A look inside Hollywood and the movies : COONSKIN CAPERS : Grab the Flintlocks! They Just Remembered the Alamo

Of the three Davy Crockett movies now in development, a “Naked Gun”-like spoof--”Davy Crockett: After the Alamo”--could be the first to reach the screen.

The other two--Columbia Pictures and producer David Zucker’s “Davy Crockett” and Warner Bros. and Interscope’s “Crockett and Bowie”--face the usual challenges of ambitiously scaled historical dramas. The most difficult aspect of producing a spoof is finding a clever script.

That problem has largely been solved, according to Rocket Pictures chairman Thomas Coleman and president Jon Turtle, who recently purchased Pat Proft and Neal Israel’s 1984 “After the Alamo” script for $1 million. (Crockett, you may recall, was among the 183 Texans and 1,000-1,600 Mexicans killed at the Alamo during the 1836 Texas War of Independence.) The pair expects to finance the $20-million comedy through a partnership with Media Trust S.A., a Luxembourg-based fund-raising concern that will organize the sale of film rights to foreign distributors at this month’s Cannes Film Festival.

“Diddling with the ramrod-straight, backwoods Crockett character is inherently funny,” claims Coleman. “Coonskin caps are funny. I have a hundred of them in my office and I’m taking them all to Cannes.”

The other two Crockett projects are straight historical dramas. “Davy Crockett” is based on a well-regarded script by Dan Pyne (“Pacific Heights,” “Doc Hollywood”) that producer Zucker commissioned. “Crockett and Bowie” was sold about nine months ago to Warner Bros. for Interscope to produce from a script by Jere Cunningham and Crash Leland. Both projects owe their momentum to the popularity of last year’s “The Last of the Mohicans” and a certain industry vogue for adaptations of historical novels and films about legendary figures. And it doesn’t hurt that Hollywood is high on reworked television shows these days: Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen starred in the mid-’50s “Davy Crockett” TV dramas produced by Walt Disney.

If it happens, “Crockett and Bowie” will be a “big, character-driven action-adventure movie,” says Interscope senior production executive David Madden. The Cunningham-Leland script focuses more on the climactic Alamo chapter in Crockett’s life and his relationship with blade-wielding adventurer Jim Bowie.

Pyne’s “Crockett” script is a relatively straightforward biopic that one non-involved literary agent calls “the best of all three.” Despite this, the word is that Columbia management is not enthused about it. If “Crockett” doesn’t happen, it would be the second Zucker project to run into difficulty at Columbia. The first was the medieval round-table drama “First Knight.”

Columbia chairman Mark Canton is said to be displeased that the studio’s relationship with David and Jerry Zucker hasn’t produced any comedies in the “Hot Shots!” vein. This sentiment has been provoked, said an on-the-lot executive, by the upcoming drama “My Life,” produced by Jerry Zucker, about a terminally ill father (Michael Keaton) trying to connect with his son.

“You can’t blame Canton,” says the source. “Paramount has ‘Naked Gun 3,’ Fox has ‘Hot Shots, Part Deux’ and what does Columbia have? Davy Crockett, King Arthur and Michael Keaton with cancer.”