Alamo Legend, Take 2

Remember the Alamo? Unless you recall it as the last stand of a multicultural Paradise Lost, filmmaker John Lee Hancock is sure you remember it wrong.

“Whites and browns lived together,” said Hancock, a Texas native, describing his home state’s pre-revolutionary past. “It was really culturally diverse. People intermarried. There was very little racism.” For one brief moment in the still-aborning 19th century, he believes, “Tejas, Mexico, was a very, very interesting place.”

As writer-director of Walt Disney Co.’s planned Christmas release “The Alamo,” Hancock is well along the way to recapturing that idyll, real or imagined. In the process, the 46-year-old moviemaker and his partners are reinventing one of America’s core historical legends -- and showing how carefully the studios must tread when turning history into entertainment for a rapidly changing and culturally entwined audience, particularly as war clouds are gathering.

For decades, the story of the Alamo -- in which fewer than 200 mostly white Texas rebels were crushed by the 5,000-man Mexican army in 1836 -- has had a decidedly nationalistic bent. The good guys had names such as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and William Travis -- white frontiersmen and revolutionaries fighting the occupying forces of Mexico’s Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

The carnage that befell Crockett and the others holed up behind the Alamo’s adobe walls transformed them into American martyrs, lasting symbols of the high cost of freedom for Texas and the U.S.

Perhaps no one stamped this version into popular culture more deeply than John Wayne, who directed and starred in the 1960 movie “The Alamo,” which was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture. Wayne, always the hero, donned a coonskin cap and cast himself as Crockett. The movie portrayed Crockett and Texas’ white residents, known as Texians, as driven primarily by a thirst for liberty.

But that was just one dimension of the real story. Wayne gave short shrift, for example, to Mexico’s case for putting down the rebellion, avoiding such ignoble Texian motivations as the desire of some to own slaves, which was not permitted by Mexican law.

More recent literature has portrayed Crockett as an overambitious politician trying to rebuild a broken career in Texas. Contemporary authors have further contended that the Texas Revolution was fomented in large part by colonists driven by expansionist notions of Manifest Destiny.

Vowing not to sugarcoat the past, Disney says it intends to make its Alamo a story not just of heroism but of inclusiveness and human frailty.

“We’re making sure all viewpoints are expressed,” said Disney Studios Chairman Richard Cook. “You have to stay away from the stereotypes and not make broad judgments of any group.”

This time Crockett, played by Billy Bob Thornton, is depicted as a frightened wanderer struggling to match his larger-than-life reputation for exploits that never occurred. Sam Houston, the powerful politician who led the decisive battle for Texas independence after the fall of the Alamo, will be portrayed by actor Dennis Quaid as a notoriously heavy drinker.

The story finds its emotional center, according to Hancock, in the twin dilemmas of a Mexican general who blanches at his army’s cruelty, and Juan Seguin, an Alamo defender who champions not Texas independence but a peaceful return to life under a Mexican democratic constitution.

The Burbank-based entertainment conglomerate will spend at least $80 million to make its epic and probably that much more to market the film here and abroad.

Clearly, the filmmakers and studio want to woo a multiethnic international audience, almost a necessity for high-budget movies, which must have global appeal to make their expected return.

This means including points of view from both sides of the conflict, even if that means soft-pedaling the fact that the historical battle largely pitted one ethnic group against another.

“It would be really hard to do something rah-rah jingoistic, patriotic,” Hancock said in an interview. A sometimes “messy and confusing” portrait of the motivations behind the conflict, he insisted, “is much better than the white-versus-brown version, which, by the way, is completely inaccurate.”

Already, some Alamo purists are burning up Web chat boards, fretting that the revisionism will go too far and that Disney’s broad-mindedness will end in what one writer called a trip “to PC-ville.” He argued against empathy for a Mexican army that in his view mirrored the forces of contemporary Iraq: “Add it up. A dictator. Conscripts. A deadly and cruel attitude. . . . So please, Mr. Director, do your homework.”

Others, however, cheer the filmmakers’ approach, including their focus on the relatively tiny contingent of Latinos, known as Tejanos, who also perished inside the Alamo. “There’s an inclusiveness about the real Alamo story that most Americans aren’t aware of,” said retired New Jersey teacher Bill Chemerka, who heads the Alamo Society.

One of the thornier issues in the various scripts produced so far has been Crockett’s death, a subject of controversy since it occurred in 1836. Persistent lore, bitterly disputed by the famous Tennessean’s fans, held that Crockett, rather than fighting to the death, was executed after begging for his life.

At least three versions of Crockett’s demise have appeared in the screenplays, including one that propped up the hero with a beat borrowed from James Cagney in the classic “Angels With Dirty Faces.” In that version, ultimately scrapped, Crockett saved the Alamo’s few survivors by pretending to grovel before Santa Anna.

For the more traditionally minded in Texas, no ending without Crockett dying in the throes of battle will go down easy.

“I don’t like that word ‘surrender,’ ” warned Kathleen Milam Carter, who chairs the Daughters of the Republic of Texas’ Alamo Committee.

But even in Texas, where Latinos now make up a third of the population, textbooks have been revised to remind students that their state’s revered founders were a mixed lot with often suspect motives.

“The super-Texan image of earlier interpretations has disappeared,” said Adrian Anderson, a history professor at Lamar University in Beaumont, near Houston.

Still, some Latinos are keeping a wary eye on the movie project, which tackles a sequence of events that ultimately cost Mexico much of its land.

“Latinos are still essentially seen in Texas as foreigners,” said Ernesto Nieto, founder of the Texas-based National Hispanic Institute. “My wife’s family goes back to 1835, and she’s still a foreigner.”

To attract the most varied audience possible, Disney expects to sell “The Alamo” as “an emotional epic, a character movie on a grand scale,” in the words of marketing chief Oren Aviv. He said the film’s advertising would aim to make the movie “relevant to people who don’t know about the Alamo.”

From the beginning, Disney’s four high-profile writers, who built upon one another’s work, struggled to overcome conventional expectations for the story. In various drafts, the writers tried to find a mix of good and evil on both sides of the conflict.

Leslie Bohem, a second-generation Hollywood writer, conceived the project six years ago after a screenwriting conference in Austin. He saw it as a relatively simple revision of Texas’ historical giants.

“I wanted to show warts and all,” Bohem said of the Alamo heroes. Bohem was fascinated by the spectacle of deeply flawed men rising to unexpected heights. “I mean, some of them were fighting for the right to own slaves,” he said.

Initially, director Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer were slated to make the Disney movie through their company Imagine Entertainment. They enlisted Russell Crowe as a leading man. But talks fell apart over the star’s and filmmakers’ salary demands. Howard also differed with Disney over the movie’s rating, although Imagine remains a producer of the film.

Disney rejected the Oscar-winning director’s proposal for an R-rated film, which would have cost at least $135 million. The current version will be rated PG-13, opening the movie to a wider audience. Hancock said this would require him to shoot epic battle scenes without the excessive depiction of violence. “The suggestion of something horrible can be far more graphic emotionally,” he said.

One scene that will not make it to the screen came from an earlier draft by John Sayles, one of Hollywood’s most prolific rewriters.

In what might have become the film’s sharpest point of controversy, it tried to balance out Santa Anna’s atrocities with brutality by the Texians, who were shown scalping Mexicans in bloody retribution at the climactic battle for independence at San Jacinto, weeks after the Alamo showdown.

“I don’t know that I needed to see scalping,” Hancock said, promising nonetheless that his film will show “the blood lust on both sides.”

Sticklers for authenticity, Hancock and producer Mark Johnson have cast actors from Mexico and Spain, who will speak Spanish in the movie, with English subtitles. Their accents are calculated to match regional and social nuances of the period, helped along by what Hancock describes as “a blue-ribbon panel” of historian-consultants.

Physical details also will better reflect reality.

Four weeks into shooting on a sprawling 40-acre set in Dripping Springs, Texas, Hancock has re-created not only the fabled Alamo mission but also a startlingly realistic version of San Antonio as it looked when the bustling town of 4,000 was known as Bexar.

Striving to replicate details of the Jacksonian era, the director’s aides went so far as to find the measurements of Gen. Santa Anna’s bed.

As for concerns that the new film’s iconoclasm will go too far, Hancock had a word of assurance. “I do have a lot of responsibility here, being a Texan.”