What historical figure/event would you like to see a movie about?

[Quixote1818]

I would love to see an epic movie about Coronado's journey into the Southwest looking for the seven cities of gold. They were traveling into an area where they didn't know what they would encounter. The first battle between Europeans and American Indians occurred during that journey when they clashed with the Zuni Indians.

It might be too long for a movie. Might need to be a TV historical series.

I would also love to see an epic movie about the founding fathers leading up to the American Revolution. Nothing really epic has ever been made.

Here are some other events I would like to see:

1. A better more accurate, intimate story of Geronimo starting with his birth and the slaughter of his family in Mexico. To understand Geronimo we must experience the slaughter of his family.

2. Onate blazing the El Camino real from Mexico to Santa Fe.

3. The life of Kit Carson from his early trapping days to his time guiding Freemont to California and his time fighting Indians and fighting in the Civil War.

4. Maybe an epic movie about Clovis people (Mammoth Hunters) in the Southwest during the last Ice Age when we had Giant Sloths, American Lions, Saber Tooth Cats, Camels etc. here in North America.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

1. There was a TV movie about Geronimo

Geronimo: An American Legend. Little about his birth but it did cover the slaughter of his family.

Rodney Grant who also played "Wind in his Hair" in "Dances with Wolves" was in the starring role. Jason Patrick, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall and Matt Damon were also in the movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107004/

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

2. Maria Bochkareva and the Women's Battalion of Death

I think Maria Bochkareva, nicknamed Yashka had one of the most interesting lives of the 20th century. She was married at a young age to a very brutal alcoholic man who beat her. She left him and joined the Imperial Russian Army and was sent to a regiment in Siberia where she was sexually abused and ridiculed by the male soldiers. She sent a letter to the Russian Czar Nicholas II who gave her permission to join a military unit that saw real action in World War I. She was wounded 4 times and received 4 Crosses of Saint George. Finally, she was given permission to form and lead an all female Russian combat battalion of some 2,000 volunteers (many of them war widows) called the Battalion of Death. The Battalion fought the Germans in the trenches alongside male units. At the battle of Smorgon, the Russian army was pinned down and refused to advance. Maria Bochkareva ordered her battalion out of the trenches and attacked the Germans head on, daring the male units to follow her bravery. About 300 of her soldiers survived. Later, she was assigned to a White Russian unit is the Caucasus but the Bolsheviks (who she had previously refused to fight against) captured her and were about to execute her. But one of their members recognized her and told his commander of her incredible bravery. They let her go and she traveled across Russia to Vladivostok where she boarded a freighter and sailed to America. There she met President Woodrow Wilson and begged him to intervene in Russia to try to stop the wholesale slaughter. She also wrote a famous book entitled Yashka: My Life As Peasant, Exile, and Soldier. She returned to Russia in 1919 and was executed by firing squad.





Another great but unheralded figure of the 20th century was Father Marie Benoit, a priest in the south of France who saved over 4,000 Jews from the holocaust, hiding them in an underground railroad and placing them in the homes of private people, at great risk to his own life. On 1 December 1966, Yad Vashem officially recognized Father Benoit as a Righteous Among the Nations and he is one of the heroic figures of the war. When the Germans closed in on his operation, he had to flee to Italy, narrowly escaping capture. A book entitled The Impossible Mission was written about his life.

[Quixote1818]

4. That sounds interesting and ready made for Hollywood. nt

[chknltl]

9. Two Russians made the list!

I am biased for my selection, (post 8) but truth be told, Maria Bochkareva is a great story, one,
I suspect, few of us have heard of prior to your post. Why was she executed? Seems to me she should be considered as a hero! I concur, her tale would make for a grand film.

(Might I suggest Mila Jovovich to play her part?)

[CreekDog]

3. Parche and his reincarnation

:think:

[sasquatch]

5. Arminius

Otherwise known as Hermann the German.

[Danger Mouse]

28. Interesting idea. He certainly was a headache for Augustus.

[sasquatch]

32. "VARUS, GIVE ME BACK MY LEGIONS!!"

[BreweryYardRat]

43. Harry Turtledove's got a fictional account of the Teutoberger Wald battle coming soon.

Amazon says April 14, 2009.

[sasquatch]

49. Cool

[cemaphonic]

6. I've always thought the succession war at the end of Shah Jahan's reign would make for great drama.

He was the fifth ruler in the Indian Mughal dynasty, and is best known for building the Taj Mahal, and he had a mostly peaceful and productive rule. But near the end of his reign, his 4 sons engaged in a huge and bloody fratricidal war for succession while he was still alive, with the winner, Aurangzeb actually imprisoning the old Emperor in one of his own forts.

Anyway, it's got treachery and personal betrayals, daring escapes and set-piece battles. The only real problem is that from a modern American standpoint, it would be a bad-guy-wins scenario, as the victor Aurangzeb was a Muslim zealot that overthrew the Mughal tradition of religious and cultural tolerance for its subjects (not to mention a usurper, as Shah Jahan was not only still alive, but preferred another son as successor).

[rockymountaindem]

7. World War II

Has anybody made a movie about that one?

Honestly, I think it would be interesting to see more dramatizations of the Spanish Civil War based on non-fiction accounts (i.e. not a remake of "For Whom the Bell Tolls") as well as a film about the German takeover of Czechoslovakia from the Czechoslovakian perspective.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. There have been plenty of Spanish movies about the Spanish Civil War

but they tend not to be shown outside the film festival circuit. The only one that has gone mainstream is Pan's Labyrinth.

[chknltl]

8. Stepan P Krasheninnikov (Explorations Of Kamchatka 1735-1741)

ATTENTION FILMMAKERS:

Stepan Petrovich Krasheninnikov
1711-1755
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Krasheninnikov

(The next two paragraphs by Ciel Yogis):
"It was not until 1724 that the Tsar Peter I of Russia commissioned the first official expedition to Kamchatka. His chosen leader of the expedition was Vitus Bering, a Dane who served in the Russian navy for 20 years. Bering was sent to discover whether there was a land bridge between Asia and America to the north, and although his mission did not achieve this particular goal, it was successful in bringing Kamchatka to the attention of the world's scientists. Aboard Bering's ship was a man by the name of Georg Wilhlem Steller, whose expertise in the area of concocting medicines from Siberia's plant life saved hundreds of crewmembers' lives from scurvy. Unfortunately, Steller could not save Bering, who died of scurvy in 1741. Steller's most recognized success, however, was on Kayak Island, one of the Aleutian chain, where he was able to describe 160 plant species. Steller died at the age of 37 in 1746.

Steller was the first to ignite an interest in the vast mystery of Kamchatka and the Bering Sea area, but the first full account of the peninsula was recorded by a natural scientist named Stepan Krasheninnikov. This Russian-born professor and explorer succeeded in describing the religion, myths and beliefs of the natives, their customs and their language. He experimented with the land by trying to grow grain, and lived in a house full of plant and animal collections that he studied. He got along extremely well with the indigenous peoples of Kamchatka, a friendship that was given full value in his book "An Account of the Land of Kamchatka," published after his death in 1755."
http://www.pbs.org/edens/kamchatka/remote.html

That is simple enough but what is left out of this account:
The VERY YOUNG, (16-17 maybe 18 I think), Stepan P Krasheninnikov, an uber-smart student at the Petersburg Academy of Natural Sciences, was sent by Peter The Great to be on the Bering expedition. He quite literally had to walk from Moscow across Siberia, (think Lewis and Clark expedition), to Kamchatka taking careful note of the flora, fauna and geography along the way. Once there he was to await for and meet up with the Bering Expedition. While waiting Stepan 'went native' exploring and documenting all aspects of this wondrous volcanic landscape known to us today as the Kamchatka Peninsula. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamchatka_Peninsula

Because Stellar was a senior natural scientist, he and Bering REJECTED Stepan, considering him superfluous and left him behind to tend to his own fate. Eventually he returned to Petersburg to file his report with the Academy of Science.

His story is one of a very harsh walk across an utterly unmapped and mostly unknown Siberia in order to even reach Kamchatka. Once there his mind remained that of a scientist while conditions forced him to learn to live as one of the natives. He is a mix of: Galen Rowell-(astonishment of the visual beauty he fond himself in), Lewis and Clark-(copious detailed notes on: cultural anthropology, geology, biology, botany, agriculture and climatology of the areas he travelled through), John Muir-(he enjoyed exploring the high volcanoes which run spine-like the length of the Peninsula) and Gulliver-(he marvelled at the unknown cultures he encountered on his journey of exploration).

Krasheninnikov naturally felt bitter and betrayed by Bering and Dr. Stellar, but put his time to use in a way that truly should be retold. I ran across his name while doing research on Pacific Salmon for a college paper years ago. I have his book: EXPLORATIONS OF KAMCHATKA North Pacific Scimitar which I recommend as a base for any film-making but I recall reading Stepan's actual account in a book which translated his diary. That book, (sorry I've no links but will research if needs-be) has details of each of his adventures, many many many of which would be worth retelling on film.

The story of this young adventurer/scientist is one utterly unknown here in America and IMO is a story that truly should be considered for film.

[MilesColtrane]

10. Bassist/Composer Charles Mingus

Plenty of drama in THAT life.





It should star Wendell Pierce. (You may know him as detective "Bunk" Moreland from HBO's "The Wire".)

[raccoon]

11. Nat Turner's bid for freedom. (aka "rebellion").

The Black Death of the 14th century.


Rebellion/resistance in the Great Depression.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

17. Harrow Alley

When I worked in the film industry in the 1980s, insiders almost universally considered a script entitled Harrow Alley as the greatest screenplay never made into a film.

Harrow Alley, by Walter Brown Newman (a prolific movie and TV drama writer, nominated for 3 Oscars), was set in London during the Great Plague of 1664-65. The great actor George C. Scott bought the screen rights in 1968, but was never able to obtain financing, as he was unwilling to alter Newman's work to make it more cheerful. The work was so dark, depressing, and devastating (as a movie about the Great Plague must be) that no Hollywood 'suits' would produce it, thinking that it would be a real downer and a bad box office risk.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

12. The crimes and punishment of George Bush

Spoiler alert.

Do to the unprecedented number of crimes the trial takes 6 years. In Obama's second term, the death penalty is outlawed so Bush is sentanced to life without parole. He is assigned a cellmate. A big black guy named Colin Powell who sodomizes George daily.

[frogmarch]

15. haha - same here!

[MorningGlow]

13. Boudicea

The Brit queen who led a resistance against the Romans. There probably has been a movie made about her, but I'd like to see a big-budget epic.

[Jade Fox]

25. There is a Masterpiece Theater movie about her.....

that I just watched on DVD!

It was okay. British actress Alex Kingston played Boudicea. I wish there had been more about the context in which her resistance took place (I'm historically ignorant), by which I mean the way her people lived, and fewer gory battle scenes.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

16. I have several ideas

1. A miniseries about an extended family from one of the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) They were under Czarist Russia for hundreds of years with their cultures suppressed, a brief period of freedom, occupation by both the Nazis (with people deported to slave labor in Germany) and Stalinist Russia (with large percentages of their population deported to Siberia and replaced by ethnic Russians), the struggle for freedom in the late 1980s, their diaspora in North America and Europe.

2. The annexation of Hawaii, how an independent kingdom whose royal family were treated as equals by the royal families of Europe was taken over in a coup by American business interests. Some compelling figures there.

3. The 1983 invasion of Grenada from the Grenadian point of view. Here in the U.S. our "free press" told us only the Reagan administration's view of things. (The Canadian media were giving an entirely different story.)

4. The officially fomented anti-German immigrant prejudice in World War I. (Some of my relatives lived it.) There are distinct parallels to the anti-Muslim and anti-Latino immigrant prejudice of today.

[Aristus]

18. Gallienus. Third-Century emperor of Rome.

He was viewed as a tyrant in his own day, but today, scholars view him as rather heroic for keeping the Roman civilization together during its roughest period. As tragically flawed as the Romans were, they respected education and the preservation of knowledge. Once the barbarians took over, the quest for and preservation of knowledge was lost for a thousand years; or at least relegated to a few obscure monasteries.

I see Gallienus as a tragic hero. I'd love to see a film about him.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

19. The No. 3 Jewish Commando Unit on D-Day

The British Army formed what was called the No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando/Special Services Brigade. Within this brigade were several special commando units of Dutch, French and others, including an all-Jewish German-speaking unit called the No. 3 Jewish Commando. Many of them were children from German Jewish families sent to England several years before when the anti-semitic activities of the Nazis started becoming ugly. Others were German-Jews who had fought for the Kaiser in World War I and knew a great deal about the German army. They were very highly trained in weaponry. In the film The Longest Day, you see the French commando unit from the No. 10 Special Services Brigade when they take the port town of Ouistraham. The German Jewish commando landed at Juno beach. It's said that the Germans who faced them were perplexed to find all-German speaking soldiers wearing British uniforms. They lost one quarter of their members in the fighting on D-Day. I think the formation of this unit and its deployment on D-Day could make an interesting film.

[schmuls]

20. Nicolo Tesla - A genius who was instrumental in many of the

energy inventions we use today. Was the creator of AC current. He was hired by Edison who said he would pay him $10,000 for his inventions. When the time came for him to be paid, Edison completely blew him off. Also, his pending patents were stolen by others (don't remember the details). There are some who question whether his death was from natural causes, as well. Anyway, I think all this would make for a fascinating movie.

[eowyn_of_rohan]

21. The man for whom California's Bradshaw Trail is named

My gggg-grand uncle, William David Bradshaw. From Horace Bell's Reminiscences of a Ranger:
A more curious or a more marked character this careful chronicler never knew — one of nature's most polished gentlemen and brightest jewel in America's collection of true born chivalry. Bradshaw was brave, generous, eccentric, and in simple truth a natural lunatic. In manly form and physical beauty, perfect; in muscular strength, a giant; in fleetness of foot and endurance, unequaled.

[MrCoffee]

22. The defenestration of Prague

Catalyst for the 30-years war.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

23. I really wanted a movie about Pocahontas.

That Disney crap came out and insulted my sensibilities.

I was thinking here's this perfectly interesting historical character, and they've got to turn her into a sexpot who sings with a talking raccoon.

If they had just made a historically accurate movie about Pocahontas it'd be a great film.

And then they did make a historically accurate movie about Pocahontas, and it was boring as hell. Lulz. In all do respect, it was a Terence Malick film and all his films are boring, in a good way. The movie was fine, it just wasn't the big exciting adventure story I was expecting.

[Jade Fox]

24. John L Lewis-labor leader

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Lewis

[CBHagman]

33. I hope you've seen "Matewan" by John Sayles.

What an amazing movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093509/

[YankeyMCC]

26. Francisco Pizarro invasion and conquest of South America

Or perhaps something a bit more expansive (a TV mini series) on the rise and fall of the Inca empire.

[Danger Mouse]

27. I think Roman emperors tend to be very interesting.

I'd enjoy seeing a historically accurate movie about Augustus or Tiberius. Or perhaps even Vespasian.

[Fire Walk With Me]

29. Batboy. Definitely Batboy.

He already has a musical, but I say that he deserves immortality in celluloid.

[BrotherBuzz]

30. Joseph Reddeford (aka Reddford, but actually Rutherford) Walker, who often went by Joseph R. Walker

Joseph Rutherford Walker, fur trapper, hunter, trail blazer, explorer, military guide, spy, cattleman, miner, and sheriff. He was the first white man to discover Yosemite, and was so proud of that fact, he had it carved on his headstone.

[jobycom]

31. Charlemagne, Lizzie Borden, The Whiskey Rebellion, King Tut.

:shrug:

[MilesColtrane]

41. There was a made for TV movie called "The Legend of Lizzie Borden" that aired in 1975.

I remember seeing it and being creeped out by it.

It starred Elizabeth Montgomery and was nominated for a Golden Globe

[jobycom]

42. I remember it.

I'd love to see a period piece done now in the vein of "The Prestige" or something equally sophisticated, and hopefully better than "The Black Dahlia," and such films. It was a complex case that revealed a lot about culture and gender at the time, as well as being an intriguing crime drama.

[SPQR]

34. Sulla and Marius

but mostly Sulla. What a madcap he turned out to be.

Also, the attempted coup against FDR in the early days of his administration.

And Lizzie Borden, too.

[kwassa]

35. Marcus Garvey, and early 20th century black nationalism

his rise, fall, under attacks by the young J. Edgar Hoover, his exile to Jamaica, his role in the creation of Rastafarianism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., National Hero of Jamaica (17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940<1>), was a publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, Black nationalist, orator, and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL).<2>

Prior to the twentieth century, leaders such as Prince Hall, Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Henry Highland Garnet advocated the involvement of the African diaspora in African affairs. Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy to inspire a global mass movement focusing on Africa known as Garveyism.<2> Promoted by the UNIA as a movement of African Redemption, Garveyism would eventually inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam, to the Rastafari movement (which proclaims Garvey as a prophet). The intention of the movement was for those of African ancestry to "redeem" Africa and for the European colonial powers to leave it. The idea that African Americans should return to Africa was known as the Colonist Movement. His essential ideas about Africa were stated in an editorial in the Negro World entitled “African Fundamentalism” where he wrote:
“ Our union must know no clime, boundary, or nationality… let us hold together under all climes and in every country…<3> ”

[Tuesday Afternoon]

36. Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, Samuel Clemons, Jane Austen

to name a few...

also ...Pocahontas, and Sacjawea, and Mary Todd Lincoln.

[madeline_con]

37. The Vikings in North America. n/t

[CreekDog]

38. Orange Julius

[elshiva]

39. Sappho. Has there been a good movie about Sappho?

Not pornographic, just a historical film featuring what we know of her poetry.

[bluedigger]

40. Smedley Butler

and the Business Plot.

[enigmatic]

44. Peter Laughner

I miss you, Peter:

http://www.handsomeproductions.com/laughner.htm

[BreweryYardRat]

45. An epic film about Ramses II or Thutmose III might be interesting.

That's two of Egypt's greatest military pharoahs, right there.

I'm also trying to figure out whether or not the Christian lords of Outremer provided a military contingent to help the Egyptian Muslims fight Hulagu Khan's Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut, or if they only allowed the Egyptian army to pass through their territory unmolested. If it's the former, a film about that might be a useful way to ease Christian/Muslim tensions.

[XemaSab]

46. A few I can think of:

Lewis and Clark

John C. Fremont

Powell

John Muir

[applegrove]

47. Nelson Mandela

[AngryAmish]

48. Tamerlane

It would be a semi-flashback form.

Movie starts out with Soviet scientists, amid fanfare and with cameras rolling, driving through the streets of Samarkand to Tamerlane's tomb. The populous looks on, thinking the Soviets were nuts.

Show scientists at work measuring the bones, et al. Then show the looks on their faces when the radio announces that Operation Barbarossa has begun.

Then flashback to Tamerlane's life.

Then, at the end as a way to bookend the movie, show the Soviets winning at Stalingrad as Tamerlane is reburied.