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Article Excerpt
Or maybe it should be "Alamo Depths." In late: October Disney delayed the released of its $90 million restaging of the mythic battle from Christmas Day to April, a decision that set the rumor mill spinning. Will Hollywood ultimately pass this history test? Or will Travis, Bowie, and Crockett die at the box office too?
HEIGHTS
ON CHRISTMAS DAY, Disney's The Alamo, Hollywood's latest historical hurrah was supposed to gallop into theaters everywhere. Now the studio has postponed the movie's opening, and what its reception will he is anybody's guess. Back in the fall of 2001, when patriotic emotions were at a fever pitch, the Alamo seemed to have something to say to contemporary Americans. But two and a half years is a long time in the national zeitgeist, and whether audiences today will want to watch Americans under siege is an open question. Disney, of course, is hoping for another Pearl Harbor, an extravaganza of patriotic treacle that raked in the bucks. * Why did Hollywood decide to remember the Alamo again ha the first place? The story begins with Leslie Bohem, the author of such high-minded scripts "as A Nightmare on Elm StreetS: The Dream Child and Dante's Peak. At the Austin Film Festival seven years ago, Bohem had a conversation with screenwriter Randall Wallace (Braveheart). Wallace had driven down to San Antonio to take a look at the Alamo, and when he said he wasn't going to do anything with the story, Bohem decided that he would and set to work on a script. In 1998 Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary of Disney, and director Ron Howard became interested in the project and bought Bohem's screenplay, which Howard would eventually hire John Sayles to rewrite. An auteur of some distinction, who had written and directed Lone Star, one of the more interesting of recent Texas films, Sayles came up with a lengthy script that, depending on whom you talk to, was either brilliant or unfilmable (recent press releases have dropped Sayles's name from the list of credits). After Sayles, Stephen Gaghan (hot off a best-screenplay Oscar for Traffic) was hired to do another rewrite. Meanwhile, the project languished. What moved it onto the fast track was the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As Disney's chairman, Michael Eisner, explained, the film would "capture the post-September IX surge in patriotism." * In the beginning, Howard wanted to shoot the movie in the style of Sam Peckinpah, the Goya of westerns, whose bloody masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, set the gold standard for last-ditch heroics. But to emulate Peekinpah, Howard figured be would need an R rating and about $130 million. * Differences between Howard and Disney soon surfaced. Disney balked at the cost, the violence, and the R rating and went ahead with new plans. The studio changed the target audience to the tamer PG-13 crowd and announced that the budget would be around $75 million. In July 2002 John Lee Hancock, a native Texan, was tapped to rewrite the script and direct a cast that included Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett, Dennis Quaid as Sam Houston, Jason Patric as Jim Bowie, and newcomer Patrick Wilson as William Barter Travis. Hancock, who is 46, had made his mark writing screenplays (A Perfect World, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) and then, in his directorial debut, helmed The Rookie, a small, family-oriented film that became a surprise hit for Disney last year. * The idea for another Alamo movie was hardly a new one. Stephen Harrigan, whose 2000 novel, The Gates of the Alamo, enjoyed considerable acclaim, says that before September II, half the directors in Los Angeles had unproduced Alamo scripts in their files. They had grown up on Fess Parker's Davy Crockett and John Wayne's World, and they reckoned that someday they just might make that Alamo film. But the fallen towers...
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