 Michael
Kraus, curator of the Pittsburgh Soldiers & Sailors Monument and
Museum, offered a very interesting and original program at the
Roundtable's October 14 meeting. He spoke about the Civil War on
film, and his own involvement in the productions of Gettysburg
and Cold Mountain. Hollywood turned to the Civil War as a
dramatic topic very early on, with dozens of movies (most of them
very short) being made about the war annually by the 1920s. Kraus
discussed how Lost Cause mythology took early root on the Silver
Screen, with both Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind
sympathetically reflecting it. (He was intrigued afterwards when I
told him that a 10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. had sung with the
Ebenezer Baptist Church choir at the segregated premiere of GWTW
in Atlanta in 1939.)
He said he usually has only a few
weeks' notice when a production company needs his help as a
consultant. He got involved in Gettysburg, for instance, on
very short notice. The 1993 Turner Entertainment film was originally
called by the Michael Shaara novel's name of The Killer Angels,
but studio research showed that the title confused potential
audiences, so it was changed. Much of the movie was filmed on
Pennsylvanian countryside near Gettysburg that was very similar to
the battlefield itself, but Pickett's Charge was filmed on the
actual hallowed ground. (The on-set rumor was that Ted Turner used
his White House contacts to get an order for the Park Service, with
great reluctance, to let them film there). The scene of Gen. Robert
E. Lee riding along the lines and being cheered by his men was
completely spontaneous, with cameras rushed in to capture it. Kraus
said that actor Martin Sheen, as Lee, was a little taken aback - if
not scared - by how loud and excited the troops were.
With a laugh, Kraus wisely offered
no defense of Tom Berenger's beard as Gen. James Longstreet, and
said by the time he and other historical consultants had been
brought on board, too much footage had already been shot of the
actor in the terrible beard to redo it. Berenger also hated his big
floppy hat so much that he took it off whenever he could. Kraus
showed slides of the same horse being ridden by several different
actors (including himself when he appeared as an extra in either
blue and gray, as needed). The movie horses were all old and tired,
he said, and had to be spurred hard to get them to go anywhere; on
the plus side, they were not bothered by simulated explosions and
gunfire. There were also fake equine and human corpses that would be
loaded on trailers and strewn about the set each morning, then
picked up again at the end of the day's shooting. One of Kraus's
jobs, he joked, was keeping the pudgier reenactors away from the
cameras except in long shots; canny troops came to realize that if
they stood near a flag they had a better chance of making it
onscreen.
Cold Mountain, based on the
best-selling novel by Charles Frazier and released by Miramax in
2003, was filmed in Romania, as the director decided there was not
enough of North Carolina left unspoiled to portray the state in the
1860s. It was also much cheaper to film in the impoverished European
country. A replica Petersburg Crater was dug, larger than the
original, but on screen it looks about right, he thinks. Local
craftsmen built many of the props and painted the regimental flags,
including one which spelled "Pennsylvania" with an extra "n." Much
to Kraus's delight, it was a replica of the flag of a regiment in
which one of his ancestors had served. The hundreds of troops, both
Union and Confederate, were actually Romanian Army soldiers. They
would be marched out from a nearby barracks every morning, sing the
Romanian national anthem, and then be turned over to the production
company for the day.
Although proud of his involvement
in these two films, Kraus thinks Glory is still the best Civil War movie
yet made. He said he knows of no Civil War-themed movies now
definitely on a production track. Manhunt, based on the James
L. Swanson book about the Lincoln assassination and Booth's escape,
has been in the works for awhile, with Harrison Ford rumored to be
starring. Kraus has heard that there's been some location scouting
for it in the Washington, D.C. area (Wikipedia.org now suggests it
might become an HBO miniseries). He also said Steven Spielberg's
project, which was to star Liam Neeson and Sally Field as the
President and Mrs. Lincoln, seems to be stalled, at least for the
moment. |
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