Robin Hood gets a makeover

Robbing from the rich and giving to the poor just isn’t what it used to be, judging from the efforts of screenwriters reworking the Robin Hood legend for a new generation.

In a television series, written by Dominic Minghella and airing this season on BBC America, Robin Hood is a pacifist interested in robbing only the sheriff of Nottingham. (A midseason marathon is scheduled for Sunday.) In a film script sold last month to Universal and written by Cyrus Voris and Ethan Reiff, the sheriff is a likable working-class cop trying to bring law and order to Sherwood Forest. (Russell Crowe has already signed on to play the heroic sheriff.)

“I don’t think it’s interesting or sympathetic anymore to have your supposedly heroic characters robbing people just because they’re rich,” Minghella said.

Every generation, it seems, wants to stamp the 12th century English myth with its own political and cultural leanings. Early Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks versions blended a socialist flavor into the revelry of Merrie Olde England. The mid-1950s TV series “Adventures of Robin Hood,” written anonymously by blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters, continued the theme representing class struggle and the redistribution of wealth. A 1980s series was tinged with a New Age appreciation for medieval mysticism.

The new 21st century projects share some of the basic ingredients: a charismatic Robin Hood and his entourage, a girlfriend, a sheriff, a forest, King Richard off fighting in the Holy Land, Prince John in charge at home in England. From there, their paths diverge.

Minghella said BBC One became interested in a Robin Hood project in 2005 with the arrival of controller Peter Fincham. As a child, his parents had punished him by refusing to let him watch “Robin Hood” with the rest of the family. “He’s exorcising that demon,” said Minghella, brother of director Anthony Minghella (“The English Patient”). The series became the channel’s flagship project for 2006.

Minghella wasn’t sure how to modernize the story until he asked himself: “What would I do if I were Robin Hood and brilliant with a bow? How would it help me solve my problems? The answer is, it probably wouldn’t help very much. It’s like having a nuclear button. It’s a weapon of last resort.”

His Robin is a handsome kid (Jonas Armstrong) just back from war in the Holy Land, determined never to shoot to kill. Robin’s gang of guy friends talks about feelings. His girlfriend, Marian (Lucy Griffiths), has a bow of her own and lines like “What’s up with men?”

“We don’t rob from the rich,” Minghella said. “We rob from the sheriff.” The sheriff (Keith Allen) is so evil, he not only taxes the poor but also plots against the king. For fun, he hosts a “festival of pain.”

When it came to scripting a feature film, screenwriters Voris and Reiff (“Sleeper Cell”) figured there’s more than one side to every legend.

“What if this guy was a cop who gets this great new job, but there’s this outlaw robbing everybody, and also he has to collect taxes from poor people? What if he’s basically a good guy stuck in this lousy situation?” Voris said.

“Cy and I feel there’s a point to examining the life of a policeman/administrator/bureaucrat in a heroic light,” Reiff said. “You could transpose [the idea of a policeman] to American public servants of one kind or another. Certainly in the military, people are called on to do their best under difficult circumstances.”

They drew the line at making Robin Hood a criminal. But what if, they asked, the two teamed up to catch a villain at loose in the countryside? And what if Robin were a celebrity balladeer forced to deal with fame? And what if Marian had to choose between the two of them?

Universal bought it. After the sale was announced, Voris and Reiff, who had been criticized for humanizing terrorists in “Sleeper Cell,” came under fire for twisting the myth in favor of a neoconservative law-and-order agenda.

“The writers’ work on ‘Sleeper Cell’ may hint at the direction in which Nottingham will go,” wrote Mark Lawson in The Guardian. He imagined the writers would twist the myth completely: “The most obvious and striking revisionism of the legend would be to make the young man in tights someone who robs from the poor to give to the rich. In other words, a neocon Robin Hood.”

Obviously, Robin Hood is a touchy subject in England where, Reiff said, “some people have embraced Robin Hood as an early proletarian hero. To me, it’s funny. At the end of the classic Robin Hood, he gets all his land and titles back from the king, the ultimate reactionary ruler of the land, and becomes another lord in his own right. Some people react emotionally without thinking stuff through.”

If the film ever gets made, those who get sentimental about King Richard, the “good” ruler who returns to replace his “bad” brother Prince John, probably won’t like their other revisions.

“The fact is that Richard spent less than half his life in the kingdom of England, the rest in France and other countries. He couldn’t care less about the English people,” Reiff said. “Whereas his brother John spent his entire life in England and had some personal interest in improving the quality of civil administration and the social systems of England.”

At a time when the U.S. and Britain have troops in the Middle East, the format calls for political comparisons.

The sheriff is not Tony Blair, Minghella said. However, in the first episode, the sheriff remarks, “We stand shoulder to shoulder with Rome,” and Robin replies, “Is that our war? Whose war are we fighting?”

Another character Djaq, a Muslim refugee from the Crusades, joins Robin’s entourage. “It’s not a political treatise,” Minghella said. “We just thought let’s put the Christians and the Muslims together and see what that does.” Season Two is now in development.

Reiff and Voris said that after two years of “Sleeper Cell,” a series that drew from current events, they did not need to fit their script to the news. “They are different,” Reiff said. “One is a story that takes place in the moment. The other takes place in 1191. It’s informed and shaded by the world we live in. Still, it’s a story about the sheriff of Nottingham.

“Also, there are a lot of actual chronicles and records about crimes in medieval Europe that provide endless sources of material for heinous criminality.”

And, he said, there will be no tights. “Those were common in the 1300s and 1400s, not in the late 12th century,” he said.

lynn.smith@latimes.com