Blue and Gray on Screen

...Released to fewer than two hundred and fifty screens, it cost $12 million and made only $10 million at the box office...

...I used to argue that the Sandinistas should have brought over Joe Stalin while they were at it," says Maxwell...

...Still, Gettysburg received considerable acclaim from reviewers and historians, and Turner is also financing Gods and Generals...

...In Amistad, you're supposed to like John Quincy Adams and dislike John C. Calhoun...

...They set up straw men and say, 'This is the good guy and this is the bad one.' It's like they're broadcasting it with subtitles...

...They're places where we made friendships and fell in love...

...So, in Gods and Generals, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (played by Jeff Daniels) makes the case of the northern abolitionists, and Stonewall Jackson (played by Stephen Lang) argues for Southern secession and independence...

...Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was...

...This has not happened much in the history of the world...

...Whether moviegoers will devote more than three hours to another film about the Civil War is a gamble...

...Making a comedy about girls betting who will lose her virginity first is a long way from the Battles of Bull Run and Ered-ericksburg, but even in that early film, Maxwell showed a surprising seriousness...

...It's something these Yankees do not understand, will never understand," says Lee...

...They're places where we learned to walk, to talk, to pray...

...He never finished the project, but seeing firsthand the impact of a civil war stoked his interest in The Killer Angels...

...He also developed an interest in Nicaragua—outraged by Soviet involvement there and the news media's coverage of it...

...Meanwhile, Maxwell directed pictures such as The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia and Kidco...

...It has to be about the fact that he must have slept with one of his slaves...

...The ease with which Maxwell can do this depends largely on the success of this one...

...All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean...

...Those were the days when Ron Maxwell was the fair-haired boy on Paramount's lot...

...As Chamberlain says, "We are here for something new...

...America should be free ground...

...Films such as the 1995 Jefferson in Paris make him prickly...

...Animal House or Meatballs—and Maxwell delivered a summer-camp comedy that showed the emotional consequences of the girls' choices...

...To us, they're birthplaces and burial grounds, they're battlefields where our ancestors fought...

...They spoonfeed you...

...When completed, the picture clocked in at more than three-and-a-half hours, making distribution difficult...

...Overnight, I went from being a golden boy to the invisible man," he remembers...

...Michael had been lied to and cheated by one or two Hollywood types, and he retreated from the whole film experience," says Maxwell...

...Hollywood executives were anticipating a movie like the wildly successful, ribald comedies National Lampoon's John Meroney is working on a book about Ronald Reagan's Hollywood years, to be published by Little, Brown...

...Through a connection with a Cuban-American friend, Maxwell visited the country in 1987 and filmed more than sixty hours of interviews with supporters of the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance to make a documentary to be called "In the Land of the Poets...

...The fifty-six-year-old Maxwell began thinking about filming the Civil War after reading The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara's 1978 novel about Gettysburg...

...If it's about Thomas Jefferson, Hollywood thinks it can't really be about his genius, or that he was part of something earthshaking," he says...

...One was filming such an ambitious story...

...The Patriot was filled with downright lies about what happened here...

...In one poignant scene, Maxwell has Robert E. Lee give voice to this theme...

...No man born to royalty...

...There were divided families down there, brothers against brothers, and cousins fighting cousins...

...It has been ten years since Gettysburg, Maxwell's first film about the Civil War—and getting that made took more than a decade...

...They're the incarnation of all our memories and all that we are...

...I don't think those filmmakers did it maliciously, but it's careless and frivolous...

...According to Maxwell and Turner, the picture has since more than earned its cost back through video sales and cable television broadcasts...

...I want characters to make their own cases...

...The English press took it as blood libel because of the scene where British soldiers herd civilians into a church and then burn it down...

...He'd come to Hollywood as an earnest New Yorker, a graduate of New York University, where he'd written and directed an adaptation of Albert Camus's The Guest...

...It puts that on par with the kind of evil that happened in World War II where the Nazis actually did that to civilians...

...Maxwell's dream of making Shaara's novel languished until Ted Turner came through for him in 1991, following introductions from actor Hal Holbrook and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose PBS series on the Civil War had focused attention on the period...

...All of it...

...Rivers, hills, valleys, fields, even towns: To those people they're just markings on a map from the war office in Washington...

...Maxwell, who urged Shaara's son Jeff to write the novel Gods and Generals, also wants to adapt Jeff's other Civil War book, The Last Full Measure...

...Maxwell is passionate about using his pictures to show that Hollywood is capable of making historical films where attention to truth doesn't come at the expense of good drama...

...No man has to bow...

...Warner Bros., which is distributing the picture, is releasing it in more than a thousand theaters, and Turner has committed an estimated $30 million to advertising...

...Or, as Robert Duvall, who plays Robert E. Lee in Ronald Maxwell's Gods and Generals, said when I asked whether he is a Southern partisan, "The right side won...

...As much as Gods and Generals is about the Civil War, it also celebrates the connection of real people to a particular region and place...

...Not divided by a line between slave state and free...

...The general is sitting on his horse in the hills above Fredericksburg, overlooking the town...

...But eventually, the weight of history becomes clear, and the real issue of the war emerges: whether the principle of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal will prevail...

...Even with Turner's support, the project had challenges...

...We are an army out to set other men free...

...Maxwell told Turner that he'd written a script of The Killer Angels called "Gettysburg," and within a week, they had a deal to make the picture...

...Being in Nicaragua helped me see another view of our Civil War," Maxwell says...

...But Shaara, who died in 1988, admired the filmmaker's passion for his book and finally sold him an option on film rights for $50,000...

...BY JOHN MERONEY Ronald E Maxwell, the screenwriter and director behind the sprawling, $70 million Civil War epic Gods and Generals, has devoted the last twenty-five years to dramatizing what Winston Churchill once described as the noblest and least avoidable of all the great conflicts...

...He jokes that the cast and crew who worked with him on Little Darlings, his 1980 film starring Kristy McNichol and Tatum O'Neal, probably had to endure his talking more about Shaara's novel than the film they were working on...

...Equally distressing, in his view, are pictures such as Mel Gibson's Revolutionary War epic The Patriot and Pearl Harbor, which he considers excuses to make big-budget action films...

...Advertisements touted O'Neal and McNichol's nascent sexuality with the line, "Don't Let the Title Eool You," and the picture was a hit, remaining on Variety's list of top grossing films for almost a decade...

...But when moviegoers at test screenings lauded the picture, the studio executives got behind it...

...We need to make $70 million at the box office," Turner told me...

...In the next few years, Maxwell searched for a way to make The Killer Angels, tracking the reclusive Michael Shaara to a residence in Elorida...

...And now, with Gods and Generals done, Maxwell says he's ready to start the final installment of the trilogy, which will take moviegoers all the way to Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox...

...Maxwell says he also wants to show that history is often more complicated than the way Hollywood usually depicts it...