Blue and Gray on Screen

RONALD F. MAXWELL, the screenwriter and director behind the sprawling, $70 million Civil War epic "Gods and Generals," has devoted the last twenty-five years to dramatizing what Winston Churchill once described as the noblest and least avoidable of all the great conflicts. It has been ten years since "Gettysburg," Maxwell's first film about the Civil War--and getting that made took more than a decade. And now, with "Gods and Generals" done, Maxwell says he's ready to start the final installment of the trilogy, which will take moviegoers all the way to Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

The fifty-six-year-old Maxwell began thinking about filming the Civil War after reading "The Killer Angels," Michael Shaara's 1978 novel about Gettysburg. He jokes that the cast and crew who worked with him on "Little Darlings," his 1980 film starring Kristy McNichol and Tatum O'Neal, probably had to endure his talking more about Shaara's novel than the film they were working on. Those were the days when Ron Maxwell was the fair-haired boy on Paramount's lot. He'd come to Hollywood as an earnest New Yorker, a graduate of New York University, where he'd written and directed an adaptation of Albert Camus's "The Guest." Making a comedy about girls betting who will lose her virginity first is a long way from the Battles of Bull Run and Fredericksburg, but even in that early film, Maxwell showed a surprising seriousness.

Hollywood executives were anticipating a movie like the wildly successful, ribald comedies "National Lampoon's Animal House" or "Meatballs"--and Maxwell delivered a summer-camp comedy that showed the emotional consequences of the girls' choices. "Overnight, I went from being a golden boy to the invisible man," he remembers. But when moviegoers at test screenings lauded the picture, the studio executives got behind it. Advertisements touted O'Neal and McNichol's nascent sexuality with the line, "Don't Let the Title Fool You," and the picture was a hit, remaining on Variety's list of top grossing films for almost a decade.

In the next few years, Maxwell searched for a way to make "The Killer Angels," tracking the reclusive Michael Shaara to a residence in Florida. "Michael had been lied to and cheated by one or two Hollywood types, and he retreated from the whole film experience," says Maxwell. But Shaara, who died in 1988, admired the filmmaker's passion for his book and finally sold him an option on film rights for $50,000. Meanwhile, Maxwell directed pictures such as "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" and "Kidco."

He also developed an interest in Nicaragua--outraged by Soviet involvement there and the news media's coverage of it. "I used to argue that the Sandinistas should have brought over Joe Stalin while they were at it," says Maxwell. Through a connection with a Cuban-American friend, Maxwell visited the country in 1987 and filmed more than sixty hours of interviews with supporters of the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance to make a documentary to be called "In the Land of the Poets." He never finished the project, but seeing firsthand the impact of a civil war stoked his interest in "The Killer Angels." "Being in Nicaragua helped me see another view of our Civil War," Maxwell says. "There were divided families down there, brothers against brothers, and cousins fighting cousins."

Maxwell's dream of making Shaara's novel languished until Ted Turner came through for him in 1991, following introductions from actor Hal Holbrook and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose PBS series on the Civil War had focused attention on the period. Maxwell told Turner that he'd written a script of "The Killer Angels" called "Gettysburg," and within a week, they had a deal to make the picture.

Even with Turner's support, the project had challenges. One was filming such an ambitious story. When completed, the picture clocked in at more than three-and-a-half hours, making distribution difficult. Released to fewer than two hundred and fifty screens, it cost $12 million and made only $10 million at the box office. (According to Maxwell and Turner, the picture has since more than earned its cost back through video sales and cable television broadcasts.)

STILL, "Gettysburg" received considerable acclaim from reviewers and historians, and Turner is also financing "Gods and Generals." Warner Bros., which is distributing the picture, is releasing it in more than a thousand theaters, and Turner has committed an estimated $30 million to advertising. Whether moviegoers will devote more than three hours to another film about the Civil War is a gamble. Maxwell, who urged Shaara's son Jeff to write the novel "Gods and Generals," also wants to adapt Jeff's other Civil War book, "The Last Full Measure." The ease with which Maxwell can do this depends largely on the success of this one. "We need to make $70 million at the box office," Turner told me.

As much as "Gods and Generals" is about the Civil War, it also celebrates the connection of real people to a particular region and place. In one poignant scene, Maxwell has Robert E. Lee give voice to this theme. The general is sitting on his horse in the hills above Fredericksburg, overlooking the town. "It's something these Yankees do not understand, will never understand," says Lee. "Rivers, hills, valleys, fields, even towns: To those people they're just markings on a map from the war office in Washington. To us, they're birthplaces and burial grounds, they're battlefields where our ancestors fought. They're places where we learned to walk, to talk, to pray. They're places where we made friendships and fell in love. They're the incarnation of all our memories and all that we are."

Maxwell is passionate about using his pictures to show that Hollywood is capable of making historical films where attention to truth doesn't come at the expense of good drama. Films such as the 1995 "Jefferson in Paris" make him prickly. "If it's about Thomas Jefferson, Hollywood thinks it can't really be about his genius, or that he was part of something earthshaking," he says. "It has to be about the fact that he must have slept with one of his slaves."

Equally distressing, in his view, are pictures such as Mel Gibson's Revolutionary War epic "The Patriot" and "Pearl Harbor," which he considers excuses to make big-budget action films. "'The Patriot' was filled with downright lies about what happened here. The English press took it as blood libel because of the scene where British soldiers herd civilians into a church and then burn it down. It puts that on par with the kind of evil that happened in World War II where the Nazis actually did that to civilians. I don't think those filmmakers did it maliciously, but it's careless and frivolous."

Maxwell says he also wants to show that history is often more complicated than the way Hollywood usually depicts it. "They set up straw men and say, 'This is the good guy and this is the bad one.' It's like they're broadcasting it with subtitles. In 'Amistad,' you're supposed to like John Quincy Adams and dislike John C. Calhoun. They spoon-feed you. I want characters to make their own cases."

SO, in "Gods and Generals," Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (played by Jeff Daniels) makes the case of the northern abolitionists, and Stonewall Jackson (played by Stephen Lang) argues for Southern secession and independence.

But eventually, the weight of history becomes clear, and the real issue of the war emerges: whether the principle of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal will prevail. As Chamberlain says, "We are here for something new. This has not happened much in the history of the world. We are an army out to set other men free. America should be free ground. All of it. Not divided by a line between slave state and free. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was."

Or, as Robert Duvall, who plays Robert E. Lee in Ronald Maxwell's "Gods and Generals," said when I asked whether he is a Southern partisan, "The right side won."

John Meroney is working on a book about Ronald Reagan's Hollywood years, to be published by Little, Brown.