Tonight we kick off Episode 4 of the weekly Guest Post series: Medium Cool with BGinCHI.
In case you missed the introduction to the series: Culture as a Hedge Against this Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We’re Living In
Tonight’s Topic: You’re the Producer
I’ll let BG explain the photos. But wow, I want to be there, and I especially want to be in the bottom photo.
Take it away, BG!
In this week’s Medium Cool, I have a question for you.
What story or events would you love to see get made into a book or film or TV show?
Not an adaptation (a book made into a movie), but a scenario, or idea, or whatever it is you haven’t seen but want to.
I’ll tell you mine: a six hour TV series on the assassination of Lincoln. Not a documentary, but a flat out TV show. Done by someone like the Deadwood team (David Milch, et al.). Gritty & realistic & savage, with no romanticism.
~Bradley
Dorothy A. Winsor
Ooh. The Lincoln thing sounds wonderful.
R-Jud
There’s a wonderful drama podcast, 1865, about the Lincoln assassination, the manhunt for Booth, and the political fallout (especially the damage to Reconstruction). The guy playing Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, is splendid.
WereBear
The first thing I thought of was a miniseries on the 1918 Pandemic. Big cast, global reach, lots of suspense, doctor derring-do but only individual victories…
BGinCHI
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I spent many months doing the research for a novel project on that subject, but decided to do a different one.
I keep thinking about it, though…..
BGinCHI
@R-Jud: Thanks for this!
Is it like a radio play?
Bruuuuce
My wife has several times considered an alternate history in which the Industrial Revolution centers not on England (and later, the US), but on somewhere in mainland Europe, like the Netherlands. The possibilities are endless, and very interesting to contemplate. (Alternatively, have it centered outside of Europe, say, in one of the large Asian countries or South America.) That would easily make a Netflix 13-episode season, and probably more than that.
Jay Noble
Reality series where I’m given $1,000,000 and they follow me around for a year. :-)
West of the Rockies
The last days of Donald Trump.
BGinCHI
@WereBear: I’d watch that.
Have you ever read William Maxwell’s novel So Long, See You Tomorrow?
It’s based on his childhood, in which his mother died in that pandemic. It’s a lovely, heartbreaking, perfect little novel.
BGinCHI
@Jay Noble: VISIONARY
trollhattan
@Jay Noble:
Can I steal your idea and add a 0? :-)
I”m boring, so the film crew can go home or follow my new supermodel friends around.
The Lincoln assassination idea is sound. I learned a LOT of new-to-me info in the Grant bio, including they turned down an invite to Ford’s Theater because Grant’s wife could not stand the thought of sitting though a show with Mary, and Booth evidently followed Grant and wife on a horse as they were driving their horse-drawn coach through the city, looking inside to see who the occupants were.
SiubhanDuinne
Have always been fascinated by the Goliards (wandering scholars) of 12th-13th century Europe. I’d love to see an in-depth exploration of Goliardic life, literature, and culture. The texts of Carmina Burana are a good start, but there’s so much more. I think their life and times could be a wonderful documentary/podcast.
SiubhanDuinne
@West of the Rockies: Oh yeah.
NotMax
The life story of pioneering (and dashing) aviatrix Harriet Quimby. Maxi-series centered on Benjamin Franklin.
reflectionephemeral
Fall of the Sui and rise of the Tang. Princess Pingyang and the Xuanwu Gate Incident are almost two seasons already!
BGinCHI
@SiubhanDuinne: Wow, great idea.
BGinCHI
@reflectionephemeral: This sounds like it’s already a series.
Mnemosyne
@Bruuuuce:
She realizes that she would have to get rid of Napoleon somehow, right? Because the continuous wars in Europe from 1789 until 1815 were a huge factor in why the relatively untouched British Isles were able to jump ahead with industrialization. Ditto the US.
MattF
There’s a broad category of narratives that fall under ‘taking religion seriously’. There are books that do it, but not movies or TV. I’m not a believer myself, but it’s just a fact that religious faith has always been a primal force in history, so there’s no lack of stories. I realize that dealing with religion seriously and objectively is nearly impossible, but the narratives are amazing.
Mnemosyne
Here’s my super-nerdy alternative history idea that only about 5 or 6 other people would get: what if Princess Charlotte had not died in childbirth in 1816 and/or her son had survived and lived to become king? That means that Queen Victoria literally would never have been born, because her father only married to try and produce a new heir to the throne after his niece Princess Charlotte died.
BGinCHI
@Mnemosyne: The opening scene would be getting rid of Napoleon, or this thing won’t have legs.
Omnes Omnibus
The works of Jane Austen seem ripe for filming.
Kent
I’d like to see Charles Mann’s book 1491 made into some sort of TV adaptation, or something along similar themes about what the western hemisphere was like pre-European invasion. https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
Mel Gibson made a movie sort of like that years ago called Apocalypto. I’d like to see something a bit more historical and factual (as best as we know them).
James E Powell
Three things:
The Russian Revolutions
Season 1 Russo-Japanese War & 1905, Season 2 WWI and the February Revolution, Season 3 the October Revolution and Civil War, Season 4 Stalin Takes Charge. I’ve got Gary Oldman as Lenin.
Charlemagne
Start with his grandfather; end with his death. Three seasons, at least.
Cherokee History
From the earliest contact forward, don’t know when it should end.
hitchhiker
I want to see the young life of Isaac Newton. He’s born a few months after his yeoman father dies, his mother marries a clergyman when he’s 3 and moves a few miles away, leaving the boy with her parents in the small “manor house.”
Why doesn’t she take him with her? Unknown. What were the grandparents like? Unknown.
She has a couple of other children with her new husband, but Isaac would never live with her again. You can go to his childhood home now, and walk the paths that lead to where she & his half-sibs lived. His childhood coincided with the English Civil War; the king was publicly beheaded when Isaac was 7 yrs old.
A few years later he’s sent to the local market town for his education, but there are almost no records of what happened there, or what sort of child he was, or who (if anyone) mentored him.
He fascinates me. The person who developed the ideas that became calculus and used them to show how gravitation operates on the planets, who first understood how light and color work, and who spent years trying to create gold through alchemy, was not remarkable enough as a boy or young man that anyone near him seems to have paid much attention.
How could that be? And what was it like to be him, surrounded by people who would never understand what he was thinking? His mother was barely literate.
Anyway, that’s what I want … an intimate portrait of a child with a massive gift growing up under all kinds of shadows and uncertainty. Six episodes, filmed by the people who made the Wolf Hall series, taking him to Cambridge and then showing him sent home during the 1666 plague.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Are you trying to wind me up.
Future MC will be devoted to my extreme dislike of Jane Austen’s work.
dlwchico
Some sort of fact based and well done series set in the Native American civilizations that existed before white people showed up would be cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia
BGinCHI
@Kent: Me too.
This is a fabulous idea and exactly why I wanted to offer this post.
Such a project would have to be done by someone who was really interested in getting it right, rather than romanticizing or whitewashing.
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.
BGinCHI
@James E Powell: I want a whole channel devoted to these ideas and Kent’s 1491 idea.
I would watch the shit out of this. But, again, it would have to avoid sappy romanticization.
BGinCHI
@hitchhiker: Lean on Levenson to write this one!
I mean, he’s never going to get rich as an English prof.
NotMax
@James E Powell
Not bad overall, albeit intermittently draggy, mini-series on Charlemagne done in the mid-90s. Pretty sure it is still available on Prime.
Bruuuuce
@Mnemosyne: She reminds me that her concept was not as much that it starts on the mainland at the time it did in England, but that it happened earlier (16th Century) as a result of Henry VII’s son Arthur surviving, which means no Henry VIII and no schism with the Church and Continent. Thus the Dutch textile makers stay put because there’s no safe haven for them there, and their expertise sparks the IR in place.
Napoleon could be a major problem later, if arms development continues apace, and his armies are better equipped than anyone else’s. But that’s one of the many possibilities I noted could be explored.
WereBear
@BGinCHI: I haven’t, but it’s on my list now. Time to read, these days :)
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I really liked the new version of Emma that just came out. It really got the stark class differences and relative levels of wealth in the village worked directly into the visuals.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne: Not only get it, but see you and raise you: that would have changed the Russian Revolution, too.
Mnemosyne
@Bruuuuce:
Ah, okay — that makes more sense. Though the Reformation and Enlightenment would also play out very differently if England was not an active participant.
WereBear
And I’M IN.
NotMax
The further adventures of Casablanca‘s Ilsa and Victor throughout the rest of WW2.
BGinCHI
@NotMax: Who would you cast?
NotMax
@WereBear
Daniel Day-Lewis.
Zinsky
My dream is a short science fiction film where the Trump Family, Rupert Murdoch and sons, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and every other right-wing tool are meeting at the FoxNews headquarters in Manhattan to plot how to steal the 2020 election, just like they did in 2016. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a flaming asteroid shaped like a mace, comes crashing to Earth, pulverizing FoxNews headquarters and everything inside to atoms. No other buildings are harmed and the good citizens of New York decide not to even attempt recovery but just salt the Earth and never allow another conservative to ever hold public office again — and everyone lives happily ever after.
i would watch that shit over and over again, laughing and cheering happily!!
WereBear
@hitchhiker: One interesting angle I have seen explored lately is the growing speculation that he was somewhere on the autism spectrum.
Such a treatment could explain a lot about his early life. Many autists arrive at adulthood with all development systems in full flower, but on a wildly different schedule from allistics.
BGinCHI
@Zinsky: Subtle.
BGinCHI
@NotMax: He’s retired!
If you say Colin Firth, you’re banned.
prostratedragon
The early Civil Rights movement as a strategic campaign, with lots of logistics. Freedom rides, the bus boycott, or the Selma marches would be good vehicles. And of course, the March on Washington. Ditto the legal campaign that led to the Brown decision.
West of the Rockies
@hitchhiker:
Such a series each on Galileo, da Vinci, Einstein, Oppenheimer would all be interesting, too.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Well, that one will be fun. You should be prepared for a shitload of push back. And, yes, my primary goal was sarky.
Kent
@NotMax: And Keira Knightley
WereBear
@NotMax: Do we really want the century’s best method actor? We could wind up with a real revolution!
RSA
I’ll lean on this producer fantasy a little:
I would like to discover that some talented documentarian was inspired by Michael Apted and has replicated his Up series in the U.S. over the past forty or fifty years; he (or she) is now releasing the records and raw film footage for someone to turn into a TV series.
BGinCHI
@prostratedragon: Along the lines of “Selma” and “Loving”?
I agree that a more thorough treatment would be excellent.
I’d like to see a hard-hitting show on The Black Panthers.
gwangung
I am currently writing the sword and sorcery adventures of Ching Shih, the real life pirate queen of China, as a sort of a mash up of Errol Flynn, Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja. (and there are still plans to do the world premiere, but we’ll see how that works out….).
But I have an alternate history brewing with Chien-Shiung Wu as an alternate Doc Savage, Hazel Ying Lee as the Rocketeer (or maybe Lady Blackhawk) and one other woman as the Batman/The Shadow, forming a Chinese American Justice Society of America, all set during World War II. Fun and hijinks accrue.
Omnes Omnibus
As Trotsky!
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: I know. You think we could have an enjoyable disagreement about her work? I mean, I get why people like it. I’ve read her, and re-read her.
But it just doesn’t work for me.
It’s mostly a class thing.
NotMax
@BGinCHI
Hmm. Thought I was the producer, not the casting director.
Not married to the idea, strictly off the cuff: Mads Mikkelsen and Catherine Zeta-Jones?
BGinCHI
@RSA: Please let that person be Terrence Malick.
Zinsky
@BGinCHI: What it lacks in plot development it makes up for in emotional uplift!
BGinCHI
@gwangung: If you need eyes on the draft, hit me up.
West of the Rockies
@BGinCHI:
The voice is all wrong, but Matthew McConaughey looks like Paul Henried a bit.
Elsa? Maybe Anna Torv (Olivia from Fringe).
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI:
Thanks! Let’s do it!
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: WIN
BGinCHI
@NotMax: Well, as history shows us, no producer has ever interfered in a casting decision…..
Great choices. You’re a natural, kid.
BGinCHI
@SiubhanDuinne: [counts money in wallet, looks into camera forlornly]
SiubhanDuinne
@hitchhiker: I absolutely love this idea.
BGinCHI
@West of the Rockies: Torv is terrific. Accepted.
Michael Shannon?
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI: I hear you, but I bet it could be pitched to people whose wallets are not full of moths.
WereBear
I recently ran across the new-to-me discovery that Einstein and his first wife, also a brilliant physicist by all accounts, had an out of wedlock daughter in 1902. She was hidden with relatives for the usual scandalous reasons. She died in early childhood from one of those things we vaccinate for now.
Or did she? What if she grew up incredibly brilliant in her own right? Angry over her abandonment, desperate to escape from a concentration camp, became a Nazi supervillain?
I’m thinking Scarlett Johansson.
Bruuuuce
@Mnemosyne: Quotha, “Ohhhhhhhhhh, yes!” (As in, she had indeed considered those things, rather than that she was just realizing it.)
BGinCHI
@SiubhanDuinne: The bad news is that historicals are expensive.
They’re much harder to sell than people think due to the sheer production costs.
Oddly, sci-fi is cheaper, due to CGI and built sets. And polyester.
BGinCHI
@WereBear: Damnnnnn
The Physicist’s Daughter.
If this thread results in millions in royalties, don’t forget your humble host.
Not Cole. What would he buy, anyway?
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: I suppose the chances of having a rational and enjoyable discussion of Austen here are as good as any other topic on which feelings run high. I’m ambivalent, but I think I am in the minority.
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI:
Where is George Soros when we could really use him?
WereBear
@BGinCHI: Love the title! Humanizes it.
I was toying with Heavy Water. But then, I’m always coming up with rock-em sock-em ideas and giving them literary titles, to thoroughly confuse slush pile readers, who don’t even exist any more.
BGinCHI
Need to bail for a bit, but I’m coming back to check in and comment.
WaterGirl
I cannot believe that not one single person commented on the gorgeous pictures or asked where they came from!
WereBear
@WaterGirl: Because we sure can’t go there if we aren’t already there.
schrodingers_cat
There are many chapters in Indian history that I would like to get the treatment of Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Indian historical movies/ TV shows usually suck its more histriography and hagiography.
According to mythology Kurukshetra where the Mahabharat was fought is what is modern day Panipat.
WereBear
@schrodingers_cat: Ambedkar in the Bronx really lit up my switchboard. Sounds like a fantastic story.
schrodingers_cat
@WereBear: He was fascinating, He also had a PhD in econ from the London School of economics. He was born into one of India’s untouchable castes.
prostratedragon
@BGinCHI:
Must admit sheepishly that I haven’t seen those –something to catch up on while I’m social distancing. (Not exactly a social butterfly anyway, but Gov. Pritzker just ordered all restaurants to stop serving dine-in customers, so I think shit’s about to get real.)
I have in mind something that really gets into things like how participants were trained, as they were for many of the early marches, how people moved about in planning and organizing when that alone made them targets, and such. Or with a court campaign, things like how the progression of contributing or supporting cases was decided –they didn’t just go all-out for everything all at once. Would the movie about the Loving case get into some of that?
WereBear
@schrodingers_cat: Just the story of how he got from birth to school of economics sounds incredible.
gwangung
@BGinCHI: Might do that.
I have DOZENS of potential casting suggests for this, some of which people around here might have actually heard of.
(But Ming Na Wen probably has the inside track as the Doc Savage equivalent…can do both the physical and mental stuff without a hitch…)
WereBear
@prostratedragon: I certainly see the interest, because I was also fascinated when I discovered Rosa Parks was both a seamstress and a NAACP strategist.
There was another volunteer, but she had areas of attack in her personal life, while Ms. Parks did not.
About time people understood everyone involved knew what they were doing.
WereBear
@gwangung: You had me at Doc Savage. I immediately thought of John Lone. Probably the wrong age now, but you know: Man of Bronze can be almost anyone, really.
BGinCHI
@schrodingers_cat: I love #4 here. I’d watch the hell out of that.
BGinCHI
@WaterGirl: Faked like the Apollo landings.
BGinCHI
@prostratedragon: Highlander Folk School!
That right there would be an amazing series.
gwangung
@WereBear: Oh, HE’S the villain…
Remember…not only Asian American, but female heroes….
BGinCHI
@gwangung: I’m in. Happy to help if I can.
piratedan
I’m not sure it would draw eyes or not, but I would be partial to see something like the Ken Burns treatment about the rise and fall of labor in America, or even a shorter series explaining the events that took place post the Matewan Massacre that led to the battle of Blair Mountain.
James E Powell
@BGinCHI:
True and there are only a few that become very popular. Were any historicals real big money makers?
schrodingers_cat
@BGinCHI: Thanks. The other stories are pivotal to the history of India and the subcontinent. Especially in the light of BJP’s attempt to recast all of India’s history as an us-vs-them (Hindu vs. Muslim) fight to death.
trollhattan
@James E Powell:
Star Wars, duh.
jeffreyw
@WaterGirl:
I figured out-takes from a Corona commercial.
Mnemosyne
@WereBear:
I like that one, too. It would also give a fresh look at the early American civil rights movement and highlight how the ACRM and the Indian independence movement influenced each other. I think most Americans know that MLK was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, but they may not know it was a two-way street.
WereBear
@gwangung: bend that genre like you stole it!
Mnemosyne
@prostratedragon:
If you haven’t seen Boycott, a 2001 HBO movie that was directed by Clark Johnson, I highly recommend it. It’s about the strategy and planning around the Montgomery bus boycott, with Jeffrey Wright as a very young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. learning how to be a figurehead for the brewing civil rights movement. Amazing cast, really interesting style since Johnson made it in a semi-documentary style.
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: Gandhi and Ambedkar did not get along much. Gandhi was a devout Hindu and Ambedkar became a Buddhist along with his followers rejecting the religion that rejected the humanity of people like him.
R-Jud
@BGinCHI: Exactly like a radio play.
Miss Bianca
The Vorkosigan Saga – done as a multi-year TV series extravaganza. Shit, they’ve done Game of Thrones!
Maybe getting a bit elderly now, but I’d still go for Cate Blanchett as Cordelia, Daniel Craig as Aral – now, who for Miles? :
ETA: Oh, and the Lincoln mini-series sounds fab. I’d watch the hell out of that!
gwangung
@BGinCHI: By the way, if the situation forces the closure of my sword and sorcery pirate queen show, I was thinking I might open it up for folks to read if there’s any interest. Bonus points if folks can point out what I stole from where….
BGinCHI
@James E Powell: Deadwood.
Gone With the Wind.
Roots.
But yeah, a lot of risk….
gwangung
@Miss Bianca: Oh. Hell. YES.
Cate would be great right now as Red Queen Cordelia…she’d had to be digitally de-aged as the Betan Captain Cordelia….
BGinCHI
@gwangung: Perfect.
Ksmiami
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Manhunt is a really engrossing book about the aftermath and the hunt for John Wilkes Booth
Miss Bianca
@hitchhiker: All right, sounds like you might want Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle filmed!
Well, shit, now so do I! : )
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: Oh, good, we’re hoping to get that in April, presuming the theater opens up again by April. *shudders, crosses self
Ksmiami
@BGinCHI: The 1927 Mississippi flood and the Great Migration
smintheus
Two things from Roman history that I’ve thought of writing a novel about, but which would work well as movies too:
1) the breakdown in society in and around Rome that accompanied Sulla’s proscriptions
2) the so-called Bacchanalian Conspiracy a century earlier (nobody has ever figured out what was really going on with this strange episode, except me)
Both stories show what happens when an ostensibly conservative society suddenly gets tossed into a pressure cooker.
WereBear
@smintheus: does this sound like now?
Kent
I love Roman history. I’d even be happy with a Season 2 of the HBO series Rome. I can’t get enough of that stuff.
Most of the adaptations of Ancient Rome are from the later Imperial era. Would be interesting to see more stuff from early Republican Rome.
Bruuuuce
@Miss Bianca:
Anyone who could convincingly play Toulouse-Lautrec
Kent
Gladiator? Or does that not count as historical.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@R-Jud: I downloaded the first few episodes. I need to fill my earholes that aren’t related to current events. I grew up on the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre, hosted by EG Marshall, and sometimes Tammy Grimes (?). I dug a few up on the internet a few years ago and they didn’t hold up as well, but I used to love hearing the sound of that creaking doo
smintheus
@WereBear: Just a bit, yeah. Both episodes involve ruthless political opportunists preying upon scapegoats, though in one of those oddly enough the scapegoats turn out to be Roman elites themselves. The other involves the Roman elites going along with crude abuse of power out of fear for their own political futures. I guess that’s why these stories resonate for me.
Tehanu
@Miss Bianca: Daniel Craig as Aral? Gag me, please! Now if you’d said Jason Isaacs or David Strathairn, you might have something there.
Suzanne
The robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. Especially that Rembrandt.
piratedan
@gwangung: I think there are a couple of actresses that could pull off a Barrayar Cordelia…
Amy Adams, Anna Kendrick, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Emma Stone come to mind
For Aral… hell, I’m kind of clueless to be honest. You need a fit, self deprecating actor with a wide range who isn’t Ryan Reynolds who has a vaguely european feel to them (since the original settlers were Russian/Greek)
Miss Bianca
@Tehanu: Huh? What’s wrong with Daniel Craig?
gwangung
@piratedan: Adams, Kendrick and Stone (in particular) strike me as too pretty for Cordelia….you couldn’t make them that plain even after two hours in the make up chair.
WInstead (particularly after Birds of Prey) would be the combo of physical presence, not otherwordly beautiful and acting chops that could pull it off.
J R in WV
@hitchhiker:
Leibnitz was a German polymath who invented Calculus simultaneously with Newton. He doesn’t get as much credit in the English speaking world, I don’t know about the rest of the world.
Still, I think the competition and combination of old school alchemy and modern science of these two genius level men would work in a series.
BGinCHI
@Ksmiami: This would be great, but expensive to produce.
Oprah money, maybe.
BGinCHI
@smintheus: Sounds super interesting.
What was the Bacchanalian thing? I don’t know about it….
BGinCHI
@Suzanne: I LOVE heist movies.
In.
BGinCHI
@Suzanne: Have you seen American Animals?
Unusual and brilliant heist film.
J R in WV
@BGinCHI:
I had a college professor, Don West, poet and labor activist, fired from faculty at Emory (IIRC) for working for integration and civil rights, taught at the tiny Antioch College Appalachian Center in Beckley. He was involved with the Highland Folk School Center back in the day.
Was organizing coal miners in Harlan County Ky, beaten, maimed, left to die in a winter ditch, saved by a school teacher who’s family nursed him back to life in secret.
Fascinating guy, founded an Appalachain South Folklife Center in Pipestem WV in the late ’60s or early ’70s. Gave me the urge to study hard when I went back to college in 1980. Long ago, now. Don was quite a guy. From NW Georgia mountain country. Where the Stars and Stripes flew over county courthouses during the whole Civil War!
BGinCHI
@J R in WV: Damn. Write a bio of that guy! I bet WVU Press would be interested.
J R in WV
Who could be Miles?
Need a tiny man, but handsome even after being mutated by the chemical attack on his mother, Cordelia. Would be a great long plot, lovers, killers, plots against him and the Empire, wow!
No idea who could pull off Miles Vorkosigan. A real challenge to cast that role.
tomtofa
The travels people undertook in the past are often mind-boggling, and they lend themselves to an extended series format.
A couple:
Death Valley in ’49
A story that covers an enormous amount of geographical and thematic territory. The author wandered from the eastern US to California, encountering brigands, hostile Native Americans, floods, cannibals, Mormons before they were Romneyized (they were scary), Death Valley crossings (three), the Gold Rush, a return trip by way of Panama, etc.
A Long Desire
Evan Connell’s essays on travels going back much further than the 19th century – Prester John, Columbus, Paracelsus, Atlantis seekers, Aztec treasure hunters – would make a cool series of self-contained episodes.
piratedan
@gwangung: while I agree that Winstead would be my preference, Kendrick doesn’t strike me as being in the “too pretty” category…
but for me, while casting is a huge component, being true to the story and the spirit of the story would be just as important…
BGinCHI
@tomtofa: I love Connell’s books & translations.
These are great ideas.
smintheus
@BGinCHI: We have a lengthy and lurid story in Livy, dating to 186 BC. According to his account, one of the consuls discovered through various ordinary Romans (including a prostitute) that the cults of Bacchus in Rome and Italy had been turned into a massive conspiracy involving debauching young initiates, forging wills, and – more vaguely – a threat to overwhelm the state. So the Senate decided to suppress the cult and authorized the arrests and trials of huge numbers of adherents. We have an inscription that records a Senatorial decree – one of the few early Roman inscriptions – so something at least a bit like what Livy describes did actually happen. But Livy’s story reads like a cheap novel, so it was a narrative that had to have been created to make the whole episode look like a moderate response to a dangerous threat. But killing thousands of people and suppressing an old cult is the opposite of moderate. So scholars have debated for many years what the heck was really going on and how in the world Livy came up with this bizarre story. As I said, I’m pretty sure I’m the first person who put all the pieces together credibly, though I haven’t yet gotten around to publishing my analysis of it.
BGinCHI
@smintheus: Really fascinating. Almost like the Cathar heresy.
What’s the word Livy uses for “cult.” It strikes me that English word is maybe not covering that concept as it ought to….
MuckJagger
It only relates tangentially to Lincoln but after reading about this guy I thought his story could make for hella good TV. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smalls
“Robert Smalls (April 5, 1839 – February 23, 1915) was an American businessman, publisher, and politician. Born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, he freed himself, his crew, and their families during the American Civil War by commandeering a Confederate transport ship, CSS Planter, in Charleston harbor, on May 13, 1862, and sailing it from Confederate-controlled waters of the harbor to the U.S. blockade that surrounded it. He then piloted the ship to the Union-controlled enclave in Beaufort-Port Royal-Hilton Head area, where it became a Union warship. His example and persuasion helped convince President Abraham Lincoln to accept African-American soldiers into the Union Army.”
So if my maths is correct, he did that when he was…23 years old.
piratedan
@piratedan: maybe Richard Armitage for Aral…..
Tehanu
@Miss Bianca: I just don’t get Daniel Craig’s appeal, whatever it is. I don’t even say he’s not a good actor; he just leaves me cold. And Aral is one of my favorite characters so the thought of Craig playing him … meh. Just noticed piratedan’s idea about Richard Armitage — yeah, I could see that.
smintheus
@BGinCHI: Yes, that’s always a problem for students. ‘cultus’ is the Roman term for any religious observances. They would have referred to the cults of Jupiter or Juno, too. The Bacchic cult was a relatively normal imported cult up, like many other religious institutions, until the time it was suddenly suppressed with extreme threats.
BGinCHI
@smintheus: “adherents”? “believers”?
Man, “cult” is a terrible translation of that for any contemporary audience.
The genius of polytheism is the a la carte nature of belief and worship. Monotheism sets itself up in opposition and then everything is charged with negativity. So much writing on Scandinavian culture falls prey to this.
prostratedragon
@BGinCHI:
That might be one of the centers I’m thinking of. I vaguely recall one in the Piedmont somewhere, but I thought it was a Carolina.
prostratedragon
@Mnemosyne:
Thanks — think it ran during one of my nonpremium periods, but I see it’s on demand streaming. Will likely watch it tonight.
prostratedragon
@MuckJagger:
Yes! I’ve long thought that could make a terrific adventure story.
Another could revolve around freedmen trying to reunite with lost family after the Civil War. They often placed classified ads.
redoubtagain
@MuckJagger: Robert Smalls: Slave To Congressman. With Mahershala Ali as Robert Smalls.
MuckJagger
@redoubtagain:
This sounded so legitimate I had to check Ali’s IMDB listings to make sure it wasn’t already a thing and I had just completely forgotten about it! :-)