On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
While D. W. Griffith is the most famous early Civil War filmmaker, Thomas Ince’s films cemented the Plantation Myth. Unlike Griffith, Ince had his family roots in New England, though he fell under the pro-southern spell early in his filmmaking career.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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: