Great movie ideas: Outlaws, bootleggers, lawmen & heroes
I know the Oscars aren’t until next week, but I’ve been thinking about movies
this week and what would make good movies. At least. the kind of movies I’d
watch.
Hollywood’s gone crazy with sequels, reboots, remakes and tons of fantasy movies. Now, I like fantasy movies, even some of the ones that other folks don’t, but there’s more than just teen angst vampire/witch/werewolf stories. Some sequels I like (I’m looking forward to the next “Captain America” movie) but not every hit — and sometimes a miss — deserves a sequel.
As for remakes, there’s one movie in particular I wouldn’t mind seeing remade — “Thunder Road.” Now, “Thunder Road” is a classic of its genre, about a guy driving moonshine in Tennessee and getting caught between the feds and big-city gangsters. It starred Robert Mitchum, who also came up with the original story, was a producer on it, co-wrote and sang the title song and, some say, even helped direct the movie.
With the ability to film car chases so much better today, this could be a great action movie. Plus, there’s a lot of renewed interest in moonshine, so it’s a natural. It could even stay set in the same time frame as the original, because what’s cooler than hot ’50s cars and rockabilly music? Finding a star as cool as Robert Mitchum might be tricky because he set the standard for cool. He was the template for the Hollywood bad boy who makes today’s “bad boys” look like 5-year-old brats.
But, I still think it would be a doozy of a movie, and I’d be there opening night with my popcorn and big orange drink.
There are lots of other subjects that, done right, could make great movies. Bass Reeves, for example. He was a black U.S. marshal who worked out of Fort Smith. An ex-slave who became a lawman, he made a big mark in Western history. He tracked down bad guys in the old Indian Territory, sometimes even disguising himself to trick them until he could get the drop and arrest them.
Not all of the bad guys went peacefully, which was a mistake since Bass Reeves was a great hand with a gun. He earned respect and a reputation as an honest, fair man in one of the wildest parts of the Wild West. His is a story that deserves to be told cinematically.
Another one I think could be interesting would be about Charles Birger and the Shelton Brothers in southern Illinois. They were rival bootleggers during Prohibition who often were at war. Birger’s tavern, Shady Rest, became a literal fortress that the Shelton Brothers even tried to bomb from an airplane. However, they all joined forces to fight the Ku Klux Klan, which as anti-liquor and essentially took over the local government and carried out random raids looking for booze and bootleggers. Birger and the Sheltons beat the Klan, then went back to fighting one another.
Actually, this strikes me as having potential as a History Channel miniseries, like “Hatfields & McCoys.” Speaking of which, our own Tutt-Everett War could lend itself to a big-screen telling, too. And that Steve Earle song “Copperhead Road” would fit right onto the big screen, too, with its story of three generations of a family carrying on their out-side-the-law tradition.
While I was on Facebook a while back, I followed a link that caught my eye. It was to a story about the last battle of World War II. An American armored unit liberated an Austrian castle where the former French prime ministers and top generals were held as “guests” of the Third Reich. Their wives and girlfriends also were “guests” as well. Then, units from an SS Panzer division were sent to recapture the castle and execute the “guests.” The Americans, the French prisoners and other VIP prisoners along with anti-Nazi German soldiers led by a major decorated for heroism joined together to fight the SS troops.
This is one of those little-known stories, like “The Monuments Men,” and I think it could be a cool movie, sort of like those Clint Eastwood/Lee Marvin WWII movies. There’s a book about it called “The Last Battle” by Stephen Harding, if you’re interested.
I realize there’s a thread running through these, but what can I say — I like action movies, and I like period pieces. Plus, each of these tales have a good human element, too, that’s essential to good story telling. I’ve seen enough stories on “Wild West Tech” that could be interesting as movies to have keep a director busy for years. There are many blues artists whose biographies would be perfect for the movies. To be honest, there are tons of untold stories in places outside Hollywood and New York that would be good fodder for either theatrical or TV movies, and with so many cable/satellite networks now there’s probably a niche for almost all of them, if someone could just write the scripts and get them filmed.
Meanwhile, I’ve got to make time to catch “Monuments Men,” and I wonder if Netflix might have “Thunder Road” available?
Hollywood’s gone crazy with sequels, reboots, remakes and tons of fantasy movies. Now, I like fantasy movies, even some of the ones that other folks don’t, but there’s more than just teen angst vampire/witch/werewolf stories. Some sequels I like (I’m looking forward to the next “Captain America” movie) but not every hit — and sometimes a miss — deserves a sequel.
As for remakes, there’s one movie in particular I wouldn’t mind seeing remade — “Thunder Road.” Now, “Thunder Road” is a classic of its genre, about a guy driving moonshine in Tennessee and getting caught between the feds and big-city gangsters. It starred Robert Mitchum, who also came up with the original story, was a producer on it, co-wrote and sang the title song and, some say, even helped direct the movie.
With the ability to film car chases so much better today, this could be a great action movie. Plus, there’s a lot of renewed interest in moonshine, so it’s a natural. It could even stay set in the same time frame as the original, because what’s cooler than hot ’50s cars and rockabilly music? Finding a star as cool as Robert Mitchum might be tricky because he set the standard for cool. He was the template for the Hollywood bad boy who makes today’s “bad boys” look like 5-year-old brats.
But, I still think it would be a doozy of a movie, and I’d be there opening night with my popcorn and big orange drink.
There are lots of other subjects that, done right, could make great movies. Bass Reeves, for example. He was a black U.S. marshal who worked out of Fort Smith. An ex-slave who became a lawman, he made a big mark in Western history. He tracked down bad guys in the old Indian Territory, sometimes even disguising himself to trick them until he could get the drop and arrest them.
Not all of the bad guys went peacefully, which was a mistake since Bass Reeves was a great hand with a gun. He earned respect and a reputation as an honest, fair man in one of the wildest parts of the Wild West. His is a story that deserves to be told cinematically.
Another one I think could be interesting would be about Charles Birger and the Shelton Brothers in southern Illinois. They were rival bootleggers during Prohibition who often were at war. Birger’s tavern, Shady Rest, became a literal fortress that the Shelton Brothers even tried to bomb from an airplane. However, they all joined forces to fight the Ku Klux Klan, which as anti-liquor and essentially took over the local government and carried out random raids looking for booze and bootleggers. Birger and the Sheltons beat the Klan, then went back to fighting one another.
Actually, this strikes me as having potential as a History Channel miniseries, like “Hatfields & McCoys.” Speaking of which, our own Tutt-Everett War could lend itself to a big-screen telling, too. And that Steve Earle song “Copperhead Road” would fit right onto the big screen, too, with its story of three generations of a family carrying on their out-side-the-law tradition.
While I was on Facebook a while back, I followed a link that caught my eye. It was to a story about the last battle of World War II. An American armored unit liberated an Austrian castle where the former French prime ministers and top generals were held as “guests” of the Third Reich. Their wives and girlfriends also were “guests” as well. Then, units from an SS Panzer division were sent to recapture the castle and execute the “guests.” The Americans, the French prisoners and other VIP prisoners along with anti-Nazi German soldiers led by a major decorated for heroism joined together to fight the SS troops.
This is one of those little-known stories, like “The Monuments Men,” and I think it could be a cool movie, sort of like those Clint Eastwood/Lee Marvin WWII movies. There’s a book about it called “The Last Battle” by Stephen Harding, if you’re interested.
I realize there’s a thread running through these, but what can I say — I like action movies, and I like period pieces. Plus, each of these tales have a good human element, too, that’s essential to good story telling. I’ve seen enough stories on “Wild West Tech” that could be interesting as movies to have keep a director busy for years. There are many blues artists whose biographies would be perfect for the movies. To be honest, there are tons of untold stories in places outside Hollywood and New York that would be good fodder for either theatrical or TV movies, and with so many cable/satellite networks now there’s probably a niche for almost all of them, if someone could just write the scripts and get them filmed.
Meanwhile, I’ve got to make time to catch “Monuments Men,” and I wonder if Netflix might have “Thunder Road” available?
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