroic Richard Wagner operas), it’s Milton; it’s a different tradition.  COPPERHEAD, it’s fair to say, is in my Civil War anthology, but not my trilogy, because THE LAST FULL MEASURE would deliver the third part.  But certainly a third movie in the Civil War.  And it’s added up to dedicating a huge part of my life invested in making movies about that part of history.   

HENRY:  I was wondering if you’d decided to space the films ten years apart, or if that’s just how it worked out.

RON MAXWELL:  It’s just how it worked out, because these things are not easy to set up, to finance.  There certainly is time involved in research, in writing a screenplay, for sure – you don’t rush into these kinds of movies.  But the bulk of the time between the movies is setting up the financing, because I’ve been forty years making movies, and thirty of those have been in Hollywood.  And I’ve yet to see or hear of any weekly meeting at a studio when the executive in charge says, “Does anyone have a Civil War movie we can do?”  (laughs)

HENRY: (laughs) I specialize in Westerns, so I know exactly what you mean.  Now you’re another NYU guy, right?

RON MAXWELL:  Yup.  I graduated NYU School of Film & Television in 1970, with my MFA.  My class (included) Jeremy Kagan, Martha Coolidge, a few others – a pretty neat bunch of people. 

HENRY: Why is the Civil War such an important subject to you?

RON MAXWELL:   The first connection from a movie-making point of view came with THE KILLER ANGELS, because I read that book in ’78 and I just connected with it as a great story,  great literature, great characters, that happened to be about the Civil War.  If it was about a different war I probably would have connected to it as well, because I was responding to a piece of literature and a story that I felt called to tell; people that I felt very compelled and interested about as a filmmaker.  Having said that, back up.  From the time of my childhood, my daddy took my younger brother and I to historical sites.  I grew up in northern New Jersey, so where we would go on weekends and family trips were places that were Colonial history, French & Indian War, American Revolution.  We visited Ft. Ticonderoga, Ft. William Henry, Saratoga, and this informed my childhood.  As soon as I could read I was reading about Nathan Hale and Ethan Allan and Robert Rogers – I grew up with this stuff.  And I walked on the places and I sat on the canons.  It was a wonderful childhood.  I was a Boy Scout, overnight camping and all that stuff.  And so I grew up really steeped in and enjoying American history.  And then when I got older I took in European history as well.  So that by the time I read THE KILLER ANGELS in my late twenties, I had already read the works that those of my generation should have read by then, which were Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote – that generation of historians.  I was predisposed to subject matter taking place during the Civil War, but I didn’t visit my first Civil War battlefield until after I’d optioned the book, which might have been in ’80.   I lived in Manhattan at the time, and I drove down to Gettysburg for my first-ever visit to a Civil War Battlefield.  And Michael Shaara, who wrote the book, flew his own little plane, landed it at the grassy little landing strip at Gettysburg, and we spent three days together.  And he walked me through the battlefield, as he wrote about it in THE KILLER ANGELS: day one, day two, day three.  I had one of the best guides you could ever have to experience your first Civil War battlefield. 

HENRY:  How did you like Tom Berrenger, your Lt. Gen. Longstreet’s performance in HATFIELDS & MCCOYS? 

RON MAXWELL:   I didn’t see it, because I was filming.   That came out last summer, and I was in Canada making COPPERHEAD; otherwise I would have seen it.  I heard it was wonderful. 

 

Martin Sheen as Lee in GETTYSBURG

HENRY:  With GETTYSBURG, you popularized the use of Civil War reenactors, instead of standard issue extras in standard issue Western Costume uniforms, to play the battle scenes.  It really revolutionized the look of war movies in general, and Civil War movies in particular.  Why did you do it?  What were the advantages?

RON MAXWELL:   Well, when I started on GETTYSBURG, anybody that works in the movie business knows, the first thing your confronted in is what is the upside potential, and what is the downside risk.    You can apply that to almost any business, but those are the terms you hear in the movie business.  So for the upside potential, most people, when they play that game, mean “Get me Brad Pitt,” or “Get me Steven Speilberg.”  Because unless you get those big names, it’s hard to even guess the upside potential of anything.  As we know repeatedly, little films can suddenly do big business, anything can happen – you’re in a very volatile area.  That’s part of the excitement of the business.  The downside risk, that’s something to address as a filmmaker. When I looked at the Battle of Gettysburg, the only point to make a movie like this is to show the scale, otherwise don’t do THE KILLER ANGELS – do something else.  Find a short story by Ambrose Bierce.  Like OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE is one of my favorite short films, and you can do that with ten people.  But because it was the Battle of Gettysburg, and the expectation of people is you’ve got to have Pickett’s Charge. If you don’t, you’re going to get hounded out of the business, and maybe hounded out of the country.  So you know you have to deliver scale.  At the time we started this, shooting in the United States seemed like an absolute impossibility.  Before CGI became CGI, nobody was making movies like that in North America anymore; nobody.  The last ones that were made like that shut the studios down, like  CLEOPATRA in the ‘60s, and even that was made in Italy.  With that many extras and that many costumes and that many people to support, you’re in the D.W. Griffith world, the C.B. DeMille world.  This was in 1980 when the process started, and I was looking at Eastern Europe.   That’s where Dino DiLaurentis did WATERLOO with Rod Steiger, Christopher Plummer.  Because you could get the Red Army.  It’s sort of ironic, because here we are doing an archetypical American story, and you have to go to the Soviet Union in the height of the Cold War to make it!  I didn’t get to the Soviet Union, but I did go, in the ‘80s, to Hungary and Poland, to set up working with their armies which were, as we know, variations on the Red Army.  And you could sort of rent an army.  You still had to manufacture the costumes and all that stuff, but your costs would come down if you could shoot in Eastern Europe, and people were doing it, especially cavalry scenes.  So as I was investigating that, what was happening in the late ‘70s and late ‘80s was the burgeoning ‘Reenactor Movement.’  It started with a few thousand, and grew to tens of thousands.  I was tracking that, and I was going to reenactments, and what you’d see at reenactments was people who took it very seriously.  There was nothing generic and, like you said correctly when you were talking about the costume houses that had  done war movies in the past; they spent a lot of time on the costumes for the leads, they have the best costume designers in the world.  But the background would be generic grey or generic blue.  The difference was here, every single reenactor was portraying a specific soldier.  They knew the private that they were doing, or the corporal they were doing; they knew their name, and what battle they were killed at, or whether they survived.  So as a result their uniforms were meticulously put together.  They’re known as living historians.  They went to all that research and homework which no film crew would ever have time to do.  And they looked right, because they had the face hair, they had the mustaches, they had the eyeglasses.  So, you multiply this by 100 people or 200 people.  Now think of the cost savings – you’re not having to build those uniforms anymore.  And the more sophisticated reenactors, they would do what you know as galvanize; which means they could go both ways, they could do a Confederate impression – they call it impressions – and they could do a Federal impression.  They could do an officer; they could do a private.  Or they could do a Tennessee regiment; they could do a Massachusetts regiment.  And then, they also had the flags – just so authentic: they’d done all the research.  The cannons!  Five or six guys, mostly blue-collar guys – you’d find the occasional doctor or dentist or businessman, but mostly blue-collar guys – working nine to five at a job.  They’d pool their savings and manufacture these cannons!  These were thousands of dollars!  Real cannons, on carriages, that could really fire munitions!  Could you imagine if a movie company had started to manufacture, to make this stuff?  Forget it!  So on GETTYSBURG, a couple of things happened.  1989, the Berlin Wall fell – goodbye to that option.  Their whole film industry collapsed a few years later.  After I made GETTYSBURG I was in Bucharest, I was in Sofia.  And I met accomplished filmmakers, DPs, directors, writers, department heads that were driving cabs, who were shining shoes.  They were reduced to beggary, in the first years after the Wall fell, because everything collapsed; (the film industry) was completely state funded.  It was a sad thing to see.  Thankfully that industry has rebounded.  But the other thing, the coincidence of that collapsing, was that the reenactment movement was growing, so that’s why we really did something.  So that’s what we did, and you’re quite right, there had been little videos made with reenactors before, but never a major motion picture.  The one movie that used them before us was GLORY.  GLORY was made in ’89; our movie was filmed in the summer of ’92.  They used reenactors.  They went to the 125^th Anniversary of Gettysburg – we’re actually coming up on the 150^th – and they filmed it.  But they put their cameras on the outside, and they captured.  So the Antietam sequence at the beginning of GLORY, that’s from that 125^th reenactment.  They sat on the outside with long lenses, and they were able to get some very good footage.  And they augmented it with some tighter work with their actors.  What we did that was innovative is we built the reenactors in from the get-go.  So we didn’t go to a reenactment; we used thousands and thousands of reenactors.  We scheduled them in. We choreographed them to do exactly what we wanted, and we decided the camera moves, through them, over them, around them.  That was innovative; we were the first big film to use reenactors that way.  And without the reenactors – I’ve said this a million times – there’s no GETTYSBURG, and there’s no GODS AND GENERALS.  They were an essential pillar to making those movies, so you could see the scale.  You’d have the camera back, but also, you could move the camera in from a long shot to an extreme close-up, and you’re still in the 1860s.  The big difference, from my point of view, between the two movies, was on the first movie, we didn’t have the heart, and the chutzpah, to turn anybody away.  We thought, these are volunteers.  We gave them three meals a day, gave them fodder for their horses, gave them a place to put their tents, but they were still volunteers, and we didn’t have the heart to say, ‘You can’t participate.’  And so we accepted people who were overweight, and too old.  And we tried to put them in the background as much as we could, but it was a problem for us, constantly.  And the ADs (assistant directors) were trying to keep them in the back, keep the younger, leaner ones up-front.  On GODS AND GENERALS we said look, we’re making a movie here, and we’re just going to be really strict about this.  We had a much more stringent recruitment process, so nobody on GODS AND GENERALS was older than thirty.  Everybody looked like they were a real Civil War soldier.  They were young; they were lean.  And that, in terms of using the reenactors, was the big difference in the two movies.

HENRY:  Now, while KILLER ANGELS and GODS AND GENERALS were current or recent best-sellers at the time that you made the films, COPPERHEAD, by Harold Frederic, was pretty obscure, being a best-seller in 1893.  How did you come upon it, and how long were you aware of it?

RON MAXWELL:   I read THE COPPERHEAD sometime after the release of GODS AND GENERALS.  I’m always looking for Civil War fiction, and I’ve got what’s got to be one of the best collections around; I’ve been collecting for a long time.  And most of it’s out of print, but you can get it now, thanks to the internet, and second-hand bookstores.  You can get out-of-prints works now much easier than you could have even ten, fifteen years ago.  And I’ve had friends at different universities – David Madden, recently retired head of the English department at LSU.  He’s written extensively about Civil War fiction, essays and articles.  He was a great guide for me, to find books I didn’t know to look for.  And there is a lot there that is out of print, really worth discovering.  It’s like all the arts.  Every now and then I come across a piece of literature, or a poet, or a piece of music, an opera that I’ve never heard before, and I think, how did I miss this?  This outstanding work.  But it’s because we can’t have it all on our radar all the time.  And things fall in and out of fashion.  Harold Frederic is a very interesting writer.  In Edmund Wilson’s book, PATRIOTIC GORE, that was published sometime in the 1960s, which is a very important work, because he’s writing literary criticism of a hundred years of Civil War fiction.  And he singles out COPPERHEAD in that book as a singular work, unlike anything else written about the Civil War.  It’s unlike it because it’s about the North, about dissenters in the North, ‘copperheads’, if you will.  And he writes with great authenticity about middle-of-the-19^th-century rural America, and through his eyes you can see that part of the world in the same way that, through the eyes of Charles Dickens you can see Victorian England, without reading any other histories, just through the eyes of the fiction writer. 

 

Jeff Daniels as Chamberlain in GODS AND GENERALS

HENRY:  And see it, really, more clearly through the fiction than you could through history. 

RON MAXWELL:   Absolutely; because he’s writing characters.  He’s also writing dialogue that he heard.  There’s a line, for instance, one of many, when Esther is handing the ear of corn to Jimmy, and she says, “It’s tougher than Pharaoh’s heart.”  If I spent the rest of my life, I wouldn’t come up with that line.  That was from Harold Frederic, and he must have heard it.  He must have heard it in a community saturated with Biblical references, from cradle to grave.  So 90% of the dialogue, give or take, is from the book.  The other 10% Bill Kaufman wrote while turning it into a screenplay.  But Frederic is a wonderful author, and he had two moments: his own moment when it was published.  He was a very successful writer, and he made a good living at it; he was popular in his own time.  Then he fell into obscurity in the anti-war years.  Then he was rediscovered by Edmund Wilson, and you can see at that time there was slight rebirth in recognition – he was back in print.  Then he fell back into obscurity again until now.  We’re reissuing the COPPERHEAD novel.  We had to re-set the type because the one that’s currently available is very difficult to read – there are typos and grammatical errors.  So we re-set the type, and published in the same book, at the same time the movie comes out, is the screenplay. 

HENRY:  COPPERHEAD is a set in Utica, New York, about two families torn apart by the Civil War.  Several characters go to war, with dramatic results, but the war never reaches the town, and is never shown.  Was it a difficult choice, to keep the physical war out of the film entirely?

RON MAXWELL: Yes.  Of course, it’s not in the book, but you’re quite right; we had discussions.  Should we have a flash-back or a flash-forward, or cut to where Jeff is?  All the boys leave, and as they come back, we learn that they were all caught up in the Battle of Antietam. Some come back wounded; some don’t come back at all.  And we know through the testimony of (the survivors), who was shot and killed.  We discussed it.  We thought, why go there?  Because the movie is about the village in the North.  It’s about their not knowing.  They don’t have an omniscient eye.  They don’t have CNN.  They only know it, and they only knew it at the time, from newspapers, and people coming back.  So let’s keep it really where they live.  It’s about Abner; it’s about Jee; it’s about the families, the mothers and fathers.  So when those people in Watkins’s store, when (soldiers) first come back, they’re listening to every word, and that’s when they hear what happened to (the boys from the town).  It’s more effective, more dramatic, more emotional.  And later on, when (another soldier) talks about his experiences, it’s not in the book, but we put that in the blacksmith’s shop, so we have an excuse to have the bellows and smoke, and the hammering that then becomes gunfire, to at least atmospherically make it feel like battle. 

HENRY:  Billy Campbell as Abner Beech is a very unusual hero for a movie.  He’s branded a copperhead because he lives in the North, but opposes going to war over cessation.  He’s politically incorrect both in his day and ours.  His scathing comments about Lincoln, and his belief that ending slavery is not a good enough reason for one group of Americans to go to war against another.  Did you consider softening his stance to make him more likable and PC? 

RON MAXWELL: The only thing we did, and anyone who reads the novel will see it, is dispensed with the ‘n-word.’  We just don’t need that, and we can portray this authentically without offending people.  But other than that we portray him honestly as he was.  He is on a spectrum of people who were generically called copperheads.  It’s like today we call people conservatives, we call people liberals.  That’s a pretty broad label to put on people, considering how different we all are from one another.  Copperhead was a term of derision, a contemptuous term used by pro-war Republicans against anyone who disagreed with the war effort.  But within those people who disagree you get people who were racist then, and racist now, and they could care less what happened to the black man.  But then along that spectrum you had people like Abner Beech, who was absolutely against slavery, pro-Union, but just did not think that this was the solution.  As he articulates in the film, sometimes you can take a bad situation, even an intolerable situation, and make it worse.  We’re having this debate now about Syria.  There’s a massacre going on there.  But if we go in there with the U.S. Army, and bombs and airplanes, how do we know we’re not going to make it even worse?  So these kinds of questions are always with us, they’re ethical dilemmas.  But the feedback we’ve gotten from audiences so far – we’ve had twelve or thirteen public screenings – enjoy the fact that it’s a film that presents ethical, moral dilemmas, where it’s not easy to sort it out.  Because it wasn’t then and, guess what: it isn’t now.  Now I have to share with you, because I know what you write about.  I am planning to do a Western.  It’s called BELLE STARR; it’s based on the extraordinary book by Speer Morgan, that was published in ’79.  I had it set up in ’79 and ’80 at United Artists.  And they were going to do it, and then HEAVEN’S GATE came out, and my Western, and every other Western collapsed.  That’s how long I’ve been going to do it.  But we have a new script; it was co-written by Alan Geoffrion, who wrote BROKEN TRAIL.  We’ll see how well we do at the box office with COPPERHEAD.  If we do well, there’s a good chance that BELLE STARR will be made next summer. 

HENRY:  I’ve enjoyed your wide range of films, including LITTLE DARLINGS.  Now this might sound to some like an out-of-left-field reference, but many of your non-Civil War films – PARENT TRAP 2, KIDCO – have focused on young people making a transition to adulthood and independence, which is a central theme of COPPERHEAD. 

RON MAXWELL: You’re the first one to bring this out, and it’s very true.  Thank you for the question, because people that were invested in this film are young, and again, as in the earlier question you asked about the former movies, they were preoccupied with officers.  They went to West Point, they were veterans together.  They were relatively highly educated, for their age.  But the guys who fought the war, and died in huge numbers, were boys, what we would consider boys, under twenty years old.  So it was very important that we cast this picture young.  And the actors are young.  Lucy Boynton turned eighteen just before we started filming – which was good, we didn’t need to have a social worker on the set, and a teacher.  So we cast it young, because that’s the truth, that’s the true image of the war.  I love stories with young people.  We had in our marketing meeting, we forget, we tend to think that people who are interested in the Civil War, in American history are a quote – unquote, older audience.  But this movie is about young kids, so we keep on saying, in our marketing efforts, don’t neglect the young audience.  The young audience can connect with this movie just as much as an older audience. 

We weren’t actually done at this point, but Ron Maxwell’s people had to hurry him to a screening in Santa Monica.  He promised to call me, to answer the rest of my questions, and two days later, en route to a screening in Atlanta, he did.  I’ll have part two of this interview in the Round-up very soon.

 

‘COPPERHEAD’ REVIEW

After a map shows the relative positions of Virginia and New York, and the voice of a lad we’ll come to know as Jimmy suggests what the Civil War, already a year old, will do to his home, we see six boys strolling down a green country lane.  It’s so idyllic, their exuberance, their all-so-different hats that each thinks makes him an individual, that you can’t help thinking of Huck and Tom in Hannibal, though these boys are a shade older.  Their discussion of the war is fanciful and childish.  And yet they are the very age – and some will be the very boys – who will cause, and be victims of, the carnage that ravaged America in the War Between the States.  

If you, like I, are a fan of writer-director Ron Maxwell’s two Civil War epics, GETTYSBURG and GODS AND GENERALS, then COPPERHEAD is decidedly not the movie you would expect to conclude his war-between-the-states trilogy.   And while Maxwell intends indeed to make it a trilogy – read my accompanying interview with Maxwell – this is not that film.  Those films are about military officers, professional soldiers.  This is a film about privates; at worst, about cannon fodder, the world and the homes and families that produced them.  The war, in fact, is never seen, though it is a perpetual off-screen presence whose effects upon a remote community in upstate New York are the core of the story.  Harold Frederic wrote the novel in 1893, basing it on the memories of his youth in Utica, New York, during the Civil War. 

 

Abner Beech & family in church

Because it is the parents who produce these lads, it is also the story of the title character, Abner Beech (Billy Campbell), a dairyman and lumberman who sides neither with the Union nor the Confederacy.  While he has no love of slavery, he is more concerned that President Lincoln is ordering Americans to fight Americans, a demand he believes to be unconstitutional.  For this, Abner Beech is labeled a ‘copperhead,’ the pejorative the anti-slavery Republicans used to describe Democrats who would rather negotiate a quick peace with seceding southern states than end slavery and preserve the Union.  It is also the story of Jee Hagadom (Angus McFayden), a barrel-maker, crushed after the death of his wife, his life taking on new meaning with his abolitionist  obsession. 

 

Fonda, Maxwell, Campbell

But mostly it is the story of the callow youth, and most of us can see ourselves, to our chagrin, in either the ones who blindly parrot their parents’ political beliefs without understanding them, or those who arbitrarily reject those beliefs as a sign of their independence.  And some of us can see ourselves in both.   Abner has a son, Jeff (Casey Brown) a bright and likable fellow, smitten with Hagadom’s daughter, schoolmarm Esther (Lucy Boynton), and he maddens his father by spouting Hagadom’s opinions.  Abner suspects Hagadom is directly responsible for the growing hostility the community is showing to him, sabotaging his ability to make a living, so he’s not open to his son’s often sensible comments.

Esther is having things no easier – her father has told her it would kill him if she married Jeff.  Her brother Ni (Augustus Prew), who has no wish to be a soldier, is crushed to be a disappointment to his father.  Jeff’s parents have raised an orphan, Jimmy (Josh Cruddas), nearly as a son, and he, too, is torn between loyalty to his adopted family, and his desire to think for himself. 

Some looking for adventure, some to impress a girl, some in a fit of pique, the boys go off to war, and Abner and his family are not only minus a son, but soon become the stand-in victims of a populace that wants to get their hands on their Southern enemies, but cannot.  The rising level of abuse and cruelty, inevitably reaching its brutal, destructive crescendo, is as upsetting as it is familiar, because times may change, but human nature does not. 

 

Peter Fonda

All of the international cast is strong, but worthy of particular note is Peter Fonda, in a low-key performance as the blacksmith, sounding board for Abner and others, who has strong opinions, but a rarely encountered open mind as well.  COPPERHEAD is about the effects of war, and the people who fight wars, but it is not about war itself.  You won’t get that rush of thrill and terror, because the battles never reach the screen, since they don’t reach the town, though the often shattered remnants of the war do come back.  COPPERHEAD is a thoughtful, well-made, involving film that raises difficult issues without presenting facile conclusions.  There is much food for discussion here.  My one criticism is that the tone is at times overbearingly solemn, in a way that, combined with a sometimes perfect but sometimes somber score, grinds all action to a halt.  A house-fire that promises some excitement is drawn into slow-motion at a time when you desperately want things speeded up.  But for all the darkness, it is a hopeful, inspiring story that will transport you to a world you’ve only read or dreamed about, populated by people you know all too well. 

SONY MOVIE CHANNEL CELEBRATES WESTERNS IN JULY WITH MARATHONS AND ‘BACK IN THE SADDLE’ SWEEPSTAKES

The Sony Movie Channel regularly features Westerns in their line-up, but they’re pulling out the big guns in July.  For the first week of the month, every night will include a western double-feature, every Wednesday night will be all westerns, and July 7^th and July 28^th will be all-day Western marathons! 

In addition to the Western films, Sony Movie Channel is providing one lucky winner the chance to experience what it is like living the cowboy way with its “Sony Movie Channel Back in the Saddle Sweepstakes.” One grand prize winner of the sweepstakes will enjoy a trip for two to Lost Valley Ranch in Colorado. The winner will get to experience the western lifestyle for 3 days and 2 nights at the dude ranch, plus airfare to Denver and $500 cash for incidentals. Also, six weekly first place prize packages will be awarded, where winners will receive a pack of Western movies and a pack of limited edition SMC hot sauces. The sweepstakes has started, \ and ends July 31, 2013 at 11:59PM Pacific Time. To enter, go to https://www.facebook.com/SonyMovieChannel or www.SonyMovieChannel.com. See Official Rules for complete details.

It’s an interesting mix of sagebrush sagas, from 1948 to the 21^st Century.  Among the Westerns they’ll be featuring are Audie Murphy in ARIZONA RAIDERS and 40 GUNS TO APACHE PASS; Randolph Scott in A LAWLESS STREET and DECISION AT SUNDOWN; Gary Cooper in THEY CAME TO CORDURA;  Tom Sellick and Sam Elliot in THE SHADOW RIDERS; Robert Duvall in BROKEN TRAIL; Brad Pitt in LEGENDS OF THE FALL; Matt Damon in ALL THE PRETTY HORSES; West Studi in GERONIMO: AN AMERICAN LEGEND; Glenn Ford in JUBAL; George Montgomery in THE PATHFINDER and BATTLE OF ROGUE RIVER; Van Heflin in GUNMAN’S WALK; Fred MacMurray in FACE OF A FUGITIVE; Robert Young in RELENTLESS; and James Garner as Wyatt Earp opposite Bruce Willis as Tom Mix in SUNSET.  Visit HERE for details. 

HALLMARK’S CANADIAN-SET WESTERN SERIES TO BE SHOT IN COLORADO!

How’s this for a switch?  Hallmark’s new Western series, WHEN CALLS THE HEART, (read my March 25 article here: http://henryswesternroundup.blogspot.com/2013/03/hallmark-greenlights-when-calls-heart.html) based on the best-selling CANADIAN WEST book series by Janette Oke,  set in 1910, involves the romance between a school-teacher and a Royal Canadian Mountie, and will be shot not in Canada, but in and around Telluride, Colorado.  Colorado Governor Hickenlooper and Hallmark President Bill Abbott made the joint announcement, noting that it’s the first TV series shot in the area since FATHER DOWLING MYSTERIES in 1991! 

The series will have a extended pilot premiere on October 5^th, with three-time Emmy winner Jean Smart, and Lori Loughlin, the series proper beginning in January 2014, starring Erin Krakow (“Army Wives” “Castle”) and Daniel Lissing (“Last Resort”) in the romantic leads, and it’s not yet determined if Smart and Loughlin will be returning.

Based on the best-selling CANADIAN WEST book series by Janette Oke, set in 1910, it’s the story of Elizabeth Thatcher, a cultured teacher who, with misgivings, gives up her comfortable city life to become a teacher in a prairie town on the western frontier.  She’s determined to prove her independence to her doubting family, and her doubting self.  She’s helped in part by drawing inspiration from a late Aunt’s secret diary.  It seems the Aunt had a similar adventure, and similarly had a romance with a Royal Canadian Mountie. 

Author Janette Oke and the Hallmark Channel have had a long and successful partnership since 2003, when they first adapted her book LOVE COMES SOFTLY.  It’s led to a dozen titles from the series since then, most or all of them westerns, many with LOVE’S (ADJECTIVE) (NOUN) titles.  The WHEN CALLS THE HEART movie was written and directed by Michael Landon, Jr.      

 

THE WRAP-UP  

That's all for this Round-up.  Sorry it's so late, coming on a Thursday instead of the previous Sunday -- I've received emails from friends who were afraid that something had happened to me!  The fact is, my wife and I had our first chance to get out of L.A. in two years, and we grabbed it.  And I cheerfully left the computer behind!

I should be back on schedule with the next Round-up on Sunday!

Happy Trails,

Henry

All Original Contents Copyright June 2013 by Henry C. Parke -- All Rights Reserved