Wistful Christmas Fantasies for a Windfall of Good Films

Chatting with George Lucas and other friends one afternoon last summer, Francis Coppola suddenly asked what his visitors would do with a windfall of $2 billion.

He had his own answer ready. He would, Coppola said, use the $2 billion as leverage to borrow as many more billions as it might take to plan and build a new kind of city, the best the world had ever seen, livable and efficient.

Lucas, ever the practical dreamer, laughed and said that the venture would end so deep in bankruptcy that even Coppola would never get out.

But Coppola was on the right track, fantasizing big without considerations of cost. It is pleasing to dream of $2 billion, or much lesser windfall sums, and Christmas Eve is a pleasingly appropriate time to imagine what uses unexpected riches could be put to in the arts. (Let us assume that other windfallers will have attended to peace, poverty, hunger and housing and other costly but conquerable concerns.)

Over the years I have heard of many a film and television project that sounded absolutely terrific but (sorry, guys) was just too expensive for the marketplace. I’m not sure that that was always the right answer, but it is hard to argue with the man with the checkbook in his hand. (More often than not, it’s the films that fall short, not the audiences.)

The producer Bob Radnitz, for example, has always wanted to re-create Charles Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle,” that history-making, five-year round-the-world cruise on which Darwin compiled evidence for his theory of evolution by natural selection.

It’s a story of personal courage and passion, great adventure and revolutionary discovery. For a high concept, we can think of “Madame Curie” and “Captains Courageous” rolled into one. Terrific and entertainingly important film, and let us dip into the windfall to make it possible.

Mervyn LeRoy always wanted to make the ultimate Western, which he wanted to call “Cowboys and Indians.” The title would probably have to go, although it has a certain generic ring to it.

But I would love to see that ultimate, epic Western. It would neither mythologize nor demythologize the westering experience but would honor equally the courage of the pioneers whose crude graves lined the wagon trails and the anger and despair of the American Indians who resisted while they could.

Radnitz has also wanted to do James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking” Tales, and I continue to feel that the Colonial and Revolutionary War era in American history is an untapped treasury. The disastrous film “Revolution” with Al Pacino has given the period a bad name. Yet John Ford’s “Drums Along the Mohawk” and King Vidor’s “Northwest Passage” (even in its truncated form, the sequel never made) are reminders of the riches that are there.

My windfalls, it can be seen, address my personal concern that we have lost a sense of history--an awareness of where we came from, and why, and what the struggles were. Uneasy about the new immigrations from the west and south, we forget we are simply repeating two centuries of the American experience, with different accents and modes of travel.

The frustrations, the troubles, the dreams are the same, and it would be lovely at Christmastime or any other if the movies and television, with their extraordinary powers to bring alive the past as well as the present, could address themselves to our shaping history.

No laundered pageants, please, no tidied-up patriotic gore. What I have in mind is not candy-box nostalgia but a reminder of hard and divisive times--loyalty to the crown vs. rebellion in Colonial days, for example. Easy to mark the card now, not so simple then; it was a theme in the Kenneth Roberts’ novel from which “Northwest Passage” was made.

I once read a huge Revolutionary War script from Michael Wadleigh of “Woodstock” fame. It began startlingly with either John Hancock or one of the Adamses leaping a barnyard fence and landing feetfirst in fresh cow droppings as he flees some redcoats. From the heft of the script it would run as long as “Little Dorrit” but it’s worth a look.

There were more than swingin’ doors and six-guns on the way West. There were sod huts, and ceaseless winds blowing snow and dust and driving men and women insane in their cruel isolation.

(It will be interesting to see how well television has delivered “Lonesome Dove,” Larry McMurtry’s superb, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a Texas to Montana cattle drive not long after the Civil War. The book captures a rude, crude, harsh, bawdy, boisterous, dangerous, demanding time and place, and with it all a restless curiosity for distant vistas. If we are lucky, the miniseries could itself be a windfall gift.)

The best movies have always been about something, although the messages and the truths are made flesh in believable and sympathetic characters and demonstrated through engrossing story-telling.

The year just closing may have not brought Coppola or any of us our windfalls but it has delivered some fine gifts, including Coppola’s own film, “Tucker,” with its celebration of the maverick entrepreneur impassioned by a dream of something better, in his case a car. “Tucker” was its own recapturing of an aspect of the American experience, with good and evil both well represented.

Like “The Graduate,” Mike Nichols’ “Working Girl,” written by Kevin Wade, seems to catch the lightning of its time: In this case the still-hampered ambitions of bright women in a man’s world. It is also an essay on the costs of success, when you make it and when you don’t: a charming comedy, with brass knuckles in the evening bag.

But film as an illumination of both character and history was never more eloquently used this year than in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Milan Kundera’s philosophical speculations around the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, interpreted by Philip Kaufman, who directed and co-authored with Jean-Claude Carriere. It was, somewhat amazingly, about the varieties of love--indiscriminate erotic love, marital love and love of country (no matter how unlovely the country has temporarily become).

“Unbearable Lightness” was a reassuring reminder of the capacity of film for more than mindless diversion. It was also a kind of prompting to all the things the movies and television could do, given some windfalls of money and courage.

May we all find both.