On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
Between 1908 and 1910 filmmakers released seventy Civil War films, and another hundred by 1916. The earliest films were pro-Union, or at least featured a Union victory, but in 1909 southern theater owners began to complain about Northern bias. Filmmakers saw a market for pro-southern movies.
Movies profiled in this book:
The last component of the Lost Cause, and perhaps the key component, is the cherished belief in happy slaves and sub-human African Americans in need of civilization and Christianity. Lost Cause adherents deny the immorality and cruelty of slavery and insist slavery was a benign and misunderstood institution.
Movies profiled in this book:
In keeping with the binary nature of ideologies, the honorable Southern generals stand in contrast to venal, uncouth Northerners. The Lost Cause insists upon the illegitimacy of Abraham Lincoln’s election and his personal villainy as a backwoods barbarian, miscegenationist and all-purpose bad dude.
Movies profiled in this book:
While any past event is vulnerable to the mythmaking of film, the Civil War might be the most contested event in American History. No national historical moment has been more written about (except perhaps World War II), argued over and romanticized than the so-called Irrepressible Conflict.
Movies profiled in this book:
Part of the problem was and is that civil wars create particular problems that World War II does not. In our Civil War we didn’t fight outsiders such as the Germans or the Japanese, we fought ourselves. In this way a civil war is a family fight and afterward we are forced to live with our family.
Movies profiled in this book:
Many Americans believe two centuries of legal human bondage left no great national scar. Our movies and television programs tell us enslaved people were happy, their owners were misunderstood men of honor and the entire slave economy stood as a shining moment of magnolias and gentility.
Movies profiled in this book:
“Add together the tendency for American war movies to be stereotypical and to celebrate a white man’s vision of martial glory, sprinkle in the fraught nature of Civil War memory and you get a sub-genre of films doomed to be mediocre at best and ideologically horrifying at worst.”
Movies profiled in this book:
As historian Thomas Cripps said, “movies not only wear history at best as a loose garment, but their makers care more for following well tested recipes for making good grosses than for the niceties of history” (Cripps 1995). There is no movie genre where this is this more true than Civil War movies.
Movies profiled in this book:
Our culture’s most powerful ideas about the past come, not from books written by professional historians, but from popular images and mythologies, including those that come from films written by screenwriters. Screenwriters write Civil War movies for mass audiences, who tend to believe what they see. And films, unlike books, don’t get relegated to the back shelves of libraries.
Movies profiled in this book:
My newest book The Civil War on Film (co-written with my colleague Peg Lamphier as part of ABC-Clio’s Hollywood History series) was published today.
Peg and I discuss 10 Civil War films based on their accuracy and cultural context. It is no surprise that we agree with a collection of historians that the most accurate of all the films of the Civil War is Glory (written by Kevin Jarre), though even that film makes the ‘mistake’ of omitting the fact that Harriet Tubman served as a spy for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment.
As we say about many of the films, one film can’t encapsulate the entirety of a historical event (though Free State of Jones (written by Gary Ross) does try, and here we admit that that attempt to do it all makes for a long and plodding film, which is sad since it is a thorough portrait of Reconstruction, which is nearly never covered in films as they all prefer ending when the war ends).
As always it was a pleasure to work with Peg. We’re in the middle of our second book for this series – chronicling how Women’s History is covered in films coming sometime in 2021.
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